Contemporary leadership means going first in complex and uncertain landscapes. Old dogmas are becoming obsolete as factors like resilience, hopefulness and having the competence to build co-exploring teams, arise to the key components of growth. Let’s dive into a conversation with leadership expert Jennifer Garvey Berger.
–Confusing. Overwhelming. Forces moving in so many directions that the idea of predicting what comes next becomes a fool’s errand.
This is how Jennifer Garvey Berger, founding partner and CEO of Cultivating Leadership, renowned leadership developer and acclaimed author of several leadership books, describes the landscape in which management teams and leaders navigate now.
Due to the uncertainty, leaders need to lead differently than before. Because to be frank, they rarely know where they are going. And on top of that, they need people who want to follow them into the unknown.
“Leaders must be co-explorers”
If the old paradigm was “leaders must define reality and give hope”, the new would rather be to BUILD hope themselves and transmit calm to their followers, says Jennifer Garvey Berger.
Jennifer Garvey Berger
Jennifer Garvey Berger is supporting leaders, teams, and whole organizations to rise to the challenge and opportunity of a complex, changing world. Jennifer Garvey Berger is the author of several acclaimed books, including Changing on the job: How leaders become courageous, wise and steady in an anxious world (2024), Unleash Your Complexity Genius (2022) and Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity (2019).
She was educated at Harvard University Graduate School of Education and was previously an associate professor at George Mason University.
–In the old forms of leadership, the leaders tended to be in the front. Now, I think leaders must be co-explorers. They are the leader of the exploration expedition. But we are all exploring a new land. Hope is incredibly important. If you are setting out for unknown land, you will have to believe that the new land is somehow better than the land you are on. You will need a sense of meaning to help guide you as a compass, since there are no tracks laid out for you to follow.
Doing this, concretely, means that leaders need to be clear about what things are known, what things are not known and what are not knowable. Leaders must face their own anxiety and fears and use tools to stay calm themselves as well as speaking the truth.
–If they say they know where they are going but they don’t, then people stop trusting them.
Instead, being transparent of the uncertainty is key.
–You may say: I’m not quite sure, but we will discover together. The leaders who do that are the best leaders. Like the CEO of Novartis saying they are going to reinvent medicine: We don’t know how this will happen, but I will stay behind you. We are going to hire the best people and support them by removing roadblocks so that they can collaborate and get their work done.
Help create hopeful stories and make room for different voices
Clear communication is another key to thrive in uncertainty. Because, when times are though, we tend to build our own stories and since we are very risk aware as a species, these stories are seldom hopeful.
–We get afraid, we get paranoid. We have a strong negative bias. So, there is a need to lead and speak into that void to help shift it.
The fear of being left out easily emerges in times of turbulence. Leaders must have this top of mind and work actively on strengthening the sense of belonging. Specifically in making sure there is room for diverse voices and perspectives. Making people feel safe – and heard – is key.
–While sometimes difficult and frustrating, these voices are fundamental to our survival. We can’t create if we don’t feel safe.
It’s that kind of “put the oxygen mask on first before helping others” kind of situation, says Jennfier Garvey Berger.
–If a leader walks into the room and is feeling anxious and hopeless, it really does not matter what that leader says because their nervous systems are going to be telling everybody in the room: I’m nervous and anxious and hopeless.
Build your own resilience and stop being so busy
For leaders to be able to lead, they must be connected to their purpose, find meaning and be restored enough. Being busy is no longer the status cue it once was. Now, leaders must take their time to build personal resilience through proper rest, movement and sleep.
–When leaders say they are busy, they really say they are afraid. They stay up late on their computers because they are anxious and feel busy. They ignore the needs of their bodies. They stop laughing and enjoying things. And they lose hope. I honestly believe that should be their number one priority right now: finding spaces of hope and meaning for themselves. So that they can transmit that to others. Leaders must be able to connect; to seek out and build a reserve in themselves so they can share it with others.
Make space for true teambuilding
If building personal resilience is key on the leader’s individual level, there is another task for the management team, according to Jennifer Garvey Berger.
–What are we using our life force for, right? You’ve got so caught up in the day-to-day that you lose track of the big picture. And that’s dangerous. We need to talk about who we are for one another. Are we a team? Are we depending on each other or just coordinating? A true team means my success and well-being is your success and well-being. We are interdependent and interdependence is fabulous.
Building that kind of team takes more than an occasional after-hours tipsy dinner. True teambuilding takes real conversation.
–People need to learn how to have these kinds of conversations with one another and take the time for them. And how to build the kind of relationships that enable these conversations to be real. The teams that do that are shocked at how efficient they become. They get stuff done so much faster because they’re all working, they’re all aligned, they’re working towards the same goals. They don’t undermine each other, they don’t go through all the crappy, wasteful political churn. They are not trying to protect their empires. We can have a nourishing, beautiful garden, but we must tend to it.
Practice hope and rebuild for the future
At last, a few reassuring words from Jennifer Garvey Berger on hope in complex and uncertain times.
–The world is very messy right now. Things are disintegrating. Cherished ideas are falling apart. We stand on a precipice and that precipice could lead us into disintegrating. Or the precipice could lead us to a giant rebuilding project. My hope right now is that at this moment of disintegration, we can lean into things like compassion. We can lean into all that is good about humanity, all that makes us, us. Let’s reimagine, recreate and solve some of the things that we’ve just never been able to solve in equity. In our relationship to nature. Our ability to forge connections across differences. Now is our moment. There is something wonderful ahead if we do this together. We have so many tools, so many capacities. We have so much going for us in terms of reinventing. We have the chance to make up for some of the flaws in earlier drafts. Hope is the foundation of our capacity to put effort into building something new. We must practice being hopeful.
”The only constant thing is change. This becomes apparent when listening to Jennifer and working with leaders today. When teams are led by a leader that is brave enough to be vulnerable, new keys are unlocked. This requires presence and intentional change of pace. It can’t be a rare luxury to get time to reflect and share the uncertainties, it’s a necessity to explore other perspectives, iterate on the known and rebuild for the future. Leaders that find their way to personal resilience and develop facilitation skills are the true leaders of tomorrow’s success and a sustainable worklife.”
Johan Norrfjärd, COO Beyond Talking
Read more
Six Key Elements Of Hope-Based Leadership (Forbes)
Leading With Hope and Kindness: 5 Ways to Be a Better Leader | Psychology Today
The Science Behind Hopeful Leadership — Mostyn Wilson
Why Hope Matters for Leadership Success | Entrepreneur
Jennie Jenssen is a freelance journalist with an HR background and 20+ years of covering leadership, organizational development and HR-related topics.