An Interview with Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan

This article was published in Museum News November/December 2003.

Robert Kegan is the William and Miriam Meehan Professor in Adult Learning and Professional Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) in Cambridge, Mass. He also serves as co-director of the Change Leadership Group, an HGSE program that trains educational leaders to implement systemic change. Victoria Garvin is AAM’s assistant director for professional education.

The age-old model of the omnipotent boss may be giving way to something new in the nonprofit and corporate worlds: the model of the adaptive leader who encourages learning and growth in the staff, inspiring change rather than ordering improvement. Psychologist and educator Robert Kegan explores the potential of the new models in a conversation with AAM’s Victoria Garvin.

Robert Kegan: Let me change your expectations here, and ask you the first question. Why are museum directors interested in issues of leadership at this moment? I mean, that certainly would seem to be a logical interest over the last 100 years.

Victoria Garvin: Museums are working to move even closer to the center of civic life. As a result, museum directors and boards of trustees are working to develop new leadership skills that will help them create and sustain relationships with their communities.

RK: Well, I could sit here and pontificate and give you the 10 commandments of effective leadership. I could easily become a kind of Hollywood version of a great man, a dazzling possessor of personal powers, who somehow is able to deliver everything that’s needed. But tempting as that might be, I’d rather see if we can demonstrate the key features of leadership in the context of talking about them. You’ll find that this approach will make you work as hard as I do, because one of the premises of the new way of thinking about leadership is that a successful leader should be like a successful educator. Of course, there are stereotypes of the educator as the lecturer or deliverer of the information. But we are also learning that powerful learning designs involve forms of interaction and engagement.

VG: In other words, this interview will require the interviewer to answer questions.

RK: Exactly. What we’re talking about is not just how one gets better at leadership but how one defines or even thinks about it. I have been very influenced by my friend Ron Heifetz, a lecturer in public policy here at Harvard, who makes a distinction between what he calls technical and adaptive challenges. However daunting they might be, technical challenges do not require fundamental shifts in the ways individuals and groups understand themselves and in how they do their work. Much of the knowledge and capacity people need to deliver on the commitments of technical challenges already exist. Good leadership has to do with connecting the resources with the right people and thinking about how they are positioned. That’s an important part of many leadership activities.

On the other hand, Heifetz says, leadership to meet adaptive challenges has to do with creating contexts in which people learn in fundamental ways and actually grow and change. That kind of leadership is much more difficult, and it requires different conceptions of who is doing the work and even of what success looks like. In the conventional command-and-control, technical-challenge-oriented kind of leadership, success often is seen as the ability to get people to do things and influence things to move from here to there. And that’s terrifically seductive. I always say to people, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, if that approach will work, good, go ahead and do that first, because it will be a lot easier. But usually people come to me because they’ve already tried those things and they haven’t worked.

VG: But isn’t everyone in favor of seeing people learn and grow? Why don’t more leaders function in this way?

RK: Leadership for adaptive work shifts us from thinking, Are we making progress? Are we getting people to do things? Are we exercising influence successfully? Heifetz says that good leadership focuses on whether we are asking the hard questions and whether people are engaged by those questions. You can detect adaptive leadership by looking at who is doing the work. Often, leaders fall into a position, which usually comes out of their generosity, in which they end up experiencing themselves as the primary source or engine of the good things that they want to happen.

VG: You mean, they try to do it all.

RK: Yes, they think, “Well, I know it would be good to involve this person or that person. But I’ve already asked him for too much, and he has enough to do as it is.” Or they think, “By the time I explain what needs to be done, I could have done it myself.”

These are all reasons you’ll see hard-working, conscientious leaders taking on too much. A basic principle of leadership for adaptive change is to give the work back to the people. Good energy is released when leaders don’t assume they’ll be the one to do it. If you look to other people and groups as potential sources of the energy for the work, you are much less likely to burn out and become exhausted. You’ll see yourself less as the first cause of the sequences you are trying to set into action, and more as the convener of spaces in which people are able to contribute their energies. And you’ll inspire people to be creative and productive, which will be less likely to happen if you keep issuing commands.

VG: That sounds great. Sometimes, though, I’ve heard museum staff say their director aspired to this kind of leadership and asked them to create a new way of doing something. Yet in the end, it was done how the director wanted. Consequently, the staff became disheartened. What does that leader have to do to follow through? Let go of ego?

