Michael Koehler: Welcome to Episode Seven of On the Balcony. My name is Michael Koehler, and I'm your host. Today, we'll close out a big section of Ron Heifetz’s book Leadership Without Easy Answers. And that is the section on leading with authority. Through the season, we looked at the distinction between leadership and authority quite a bit. Authority: providing direction, protection, order, coordination. Leadership: mobilizing people to confront difficult realities, address complex challenges, learning and unlearning. We looked at the resources roles of authority can bring for the practice of leadership, and also what's constraining about them, and how being in charge can really be a dance on a razor's edge.

On the one side of the edge is the status quo, challenge people too little, and they are disappointed for the lack of progress, and might eventually replace you. On the other side of that edge, is too much change, overwhelm, freak out, challenge people too much, and they will resist and push you off the edge. And that gets us to today's chapter, where the title 'Falling Off The Edge'. It's the chapter in which Heifetz looks at three American presidents from the ‘60s and ‘70s, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter, and examines how all of them fell off the edge and lay the foundation, if you want, for the mistrust in authority figures in America that we might still be suffering from these days.

These are case studies of leadership failures at its best. And while these political examples may be far away in time, the lessons are still relevant. First and foremost, failing at leadership doesn't mean you are a failure. In the last chapter, we saw Lyndon B. Johnson exercise a lot of good leadership around the civil rights movement. This chapter, we see his horrible leadership failures around Vietnam. That's the nature of the work. You might succeed today but fail miserably tomorrow. Our guest today will help us build the bridge of these lessons into today's world.

Jevan Soo Lenox, Head Chief People Officer roles at multiple exciting Bay Area growth companies places like Blue Bottle, Stitch Fix, and most recently, insitro. He talks about bringing the framework to life in a fast-paced hypergrowth environment and shares moments of where he fell off the edge with powerful lessons for both executives and people developers.

As always, I invite you to read along with the book. This is chapter seven of Leadership Without Easy Answers with the title 'Falling Off The Edge'. All right. Let's dive right into my conversation with Jevan.

Welcome, Jevan.

Jevan Soo Lenox: Thanks for having me, Michael.

Michael Koehler: I'm so excited to talk with you today about chapter seven of Leadership Without Easy Answers with the title Falling Off The Edge. And we'll start our conversation, just curious, as you reread the chapter, we both reread the chapter today, what core ideas stood out to you?

Jevan Soo Lenox: The first thing that really struck me was the chapter taking us through three very different leaders. Any American citizen or student of American history would say LBJ, Nixon, and Carter, I don't know if it's the widest range of US presidents you could pick, but it's really not a small range in terms of style, personality, approach to leadership. And so it’s interesting to think about a fundamental leadership failure on all three parts that had a similar thematic edge to it, even if the way each of them came to it might have been in a different way or the way that it played to each of their fears or anxieties or weaknesses.

But actually, fundamentally, underneath it was this idea of avoiding the adaptive work and leading into the seduction of authority and leading into the temptation of providing technical answers in the face of doing the work. And so it's just interesting, I think, for me to reflect on all the ways that you can fail. Even if the face of it's the same kind of failure, there are actually many different ways. And almost insidious, the being thoughtful as a leader around what are my tendencies? What are the ways that this devil can seduce me that is different than the way he would seduce Michael, different with the way it would seduce Jennifer? So that was one thing that really struck me in reading the chapter.

I think another thing that struck me was this idea of pacing versus avoidance, and how to be honest with yourself about are you really playing the long game? Are you really pacing the work? Are you really thinking about influence or so on? Or are you really just avoiding the hard things and avoiding the conflict. I thought there's this beautiful litmus test that kind of emerged for me in reading about these different leadership journeys that these presidents have had. If you really look at the challenge and you think about the adaptive work and the different parties at the table that might be doing that adaptive work with you. And if you cannot, during this moment of pacing and quietness and frankly maybe even hiding the ball a little bit in terms of the work, if you cannot immediately point to some parties that you are actively working, then you are actually just avoiding.

We sort of think about that as a really clear litmus test. It's actually quite clarifying because all of a sudden, you sort of say, of course, it'd be really started thinking about adaptive work that I'm doing in my organization that's hard and so on. And is there any movement? Is there any party that I am trying to push this forward with or orchestrating or thinking about the conflict and the learning and so on? Or am I kind of burying my head in the sand?

