Kerry Sulkowicz
Seeking the truth.
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 340: Kerry Sulkowicz
Here’s a question. If you don’t know what you don’t know, how certain should you be about what you do know?
I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach their leaders to help them maximize their impact and grow their business. To help them succeed where leadership has its greatest impact. The intersection of strategy and humanity.
This is my full conversation with Kerry Sulkowicz, the leadership confidant and psychiatrist. Parts of this conversation were featured in last week’s Look Ahead at 2022 episode. If you haven’t heard that yet - I spoke to nine different leaders about how society has changed as a result of the last two years, and what that means for leadership.
The episode was featured in Fast Company and the link is in the show notes and on the Fearless website.
Kerry works with leaders across the world and is also President-elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He knows a thing or two about the psychology of leadership.
“One of the dangers of leadership is that the nature of the leadership role is such that the the power that's inherent in that level of authority is inhibiting of the upward flow of information, so it's really incumbent on leaders to make sure that they're getting feedback from below.”
The human condition is attracted to certainty. To be fed and safe and healthy. To belong. To matter.
It’s hard to get away from these instincts and the impulses that come with them.
Which makes us more inclined to look for evidence that fits our desired view of the world and to overlook questions and possibilities and gaps in our knowledge that might contradict that view.
Which, in turn, makes what we do know more risky and what we don't know more valuable.
In most organizations, leaders sit or are placed on a pedestal. There is a structural hierarchy that directly affects the flow of information.
When we allow ourselves to believe that the structure itself provides us with all the information that we need, we run the risk of never knowing what we don't know.
If your goal is to be someone who leads empathetically and impactfully, a question to add to your leadership portfolio is the one that Howard Schultz reportedly asked himself and his leadership team at Starbucks every week.
What do I not know that would make this decision wrong?
And then follow it up with this one.
Why am I afraid to find out?
Here’s Kerry Sulkowicz.
Charles: (02:32)
Kerry, welcome back to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming back on the show.
Kerry Sulkowicz: (02:36)
Thank you. It's great to be back with you.
Charles: (02:38)
How do you think society has changed over the last couple of years as a result of what we've all lived through and are living through?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (02:46)
It's a big question, Charles. I mean, it's changed in many ways. One of the things that I've learned by becoming a student of pandemics since the onset of this one, I knew essentially nothing about them before, but one of the things that I've learned is that pandemics are catalysts for social change and that can be for better or for worse, often for better. And, I think this one, we've learned a few really important things. One is fairly obvious about the importance of public health. It used to be that people thought that public health officials just inspected restaurants and it turns out that they do a lot more than that.
We've learned about the need for flexibility and the ability to take advantage of technologies to do things that we had previously assumed must occur in person, and certainly the world of work has changed dramatically, where you and I spend a lot of our time. But I think that the pandemic has also highlighted a lot of inequities in society by sort of laying bare how those who are less fortunate are, not surprisingly, more vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic and all of the political and social upheaval that has been happening more or less at the same time.
And I'm hopeful, frankly, that as we emerge, eventually, from this pandemic, we're not, certainly not there yet, that we will hold on to some of what we've learned and adapt the way we treat people accordingly.
Charles: (04:15)
Why do you think the pandemic has become so politicized? I mean, is that typically what's happened in the past with other pandemics? Is this just human nature or are we at a moment in history where the politicization of pandemics is just a useful tool for people?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (04:29)
I think it's more of the latter. I don’t think there's something specific about the pandemic that lends itself to politicization as much as that we live in a society that, of course, is increasingly polarized and has an inclination to politicize everything. So it's not at all surprising that the pandemic has gotten drawn into that. it's really sad and unfortunate to see it, but entirely predictable.
Charles: (04:53)
And is there a reason why society is becoming more polarized, particularly now? I mean, are there kind of underlying factors that you've identified that have led us to this moment where we seem to be on either one side of every argument, of every situation?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (05:08)
Well, I mean we could spend several podcasts talking about that and I'm not sure how original my ideas are. It's certainly something I've thought about a great deal. I think that the underlying, if not cause than certainly facilitator, of it is electronic communication and social media and the rapidity with which information, particularly misinformation, can spread around the globe, and as well as the disinhibiting effect of that kind of communication. It's kind of funny, it's a little bit like something that I wrote about more than 20 years ago, when it seemed like a novel idea, which was that there was a similarity that I thought existed between what happens in psychoanalysis, in traditional psychoanalysis, with a patient lying on the couch out of view of the analyst, and Freud had written about that, that the analyst sitting essentially behind the patient was disinhibiting. The lack of the face-to-face contact removed the social cues that served, actually in general, a positive inhibiting effect and made communication in general more socially acceptable.
And in psychoanalysis, of course, you want everything that comes to mind to surface. But my analyst told me, years and years ago, that speaking everything that comes to mind is a great idea if we're a patient in psychoanalysis, but basically, a terrible idea in any other social circumstance. What we have in the world today is essentially that. That people can speak their mind, anywhere, anytime, and what in a civil society tends to remain repressed, in a healthy way, is no longer repressed, it's all out there, and I was going to say for better or worse, but it's largely for worse, unfortunately.
Charles: (07:01)
Do you see anything changing this dynamic? What's the hope for the future?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (07:05)
Well, I think there is some reason for hope for the future. One is that we're already seeing a backlash against that kind of disinhibition of communication. We're seeing a craving for such fundamental things like the reliability of information. We've lost that. We've lost the belief that when we're given a fact by the news media that it's trustworthy, that it's reliable. That we can overlay all kinds of opinions on that, but facts should be facts, and that really hasn't been the case. But I think we're seeing a great deal of attention to the need to restore some semblance of reliability to basic information that should be shared among all humans rather than the politicization of information itself.
