Episode Jennifer Jordan

Lead Long and Prosper is a Spellcast for Joy in Leadership. They have a guest, Professor Jennifer Jordan, who teaches and does research on leadership. She believes that leadership cannot be taught like baking a cake or solving a math problem, as there is no right answer. Her approach has shifted from giving answers to helping leaders discover their own solutions. She emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and understanding the role of emotions in leadership. Jennifer also discusses the challenges and accountability that come with being a leader, comparing it to being a principal dancer in ballet. She believes that leaders should be able to work in a group but also handle accountability. She mentions the importance of agility and flexibility in roles and the need for leaders to understand both the abstract and concrete aspects of their work. Jennifer also shares lessons from ballet, such as dealing with criticism and staying elegant under pressure. Lead Long and Prosper, the Spellcast for Joy in Leadership. Experiences, tips, and valuable hacks for all those who want to lead with joy. Hello and welcome to our Spellcast, Lead Long and Prosper with Joy in Leadership. My name is Hans-Jörg Spreng. We have a wonderful guest today, which I will introduce in a second. With me today in the conversation is Sabine Schmidroth. Hi, hello. And Achim Plückebaum. Hello. Achim will be today the Spellcaster, so he will listen to flow and summarize at the end of our talk, share what he has observed. Now, welcome Professor Jennifer Jordan. Hello. Jennifer is a social psychologist and a professor of leadership and organizational development at IMD in Lausanne. She teaches and does research on digital leadership, ethics, influence, and power. She has received specialized training and certifications in lie and truthful detection as well in conflict resolution. She works in different organizations and is well-known in the society. Welcome, Jennifer. Thank you, Achim Plückebaum. I would like to start with a quote, which I've seen in one of the electronic media. Leaders in today's society need to constantly learn, unlearn, and relearn. They know that they have to learn. The challenge is how to unlearn and how to relearn. In working with leaders, my aim is to facilitate that process. Jennifer, you are hosting leadership for leaders. You are hosting a space for learning for leaders. How has the way you help them learning changed in the phases you have gone through? I would say I think framing it as going from telling somebody, right, telling someone how to do something to helping them to discover how to do it. I think I'm in a unique place in the sense that I have to teach people to do something that can't be taught. You can't teach someone to lead. It's not like teaching someone how to make a cake or even how to solve a math problem. There's also no really right answer in the sense that if you need to bake a cake or solve an equation, there's sort of a right answer there. Leadership is very much the gray zone. So it is quite difficult and maybe dissatisfying as someone in my role that you can't really provide answers. So I think in terms of my, your question was about my transition. My transition has gone from, I guess, around that acceptance. When I started my career, it was more about trying to give people answers in the sense of maybe self-validating myself that I am a professor, I have the answers, but also maybe believing that there were answers to now facilitating in the classroom people's self-awareness, their self-discovery. Most of them, the answers lie in them at this point of their leadership. There's very few new things I can tell them. I merely can do rephrasing. I can rephrase. I can provide maybe some models. I can help them organize their thoughts. But very little I can do around actually teaching something completely new. Is it only about thoughts or is it also about feelings? I imagine that interaction is a big part in that kind of work and helping them. Is there a part of, let's say, helping them to feel or is it just about awareness? No, it's not about awareness. It's a very good question. It's not just about awareness. However, even when we talk about feelings, it's also awareness of feelings. So how much are you mindful of? My belief is that all thoughts originate from or come from emotions. So you would say that the thoughts are a product of some feelings someone has. Maybe it's not even something they're aware of, not at their conscious level. So it's also self-awareness around emotions, around how things make them feel and how are they reacting. Maybe what they think is a cognitive level, but it's quite an emotional level for them. Their reaction is what they think is cognitive, but it's actually emotional at its origin. What was the reason to pick up this leadership professorship? It's not so easy. It's not right or wrong. So what was for you the reason to do it? That's a good question. I started out as a math major in school. One of my great loves in life is ballet. What both of those things share is elegance. If you've ever seen ballet, it's a very elegant form of dance. There's a right way to do it and a wrong way. There's kind of black and white in dance. In the very complex levels of mathematics, you get into the gray zone, but there's a bit of black and white. As one of my favorite math professors once told me, I was arguing about the outcome of a problem. He said, Jennifer, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and atom bombs. It doesn't count in math. I like that elegance. Then as I matured and got a little bit older, I realized that life is not about black and white and