Michael Koehler: I love that. And what's so interesting for me, as I'm listening to these two insights, I resonated with these two ideas of that chapter too is kind of the interplay between the system and the self. There is a certain pressure that the system is placing on people who are in charge, in power to fix and solve and make the pain go away or lower the heat or whatever we want to phase it. But then used this word seduction, which I love, this tendency that sometimes we believe our own press releases. We are prone to think about, 'Oh I am the one who can who can fix this.' And I think this is so beautifully described here in these cases. All of these presidents, in a way, put their foot in that trap too of that lone warrior, heroic kind of approach of leadership.

Jevan Soo Lenox: 'I will be the one to solve it.'

Michael Koehler: Exactly. And even though these examples are like decades old and the book was written 30 years ago, I think we still see that not only in politics. As we're getting to know you Jevan, we’ll hopefully tap into your very rich experience in the corporate world, and particularly this fantastic, exciting growth companies in the Bay Area. I'm really so curious to hear like how that resonates in your own experience in organizational life, not just in these political examples, which serve so well, because we all know them, but of course, as we think about leadership from all of places. These are metaphors for the dynamics we see around. So we'll talk about that today.

Before we do that, we want to get to know you a little bit more. And a practice we found here on the podcast is inviting people to share their identities and their roles that they play. So both internal identities, social identities, but then roles that they bring. So Jevan, what would you like to put forward? Who are you?

Jevan Soo Lenox: I think this is the hardest prep question that you actually provide. The fundamental human question of who are you is not actually a straightforward one. I think on the face of it, I have a number of intersecting identities that don't always obviously come together. So I am a Chinese American. I was born here in the States. My parents were born and raised in Taiwan, and my grandparents were born and raised in mainland China, so that that kind of diaspora which is a very particular flavor of Chinese America, which is important to call out.

I grew up on the East Coast, in New Jersey, which there are definitely some East Coast elements to my personality and approach to life, particularly fast walking. I am a bit of an academic at heart. So I did two grad school degrees. I came perilously close to doing a PhD. And so even though I'm not a true academic, actually now in my current company, I’m surrounded by PhDs and former professors. But I do feel like I have that heart for learning, for curiosity, for reading others’ perspectives, even though I ultimately didn't choose to put my entire professional career into that. It's definitely, I think, in my mindset. I grew up as a pretty nerdy little bookworm who read a lot. And so I think that's never totally kind of escaped me.

I am a gay man. I am married to a wonderful husband. I have two young children ages four, age two, both sons. So we live here in San Francisco in our little queer refuge from the world with a very, very large Airedale Terrier. So we are living our version of the American nuclear family, although admittedly are very 2022 version of that relative to our country's history.

One fact that actually not everyone knows about me in my professional life is that I was raised evangelical Christian. It's actually kind of an important fact. People are often very surprised by that because I'm very somewhere in the range of humanist to atheist. I'm pretty open about that. But having spent time in a fairly fundamentalist community gave me a lot of understanding and some empathy actually for kind of the, some of the challenges that our country has been going through in terms of wrestling with these different identities and perspectives and so on. And even though I deeply disagree with some of those perspectives and some of those perspectives are openly hostile to the core of who I am and what my family is, I do feel like that immersion in that for a time in my life and having spent a lot of energy and emotion in that is part of who I am.

It's interesting because I only recently was able to say that out loud. I think for a lot of time, I really rejected that part of my history. Now, I think I’m becoming partly more at peace and then partly more actually embracing of the fact that there are parts of that experience that are a part of who I am and are actually powerful parts of who I am, not parts that are just fundamentally to be rejected.

Michael Koehler: Thank you for sharing the complexity and the richness of these identities and how they intersect. It makes me think about the leadership work we like so much that includes, that's so hard, that includes the crossing of boundaries and how those internal boundaries may relate to the external boundaries and the capacity to cross boundaries, actually, is potentially something that can be learned and practiced earlier on in life when these different identities internally or in our nuclear family are clashing.

Jevan Soo Lenox: I think we live in a world that without getting into a big diatribe about big technology, but we live in a world that is fundamentally oriented towards polarizing us and categorizing us. In many ways, unfortunately, the human mind contributes to that. We want to categorize things into binary categories. It's how we process information. I think the true richness of humanity is actually, to your point, the complexity and the collision of some of these things that are not are not easily reducible.

