Unifying Leadership in a Divided Time
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Welcomed the h. Bari decas from harvard business review I am Allison beard.

Over the past decade or so, IT seems like our debates over social, political and economic issues have dramatically intensified around the world. People are at each other other's throat. Over everything from coffee restrictions to climate change to campus protests.

We see anger expressed on the streets and across social media, and increasingly, it's spilling over into the business world and the form of consumer boycotts, employee strikes and colleagues who struggle to collaborate in this highly polar as time is harder than ever to separate what goes on outside and organization from the work that needs to happen inside IT. So what are leaders and managers to do? Our guest today says there's a way to break out of this constant crisis management mode.

IT involves strategies to take the temperature down, analyze the outrage shape and bound the response, understand your power and build resilience. Carthy romona is a professor, business and public policy at the university of oxford, blob t next school of government. He wrote the book the age of outrage, how to lead in a polarized world, and the h. Br article, managing in the age of outrage part that welcome such .

a pleasure to be here thank you for having the Allison .

taking a long view. There have been certainly other periods of vehement n disagreement on issues in the U. S.

You don't thinking about the civil rights era, the vietnam era. So why does this aid seem so plagne by outrage? What are some of the key factors driving polarization?

In my estimation, there are three things that, in some sense define this present age. And it's the fact that we have all three of these things at the same time that's really sort of exacerbating the situation. The first is what we call a fear of the future.

So between climate change and rising concern about demographic shifts and migration, the advance in technological innovation, particularly artificial intelligence, and the prospect that IT will radically change the nature of work, you ve got all of these sort of developmental factors that contribute to people feeling like the future is not going to be as pleasant as the past. The lives their kids will lead is not going to be as comfortable as the life's theyve LED. The second thing that matters is we've been through periods where we've dealt with technological uncertainty and where we felt like, you know, we've got a lot to deal with as a society.

But if we have a trust in our institutions, if we have a sense of confidence that our leaders will be able to navigate this, then maybe that fear will be somewhat. But we are also dealing with the second force, uh, a perception of a radial, a sense that the rules of the game are somehow broken. Uh in, say, the western world, middle income and lower income individuals feel like they were really dealt t the radio on globalization, that the establishment is in working for them, that the rules of the game are broken.

Now you put this fear of the future and the raw deal together. And IT sort of brings to light the third factor, which we call the ideologies of others ing. So for a long time, we've sort of felt like we're in this together.

We're in this enlightenment project. Through the pursuit of knowledge, we will somehow figure out the answers to all of life's great chAllenges. But increasingly, we are reverting back to our tribal instincts to a sense that, uh, it's us, worse them. It's this community versus some other community. And that ideology of other's, when you laid onto the fear, the future and the radial that really contribute all three of these things together, really contribute to the age of outrage.

when did you realize that this was such a big problem you needed to start educating students in how to deal with IT?

Yeah so about eight years ago I was um sort of plucked out of cambridge, mass musette where I was teaching at harvard business school to serve as the director of the master public policy program at oxford. And over the course of the seven or so years that I let that program, we brought together about a thousand public leaders from one hundred and fifty or so countries around the world. And these are individuals who came from the U.

S. In china, from russia, ukraine, from israel and palestine, I, from indian pakistan. They have fundamentally different ideas about what is the purpose of government.

And I found myself at the center of this community with the chAllenge of trying to make their experience with us such that they left stronger for IT, that they left, in some sense, with a greater capacity to build unlikely coalitions across all of the fractures in the world. And speaking candidly, I didn't know how to do this. So what I did is what many professors do when they don't know the answer to something.

They teach a course on IT. I brought together about eight of my friends who C, E, S, or cos of, you know, businesses of government agencies, of nfa profits. And I said, can you come to my class as a guest speaker and bring us your hardest chAllenge? But don't tell us what you did.

Just describe the chAllenge, and lets see if we can work our way through IT as a community, as a classroom, and also bring to us your favorite piece of reading, right? IT could be something that you read from poetry that really move you. IT could be some sort of piece of scientific reading about how the brain works that really move you, but bring to us your favorite piece of reading. And at some point I said, well, are there lessons here that we can distill?