elegance. Life is quite messy. For me, I mean, I'm a psychologist before I'm a leadership professor, I would say. That's what I love about leadership and about psychology, Sabina, is the messiness and the gray zone, which I think mirrors real life better than the black and white. At what time did you realize that you are really good in this, sorting the mess? I don't know if I've still realized that. I don't know how good I am at this, actually. I think like many people, there's always a pull to get back to the black and white to simplify. It's still about, even at this point in my career, I've been teaching leadership since 2005, so almost 20 years now. Sometimes sitting with that gray zone, sitting with that ambiguity, sitting with that uncertainty, especially when my job is as a professor to come in and get answers and to help people to solve their problems, I have to keep myself in that discomfort zone as well if I'm going to help them stay in that zone of grayness. At the ballet, we have the prima donna and we have the chorus, right? And the question is, whom do I employ, the prima donna or the chorus? And I would, in leadership, think someone employing, I would look for a leader who can dance the chorus, go with the chorus, and can dance the prima donna, because both is important leadership. How do you look at that? Because you love ballet and elegance. I would say both, right? I mean, for almost every principal dancer out there, they've once danced in the corps, the corps de ballet, the group. They start there. So I think it is being able to do both and knowing you can do both. And I think one thing that makes leadership so darn hard, I mean, many things make leadership hard. I think it's one of the hardest roles you might ever have in your life. One thing that makes it so hard is the accountability. All eyes are on you. You're holding a lot. You have to make decisions that impact hundreds, thousands, maybe, depending on your role, millions of people. And for saying, I guess, with a principal dancer, right, if you're in the corps and you make a mistake, but there's a line of you or you're in the back, maybe no one will notice. If you're the principal dancer, you make a mistake, you're out there in the front, the spotlight is on you, everybody notices. And that's a lot to hold. I would say, yes, you need to be able to work in a group. But you also, if you're the leader, you need to be able to hold a lot of accountability. And that's very stressful. It's not easy, just like for a principal dancer. Just imagine your last courses, the court you have there. How many, let's say, chorus dancers have been there and how many leader, principal dancers have been there? So how is the equation between these groups? Or are they coming and have already the spark for both? My first reaction to you, and this is not fully answering your question, my first reaction to you is it's easier to take someone from the chorus and propel them out to the principal dancer role in the spotlight because it's like, wow, I'm special. I'm finally able to be seen and heard as I should always, as I always meant to be seen and heard, than to take somebody who's been in the spotlight and ask them to be back in the chorus. Because it feels like, oh, this is demotion. This is not where I should be playing. And at the same time, anyone who knows that spotlight role, especially for a long period of time, knows that it wears on you. It is quite, as I said before, it's quite a lot of responsibility. So I'm not answering your question directly because I don't think I know the answer to your question. But I think about more of agility and flexibility in people's roles. How easy is it to go from one to another? And also, when you're sitting there in the chorus, I think it's easy to kind of vilify or to put labels on the person in the spotlight to say, oh, you know, they're not, they're not this, they're not that, they're not listening to us, they're not cooperative enough. And then once you get there in the spotlight, you realize when you're there in the spotlight, all that accountability is on you. It's not always easy to remember what it's like back in the chorus. So maybe, and maybe that's the challenge of leadership too, right? Is that to be a good leader, you have to go from the abstract to the concrete, or you have to be able to go there. If you're always at the high level, it doesn't work. And if you never go to the high level, it doesn't work. But you have to be able to at some point go down to the concrete. I have still a last question about ballet. What you learn in ballet and dancing is that you'll be elegant under pain. You smile even if you feel the pain in the shoe. And this is maybe an attribute which is as well important for a leader to see the positive and be elegant in the smile. There are so many lessons I learned from ballet that I'm so grateful for. One is criticism. I mean, people say criticism isn't personal. It's incredibly personal in dance. People will say, like, you're not worth watching on stage. I mean, that's the level of criticism that you get in dance or get off the stage so you can learn your steps. You don't deserve to be here. I mean, very, very personal. So how to take criticism at a very, very personal level is one. But the other one you learn is when people are paying to watch you, they don't care if you've had a bad day. They don't care if your grandmother has died. You're there to perform. And that is an incredible lesson. At the same time, I think we're getting in leadership more into this idea of vulnerability and sharing your vulnerabilities. And for me, as someone who grew up in that world, that wasn't something I learned. And we