Michael Koehler: Let's just talk a minute about your professional identity, if that's okay. Square, Blue Bottle, Stitch Fix now, insitro, McKinsey, several executive roles. A lot of people and culture work in these different places. How would you describe the piece of work that you've been holding at these different places?

Jevan Soo Lenox: Well, the last decade of my career has been joining companies that are growing very, very quickly. By definition, if you're growing very quickly, you have to evolve very quickly. My snarky description of that is that I help companies that are hot messes become more messes because you can't be on this growth trajectory and not be messy. Actually, I think they actually have to accept some of it. But you can do it in a way that is more in an acceptable range. Yeah, exactly. It's an adaptive challenge. I think that's why this content has resonated so much for me even to 10-15 years later after I first encountered it because there is this element in these kinds of organizations where there's so much emotion and there is so much of a sense of risk, actually, for people who are in these contexts where it's exciting, it's scary, it feels like everything is constantly changing. It feels like any time someone feels comfortable or attached to something, 6 months later, 12 months later, things are changing again, and that feels at risk.

And so I find a lot of resonance in the adaptive leadership framework because a number of things happen in these kinds of environments. The first is the simultaneous putting on a pedestal of leaders and the desire to assassinate those leaders. Sort of like, give me all the answers, but also I don't think you have the right answers. So I'm going to take you down pretty fast. I’ve just seen it over and over again and again. One of the big lessons I've tried to apply from the adaptive leadership work is this idea of separating the technical and the adaptive. And so inevitably, yes, there are things about growing an organization rapidly and putting in more structure and thinking about how to make decisions differently and bringing in new leaders and so and so on and so on, that are technical in nature, there are things that you could do that are somewhat playbooky, and these are best practices and so on. And then there is inevitably an entire emotional side of bringing people through that process that is very specific to that culture, that is very specific to that group of people, that is very specific to each of those individuals, where there are certainly ways to think about it.

So there are these frameworks that we can bring to it, but are actually quite unique. And the way of thinking about how to hold people in that discomfort and to have them do the right work and to bring them along in that journey while not having them feel like you are abdicating your responsibility for direction, for support, and so on, is very, very tricky.

I'm now a decade into this type of work, and I just received feedback from another executive this very morning. It’s very fresh, that the way I answered a question at a recent All-Hands displayed some frustration with the way the question was phrased and so on. And at first, I had a very kind of human defensive response. And then I had a moment of 'I’m the leader. I'll just be the big person' and so on. And then, because I knew I was coming into this podcast with you, I was thinking of it through the framework. And I realized I think actually the emotional piece underneath it for me was I was seduced. The person was implying in the question, 'You're supposed to have the answers, and you're not telling us all the answers.' I felt attacked and scared because I don't have all the answers. Because by nature, this is an evolving organization and bringing people along and the work is not all mine. Actually, the work is shared, and actually, I always wish the work is further along and so on.

So part of my response, even if I can justify it through other things, was actually that I was inhabiting this place of the leader who should have all the technical answers and responding in a kind of 'Don't question me. How dare you,' right? When I really unpacked that, it was kind of like, wow, it's all coming back to this. So in that moment, I can recognize the energy that they're bringing and then respond in that kind. Whereas I think I allowed myself to be at the center. That's not a good place to be.

Michael Koehler: Beautiful. We are already in the midst of your experience, and we'll dive into that more deeply. Really excited to hear a few of these really relevant applications. I think they make it really come to life.

And I would love to anchor it a little bit around a piece of the text. So I am curious, Jevan, what piece of text did you bring to our conversation today?

Jevan Soo Lenox: I brought a sentence that was relatively early in the chapter on page 155, in a new chapter heading called the 'Sources of Autocratic Action'. And the sentence is, 'As a political calculation, Johnson felt compelled to bear the weight alone and deceive the nation.' And it really struck me because having taken this class and this content and having been on a teaching team and so on, I do think there is this element sometimes of, with 20/20 hindsight and sitting comfortably from your couch or from a classroom seat and so on, you can critique these leaders and say how dumb they were, and like what an idiot. Like why would LBJ not- he clearly was doing it over here on the domestic side? Why would he do it on the foreign side? And what was Carter thinking and so on? It's really easy to do that. I think that was a sentence that, for me, really captured with empathy, the challenges of being a leader. And that even the most experienced and talented and so on, it is a really hard job, and it's a very lonely job, and the temptations of doing these things, I don't think it's productive to think about them as an indictment of character or indictment of person. They are the hazards of the job.

