74: How leaders lead? A conversation with Liz Sweigart, Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Safe Kids AI

The Elephant in the Room

Shownotes:

My guest on The Elephant in the Room podcast this week is Liz Sweigart, PhD Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Safe Kids AI. Liz serves on several boards, is a frequent author and speaker on mental wellness and mental health.

In the episode we explore leaders, leadership, conscious, moral, ethical, moral leadership. We also spoke about her journey to discovering who she is and separating that from what she does.

👉🏾 The imperatives for leaders to lead differently

👉🏾 What it means to be an authentic leader - eliminating the gap between who they are and how they present themselves to the world

👉🏾 Conscious leadership

👉🏾 The concept of the leader as a moral integrator

👉🏾 The inherent contradiction between moral leadership and capitalism as we know it.

👉🏾 The double bind for leaders in today’s world to deliver returns for shareholders and their obligation (as perceived by society) to act ethically and in the wider interests of society

👉🏾 Female leaders and trust

We also spoke about the people who inspire her.

“And where I think that leads into this whole question of leadership, is how is the view in the world changing, around who it is, again when the music stops, who it is that deserves these returns. And so I think leaders are being pressed to negotiate between this evolving view of shareholder capitalism, this evolving view of stakeholder capitalism.” Liz Sweigart

Memorable Passages from the episode:

👉🏾 Good morning and good afternoon, good evening and I guess good night, depending on where you are and when you're listening to this.

👉🏾 Well, I appreciate the opportunity and I am thrilled to get a chance to visit with you.

👉🏾 Oh, okay. Wait, how long did you say we had?

👉🏾 That's actually a really beautiful question for me because I've spent a lot of time in therapy actually exploring that. As some people listening may know, if you did any sort of light internet stalking on me, I'm very public about my journey with mental health, specifically with depression and with O C D, obsessive compulsive disorder.

👉🏾 And one of the things that I had to do in therapy in the last several years is to really engage with the question of, who am I? I got to a point in November of 2019 where I was suicidal and it was in large measure because I really had no idea who I was. And I didn't have really any anchor points as a result, I was completely unmoored. And so I have spent quite a bit of time in therapy and on my own trying to understand who am I.

👉🏾 And here's what I've come to. I am a person who loves connection, I am someone who loves meeting new people, I am someone who loves bringing people together around a purpose, which is one of the reasons why I was excited to talk with you and to join The Elephant in The Room today. Because for me, I have found that I am a wanderer, I love to journey and explore and adventure. I am a thinker, I like to sit and think, and I like to engage with others, I like to connect with other people.

👉🏾 So that is who I am and then there are things that I do. And the biggest lesson for me, I think in all of this was separating who I am from what I do. My answer to who are you used to be, essentially my name, rank and serial number, it was my title, it was my job. And then when I realised maybe that was the wrong answer, then it was my other jobs, it wasn't my professional career. It was, oh well, I'm a wife, I'm a mother, I'm a daughter, I'm a sister.

👉🏾 And that actually still isn't who I am, those are roles that I play and those are things that I do. So I am all of those things and more. But figuring out who I am, began with what is it that motivates me, and then what do I feel is my purpose? And my purpose is to foster environments where human beings can flourish and bring people together in those environments where we can solve problems and we can be generative toward one another in the earth.

👉🏾 Thank you. I appreciate that.

👉🏾 So that's such a kind way of you're saying, why can't you keep a job? (laughter) So you are absolutely right, I am a polymath and a Renaissance woman. The challenge I found is that there are so many things that interest me, and there are a lot of things that I am very fortunate that I can do well. And so the challenge has been over the course of my life to allocate my time in line with the things that I believe are most valuable to myself and to others.

👉🏾 I don't want to just do things because I can and I enjoy them. It's important to me that what I do provides meaning and value and support and care and kindness to others.

👉🏾 So why did I go get a PhD? Well, it started based on the whole, why did I go get an MBA? So I grew up in New York city, I grew up in the upper west side of Manhattan. The bubble that I was in, I went to an excellent private all-girls school and there were 30 women in my graduating class when we got to the 12th grade. And the only other people that I found who've had similar experiences to having such small high school graduating classes have been from incredibly rural parts in the US. So I realised that I needed to do something pretty drastic if I was gonna get out of the bubble that I was in. And so I picked Rice University and I moved to Houston, Texas.

