The Adaptive Challenge of Managing Growth with Jevan Soo Lenox

On The Balcony

On today’s episode of On the Balcony, Michael is joined by Jevan Soo Lenox to discuss chapter seven of Ronald Heifetz’s Leadership Without Easy Answers. Jevan has held Chief People Officer roles at multiple exciting Bay Area growth companies, including Blue Bottle, Stitch Fix, and most recently, insitro, where he has brought the adaptive leadership framework to life in fast-paced hyper-growth environments. Today, he helps us bridge the lessons from Heifetz’s examples of leadership failures into today’s world.

In his reading of chapter seven, Jevan was struck by the common thread of failure resulting from an avoidance of adaptive work and leaning into the seduction of authority. It’s so common for people in charge to carry the burden of all the work, both technical and adaptive, and as a result to overpromise what can be achieved. The result is often disastrous - momentum is lost and opportunities are missed. Eventually people get frustrated with their executives and politicians and push them out.

Jevan has spent his career helping organizations to accept that adaptive work is an essential part of their approach to change and the emotions it creates within a company. This includes the loneliness and pressure experienced by those in authority roles, and Jevan finds joy and meaning in helping CEOs and founders feel less alone in their work and think about bringing others in without shying away from their responsibilities.

The Finer Details of this Episode:

• The seduction of authority
• Lessons from the adaptive leadership framework
• The hazards of leadership
• Balancing technical and adaptive work
• The weight of holding secrets

Quotes:

“We live in a world that is fundamentally, I think, oriented towards polarizing us and categorizing us. And in many ways, I think, unfortunately, the human mind contributes to that, like we want to categorize things into binary categories. It’s how we process information.”

“It is a really hard job. And it’s a very lonely job, and the temptations of doing these things are not… I don’t think it’s productive to think about them as an indictment of character or indictment of person, right? They are the hazards of the job.”

“I’m now very, very conscious, actually, that there is, in almost any project or seemingly small kind of task or initiative, there is usually a technical element and an adaptive element and just being super clear on articulating them fast and then talking through them in a really open way.”

“Part of, I think, adaptive leadership is just really living in this deep empathy. And even when you’re super frustrated, to just remember that often part of what’s challenging for these other parties is they don’t have the same constellation of experiences that you do, they often don’t have the same longitudinal set of experiences that you do.”

“The adaptive challenge, the challenge writ large, of course, is well, how do you lift this whole set of leaders, this generation of leaders to where they need to be? You know, unfortunately, there is not a technical playbook to do that.”

“As a political calculation, Johnson felt compelled to bear the weight alone and deceive the nation.”

Links:

On the Balcony on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast

Leadership Without Easy Answers on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Without-Answers

Jevan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jevansoo/

Mentioned in this episode:

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