And how do you see this age of outrage affecting the business world? Why is IT so important for organisational leaders, team managers to think carefully about how they're going to deal with IT?

So for a number of reasons, one, managing in the age of outrage is not managing outrage, right? Managing outrage is just crisis management. And you can hire external firm to do that, a communications firm.

You can have your P, R. Department and it's important, but it's firefighting. And then you go back to business as usual. The age of outrage is something that's deeper and more structural. And managing the age of outrage basically says if you're going to approach this, is firefighting constantly going to be in firefighting mode, and that's not healthy because then when do you actually take time to renew yourself? When do you take time as an organization to do deep strategic thinking?

When do you take time as an organization to do innovation? When do you actually grow? So if you're in constant firefighting mode, you're very quickly with her and die as an organza. And that's why, for instance, we say resilience plays a huge role in the age of outrage because not only are you trying to figure out when to respond and how to respond and whom to listen to as you make these decisions, you have to figure out how to do this in a way that both you as an individual and the organization as a whole are really able to come out from each experience stronger for, or at least not we.

Do you have some specific examples of scenario in which polarization or outrage has derail ed, a team or organization because the leaders weren't equipped to deal with IT?

In the book we talk about two case studies, one involving neli early on in the history of nestle's um engagement on this particular crisis with its instant uh roman noodle product in india called Maggie noodles.

Meslay was wrongly accused of having a LED content in its noodles and IT took sort of a rather religious approach to that accusation you know trying to be little the regulator and trying to take a confrontational approach with social media on IT and that backfired. The constituents that they were um trying to reach their customers. They were not in a mood for that kind of you know of uh some sets, a hatty or disdainfully on part of a large multination co Operation.

And nez had in fact advertised this as a health food. And then what happens is the regulator double down and they say, well, actually you necessary have this claim of no msg added to your roman noodles and IT turns out that there's msg in the noodles. Now while the regulator was wrong about the LED, IT turns out they were right about the msg.

So now they have gotten necessarily gotten themselves into even bigger trouble, because now the regulator had them on something that they had genuinely, perhaps most stepped on, so that now, you know really sort of a affected the trust they had with their customers. And the social media really took over you you know how IT is with these sort of things that they becomes their own narrative and they were posts on social media like nesle y has broken our indian hearts. And things like bad and IT tends to get dramatized.

And the company then had to really sort of change the leadership in charge of the situation in order to get a fresh perspective. They flew in the senior vice president for the entire age of pacific region to sort of take a hold of the crisis over time. The uh, leadership had to be turned over. You know IT really required a uh complete renovation of uh their approach to engaging with stakeholders because they had let this get out of hand.

So that's an example of sort of an an external outrage. And do you have one where the outrages internally, you know either its employees angry at the company or at one another?

Yeah, that happens a lot these days. I mean, the world is a complicated place, right? And there's a lot going on right now in the world that is cause for d personal anguish and h. There's a lot of injustice that people see in the world, and they feel like people with the perceived capability to address that injustice should be standing up for IT.

So you have instances of, say, employees at leading tech companies saying, well, look where these powerful tech companies that have these sort of omission platforms, why aren't we doing more about this? And why aren't we perhaps, uh, more actively using our platform power to win on what we feel is the right thing? IT is for the management of these tech companies now to carefully navigate this.

You know, on the one hand, they might be right to say, look, we are a tech company. We are in the business of, say, social media connections or selling ads. This is sort of outside of our core competence. But at the same time, these are knowledge businesses, and their employees are so central to their existence, they have very few real assets outside of their employees, so losing the trust of their employees in this moment is something they can afford.

okay. So we've described a pretty dire situation. Um but let's talk about solutions. What can leaders do first to turn down the temperature? You describe that as the first step.

So turning down the temperature is probably the first step when you're in the crisis. But i'd like to actually even start before that. The first and most important thing is not to be surprised by the fact that you're going to have these crisis start preparing for IT today. When you don't have an immediate problem on your desk, it's thinking i'm going to have a crisis at some point and it's gonna blow up in my face because something probably I didn't do. But my employees are going to think that i'm not being um just in the moment or my customers are going to think that of me or my investors or someone else.

