Choosing Leadership

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today, we're actually way more than delighted to be speaking to Dr. Linda Ginzel. She's been a member of the Chicago Booth faculty since 1992, and is the author of a wonderful book called Choosing Leadership. Linda specializes in negotiation skills, managerial psychology, leadership, and executive development. In 2000, President Clinton awarded her a President's Service Award. The nation's highest honor for volunteer service directed at solving critical social problems.

In addition to her responsibilities at Chicago Booth, Linda is the co-founder of Kids in Danger, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting children and improving product safety. And I must also chime in that Linda is also the winner of Us, an award given by students for their favorite professor.

Linda Ginzel: Thank you. It's very nice to be here with you, Anita.

Anita Brick: I get completely stumped by leadership. Everybody has a different definition. How can someone begin to define leadership for themselves?

Linda Ginzel: Your question assumes it's important. Many people do not even think about this question itself. I think it's really important for people to come to their own understanding because, as you said, there is no conceptual definition of what leadership is. The premise I have is that we have all these assumptions about what leaders look like. For example, you have to be blond or you have to have a big title, or you have to have a certain credential, or you have to be male, or you have to be extroverted or be in the C-suite.

People have all these stereotypes that actually limit their capacity, their ability to make a difference. And we tend to buy into these stereotypes. So one thing I'm trying to do, try to get people to stop using labels like leader and manager and start realizing that leading and managing our behaviors, every one of us can participate in leadership behavior.

Anita Brick: That's a really interesting point. In the book, you talk about self understanding. There's a connection between self understanding and defining leadership for ourselves. When you have people in your executive education programs, in the MBA program, how do you help them develop a self understanding? And this is actually a question that came from a student.

Linda Ginzel: I love that you use the word self understanding because some people say, oh, it's all about self awareness. Self awareness is just the first step. Self understanding requires analysis. I really believe that unless you understand why you're doing what you're doing, or what's even worth taking a risk for standing up and making a choice. I don't think people really have a good sense of what leadership means, even for themselves.

So, for example, one of the exercises that I recommended that I have in the book is to try to think of your earliest leadership experience, so we can do that if you want. Now, I want you, Anita, and everyone listening to just think, what is a very early leadership experience? This is a telling exercise because whatever example you come up with is going to reveal something about what you think is at the core of your definition. What's your earliest leadership experience?

Anita Brick: The earliest probably was at three, when I decided that I wanted to have the lead and lead everyone in the ballet recital we were doing. This is probably way too self revealing, but I made a decision that I wanted to set the tone and the direction of what was on the periphery and I was three.

Linda Ginzel: So we'll take this one. I think that's amazing when I ask people this question, even, you know, my students who are very accomplished people, some of them will say, I haven't actually been in a leadership position yet. I haven't had an opportunity to lead. And what this exercise reveals is that everyone has an opportunity to choose leadership, but it depends on how we define it.

So if you define leadership in one of those stereotypical ways that I mentioned earlier, it's true if you say I have not had the opportunity to lead, but if you have your own definition of leadership, because whatever you believe is the core essence of leadership, that's going to affect the choices you make and the choices you allow people around you to make. In your example, a three year old, what are the elements of that situation? You were a peer. It was a ballet.

Anita Brick: I was actually a little younger than the rest.

Linda Ginzel: So you were younger. You had no formal, legitimate title. They were your peers in the sense that you were all dancers. Was there a lead dancer?

Anita Brick: I ended up taking on that.

Linda Ginzel: Exactly.

Anita Brick: Because I chose it.

Linda Ginzel: Yeah. So I would say that your definition of leadership and it could be different because this is one example, has something to do with peer to peer influence, has something to do with organizing a group of people in a way that is more productive, creates more value, creates more meaning, however you define it. And that you're not thinking so much about hierarchy and legitimate authority to, quote, lead.

But if you think about your earliest leadership experience, it's very telling about what elements you think are important. I encourage everyone to write down their current definition of leadership, and then to inform that definition through experiences, through behaviors, through readings, through exploration. I want people to realize people everywhere, for people to understand that they have much more capacity, much more potential to make a difference, but they have to decide what that means for themselves.

Anita Brick: Okay, so let me stop you for a second. So when we think about that and we think about going back to that original experience, and we have a level of self understanding, there was an alum who feels like he is a leader by title of his department, but he's not taken seriously.

Linda Ginzel: It sounds a little bit like either he has a lack of confidence, which could be completely unfounded in reality. Perhaps he's in a situation, a very difficult situation, which doesn't allow him to be able to exhibit his leadership behavior. You know, a lot of people think that it's about them, but it can be a lot about the situations that we find ourselves in.