I think the act of leadership, and particularly the act of very senior leadership, maybe the president of a country would be one of the most dramatic examples, people talk about this frequently - it's very, very lonely. It's very, very lonely because there are many aspects of what you can talk about and who you can share your experience with and bring in that are challenging, that there are constraints in. I thought this sentence brought to life that loneliness in an unexpected way. I was reading through and, all of a sudden, I was almost emotionally struck by that. And also I think illustrates where you can go wrong because in that loneliness and in that isolation, you're with your own fears and you are tempted by what feels like the most expedient path or the safest path or whatever it is. What is the act of sharing that burden, to use the language, to share the burden, sharing that weight with others, in a way that makes you feel less alone and makes you feel connected in the work?

One of the things that I experienced very early in my operating career, so my first operating job after McKinsey was a company called Square, fairly well known now. I joined them at 400 employees at a particularly rocky time in their company history. They were growing very fast. It was very hard. There were some big cultural challenges in the company when I joined them. A lot of leadership turnover and so on. I got introduced at an All-Hands as this person who's coming with nine years’ experience in McKinsey and three Harvard degrees and a faculty position, not a technical answer guy. I remember thinking, during the little overview of me in the All-Hands is like this is actually not the way I would like to be introduced because I think it positions me in a way that creates a dynamic and expectations that may ultimately not be healthy or productive, which somewhat came to pass.

I think I then fed into it because then you think, 'Oh gosh, I'm supposed to have all the answers. And people are asking me questions about hard things. And I'm supposed to have all the answers.' Then I started bearing the weight alone. It's like, 'Oh, my role is to have all the answers, and I need to just produce.' And that is, as we all know from this book, the recipe for failure. That first year was very, very hard in many ways. It would have been hard no matter what. I think one of the things this chapter talks about nicely is, this is not a binary thing. It's not like 'Oh, share the work and do adaptive work, and it will all be fine.' It could still not be fine. You could still fail, actually, but the idea that you can increase the possibility of success, just a very rational assessment.

But also, I think, circling back to this idea of being alone. I think there is something about feeling like you're doing the work together and failing together is a very different feeling than failing alone. And so that's something I think about that first year. It was a really big lesson for me. There's a moment where - it was very rough first year, it was definitely not the best work of my career, and I switched projects and so on - I had this moment, and I think I really looked in the mirror and realized, this is what I was doing to myself was putting myself in this impossible position of having all the answers that I never would have the answers.

And instead of treating it as this exploration of there's work to be done, I - rather than put myself on a pedestal - well, of course, I don't know the answers. All I can do is bring myself to the work with curiosity and to move the work along. So if you'd start to think of a lot of language and the ideas here, and that is actually my responsibility. That is what I am called to do, but the answer will kind of emerge through that work because I can't possibly have the answer. It was just a very different frame for me and a very empowering frame. I was very lucky because the project I happened to be moved over to or the role was in an area that I knew nothing about.

So the first role I took on at Square was literally called Head of People Development. So coming from doing amazing work with Ron Heifetz - boss at the Kennedy School and so on. And so I'm supposed to know all the things about leadership, people development, and I do not, still do not 10 years later. But I fed into the seduction or I succumbed to the seduction, and then I moved over to this role in sales operations that I'd never done before. I'd never done it at McKinsey. I never learned anything about it in graduate school. It was one of the best things that ever could have happened to me for my career because I was forced in the role to be really humble, and to know from the very, very outset of the role I know nothing. And yet I actually had to lead. I was given a small team. And so how do I lead this team that actually knows more about the content than I do in a way that gets the work done. So I don't get a pass. I would be laughed out of the building if I tried to pretend to them I know, I had known of the technical answers. I was much more new to the work than they were. And it really taught me to lead through questions, which is really bringing the work back to people, not pushing it on them, but guiding them through the work.

It was some of the best work of my career. And it really taught me what it is to lead in an adaptive way, what it is to really own where you do not have the answers, to own your own limitations, honestly, but to do that in a way that is hopefully not disempowering or confidence-crushing. You have to do that in a way where people actually still value your counsel, feel like the work is better for it, but does not rely on this traditional hierarchical model of authority and the technical expertise that's embedded in that.