And so part of what managing the age of our region tails is actually searching around through your stakeholders, particularly people who might be perspective and tag once in a moment of crisis and building the trust with them when times are still okay so that when IT is you face that crisis, you can call on them to advise you. You can call on them to tell you the things that you might not othe wise here because you're in the psychic e chAmber. And then step one is, as you say, turning down the temperature, because when you are in that crisis, you know the way the signs of aggression in our brains works, we're really provoked by things like ambient conditions, right? So if you are in a hot, crowded room or you're in a context where everybody is standing up and being drawled around and being fed tons of caffeine, and so for then, they're just more prone to be triggered and to get angry about a situation and set up my .

husband jokes that I always fight when i'm hungry.

Yeah ah me too ah and often times there are some simple solutions here. So when I was uh, running the program with for the public leaders that I mention, there's a cake shop down the street from my office and if somebody had you know they were in my office upset about something, I say, well, first we ve got to go eat some cake and so I became famous at the cake shop because I would bring in people and say, well, you know, thank your favorite cake and we're going to sit down and we got to e cake and then we'll figure out what we need to do.

I love that as a management. I think that's fabulous.

I like k to the win win. Um so it's about sort of getting those ambient conditions right and then it's giving people the space to not let their initial instinctive reaction. Kk, often times you give people a hearing on the first day, and then you say, okay, I need to sleep on this and i'd like you to come back tomorrow.

And actually, then you give them a second chance to play the thing again. And you'll see that they might play IT very differently because they've had a chance to a played out uh, with the heat of the emotion and be sleep on IT and then they come back with maybe a more structured uh, sense of, you know what IT is you can address about the problem. And probably the most important thing in turning down the temperature is recognizing that even when we think we're seeing things rationally, what we call a rational analysis of the situation is really the product of our lived experiences.

So we all have different scripts that shape the way we look at the world. And so when someone sits down with you is recognizing what what are their scripts and how are their scripts different from yours? And if this is something that comes down to a difference in the scripts and lived experiences that have been baked in over six, thirty years, then it's full.

Hardly, if not impossible, to imagine you're gna change IT in one city. So let that not be the objective, right? The objective at that point is to hear IT out and then to be able to take you back again to that group of prostate adviser that you convened in step zero and say, okay, here's what I am hearing. Now tell me what I can do about this yet.

That was the question that I had about analyzing the sources of outrage. Why is that important to still do that if many of the things might be totally out of your control?

One is important to know what is and what isn't in your control, right? And if you are not seen to act on the things that are in your control. Then you could get yourself into even more trouble. The second reason why you take the trouble to do that is in the process of that analysis, you might learn about who are catholic forces or individuals in a possible the escalation.

In the book, we tell the story of uh, the commissioner of london metropolitan police she's dealing with a crisis in uh the early part of covered uh where during black lights matter where a report comes out that says that Young black londoners might be stopped by police as many as ten, if not sixteen times more often than White londoners. This is obviously a real serious problem and she's trying to understand how, in the context of the lockdowns where everybody was at home, this data suggest that this is extreme discrepancy and the number of stop and searches of Young black men have actually gone out during lockdown. That's like counter intuitive.

So she's trying to figure this out, but she's also trying to figure out, well, if i'm going to have to manage the situation, who's really important and part of what that analysis is will will yield as well. The head of the met black police officer association is really important, because if I, as the commissioner, the met, lose the trust of the head of the met black police officer association, I finished. I obviously need the support of the black community. I need the support of my ranking file police officers, but it's this particular constituency that at the intersection of those communities that is catholic to anything i'm going to do. And so it's that analysis that allows you to say in this moment who are the really catholic individuals or forces that need to be at the table, that need to be actively listen to, and that, in some sense, need to be given perhaps more prominent decision rights in figuring out what's next.

And then you talk about crafting a response. I think the language is sheep and bounding. What do you mean by that?

We sort of say that, look, there's two forces here. The first is the force of recognizing when you might have asy metric capabilities, disproportionate capabilities as an organization to help to alleviate the harm that people are experiencing and seeing in the world. We offer managers a series of questions that helped them identify their capability of symmetries.