RK: To let go of being the commander or controller, the great man who is pulling strings. Well. . . . See there’s such a temptation to answer these questions. But so I don’t end up being the great man who is giving you all these ideas, let me ask you the same question. What does a leader need to be able to make this shift?

VG: It is about letting go, especially from your own thoughts about what something should be. If I am going to let somebody else do the work, then I need to let her do it in her own way. I need to stop talking and start listening. I need to consider that my point of view may not be the only right answer. In fact, a situation like this recently presented itself at work.

RK: Okay, tell me about it.

VG: Instead of saying, “Do the project this way,” I said, “What do you think?” My coworker told me, and I was impressed with her response. “Great ideas!” I said, “Do it that way.” And I saw her grin and stand up a little taller.

RK: I’m guessing that when you did that, you had a hope, conscious or unconscious, not only of how it would get the work done but what it would do for the other person.

VG: I did feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction because I saw that other person grow and become more confident.

RK: I think you’ve hit on a key dimension of all of this. This is what I mean when I say leaders should think of themselves as teachers or educators. Not the “downloading” lecturer or the command-and-control version of a teacher, but the kind of teacher who supports the growth and development of the learner, an empowerer. This may be a crucial feature of an adaptive leader. From that interaction with your coworker, you created a story of what work could be.

VG: So then a leader doesn’t have to be in the head position, but is someone who creates adaptive change?

RK: That is a distinction that Heifetz makes between what he calls leadership and authority. Sometimes people think you can only be a leader if you’ve been given the authority to be the top dog. Heifetz reminds us that some people in positions of authority aren’t very effective leaders. And there are people who exercise all kinds of good leadership from the middle. In fact, it’s a bit of an excuse to say, “Well, I could be an effective leader if somebody would put me in charge of it all. But until they do, why am I bumping my head against the wall?”

VG: We’ve got a few ideas on the table now. Let’s talk further about what it takes to give up control.

RK: It means becoming more like an organic farmer than an engineer, and that does require giving up a certain amount of control. If I see a sprouting flower, I might be able to tell you whether it’s going to be a Japanese tulip or an American tulip. But I can’t pull on it and make it grow. Direct force won’t help me guide that tulip into becoming what it can be. Still, I can’t just sit back and wait either. I need to protect the sprouting flower; I need to nourish the soil around it. I need to trust that there are dynamic forces at work, whether you call them nature or God, besides me. But I also know that I have a role to play and that the moves I make may help or harm that sprouting tulip. I also must recognize the controls I have and the controls I don’t have, and give up the fantasy that I ever had certain controls at all.

VG: You’ve also talked about the importance of creating a“story.”

RK: A story or narrative can help people focus and gives them energy. A very powerful dimension of leadership is the extent to which people create a collective story that leads to the culture we’re aiming for. That’s probably the central contribution Howard Gardner, another friend and colleague here at Harvard, has made to effective leadership—the notion of a powerful narrative. Now it’s interesting, if we put together the notion of the story and the notion of the shift that needs to happen, then we start to see that energy is at the center of it all. So here’s another concept: The effective adaptive leader is not the sole source of that energy but someone who is savvy about the promoting and the gathering of the energy. There’s energy in that tulip; there’s energy in the tulip’s relationship to the nutrients in the soil, and the sun, and the water. Similarly, a museum is an organism, and you have to respect its sources of energy.

VG: What would you say to the director who asks, “Why do I have to think about all this? Why do I have to even think about being an adaptive leader?”

RK: Here, to give the work back to you, the way you’ve prepared me for this conversation and to think about museum leadership comes into play. It looks to me like the role of the museum leader is in transformation, just like the role of leaders in school districts and in the for-profit sector. In all three settings, something is going on now that wasn’t the case 20, even 10, years ago. And that is that nobody is being hired to lead something and keep it going the way it was. No one says to a new director, “Listen, we’ve got a really fine school system. We’ve got a company that’s running really well. We’ve got a museum that’s working perfectly. And what we want you to do is not mess it up.” Where is that job, right?

People are being asked to be extraordinarily entrepreneurial, even in the for-profit sector, in so-called mature and established businesses. People who are heading up our school districts are being asked not just to make incremental improvements to the school system but to take on a jaw-dropping goal—“leave no child behind.” The reality of that slogan is that our school systems have said, “We can leave a whole group of children behind because there are jobs that are more hand-oriented than head-oriented. Those children can still live a fine life.” And that might have been true 50 years ago, but it’s not true anymore.