So I always tell my students, you know, look to the senior leadership in the company, do you want to be like them? Because that's success in this organization? Yes. That's not who you want to be. Then you could probably be successful because you're talented, you're smart, you're capable. I will assume that. But do you want to become this person? So, you know, you want to think about, am I in the right place? And the student may not be in the right place for him to be able to exhibit leadership, to make the choices that he feels, even if he has a definition of leadership.

Anita Brick: The point that you made is such a really, really important point. We're evolving, and when we evolve, whatever our definition of leadership, we will ultimately become them. We will evolve in a way that we don't want to evolve. And so it's so important when you're assessing an organization to look at what is valued. And then they have that definition of leadership and success. If it's not yours, it's really hard. We do become someone through the goals we set and achieve.

Linda Ginzel: I actually think we become who we are as a result of our behaviors. You know, I'm a social psychologist. That's my discipline. And one of the truisms of this field is that if you want to change your identity, change your behavior. I always tell students everything I talk about with regard to developing your leadership. It's about your behavior.

You know, you want to be more courageous than start practicing taking small steps of courage. Courage is a skill, and skills benefit from practice. So take a small step that's courageous. You'll get feedback. You know, probably things will be fine and maybe things will even be better. And then you'll get maybe confidence or you'll see, oh wow, I did this and it's happened.

Now, if I do this, it's like experimenting with your own behaviors. And I believe that most behaviors of leadership need practice, that we need to practice them. We are growing every day. If we are more deliberate in our practice of our skills, in our collecting the data of our experience and experimenting with our behaviors, I believe that we have more control over who we become than we might otherwise.

The question is, who do we want to become? So if you have goals, the question is how do you put them into practice, into life? How do you actually enact those goals? And then as you behave, your identity will follow your behavior. Back to the example about fit and the organization. This is incredibly important, and I just want to go back to it. Organizations have value judgments. Now. You also have values again, not morals but values preferences. If your values don't fit with the values of the larger organization, one of the ways you can see that is by looking at who is successful. Look at who are your positive and negative role models here in this environment. And they're mostly negative role models.

That's what that environment is rewarding. So it's a matter of values, both personal and cultural and set and looking to see who you're going to become as a result of being successful and accomplishing the goals of this organization. And you can probably prevent a lot of grief if you think this through a few steps ahead in your current position.

Anita Brick: This is all very, very powerful and it is a little bit different.

Linda Ginzel: People have these stereotypes and they elevate leadership as this noble goal. They deflate management as though management is something lesser than leadership. And what I'm trying to do is my part of my mission is to get people to realize that leading and managing are behaviors. They are more equivalent than stereotypes, and common assumptions might lead us to believe.

So the idea is this Anita, when you are managing, you're in the present, you're in the here and now. Right now you're managing, you're doing an interview, you're doing your job, you're getting things done. And management is noble because of management. We provide people who work with us in ourselves, with opportunities to achieve our dreams. Management is what we do in the present, and the present provides a platform for the future.

If we don't have a good present, we don't have a future. You're an executive and most of the time you're managing. Once in a while you make a choice to change the future. Now, this choice is usually a result of some dissatisfaction with the present. It can be a small dissatisfaction. I call that leadership the lowercase l. It could be a huge dissatisfaction. That would be like a transformational leadership with a capital L, but once in a while you, the executives, make a choice to lead. What you're doing in that moment is you are going from the present that exists to a future that does not yet exist. That is a risky choice, and you don't want to make that choice too often.

You make this choice because you have a vision of a better tomorrow. Now you don't actually know if that tomorrow exists. You've never been to that place. When you're managing, it's like you have a map. The terrain is charted. You know, where things are when people work with you and you bring them along with you. When you're in the present, you don't need their heart. If you have their heart, that's great. You just need their head. If you have their heart, that's a bonus. But when you make a choice to go to a place that doesn't exist yet, you better have people's hearts because they have to believe in your vision, and that means that you might just be taking them over a cliff because you don't know either.

You haven't been there. You have to believe so much in your vision of a better tomorrow, and people have to believe so much in you that they're going to follow you to that place. It doesn't exist yet. Now, once you get there and you establish that, that becomes the new status quo, that becomes the present, now you're back to doing more managing. It's not that some people are managers and some people are leaders. I have been arguing that people, when you're in the present, your managing, and once in a while you make the choice to lead, but you don't do that too often because it's risky and it's exhausting and you could be wrong, and you only do it when you really have a strong sense of what could be better.