But the the chAllenge with that is that IT sort of leads you perhaps in the direction of overreacting almost to a situation and feeling like, you know, i've got to do something here. So there's another country veiling force you need to baLance here, which is the board, the force around managing shifting expectations. And that actually pushes in the opposite direction and perhaps pushes you in the direction of the reacting.

Because you say, when I make a commitment, I need to not only authentically deliver on that commitment, I need to anticipate how this is going to change, how the expectation of my delivery is going to change as the world evolves. Because if I act today and then the crisis grows and I fail to act tomorrow, i'm going to mean even worse trouble than I am in today. It's these two sort of travAiling forces of acting on your capability asymmetries and acting in some sense, to recognize how expectations are shifting around you.

And therefore you should be bounding your response that we give. We give managers A A series of all told seven questions that allow them to navigate these trade, ffs. That then helped you say, okay, where in this particular moment do I need to land? What is? What are the boundaries of my commitment? I have to make a commitment.

But what are the boundaries of my commitment? How are how those boundaries communicated to the people that are impacting today? How have I anticipated how their expectations by shift? And however, I incorporated that into my plan for delivery.

what if you as a leader, have a really strong view on the issue yourself? Is your jo B2Be com pletely imp artial and ign ore you r own per sonal vie ws?

So that's a question that comes up a lot right? And often time people feel like, oh my god, I am being expected to somehow put my own values aside and you know listen to people that I have these sort of very strong disagreements with. I think there are two things that leaders need to hold in mind.

The first is that your responsibility ie s as a leader are different than perhaps your responsibility ie s as an individual citizen. And this is great lying from um socket ties where he says the privilege of leadership is that IT is Better to suffer and injustice than to perpetuate IT. That part of what being a leader is is being able to sort of you know this is a moment where I have to recognize that I am acting in a separate capacity from what I would if I were not in this position of power.

But there is other element to IT leadership is leaving a situation Better than you found IT, right? That doesn't necessarily mean abandoning your values, but it's saying, well, how do I recognize what might be the way in which I can manage this particular situation so that tomorrow we can have a more robust conversation about those values? Because if I try to force my values on this particular scenario, in this moment of divisiveness, I probably won't get much done in terms of healing the community. I won't leave IT Better .

than I found IT. So talk a little bit about how power, whether a litter has IT or doesn't affect their ability to change the situation, you know, to bring the temperature down to fine solutions.

So, you know, in the book we talk about the various sources of power that managers enjoy with a view to, particularly home in on one type of power, which is the sort of recipe c relational power that you want to use in a situation like this, because trying to effect the outcome that you want by, in some sense, commanding people to do IT, that actually diminishes your power for the next time you need to use IT.

But if, on the other hand, you can create the institutions or you can create the community, where people, through a deliberate process, are able to give you the answer that you think is the right answer for the community, that they think is the right answer for the community, because you've created the right relationships within the community. So now IT is, in some sense, turning over your power to your community in the spirit of trust and having them tell you what they think is the right answer. Now of course, you can't be leading the vit witness on that.

Because if you are leading the witness on that, people will feel managed. And you know, you're not going to get what you want. They need to genuinely feel that you're gona give them the band with to make the mistakes that they might make. But at the same time, they need to feel empowered by the shared sense of values that you think will allow them to get to that right decision. You step back as a leader, you become sort of the active listener, and you let the community with the right set of shared values discover what might be the right answer to navigate this organza forward.

And you talked at the beginning about the importance of sort of preparing for these events to come up over and over again. So that requires resilience. And how do we build the personal fortitude first that we need to be able to manage in that temporary way you just described.

You know it's interesting that when I profiled um all of the leaders that I mentioned in the class, you know people who are C O S, C O S of businesses, government agencies, sea, I started asking them, you know, what sort of philosophical reading had really helped them navigate this um particular moment at this particular age one sort of particular philosopher kept coming up, which is Steven ism.

People think of stevie says, sort of emotion list and you know lacking empathy in a situation. But that's not really what Stewart m is and it's not what these leaders mean by steel ism. I think what they mean is a sense of recognizing that there are things that you can control, and there are things you can't control, and being at peace with the things that you cannot control, and making a deliberate effort to affect the things that you can control. IT also means having a sense of almost conversational sophistication, a dialect dal sophistication, where you don't overuse your words, where you don't sort of overplay your emotions, but you are an enabling. You are allowing people to, in some sense, discover for themselves what is the right response in the situation, and letting the process then play out as IT must.

