Professor Kimberlyn Leary on Working with Authority: Overcoming the Binary Between Admiration and Allergy

On The Balcony

On this episode of the On the Balcony podcast, Michael Koehler welcomes Professor Leary to chat about yet another chapter of Ronald Heifetz’s Leadership Without Easy Answers. As a chief Harvard psychologist, a Senior VP at the Urban Institute, and an advisor to the White House, Professor Leary is deeply familiar with Heifetz’s work and the man himself. Today, with Michael, she opens up the episode to talk about authority and the importance of understanding that an authority figure doesn’t always exercise leadership. Often, we conflate the two, and look to people in authority roles to lead us away from suffering and pain.

Working with Harvard students around the concepts highlighted in this chapter, she and Heifetz noticed how people often fall into a binary way of relating to authority: those who accept or even admire authority figures and those who reject and rebel against them. In their class, Professors Leary and Heifetz invited their students to explore further options to work with authority on a gradient. The first part of today’s episode is closed out by Leary’s personal experience in positions of authority. She looks back on these times with a sense of accomplishment around her team’s coordinated efforts around President Biden’s executive orders to address issues of equity.

Be sure to stay tuned to the second part of today’s episode where Michael once again engages in a coaching session of his own. This week, he welcomes fellow coach Judit Teichnert to help him explore his patterns around authority, particularly around cisgender men—a deeply personal, emotional, and, ultimately, revelatory conversation.

The Finer Details of This Episode:

• Authority as a role
• Leadership as a practice
• Authority work: protection, direction, coordination, management
• Pains and promises
• The binary way to relate to authority
• The authority gradient
• Teaching at Harvard
• Questioning authority
• Learning from each other
• Professor Leary’s experience in positions of authority
• Michael’s coaching session with Judit Teichert
• Examining his patterns around authority

Quotes:

“In this chapter, authority, described in very particular ways, of course, has value to it. It’s about survival. It's about protection, it's about the human need to be empathically seen and recognized.”

“Leadership as a practice and authority as a role.”

“I also have been a chief psychologist running a division of Psychology at one of the Harvard hospitals. I'm currently a Senior Vice President at a DC based think tank, the Urban Institute. I'm a professor at 2 Harvard Schools and a lecturer at a third I did two turns of public service, one in the Obama administration as an advisor to the White House Council on Women and Girls, and most recently, as a senior advisor, Senior Policy Advisor to Domestic Policy Council, also in the White House.”

“There is a sentence that I think captures a critical part of both the opportunity and the dangers of authority. ‘The misuse of authority,’ Ron Heifetz writes, ‘We attribute charisma to people who voice our pains and provide us with promise.’

“They are looking to you hoping that you might be able to bring them relief. And it's quite a thing to help them realize that relief will come from the two of you, but not from you alone.”

“If you decide you're going to negotiate with authority, on one day, on one issue, it does not commit you for eternity to do that.”

“That was a very powerful experience of seeing how coordinated expertise could deliver outcomes, and use both the tools of authority and the tools of leadership, towards trying to make the world a better place.”

“I think the important part of the framework is that it's not as though you could take the work off their shoulders, you know.”

“I realized that some of that pattern that felt, like, huge and big in my own family that relates to me feeling afraid around a parent, that some of those parents are also showing up in other parts of my life, maybe and are maybe not as big, but, like, present.”

“I particularly feel, like, some fear and some nervousness around people in very senior roles of authority, especially if they're kind of cisgender, male, white, and, like, a little bit in that dominant, slightly even aggressive stance.”

“I think I would love to find more courage to engage in moments when I may fall silent, when I may fall into that pleasing pattern, to at least be more in touch with that sense of injustice, that sense of my own anger.”

Links:

On The Balcony

Leadership Without Easy Answers

Professor Leary at the Urban Institute

Professor Leary at Harvard Kennedy School

Professor Leary on Twitter: @kimberlynleary

Mentioned in this episode:

OtB_KONU_Nov promo

OtB_KONU_Nov promo