know it's not always appropriate, right? When you're standing in front of the board, when you're standing in front of customers, they don't always care if you've had a great day or your kid has been sick then. And it's like, OK, what is this balance? We talk a lot about vulnerability. What is this balance then that is healthy between revealing your vulnerabilities and putting on the smile even when you're in incredible pain, physical or emotional? Do you think that a leader needs such a physical metaphor, physical exercise, sport, ballet, soccer, whatever, to build out of this joyful experience of the past? Because it was joy. Otherwise, you wouldn't do ballet. But this is a metaphor where leadership stories can be built on. I think a lot of leaders I've worked with have learned a lot from sports, but I don't think that physical side is necessary. I've also heard leaders that have had amazing metaphors from a life of chess for artistry, like painting. So I don't think there has to be a physical side, but I do think we learn a lot from leaders by having a rich life, one that's not just about that leadership in the office. In the last podcast, we talked a lot about, is it possible to learn leadership? If you have a scale from zero where you say, no, you can't learn it, to 10, it's, yes, sure, absolutely, you can learn. Behind this is the question about talent and the competences you need to be successful as a leader. So your scale, what is your opinion? To answer that question for the United, let me just give you my definition of leadership, and then we can say, can you learn that or not? So I define leadership as, and I'm using Robert House's definition. So it is influencing, motivating, and enabling people to reach a common goal or a shared purpose. Can you teach people how to motivate or give people tips on how to motivate? Yes, you teach people how to be better influencers. Yes, you can teach people how to do that. You teach people how to enable other people. Yes, you can give them the frameworks, you can give them the skills. But then when it comes to actual implementation, just like you can show someone dance steps, but then you put them on stage and you see, can they actually do the ballet? Can they do the routine? Which is really about bringing themselves in the picture, making it feel and look authentic to them. That you can't teach. So the frameworks, the skeleton, that stuff you can give, you can teach. It can go here. You can't teach the stuff that goes to the heart. I think that's for that person to do the introspection on, to look for examples, role models that are inspiring to them. That's stuff you can't teach. So as I always say, my job is merely to give the tools, to give the frameworks, and to maybe give the encouragement and space for them to talk about their frustrations or their challenges. But you can't necessarily teach the doing part. That is done just by practice and by making mistakes in that practice, too, and having that space to make mistakes, which I think is maybe the hardest one, the unlearning or the relearning part that you talked about earlier. To let go of the success pattern of yesterday. I've read that you have a focus on power, ethics, and wisdom, and maybe other things in the course. My question aims about the energy with your course. So at what themes do you feel the most energy in the course with your suspected leader or your senior leaders who would like to become a CEO? So where is the most energy? Where do you feel that they're writing with their heart? I don't think I'm giving you the answer you want or you're aiming for, but I would say the most energy comes when people talk about themselves. Humans are egocentric. So I don't care if I talk about power, ethics, whatever. People, the most energy comes when you hit that problem that they're facing right on the head and it resonates with them, whatever that might be, right? And what resonates with one person is not what resonates with another. And that's something we talked about what I've had to learn as a professor in this space. It's like going from what I want to tell them, what my objectives are, to really giving up some control and letting them tell me what they're interested in, what they want to hear. And then, of course, it is a very delicate balance because I'm still the professor. I still have to hold some power. I'm often, well, until recently I was the youngest in the room many times and I was a woman when there was many men. But I think even more important that I'm able to hold that power in that role. And yet, if you don't give up that power and let them tell you how this resonates with you or what's really on their heart or their mind, then especially at this level of teaching and leadership, you're not very affected as a professor. And that's still a delicate balance I don't always get right, if I'm honest. Wisdom has been one of your last research works. So what is the connection between wisdom and leadership? I would say that, you know, if you want influence, if you want to motivate, if you want to enable people, wisdom, which I define as fundamental pragmatic in the fundamental parts of life, expert knowledge of the fundamental pragmatics of life. I would say that, do you know kind of what inspires someone? Can you sense that? But also, if we think about the common goal or the shared purpose, how do you create a common goal that will inspire people, that people will be excited to follow, but that also benefits the organization or society? A lot of that is undergirded or supported by wisdom. Is every great leader wise? I would say every great leader, yes, has some significant amount of wisdom. Maybe they look different