VG: So our task is to help leaders deal with today’s realities?

RK: I’m sure there are people in museums who, through no fault of their own, are beset with a set of leadership challenges that nobody prepared them for. To ask them now to be brilliant leaders, to transform the museum and its purpose, is a big thing to ask. We need to recognize that it’s a different kind of leadership challenge, and people need all kinds of support. In many ways, what you’re saying about museums’ move toward the center of civic life—their efforts to come down off their pedestals and be seen as real-life resources, especially to traditionally underserved communities—is not that dissimilar from the challenge to America’s public schools. There, we talk about closing the achievement gap. It seems that there’s a gap museum directors want to close as well. They are looking at who values museums, who comes to them, and who sees them as irrelevant or the luxurious toy of a privileged group.

VG: At a recent AAM seminar called “Building Community Connections,” one participant said, “I have three distinct communities, and they do not interact with each other. I feel thatI need to serve all of them, but I don’t have the resources todo that.” How does she choose from among so many worthypriorities?

RK: What are your thoughts about that, Victoria?

VG: Deciding what gets top priority is difficult. I think you have to be as democratic as possible, letting all the needs surface by asking, “Who are the stakeholders and what do they want?” All stakeholders should be given a voice, and your decision needs to take them into account.

RK: You say that being democratic is to be mindful that there are a lot of different constituencies, with reasonable claims on a limited set of resources. That’s one reading of the story of democracy—that everybody has a voice and everybody is respected. But I don’t think it actually has to lead to the notion that we’re going to divide our resources evenly among 10 different claims. A museum that has 10 goals or priorities for the future actually has no priorities for the future.

It’s hard to come up with a compelling story that says, “Here’s the bold way we’re going to resolve this. We’re going to give a little to everybody. Want to get on board?” It doesn’t sound like much of a mission to me, though it is a way to try.

VG: Agreed, but often the reality is that we are trying to keep everyone happy, thinking this is a way to ensure our survival.

RK: You have to find a way to survive, as Heifetz says, because there’s always a force that is marshaling to kill you in one way or another. Everyone has fears and things that they want to prevent and avoid. But there’s no escaping the fact that effective leadership sometimes means making hard decisions and realizing that some people will be unhappy. Heifetz also says that leadership isn’t about meeting everybody’s expectations, it’s about disappointing people’s expectations at a rate they can stand. Democracy is about everybody having a voice, everybody being respected, everybody being heard. But everybody’s candidate doesn’t win. We’re dead in the water if we have a story that’s a little bit of this for you and a little bit of that for them. As much as possible, you need to allow constituents to be heard and respected, but also—bringing the work back to them—to ask them, “Given the factwe can’t be all things to all people, what do you see as the most critical need?”

An effective leader needs to make sure that all the voices are heard, to say, “I’m not asking you to be a totally altruistic person, but to answer me honestly: What do you see as our most urgent need?” That approach invites people to get on board even as they recognize that there will be some sacrifices. And this is another important leadership principle: People are willing to sacrifice, to get less than everything they want, if they can clearly see the value in it. Leadership is also about lifting people’s sights. This goes back to the compelling story; having a gripping image of a new possibility that feels so exciting that people want to be part of it—even sometimes at a cost to their own personal advantage.

VG: It’s about encouraging people to act for the greater good rather than their own personal self-interests.

RK: It’s not easy. And some people won’t like it, and they’ll

say, “Oh, you turned your back on us. This isn’t my mother’s museum.” And that’s true.

VG: How can we help a leader who seems unable to make that shift?

RK: It’s possible that the person actually wants to find a new way of working. This is what we’re learning from the field of adult development and learning. Complex systems—like human beings, and museums, and individual leaders—are not programmable machines, which with a few effective moves here and there, will increase their capacity. They are organisms, they are complex. And a feature of this complexity is that we compose a variety of assumptions, commitments, and beliefs, which often are in conflict with each other. A leader might genuinely want to make certain kinds of shifts, to adopt a more collaborative form of leadership, though the people around him could give you all sorts of examples of how he doesn’t do that. When people see a leader espousing one thing and acting in another way, they tend to feel that person is hypocritical. And there must be a certain percentage of people who are hypocrites. But most people aren’t, and that’s actually much more interesting.

VG: Because they have those conflicts.