And that's obviously good role modeling, you know, to to not be outraged yourself. But how do you transfer a broader resilience to the team or organization? You know, like what do you do on an ongoing basis to make sure that everyone can make IT through the next big news event without some big divide?

So the really great organza we've study in this have done two things. One that they have allowed organizations to. They've delegated, in some sense, within deep within the organizations, the capacity to make the decisions at the location of the organization where it's most impacted, right?

So you have to push the decision down to the place where the impact felt most greatly. Now that, of course, requires a deep trust in the people that work for you. And you say i'm going to give them this power to do this thing, and i'm going to trust that they are going to do not just what's right for them, but that's what's right for our collective purpose.

So is there are a lot of training that they do for these managers OK?

Yes, exactly. And because you can't delegate without, in some sense, preparing people to make the right choices, right, you, you need two things to delegate. One, you need to prepare people to be excEllent at what they do. You need to align them on values. You need to give them the skills and competencies they need to really perform at the level of which you d expect them.

And two, you need to give them the freedom to fail, right? And they need to trust that you will have their back if they do fail, not withstanding the fact that you have given them a great training. And so for and it's those two things that the organization is holding and baLance as they're delegating this down.

And by delegating IT down, repeatedly, training people really well, aligning people really well and giving them the freedom to fail the organization over time builds the right kind of values to manage in the age of average. The organization itself is telling you, okay, look on this particular flare up point to the world. We shouldn't necessarily have a view because we figured out that actually there's no upside to doing that. Now you, as the C, E, are being told by your organization what that answer is rather than the other way round. That's resilience.

What do you say to managers who might push back and say, well, I would just prefer to say don't bring your political issues into the workplace like let's just not talk about IT here.

Um I think in this dn age, if you can, as a manager, afford to say that more power to you and go ahead and do IT because you might be in a ticula position of strength to be able to do that. But again, if you are uh, working in a sort of competitive labor market economy, if you are working in an environment where you are you know working hard to acquire and retain any customer, you need your employees fully committed, fully bought in that they're there because this is a shared venture, otherwise they'll find the next thing, right? And so if you're in that situation, which quite Frankly, most businesses are in this a environment, then you can't afford really to be so command and control about this yeah and again, because if you are command and control about IT, you'll very quickly lose the ability to use that the next crisis and the next crisis because it's an ongoing crisis.

Is there anything else that you'd recommend to all of us, not just leaders, to get Better at dealing with the next event that might Spark our outrage?

So two things have really worked for me and with people. I work for every level of the organization. The first is, no matter what, recognize that you're not going to solve the whole problem in front of you.

That sense of perspective, that sense of temperance, will actually allow you to be thought ful about the parts that you can address IT will allow you to be delivered about delivering success on that well defined nature of the problem that you did bite off, just recognized. I'm not going to solve the whole problem. That step one, step two is to recognize that if you are in a capacity to actually address part of the problem, you are also going to be seen by some people as part of the problem.

Because the power that you have to make a change is itself what is dividing people in this moment. And that's important because you cannot be liked by all of the people all of the time. And if that something that is how you go about managing, then you find yourself again very quickly, deplete IT. So recognize that, look, they're just going to be some people because of the nature of the decisions are making because i'm taking, say, a more temperate route to this i'm taking around, which is about building rather than policing coalitions. At this moment, they're going to be some people will be upset by me.

You just have to come to terms with that. Well, thank you so much for being with me today. Fingers cross that we can bring down the level of outrage.

Yes, make a small difference.

That's cartel romana, professor, the university of oxford blighted ic school of government, and author of the book the age of outrage how to lead in a polarized world we're nearing in on our thousand episode, which means we have many more shows to help you manage your team, your organization and your career. Find them at h br dot ork flash podcasts, or search h br and apple podcast difc or wherever you listen.

Thanks to our team, senior producer mary do asa, producer hana bates, audio product manager ian fox and senior production special rob ecard, and thanks to you for listening to the H. B. Idea, cast will be back with a new episode tuesday. I'm Allison beer.