in how they impart that wisdom or how they lead. But I would say that wisdom is required for great leadership. Maybe this could be the part of joy also for the people, because I'm reflecting what you said, that it's hard leadership with responsibilities or it's tough work. So what is your observation? What brings joy in the life of leaders? That is an outstanding question. And it's one when you were talking about that, that I was thinking about a CEO and a few CEOs I've talked to, and I'm going to summarize what they say, but they essentially say like 80 percent of their job is dealing with a lot of crap. A lot of upset people, angry stakeholders of some sort, trying to get something to the board that is quite tough. So I mean, leadership at the top of an organization doesn't sound like a lot of fun. And if we think about what is joy, right? Joy, if you think, I would have used kind of the Csikszentmihalyi definition of flow. It's like being in, fully present in the here and now and what you're doing, but not necessarily thinking about the completion of that task or the criteria that needs to be met for that task to be done right. You're really just in that moment and experiencing it at an emotional and cognitive level. And therefore, you would almost say that organizations are successful only if people suspend joy, only if people think about, you know, what is the task I have to complete? What is the goal that I need to meet? How close am I to achieving that goal? What is left to do? What are some of the gaps that I'm not thinking about, which is all about not always being in the present moment, being very task oriented. So I'm going to make a very bold statement that says for most modern organizations to be successful, it requires that people go out of a state of joy or are not prioritizing joy. And that's quite a statement to make. And maybe I will regret saying that, but it is the impression that I get and what I've seen. So I guess that goes back to your question, Sabina, then what, where is the place or what is the place of joy in a successful organization? And how is joy defined by different people? What is joy? It differs from person to person, and maybe discipline is for one person, joy. I have a very strong feeling about that. I think that some people think discipline is joy or some people think that completing a task is joy, but I think that they're fooling themselves and confusing joy with satisfaction or with pride. And those are three different, very different things. Just because someone says it's joy doesn't mean that they're actually experiencing joy. We had in Germany a discussion some years ago about heroic leadership and post-heroic leadership. If you look in politics, you know, heroic leadership comes back again. You see old white man behaving heroic. Is that something which is reflected in your courses or do they come mainly as a post-heroic? I'm very much of a systems thinker. So I always say, okay, whatever we see is normally a reaction to what people, what the systems subconsciously want. I mean, just like with power, right? People will say, I want a flat hierarchy, so much nicer with a flat hierarchy, but you give people a flat hierarchy and they create a vertical hierarchy because it's easier, right? It's easier to understand how life works. I think that the same is true with this kind of leadership of being, leadership being like empowerment oriented, one of the group, teamwork, especially the younger generations. They say that they want a leader that is much more one of them that listens, that takes a more team oriented approach. But then if you look at who society actually elevates to these kinds of God-like levels, we can think about, you know, the Elon Musk or on a different leadership style, the Satya Nadella's, et cetera. They're still very much of like, as you say, mostly men, but like the leader on the pedestal, the one that saves us, the one that is heroic. And again, I don't in any way blame the leader for this. I think it's society that feels very comforted by this very classical idea of like the leader out in front and being courageous and risk-taking. And I think they're merely responding to a societal need for this. Jennifer, my last question before Achim comes in, how will AI change leadership? I don't think AI is going to change what leadership is. I think for a very long time, leadership is going to still be motivating and enabling and influencing people to reach a common goal or shared purpose. However, I think the how, the how a leader decides, OK, this is the group I'm with. How do I maybe motivate them? Or what do I need to do to influence them? Or maybe what should my common goal or shared purpose be? I think that's where AI will come in, helping leaders maybe define these things or give them tips, especially because we're having to motivate, enable and influence people that are very different from us now, right? They don't look like us. They don't maybe have the same backgrounds as us. So understanding how to motivate or influence these people might be harder than before. So perhaps AI can give us some tips on that. But what leaders have to fundamentally do, I don't think that's going to be, at least for the near future, going to be affected by AI. Thank you, Jennifer. Achim, I welcome you back. What have you heard and what would you like to share for us and also for our listeners? And thank you, Jennifer. For me, the first real takeaway is you have almost redefined what a professor does. You went away from the old classical concept of teaching, where we all see teaching as somebody is in the front, and there's an audience that gets the answers. And you said right away from the