Michael Koehler: So I'm curious to distill a lesson from here because it sounds to me that you're moving in, I would say, what Ron Heifetz describes are systemic forces of groups. Groups look for expertise, they look for authorities in our language to help them deal with the tough problems they're facing. That's what we get hired for it. That's what we put out a job description for. And yet there are these adaptive challenges out there that don't have clear answers, that don't have clear solutions, that require learning.

So it feels like there was an assumption coming in being hired of 'I need to deliver' or 'I need to fix this' or 'I have the expertise' or some kind of assumption around that. 'I need to prove myself', a little bit more, maybe in our words, technical orientation. Does that sound right?

Jevan Soo Lenox: Yeah, I think that's right.

Michael Koehler: And then there was this mindset shift that you're describing. And I'm curious to hear what is the different mindset? How would you describe that?

Jevan Soo Lenox: Yeah. I'll connect the dots a little bit between that first stint at Square and then some of the more recent experiences. Because dwelling on some of the more spectacular failures, just give some instructive lessons where probably the arc is more helpful.

So that first year, in many ways, it's funny that I didn't recognize at the time, but I was hired to help do the adaptive work. When I spoke with the VP of People at the time about the team, the role, the role is a brand new role. So they had never had this role before. It was bit opportunistic. They got to know me. They said, 'We're having this problem. We're 200 employees a year ago, we're now 400. We're going to be 80o in nine months. Everything's breaking. We actually have a lot of technical experts on the People Team. People who know how to do HR, know how to do greeting, who knew how to do benefits, whatever it is, but we don't have people who are bringing the capacity and the focus on these harder things. Just what does it mean to be a company that's growing this quickly? And what are the things that break? And how do we think about the company being more effective and our people do not just hanging on for dear life, but actually thriving through this context?'

As we talked about it, I mistook that, and to be a little bit fair to me, the natural human condition, it’s like others pushed on me of like, 'I 've got to be able to do all these technical solutions.' I think I mistook that. I had a lot of learning from it. Now, this is my fourth Chief People Officer role. I'm now very, very conscious, actually, that there is, in almost any project or seemingly small task or initiative, there is usually a technical element and adaptive element and just being super clear on articulating them fast and then talking through them in a really open way. I'll give a couple examples in a second. And then recognizing that there's a macro arc of adaptive work that also needs to be done. And again, figuring out how to enlist others in that work with you and be very explicit about it.

I joined the company, about 150 employees, at my current company, insitro. We almost doubled that from a year ago. We'll be over 200 employees by the end of this year, and so on. So you can see the emotional experience, the daily experience of employees through that are like it's changing pretty fast. And one of the natural things that happens in an organization as it grows is these things that you did when you're a small company don't work. I came in and within my first few weeks, we used to announce employees’ work anniversaries at every single All-Hands. So we'd say, 'Michael, congratulations this week. You've been here your first year. These are the nice things about Michael.' That's lovely and it works great when you are not that many people. And all of a sudden, you are 150. And so some of the executives say, this doesn’t really work anymore. I looked it afresh and said, the math is at 150 people and growing, we're averaging that employee anniversary every other day.

So by definition, at some point, it's not going to work, because all of a sudden, the All-Hands are just going to be acknowledging anniversaries and not doing anything else. So the natural response was we stopped doing it. I've been around the block enough to know, okay, I'm the new guy, coming in and saying, this doesn't work anymore. We're at a scale that we need to get rid of it. It was generally not going to get a great emotional reaction. I certainly tried to say it not because I had been a genius at it but because I've made this mistake before. So I learned from it.

So I talked about the technical challenge of we want to acknowledge people's contributions and experience and so on, but we can't do it in this context anymore in this way. But really kind of highlighting the adaptive work of saying, that doesn't mean that that desire at an emotional level goes away. All of us want to feel affirmed in our work here. We are a culture that is warm, that is collegial, where we want to celebrate others for that moment. And so none of that goes away. So the work hasn't gone away, the work for us to figure out well, how do we do this in this new context in a way that feels authentic and also feels of, frankly, efficient for our growing complexity is a thing.

And so I presented some early thoughts on how we could do that. I wasn't hoisted on people's shoulders, but I do think the emotional reaction in the moment and feedback afterwards was very different than it could have been, because, sort of taking chapter seven as a lesson, we took the adaptive problem head on and we acknowledged it. We acknowledged that we hadn’t solved it. We acknowledged that this is hard, and we need help. Here's some thoughts. But there's not an easy answer, like, we just do it. And so just something as small as these process tweaks or how you run a meeting and so on. You recognize that there's this adaptive emotional energy element to it that kind of comes along. So that's one example of looking at the micro.