👉🏾 So while I was at Rice, I studied a whole variety of different things. And I somehow talked my way into my first job which was in international tax and over the course of my career, I ended up needing to go and get an advanced degree, they said, you gotta go get yourself a credential. And one of the options was going to get an MBA, so I went and got an MBA. And I promise this is going to answer your question. I started that in 2005, while I was working on my MBA part-time while I was working at the same time. And one of the professors I had, a brilliant man, he's a psychologist, an exceptional executive coach and he'd just published a second book on executive coaching.

👉🏾 He taught my organisational behaviour course, and I'd never taken a psychology class before. I didn't know anything about organisational behaviour and in this class, it started to answer all these questions I had about even the work that I had been doing. And I just loved it and at that point. So that was 2006, fast forward to 2018, so this has been sticking with me this entire time, I keep dancing around this whole area, this whole piece of psychology that touches on leadership organisations and groups of human beings. And I finally just got to a point where I went, you know, I want to do and be something different professionally than what I'm doing right now.

👉🏾 And so I went and pursued the PhD and it was marvellous, I loved it. And it was a great experience because I think I was also at the point in my life where the pieces came together.

👉🏾 There's a proverb when the student is ready the teacher appears. And that seems to be a theme in my life.

👉🏾 Yes, and I think that's another question of, oh my goodness how much time do we have? So I think one of the things that's important when we frame these conversations is to first kind of define our terms. Leaders are people who lead and how they lead is the practice of leadership.

👉🏾 And what I have seen frequently is a sort of conflation of the two. I've heard people describe especially in corporate settings, well that's what leadership wants to do, and what they really mean is that's what the leaders want to do. That's what the people in charge want to do. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're actively practising leadership. So when I think about the question of what's changing in the world? What do leaders have to do to lead differently? How is the practice of leadership evolved?

👉🏾 I am a firm believer in nothing new under the sun. So I think the world has always been in a state of flux. I think leaders have always been challenged with ongoing change. I don't think any of that is new or different, I do think that, what we have now is essentially the fourth industrial revolution, right? We have... and I'm just gonna use 5G as a proxy, but essentially what we have is the ability to transmit incredible volumes of data at incredible speed. And so I think that what has happened is that the perception of the pace of change has, changed, because we have more information than we did before, and that information is delivered without filters.

👉🏾 And then that information is also delivered with different lenses. So when I say it's not delivered with filters. I'm not talking about how you receive information from say a news agency and it's through their particular lens, what I mean is that volumes of data are simply available. And then it is up to leaders to parse this data and to make meaning from it.

👉🏾 And so the ongoing human struggle of meaning making, I think has become much more challenging, particularly for those in positions where they are practicing leadership. So I think leaders are one, grappling with all of the information that's available. Instantaneous feedback, which again is a relatively new phenomenon in the grand scheme of things because we haven't had telecommunications capabilities as we do now, we did not have social media the way that we do now. There has always been a form of media, and there's always been a form of human beings being social, but the way that it's come together now with technology is particularly challenging. So I think that leaders are at a place where the expectations have ratcheted up. They're more aware of the expectations than they may have been before. The ability of stakeholders to communicate those expectations and to do so loudly and broadly is all new and different.

👉🏾 So to me the great challenge of leadership right now is actually one of information and communication. Because the tenets of leadership when I think about, what leadership means when we get to kind of more of the theoretical level, it's actually, it's almost static. What to me is different is the environment in which it's being practised.

👉🏾 Yes. So let me start with the last one first. I think that there are certain words that sound inspiring and important and so we use them excessively without necessarily ever defining what we're talking about, kind of going back to the whole question of leaders versus leadership. When I think about authentic leadership as a subject area. And we think about that sort of in the firmament of leadership theory. Now leaders in leadership have been around from millennia, but we've only really dug into this idea of, are there different flavours or different types or different practices of leadership. You know, what are the different types of leaders, how does their personalities....all of that stuff, is really only something that's come about since the mid 1800s. So kind of the first theory of leadership that was put forward in sort of an academic or theoretical context, was actually Carlisle in 1841 and was the idea of the great man theory.

👉🏾 And that was the idea that throughout history were sort of ordained, appointed, divinely inspired to be leaders and to lead the people and basically tell other people what to do.

👉🏾 And then this view over the next couple hundred years, has evolved and it really started with this view, which is a fancy way of saying that it started with this idea that leadership is about individuals. It's about individual leaders.

👉🏾 And really it's been in the last 50 years. The view has evolved to understand and appreciate what's known as relational leadership or a view of leadership as being less about the individual leader and more about the relationship between leaders and followers and with followers among each other.