beginning, this is not about providing answers because they don't exist. There is no more black and white. It is gray, as our world is. Our world is gray. Our world has different facets. It has different images and pictures and personalities and diversities, which is great. And you redefined, for us, I think, your role as, yes, I'm the professor, but I'm the facilitator. I'm opening eyes, I'm opening ears, and I'm going deep or I'm helping others to go deep, which is the self-awareness, the rephrasing, organizing thoughts, the mindfulness. Who am I? What do I stand for? And you put yourself as the facilitator of that process, which is not like it was in the past, maybe, the professor standing in the front of the audience and telling others how to be. You basically facilitate them how they want to be, and then enabling them to ask the right questions themselves. And you said it at the end, also, people are egos. People like to talk about themselves. So what you do is, maybe what we should all do, maybe what other leaders should do is enable others to think about themselves, give them the right questions. Don't give them the answers because they will have to find them themselves, but leading them into a path, how they can get there. And your own story, I think, was also interesting to a certain degree to say, I have learned this in my own way, how to go a bit with the zeitgeist of leadership and become that facilitator that helps others to become better. Yes, there are frameworks. Yes, there are methods. But at the end, it goes down to the individual, what he or she makes out of it. Of course, we liked the image of the ballot. And if I take the comparison there, yes, there's the prima donna. Yes, there's the corals. But there needs to be somebody who's conducting all of this and making this together in an ensemble that works together. And again, I saw you there. I almost had an image where you are the conductor of the prima donnas and the corals and everything and how it all comes together into one logical piece. But it's not easy because you said also leadership is painful. And why is it painful? Because you take accountability and accountability is hard. You're always in the spotlight. And no matter how you perform, people look at and you have to be able to take criticism, you said also, which is also not easy. But the good thing is, and I think that was the light a bit at the end of the tunnel for those who want to take accountability. Nowadays, it is fine to be vulnerable. It is OK to show weaknesses. And I think this is also a very important signal that you gave our young leaders that, yes, accountability is tough, but you can be vulnerable. You can be who you are. And you do want to show also what's going inside of you because the emotional side of leadership is almost as important as the factual side of leadership. Joy is something that has to be present in modern organizations. And maybe that's the way I would close my summary here. We are going away from task-oriented organizations to joy-oriented organizations and companies, especially modern companies who want to attract young talents and who want to have the future of leadership, need to think about the element of joy because the task alone won't motivate people any longer. And I think you and yourself role model this for us here today. Thank you so much for this very enriching conversation, Jennifer. Thank you, Achim. And like in any of our spell cards, the guest has the last word and then we close. Jennifer, it's your last word. OK, I'm going to actually, three last words, but I will make them concise. You talked about the kind of conductor in the ballet and you have to understand that in a ballet there is no conductor. The dancers are there on the stage by themselves. It's not an orchestra where you have the conductor there with the musicians. And so I think a leader, like a choreographer, can give the steps. They can say, this is the vision. This is where you should be on stage right or stage left at this point in the music. But then you also have to trust your dancers enough that when you walk away, they're going to live your vision out on stage. And that requires a lot of trust because you're not there with them all the time. And I think it's also about having that then that trust in you as the choreographer, that your vision is one that they want to dance on stage, but then in you as well, that they can step away and you can perform that vision. And that's not always easy to do. The second thing is that I have an incredible privilege that many leaders don't, is that when students come in my classroom, most of them, 80 percent of them, are there because they want to be there. They want to learn. They want to introspect. That's not true for a leader. You might have a team where less than 50 percent want to have that self-awareness and an introspection. And it's really hard to get someone to want it. And so that is an additional challenge that I don't have to face. And then the last one is, you mentioned, Joaquin, this vulnerability. Again, it's this balance. Yes, there are, I think, there is more space for leaders today to be vulnerable. But there are also many places in organizations, within organizations, but across organizations, that leaders still cannot and maybe it's not appropriate to be vulnerable. And so really looking at that one, vulnerability very much in the gray zone. We say a lot about vulnerability. We read about it. There's TED Talks. And yes, it's not always appropriate or safe to be vulnerable. This was your Spellcast. Lead long and prosper with Sabine Schmitzbrot, Achim Glückebaum and Hans-Jacob Spreng. Thank you for being with us and see you next time.