At the macro level, fundamentally, a part of it, I think, is having deep empathy for the people you’re doing the work with. And so even when I'm really frustrated, one of the things that I constantly try to remind myself and remind others is part of what anchors me and gives me steadiness through the challenges or these types of organizations is that I've lived through them before. And so I have a sense of the emotional arc of this adaptive work. I have a sense of the ups and downs of it. I have a sense of when I can see certain lows, why to believe that you will emerge to be in a better place, while not dismissing that you are in a low place, and the low place is probably not going to just be over tomorrow. It's actually going to be for some amount of time because the adaptive work pars it. The disequilibrium, they're correlated.

You can't do great work without living in the disequilibrium really pushing. Part of that is I see is my responsibility to try to bring that ballast to others around me, because many of them haven't lived through it. And so, going back a decade, my first year at Square, I looked around and was constantly like, Oh, my God, what's happening? This is so hard. This is really scary. What have I done with my career? What am I doing here?' And so part of adaptive leadership is just really living in this deep empathy, and even when you're super frustrated, to just remember that often part of what's challenging for these other parties is they don't have the same constellation of experiences that you do. They often don't have the same longitudinal set of experiences that you do.

And so the emotional response that they're bringing to the work, even if it's frustrating, is actually pretty understandable. If you can anchor yourself in that, I think you're better equipped both to meet them where they're at, but then also to show up as a better leader. Because otherwise, it can feel very personalized, particularly when you're a leader and they're coming at you and so on. Then the natural response, unfortunately, at least for me, is to come back. And recognizing that their fear or their anxiety, their frustration, unfortunately, you as a leader are being a vessel for it, that's part of leadership, but recognizing it’s actually about all this other stuff. And so just hold strong and don't allow yourself to get sucked up in it and say, 'It's actually about this other stuff. And if I were them, I would be really scared too. I would be really upset too.' So just hold the course.

Michael Koehler: That's beautiful. Now, the question that's coming up for me as I'm imagining myself into these high-speed growth companies, and Jevan, is there, with empathy and that needs time and attention and maybe also a little bit slowing down. How's that negotiated when you got to hire another 50 people? And all of the hot mess you were talking about in the beginning is so present, the disequilibrium is through the roof. How did you negotiate those?

Jevan Soo Lenox: That's such a great question. I think that connects more fundamentally to this question of pacing and how do you determine for yourself what the right basic approach is? And how can you get others to be comfortable with that? And so I don't know if I have an easy answer for it, but I would say, of course, part of it ideally comes from experience and pattern recognition. I think part of it is, if you can explain the challenges of the adaptive work in a way that really lands for people, depends on the organization you're at, the context, the problem, but I think in many situations, they can then naturally understand, 'Oh, of course, this is going to take some time. That is a hard problem. That isn't an easy problem. That isn't something that one executive is going to have the right answer for.'

And so I think you can, again, ironically, counter to maybe the human instinct is, the more you are vulnerable and actually are very open about the path. I think there's a way to do that, that is shows confidence and a sense of direction versus just like, 'It's so hard. I don't know, what do you think?' That's generally a great strategy. But you can do that in a way that then, again, brings them into the work, brings them into the journey with you. Then I think naturally then argues for a trajectory over time and a pace over time.

The second thing I would say, and I think a lot about this when I'm taking leaders and teams through the work that needs to be done is really that explaining, if we're then meeting the people where they're at, then by nature, whether it is evolving understanding or evolving capabilities, or so on, you need to face that work over time. I have two young children. There might be some out there, but my sons definitely did not learn to run. They pulled themselves up and they crawled and they walked and now they now they run a lot.

There is this piece of giving people the space and the grace to develop and work through and do the work with you at a piece that requires some time and some patience. Part of it, I think, is bringing that way of thinking to the work and hopefully getting leaders to really enlist in that with you and to buy into that and be excited about it. Or maybe not be excited about it, but at least understand it.

The concreteness is important, of course. So it's not just that it's abstract, but then to say, and so given that, here's what we're going to focus on here and why. And it might be both for technical work and adaptive work, actually. It might be there's a concrete piece of it. One example would be the classic challenge at high-growth organizations is you've got a lot of managers who are not experienced managers. They're first-time managers, or maybe even their reasonably experienced managers, but they're in the biggest job they've ever had. And so they're constantly at the edge of their own incompetence and experience, whatever. I'd say this as somebody who has continually been in that situation. So that's not a judgment; that is the nature of these organizations.