RK: Yes, they have competing commitments, ones they may not be aware of, even though they’re carrying them out more effectively. For example, they may have a conscious commitment to collaborative leadership and an unconscious commitment to experience themselves as indispensable, or not to feel out of control, or to avoid the risk of failure because of the way it reflects on them. Though they may want to give more of the work over to others, they deeply fear that other people will screw it up.

The developmental research shows us that people grow through the experience of their own internal contradictions. That means that one of the most powerful sources of people’s growth is the opportunity to experience this conflict. But often we don’t experience these contradictions; other people experience the results of our contradictions. We know as good educators that people need sufficient supports around them, so they can bear the discomfort of experiencing these contradictions. We know that good teachers give kids problems; a curriculum is filled with problems. But teachers also give kids the supports to engage these problems, which tempt them out of their established habits of mind and help them grow.

If we’re going to think about new kinds of leadership, we also have to recognize that just as leaders need to support others, people need to support leaders. Maybe that’s where AAM comes in; that’s another way of thinking about the education of museum leaders. Leadership for adaptive change means providing sufficient supports and helping leaders learn from their own contradictions.

VG: Let’s try to summarize what we’ve covered, so far.

RK: Hopefully it won’t all come from me but from our good “Every one of these kids has a parent. Is this what you’d want for your children?” Or you could look at it quite selfishly and say, “These are your fellow citizens, the people who are going to be making critical decisions in civic life, at the ballot box. One day, you’re going to need to hire a work force, and what you’re going to need isn’t going to be there. You’re on the Titanic and enjoying the chamber music and not thinking about the fact that in about 12 hours, we’re going down.”

It’s very easy to do that because we live in an entertainment-focused society that conspires with market forces to allow people to ignore fundamental realities around them. If we are on a sinking ship and we do nothing about it, aren’t we going to experience an enormous regret when it’s too late?

VG: AAM’s Museums & Community Initiative has sounded such an alarm: “Museums, you may cease to exist if you are not relevant to your communities.” And museums are responding. To use your terms, they are beginning to craft stories that will resonate with their communities.

RK: It takes courage to tell a story of alarm, especially for leaders who are not new to the scene. Most people who have been leaders for a time—whether they’re museum directors or superintendents, if they have boards to answer to and they have constituents—will tell you that a certain part of their work involves putting a good face on what’s happening. It is a form of public relations that leads people to think, “Things are going pretty well with our museum; John’s doing a good job.”

One of the big pieces of work we do at the Change Leadership Group is to help leaders say, “Wait a minute. We have some big problems that need to be fixed.” There’s a natural aversion for leaders to do that, because they might be asked, “What have you been doing all this time?” But there is a way to make this shift, as well as to produce hope and inspire ambitions, and help people to realize that we can do something about those problems.

VG: By creating a clear focus, as you said before?

RK: That’s the other side of the coin—not just the alarm and not just the vague hope that things can get better, but an absolutely inspiring, energy-releasing image of a future. So we say, “Imagine a museum that looks like this. Here’s who’s coming; here’s what they are getting out of it. Here are the connections that you’re developing between them and this individual, this family, this community.” The leader doesn’t have to invent that image from scratch. Instead, he might say to the community, “This is what I’m delivering back, after listening to you about what you want, what you hope for, what you believe an extraordinary transformation of the museum would look like.” And hopefully some of it does resonate with things people said, and they hear their own hopes in that image. In a civic society, it would seem to be an image of contributions to the community, in which people feel that they’re making a real difference in other people’s lives. But whatever that image is, it’s got to be something about which people say, “Where do I sign? I want to be a part of this cause.”

This is what the Change Leadership Group calls the neglected foundations of leadership. Because much of what people attend to is the second act in the drama, which is, “What are the benchmarks of success? How do we move along?” We’ve found that people developing change processes often jump to that act too quickly. They start moving toward what looks like progress before they’ve laid the foundations, listened to people, analyzed the problem, or even described their vision for the future. They haven’t put enough fuel in the change engine, the fuel that comes from energy, assent, and excitement. All of that has to be prepared for, before you take off on the trip of change.

VG: How long does it take to lay those foundations? Because, meanwhile, the museum is continuing to operate.

RK: We’ve found that it takes nine months, three weeks, and four days—in every case. [Laughter] Actually, it can take several years for a change process to have a critical momentum where you can see the beginnings of the future you’re trying to create. It isn’t too long to think about a full year that is just spent in laying the foundations.

References

H. Gardner, Leading Minds, New York: Basic Books, 1996.

R. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1994.

R. Kegan and L. L. Lahey, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.