👉🏾 And within this relational view, that's where you start to get concepts like authentic or charismatic leadership. Because for authentic leadership to be practised, you really are depending upon followers to perceive the authenticity of the leader. And one of the challenges I think is that we continuously present the idea of leadership as being all about the leader.

👉🏾 So we talk about leadership development, but we're not actually developing the practice of leadership. We're talking about helping individuals to be different or potentially better versions of themselves. So what happens I think, is that we get into this idea that, oh well, this person is really unliked, this person is authentic and we tell leaders, you have to be authentic.

👉🏾 But the thing about authenticity is you don't get to decide it for yourself. So I can go and be me and I can just present me to the world. But it is the determination of another person as to whether they perceive me to be authentic, genuine and a true reflection of who they understand me to be and who they believe I understand me to be.

👉🏾 So I think one of the challenges is that you can't go to a group of people and say, I'm an authentic leader, you can't. Like that's a determination that you don't get to make and so I think we have this sort of challenge in how we present leaders and leadership, that we sort of tell people, you have to be this thing, and the thing is you don't actually get to decide if that's what you are. I think that what we want to inspire leaders to do is to eliminate as much of the gap between who they know themselves to be and how they present themselves to the world, to narrow that gap.

👉🏾 And it's also what speaks to, you know, the basis of social power. I mean, and that was first and partially best articulated by French and Raven, who talked about this idea of referent power, which is where an individual has power because other people see, revere and want to essentially refer to them as the standard.

👉🏾 So referent power is, I see you and you are someone who I want to emulate and be like and that becomes the base of your social power. And I think in leadership, that's the secret sauce is when it's not that you have power, you are able to practice leadership, because you can give people rewards, or you can coerce them, or even that you were elected or appointed, or even that you have knowledge denied to others. It's that people see you and go, I want that. And that's what compels the followership. But I, think that's where the authenticity piece comes in.

👉🏾 Oh another really good one. Okay, so here's the fun thing about anything in the leadership realm? There are so many different definitions because essentially there's not a lot of standardisation in all of the terms, even leadership itself, when I was writing my dissertation I think that was one of the first things that really caught me was that there's actually no universally agreed definition of leadership. You could go to the dictionary, but that definition itself is hotly disputed and essentially self-referential as well.

👉🏾 So what I would say about how do we define terms when we talk about leadership? I think the most important thing is to be clear about what you are speaking about in that moment. So I want to acknowledge that there is quite a bit of valuable scholarship around the idea of conscious leadership, as in raising consciousness, and it's tied to things like mindfulness and awareness and that is valuable.

👉🏾 When I talk about conscious leadership in the course that I've had an opportunity to lead with David Reid, what we are talking about is leaders who are conscious of the world around them and they're conscious of the often conflicting and frequently complex landscape in which they are trying to lead others. And so our definition of conscious leadership is leaders who are conscious of self, so they're self-aware, they're conscious of others in environment, so they are situationally aware, and then they have developed a degree of emotional intelligence and self-regulation that allows them to bring together their self and situational awareness to strengthen their community.

👉🏾 And our focus on this is to help leaders to be able to act in ways that help those in their communities who are often the most vulnerable.

👉🏾 So it's really a question of how do we help business leaders to gain in their own self and situational awareness, such that not only are they able to lead in business, but they're also able to strengthen their communities.

👉🏾 Yeah, with all of us, I would say even followers. And we all lead and we all follow. Yes. self-awareness is a challenge.

👉🏾 All right. So we both agree that's a stacked question right there. Okay. So let me start with this. So the goal of the three-part course that David and I have been leading on conscious leadership. It has been built largely around my doctoral work actually, which is where you kind of bring up the point of the moral integrator and ethical leadership.

👉🏾 So when we think about what is ethical leadership there has been kind of an established definition, at least in the academic literature since, oh gosh, like the middle 2000s. I think that the definitive article that was written was Brown, Harrison and Treviño in 2005. And they described ethical leadership as leadership practised by leaders who were both moral persons, meaning that they themselves acted ethically and responsibly, and moral managers, meaning that they role modelled for others, how to behave in an ethical and moral fashion, and that then they used their power to inspire or compel others to do the same.

👉🏾 And they were able to bring about change in their organisations as a result of their actions. And so over time, this idea of ethical leadership has evolved Muel Kaptein in 2019 wrote a paper that added this idea of the moral entrepreneur, meaning that leaders, particularly leaders in business, are in a position to innovate new ethical norms in society, and so you can sort of think about it outbound. So the idea of the moral person and the moral manager, those are really taking place within