Anita Brick: You made a really interesting point about creating a better future. It has risks. There's direction. But no matter if you are not CEO, what's an example of someone who may be part of a team? Maybe even manage a small team? How can he or she carve out an opportunity to create a better future?

Linda Ginzel: So look, I believe that we have opportunities every day to do this, you have to think about either what is your definition of success or what do you find meaningful? I like to build community. I think that the building of community is a skill, and it's actually something that I personally try to practice. If someone else is a part of a team and they believe that building community is important, they could create some opportunity to build community within their team that isn't mandated by the hierarchy.

Anita Brick: There is, like starting a book club.

Linda Ginzel: Yeah. Speaking of which.

Anita Brick: Right, right. But it could be something as simple as that, where they have enough control over making that decision that they don't need nine levels of approval, but something that is within their purview to actually decide. Right. It doesn't have to be a big scale.

Linda Ginzel: This is what I mean by leadership with a lowercase l. Everyone thinks leadership has to be like a big capital L transformational.

Anita Brick: So let's go back to leadership with a lower L. So starting the book group, creating a new process, doing something that's within a person's control. I mean, that was another question a student asked, how does one notice what is safe enough to not get too much attention, that people will stop it and yet have the potential to make the world better?

Linda Ginzel: I think it depends on what people think of as making the world better. I used to think that I needed to make a big difference with lots of people in order to create meaning, and I would still like to do that. Actually, Harry Davis, my senior colleague, who I hope people who are listening have had a chance to be in his class or read about.

Yeah, exactly. He has convinced me over time, you can make a difference if you just reach a few people deeply, rather than try to do a broad brush across a huge public, developing relationships, mentoring, and championing you can champion others. If we don't determine our own priorities, they will be determined for us until we decide that we're not that uncomfortable with self reflection, the benefit is worth the cost.

Anita Brick: It seems like your approach to leadership is very entrepreneurial. I mean that you figure out what it is that you want to create and how you are the actor, the founder of that creation. And it may change. Just like an entrepreneurial venture. You may have to pivot, you may choose changes. Yeah. I mean, you may have to pivot for certain reasons that it is your choice. It is your decision to follow someone else and just do it and assume their values and their definition of leadership. In the short term, it's lower risk to do that. But in the long term, it is really high risk to take on someone else's values. Most people wake up one day and say, how did I get here? It was through maybe an abdication of self understanding.

Linda Ginzel: This is why I say you could pay me now or you can pay me later, since I always tell me, oh, you know, I wish I had taken more psychology when I was in school, I wish I had, you know, I was all focused on these technical skills and I'm all the econ and the finance, but you're now I realize it's really about people. Well, it's always about people. It's just a matter of when you come to understand that and you are part of that. Right? So it's understanding self and understanding others. I believe social psychology is actually the most important discipline for executives, for managers, for leaders. If we just really understand interpersonal dynamics, about relationships, about why we do what we do and what brings meaning to ourselves into others, I actually believe we can create more meaning.

We can make a bigger difference and social psychology teaches us that if we create strong environments, then we can move people in our direction. So create a strong environment around yourself. What is it that you care enough about to be the architect of your own situation? Situations are very powerful. You know, you get into like for example, think about the classroom.

That's my environment. The classroom is set up to help me succeed. As a teacher. You create your own environments in everyday life. How can you create the strongest environment around you to help you succeed in your role in your goals? Everyone has more opportunity and choice. You know, people say, professor, you can do all that stuff.

It's not like me. I don't have the choices that you do. I believe we have many more choices than we recognize. And it's just a matter of experimenting, of trying, of practicing, getting feedback, doing it again. I call it moving up the curve. Move up that curve faster. Be wiser. At a younger age, you can make a bigger difference. But we have to stop having some of these excuses of, oh, it's too hard or oh, it's not important right now, or I'm too busy. If you're not ready to do it, then you can just pay me later.

Anita Brick: Okay. So do you have time for two more questions?

Linda Ginzel: Of course I have. I have all the time.

Anita Brick: One of my mentors, he believes that everyone is a leader by their own definition. But part of that definition, I guess, is inserted. And that's to create value, positive value, which I think I would agree with. So when you think about creating an environment that supports the individual creating value for him or herself and also having an impact on others, are there things that someone can be thinking about or doing to create an environment that attracts others? The question is from an executive MBA student.

Linda Ginzel: As you were talking, what I was thinking, what came to my mind is the difference between transactions and relationships. I really believe that's what I believe. So there's a lot of research in social psychology. Evidence tells us that we benefit more from giving than from receiving. So for example, when we give advice or when we give support, we get meaning and we benefit as individuals.