And so they're scared, they're trying, they don't know what they're doing. The adaptive challenge, the challenge writ large, of course, is well, how do you lift this whole set of leaders, this generation of leaders to where they need to be? Unfortunately, there is not a technical playbook to do that. If someone has that, I would love to see it, because it would make my life a lot better. But I'm pretty convinced there is not.

And so then you can say, there might be some technical solutions that are part of this adaptive journey, but they are individual interventions. And those interventions need to be deliberately sequenced and thoughtful around why this intervention now, why it’s a powerful intervention, and how will this intervention then lead to this next intervention being more effective in time?

So I talk a lot with my teams about this chess game of thinking about adaptive change. One of the things I've come to appreciate more over time as well as is sometimes I think you can think about adaptive versus technical work as also this complete separation. It's like, 'Either it's technical work or it's this big problem. We need to do adaptive work, adaptive work, adaptive work,' and really I think the reality of life is that they're intertwined.

And so, again, if you don't show up with any technical solutions, you're not going to have the credibility, you're not going to get anything done. But it's the idea of using the technical interventions in a way that is really thoughtful about this arc of change and this arc of work, the adaptive side that you need to achieve and really bringing others through that. That's actually where I find that if you do it well, you can really lift people in a way that feels really powerful, because I think they feel the comfort and the confidence of your technical expertise in a way that is actually appropriate.

So if you're a leader at a certain level, you should have some technical expertise, ideally, but as we've read in this chapter, and in other parts of the book, it is the danger of when that is fully substituted that things really, really go wrong. And so having people understand this broad adaptive arc, be enlisted in the work with you, and to actually be enlisted in the strategy with you of, 'Here's a menu of technical solutions. These technical solutions are not the only answer. So again, we're going to anchor ourselves and the work that we have to do together. But they are part of the work that gets us there.'

Now, 'I would personally choose A and C. Here's why.' That's a really reasonable thing for them to say like, 'Well, no, it's B, and D.' But it's all in service of how are we going to do this together to bring the adaptive arc at as fast a trajectory as possible. It's not a debate around simply, like, these three things and we're done.

Michael Koehler: As I'm sitting with that sentence that you brought, there's a piece of me that is stuck a little bit on one piece of the sentence. I'm going to read it one more time. I’d love to have a little conversation with you around that, that piece of yours. Here’s the quote one more time. 'As a political calculation, Johnson felt compelled to bear the weight alone and deceive the nation.' And I think we've talked a lot about the feeling of being compelled to bear the weight of the world. But what I'm curious about the sentence, and I don't know if that was part of your initial response to it or if you chose it, but I'm so struck by this 'deceive the nation'. You're bearing the world. And then because it's so big, you're moving towards deception. What is coming up for you as you engage with these three words, 'deceive the nation'?

Jevan Soo Lenox: I love that you called me out on that because I had hoped that we'd just cover the sentence fragment. But you're right. Deceive the nation is language that really strikes you at the heart, I think, particularly without getting political, the history of the United States the last few years. But really, honestly, over decades as really just students of American history would probably then quickly correct me. I think for me, it's interesting because as someone, Chief People Officer, HR a historical parlance, I used to joke or do sometimes joke that there's a character in Mean Girls - this is now a throwback reference for many people - one of the key characters is the queen bee of the high school named Regina George and another character kind of refers to her very starkly as, 'her hair's full of secrets'.

And the Chief People Officer job is like that. You hold a lot of secrets all the time. Most of the time, the secrets are not super pleasant. It's honestly one of the hardest things of the job, I think, in that you have to hold hard information and hard truths often for good chunks of time well before many others can know it. And sometimes you are put in situations where you are right on the edge. But unfortunately, by the nature of the work or the nature of the secret and so on, I do have a responsibility to keep it under wraps.

And so again, connecting to the broader content of the chapter, what I thought was so brilliantly laid out later in the chapter is this idea that Johnson said, 'Well, this would come at great sacrifice to the domestic agenda.' I think many of us would say, the things that he achieved on that side of the house was amazing for the country. And so you could easily fall into the moral calculus that he was baking. I think there's a sentence later in the chapter I'm trying to remember that talked about. I think it really actually acknowledged if you're doing the adaptive work and you're pacing the work, there may be a moment where you're actually obfuscating and deceiving and so on. But we come back to the litmus test that we talked about earlier in this conversation, of saying, if you're honest with yourself, can you really point to- well, even if you're hiding the ball broadly, are you pushing yourself in a place of discomfort to do the adaptive work and move it along? Even if it's a small quarter, even if it's a small group and so on. And that is where Johnson did not.

