Copenhagen Studying Leadership Conference: What I was actually here for…
“When I landed at my stopover in the US, there were a lot of airport security people with guns. I went over to the Black TSA agent who was smiling and seemed nice. I don’t know if that is racist. It turned out, he was new to his job and impressed with how my arrival to LA, at a time that was before I left New Zealand, made it appear as if I could time travel. He was nice, I’m glad I went to him.”
“That is hilarious, I forget how militarized the security is at our airports. Also, I think that is the opposite of racist.”
The Studying Leadership conference in Copenhagen, Denmark was a great balance of humility, fun, high quality research, and constructive criticism of the systems of which we are in and adjacent. It was a scholarly, cultural, and human-level exchange. In a brief summary of what follows, 1) it was noted that the US appeared to be deteriorating, 2)the comedy workshop I hosted was met with enthusiasm, and 3) I was inspired to distill what I am finding in my dissertation about leadership accountability, self-development, and communication using both social cognitive theory and complexity leadership theory, with perhaps a hint of group relations.
Dismal. While each country has its own collective trauma, it seemed, from the gathering of mostly Western academics in the leadership field, that the US was in the most despair. During this summer’s European and US military ethics conferences, Russia was at the forefront of concern, however, in this leadership conference, US and non-US academics presented studies on the US leadership and system issues, with particular attention to January 6th.
Our country was being studied from the inside, by scholars trying to make sense and put reason to what was happening to our political system and society. It was also being studied from the outside, because non-US scholars wanted to understand our division and perhaps prevent further outsourcing of the commodity of dysfunction. A message from a previous publication was that the hateful movement in the US could be defeated, however, briefly opening my news app to see that the aid to Ukraine was being blocked and held hostage by a misconstrued migrant issue (which is definitely an issue, but not one that needs to hold back funding for Ukraine…) confirmed for me the idea that the US may have already entered an era of being beyond repair. Not only was aid blocked, but the President of Ukraine, a country under attack, was present in the US, almost confirmation the dysfunction was real and could not be resolved by humility and attention to the reality of a situation.
I will have to wait for the mentioned book, “Duty of Hope” to come out to help me move beyond my current postulated future in which those with decent social connections will be fine in our own tribes, but perhaps not fine as a respectable political contributor on the global stage.
Fun. Every comedy workshop emerges with its own liveliness and this that I hosted at the conference one had its unique energy as well. In the multi-cultural context, I remembered that new comics in Australia wrote full hour long sets at the beginning of their comedy career, so that they would have material for their comedy festivals, whereas new US comics got 3–5 minutes, in which they had to pack as many punches as possible. There was a story telling rhythm in the class for sure, stories that packed a big punch at the end. We heard about reasons to get married in Copenhagen, twins who looked nothing alike being asked in they were fraternal, and an organizational reality joke of wanting to embrace and confront all the complex issues of the our time, but only being provided a 2D Excel matrix in which plot the issues. It was a fully engaging two hours. I know it sounds cheesy, but we learned so much about each other that we would not have known only in conference-mode. I felt like there was such a strong engagement in the analytic and the human-centered elements, at the same time.
Thought provoking. I had previously explored complexity leadership when working on a project using social network analysis. I had wanted to see what the network of Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP) participants looked like and if there were any “nodes” (students) who might have been influencers in getting new students to attend additional classes. Basically, there were people who took a lot of classes and connected to a lot of people who also had taken a lot of classes. What were the characteristics of those people? Would they be interested and interesting to interview? Perhaps. If my dissertation topic had not changed to ethical leadership at the CIA. Bookmarking this.
The complexity leadership model I want to incorporate, that I hope I can find on these online journals, had to do with the systemic tension that arose during the time between dedication to change and remaining at the status quo. I realized that each of the themes of my findings — accountability, self-development, and hard conversations — required leaders to experience a tension and choose to either address it or remain at the status quo. The described tension often had to do with the decision of whether to engage (in accountability, self-development, or hard conversations) when the outcome would be changing a relationship that could not later return to how it had been.
Relationship tensions in accountability included changing the relationship with a subordinate, colleague, or supervisor when it came to doing what the participant thought was the ethically right thing to do. There was an awareness of the risk that a relationship may not return to status quo after speaking truth to power or intelligently disobeying when it came to operational issues. Their motivations choosing the relationship change and opt for accountability, with actions such as speaking and enacting the truth, seemed to be at their core way of being. A number of participants related ethics to how they were raised as children. Some also described the importance of doing the right thing as a patriotic duty, an organizational duty, or their duty as a civil servant.
Self-development involved choosing to engage in the relationship with yourself and how that had an impact on others. Feedback about your way of behaving could be implemented to change, or ignored, with a return to the status quo of your behavior. Participants communicated their general commitment to learning, their love of challenge, and their commitment to being a leader as motivations that pushed them into the tension and choosing to self-develop.
In terms of communication, when it came to interpersonal issues, where participants could choose whether or not to verbally address an issue with a colleague, there were examples of both choices. In one example, a participant noticed that her team had a problem with a colleague who was on an adjacent team. They did not trust that colleague. This participant chose to have a one-on-one conversation with the colleague and openly share that they were having trouble collaborating because of how the team perceived her. This conversation risked a bad reaction and further deteroration of trust, should that other colleague have acted in defense of herself, felt threatened, or superior. The conversation, however, was described as a success. The ongoing discussion and reflection of how that conversation helped them work together further changed their relationship and ability to collaborate for the better. In another instance, a participant chose not to engage. This participant wanted to address a decision that he felt was not wrong, but was maybe not the best one. He evaluated the colleague, however, and determined that there was little risk of influence or change and a high risk of disrupting their working relationship. Thus the conversation was not engaged.
A theme in the “hard conversations” was that they were all done in person and one-on-one. I don’t know if that’s an obvious thing to do, but it was something described as done for privacy, and involved an awareness that these hard conversations often evoked emotions, that maybe would be best to engage with in that type of setting. Today I learned from a presentation that emotional reactions to feedback indicate a potential for change and should be seen as informational, rather than a “bad” outcome to feedback. Another study I need to find…if it has been published…
The last two days were a blend of cerebral engagement and just nice, friendly, December connection. It was a blast to chat with people around the world and compare notes on academic pursuits as well as life in general. One of my favorite things from the casual conversations is knowing that one attendee completed her dissertation on Sean Spicer’s relationship with the press and it is the number two “future reading” reference on his Wikipedia page. While the academic world idealizes publication in top journals, I would guess her dissertation’s visibility on Wikipedia has far more impact that an elite leadership academic journal.