There's so much mutual benefit in developing relationships. A lot of people think it's like tit for tat, right? You do this, I'll do that. You know, that's kind of how the world works. That's the equilibrium of, you know, there's give and take. But actually I believe that there's a lot more meaning in relationships, which means that you'll give and you may not get something right then, but what you're building is you're building a community. You're building this base, this really strong base of people who then have the slack when they need it to be stronger, to make a bigger difference, to stand up and make a courageous but difficult choice. I believe that's what relationships do. Is there your ability to take a hit, building community and building relationships, trying to turn off the default that life is transactional.

To give something, to give something, but to build a stronger base. I believe that that creates an environment because we're all human and we all want to feel supported, and we all want to have the opportunities to take risks and chances and to feel that we won't lose anything because of that. Maybe that's the answer is that if I can get more people to buy into my mission of community building, that will create stronger environments for everyone.

Anita Brick: Got it? Okay. It seems that the foundation for all of this is self understanding. Like if you don't know yourself, who you are as an individual, what you value, all of those things, none of this will actually work. Let's focus our three things around that. And this actually emanated from a question that an alum asked. You talked about writing down your earliest leadership experience. So that's one thing that people can do. What else can someone do? Maybe almost on a habitual basis to make it habitual. So it makes it easy to do 2 or 3 things that someone can do to keep that understanding, to do it initially and keep it fresh.

Linda Ginzel: So I just want to say one thing about your question or the premise to your question. I believe it is self understanding linked to action. Understanding is necessary but not sufficient. It's just like knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. The question is what do you do with it? So I love the second part of your question, which is yes, our actions are based on self understanding and therefore what actions do we take in order to create our leadership capacity, improve our wisdom, get more courage?

So I would go back to the idea that all of these are behaviors, behaviors. Once we practice them, they become skills. And the more we practice these skills, the more capable we become, I would argue, courage. I think that there are things that we don't do because of small things, even that we don't do in a given day because we don't have the courage to try it. A small thing, if you want to support someone or listen more or delegate more, have the courage to take that step. Just do the experiment. See what happens. It's such a difference when you approach a task or a day or an event with fear versus hope. And a lot of times people are afraid to hope for the best because they're protecting or some kind of defensive mechanism of protecting the self.

But you know, when you protect yourself from bad things happening, you also prevent good things from happening. And if you don't do the experiment, you won't know that. So yeah. So once in a while you'll get hurt. That happens. We're human. That happens. But if you protect yourself from that, so strongly, you'll never know the beautiful benefits that you could have had. And you can start practicing courage. It's a skill that benefits from practice. Practice community building champions. Other people go out on a limb to not just mentor but support. Put some skin in the game, help some young person, or help someone who looks up to you or could make a bigger difference. Or maybe who you feel doesn't make the difference.

They could because they don't have someone like you championing them. That's two things. What's the third thing to think about? What does success mean to me? How am I, Linda? Gonzo, I need a break. People listening? How am I defining success? And is that definition more founded on what I believe or what other people want me to do? So I was listening to one of your other podcasts, one of your other interviews, and she was talking about the Venn diagram. It made me think about the Venn diagram of success that I talk with my students about. You know, one circle the arrows are pointing in and this is you and all the arrows are pointing, and that's what you want to do.

That's what you love. That's what you're good at. That's what's meaningful to you. And then there's another circle that intersects you and that's others. And those arrows are pointing out, and it's what others want us to do and what we can do, what they want us to do. So here's the problem. If we're too much in our own circle, that is not sustaining really, usually, usually we can't just be completely in that circle.

That's unsustainable if we're too much in the other circle, what others are having us doing, then that's pretty unfulfilling. There's that sweet spot, that sweet spot, that intersection between you and others. If you can figure out how to get in and stay in that intersection, that is a task that you can work on every day and make sure that you don't end up one day with a crisis of identity and wonder how you got to where you are, and realize that you could have been wiser at a younger age.

Anita Brick: I love it. That's great. Thank you. Linda, this is great. Thank you for writing the book. It was my pleasure. It is so important because the way you approach things, people can choose what they want and the meaning that it provides, but they can also take full responsibility.

Linda Ginzel: That's my hope. And I'm really hoping to sort of see the grassroots leadership development movement. I want people to use the book to help themselves, but then also to get together. You mentioned book club, get together with others and teach and learn together.

Anita Brick: I love it, I think, and if you want to learn more, you can go to ChoosingLeadershipbook.com. Thanks again Linda.

Linda Ginzel: Thanks, Anita. My pleasure.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.