As the chapter lays out, Johnson really hoped that somehow all of this challenge in Vietnam would resolve itself quickly and so he wouldn't be forced to do the real adaptive work. That was a fatal mistake. But to deceive the nation, it's hard because I think that you read it and you think emotionally, morally, well, how could anyone ever justify doing that and so on? I think actually, later in the chapters, some of the moral complexities of that and actually sometimes the adaptive work actually may require some element of that. But again, what is the path out?

I was thinking all of these things propped up many hard conversations I've had over the years. I was thinking about a conversation once where I was coaching a leader through a challenging situation where we held a secret and a full truth and a direction that we're going to go in that was not ready for primetime. And we were navigating how to go through conversations in the time before that. One of things that we talked about was this idea where even if we could not be fully truthful, even if we could not be fully transparent, could we see the positive arc towards transparency? So it's like every week, every conversation, are we slowly moving towards that in a way that we felt we could hold our heads reasonably high. What the chapter brought up for me was even the complexity of that, if you feel forced into that corner, are there ways to do the work honorably, despite it?

Michael Koehler: Yeah, I really appreciate the transparency around the in-transparency. One of the moves that I sometimes see and even that is hard is, even if we can't be transparent about everything, can we be transparent about the process or around a timeline. We may not be able to say that now, but in three months, there will be more clarity. It's hard. It stresses one's authority because it is ultimately related to the trust that people have in you.

I would like to close us out with one final reading of the text. I want to invite you to read the quote one more time, and then I'll ask you one final question as a wrapper.

Jevan Soo Lenox: 'As a political calculation, Johnson felt compelled to bear the weight alone and deceive the nation.'

Michael Koehler: Looking forward, Jevan, into your future, what are you being called to do?

Jevan Soo Lenox: I think one of the things that I find the most joy and meaning in is actually helping other leaders not feel alone in the work. I've never really crystallized it that way. Actually, this conversation is really illuminating for me, but by the nature of what I do, whether it's through my operational work or through advisory consulting work, I often am working with CEOs and founders, which is a really lonely job. Being able to help them not feel alone in the work, partly through my own counsel, apparently, actually, to think about bringing others into the work in a productive way while not shying away from their responsibilities, I think, is something when I'm able to crack the code with somebody, it’s very powerful and affirming. I think there's lots of ways to do that work. But ultimately, that is the calling.

Michael Koehler: Jevan, thank you so much for all of these rich insights, both from your own personal experience and what you're seeing around yourself. I'm so glad that this chapter about these old failing presidents has been so generative in making sense of our current world and current organizations. Really, grateful. Thanks a lot.

Jevan Soo Lenox: That was great. It was great to reconnect with the content. I have to admit, when I first started reading, I was like, 'Oh, gosh, okay. I haven't thought about LBJ and Vietnam and all of that.' And then as you can tell, there's a lot of emotional resonance that actually comes in when you really, really, really engage.

Michael Koehler: Perfect. Thanks so much.

Jevan Soo Lenox: Thanks so much, Michael.

Michael Koehler: We'll be back in two weeks with chapter eight of Ron Heifetz’s book, Leadership Without Easy Answers, with the title 'Creative Deviance At The Frontline'. This is the first chapter where we'll explore how leadership looks like from the margins with little authority, and the resources for leading beyond your authorization.

We'll be joined by Julia Fabris McBride, who is the interim CEO and President of the Kansas Leadership Center. She'll share with us wonderful examples for leading without authority in communities in Kansas and beyond.

If you liked the show, press the subscribe button and leave a review. These reviews really help others to connect to this important work.

On The Balcony is brought to you by KONU - Growing and Provoking Leadership – and hosted by me, Michael Koehler. We’re produced by Podigy: Editing – Riley Byrne, Daniel Link. Cover art by Kenneth Amoyo and Rosi Greenberg. Our music is called ‘Change in Blue’ by Hannah Gill and the Hours.

Thanks for listening. We'll see you back for Episode Eight, On the Balcony.