I think we're going through all kinds of convulsions in society, not just in American society, socially. And some of it may ultimately lead to a good place, even if it's agonizing right now. The conflicts over, what seems to be freedom of speech versus civility. But the extremes, in my view, clamp down on our ability to have lively, open debate, although lively and open debate doesn't mean anything goes. And, finding that balance, of course, is something that's wrenching for society right now. But I'm hoping that what Reverend King said a long time ago when he said something to the effect that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, and it's worth reminding ourselves that we may be somewhere on that arc right now, even if it's a particularly painful point on the arc.
Charles: (08:48)
I'm struck by the fact that in our lifetime, we have been relatively unscathed by global phenomena. Obviously, you were particularly affected by the Second World War in terms of what happened to your family, but you and I have not lived through global phenomena. We haven't lived through world wars, we haven't through a pandemic before. And I'm conscious these days of the fact that we are very much living in history. That these are days that will be written about and studied for generations to come. Within the context of all of that, given the fact that leaders, obviously, are all part of that same community, they're all part of a group that have not really experienced something at this kind of scale before, how do you think leadership is changing as a result of everything that we're living through?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (09:32)
I think leadership, on one hand, is leadership at any point in time, and leadership has been around more or less since the dawn of time, so some fundamentals of leadership, I think, are unchanged. On the other hand, I think that with the leaders that I have the opportunity to work with, and I suspect the leaders that you, Charles, work with, as well as in our own leadership roles that we inhabit, that how we and how other leaders have conducted themselves during this pandemic will be looked at by history as the defining moment in our careers and in the careers of all leaders, whether leaders have risen to the occasion under these extremely difficult circumstances or whether they haven't.
And I've seen a range of leadership responses, from ones that I deeply admire, to ones that are profoundly concerning. I think that old saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” is true and, for some leaders, they have used this period of time to accelerate changes that they might have wanted to make in the first place or changes that were underway that now have the obstacles to their realization removed. I think that if ever there was a time when the emotional dimension of leadership was important, it's been this past two years. By emotional, I'm really referring to the attunement to the psychological, emotional needs of all stakeholders that leaders are responsible for.
I think it demands a lot, emotionally, from the leaders themselves. I think never has there been a time when leaders have needed to be more flexible, more tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity than during these times. I mean, one very concrete example of that, I remember, the leaders that I have the privilege of advising, I remember some of them, early in the pandemic, were saying things like, you know, "We're going to be back in the office by July 1st," and I would think to myself, "Where do you get that? Because how do you know? I mean, that doesn't have any connection to science or to an understanding of the pandemic." We just didn't know.
Then they got a little less certain as time went on, so they were thinking less in terms of picking a date, which felt like throwing a dart at a calendar, frankly, to thinking about some kind of formulaic way of returning to in-person work, three days in the office, two days out, or some such thing. But even that was fairly random. And now, the best leaders are thinking about it in a much more nuanced way, and there's no right answer, which we have to acknowledge. But thinking about, "Well, what are the kinds of human interactions in the workplace that are qualitatively better in person than via remote technology and how do we then engineer the workday of the future, or the present, really, and the future, in such a way to make sure that we have enough of those kinds of interactions, so that it's less formulaic and really more about the quality of human interaction?"
Charles: (12:45)
I interviewed somebody, I think back in May or June of 2020, so three months after this had started, and was struck by his answer when I said to him, "What are you focused on?" and he said, "Well, we're trying to figure out what is an office." And I thought that was so prescient, so early in what we've lived through, and it, for me, was a real indicator of somebody, who, to your earlier point, was really acting at the upper echelon of leadership. There have been so many examples, I think, over the last 20 months, of leaders who had the title, but when suddenly confronted by a completely original set of circumstances for which there was no playbook, suddenly revealed themselves to not be leaders at all, but, in fact, simply copying somebody else's path.
This is an unfair question, but I'm curious to see if you have sort of a subjective response. Out of the pantheon of leaders, or out of the entire community of leaders, how many do you think have actually moved forward and risen to the challenge and how many have been revealed to be people that weren't actually leaders at all, but had titles that had leadership connotations?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (13:49)
As your question implies, and I couldn't agree more, that having the title of a leader, CEO or whatever the title is, that in and of itself doesn't say very much. The way I think of it, the title entitles someone to be a leader, but it doesn't make them a leader. You know, what makes them a leader is how they behave, and what they think and how they act and the example they set for their people. I think that there are a lot of leaders who I work with who have done really well, I will say that. I'd like to think that I've been a little bit helpful along the way.
But I think that more entrepreneurial leaders, who are the leaders that I tend to gravitate towards or who gravitate towards me, I don't know, by virtue of the kinds of personalities that are more entrepreneurial, they tend to have a greater temperamental affinity for dealing with uncertainty, for being able to transcend unexpected roadblocks that come up all the time and not see them as devastating, but actually see them as interesting challenges, problems to solve. And that is a good set of traits to have, over this past couple of years.
Charles: (15:05)
How do you think leadership has to change over the next 12, 18 months? What will you be looking for as the signs of effective, meaningful leadership?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (15:13)
Well, one is the continuing embracing of uncertainty and, actually a willingness to say, "I don't know." That's one of the strongest, not weakest, things that a leader can say. I think that's an important one. Empathy, seems almost like it goes without saying to talk about how important that is, but it really is important, not only to understand the variety of human experiences that are involved in these complex times and to empathize with employees. But I think that the younger generation of workers are demanding even more empathy and even more passion about purpose from leaders than ever before, and I think that's a really good thing, actually. Some leaders are struggling with that and others are really embracing it. The ones who embrace it, I think, are going to be much more successful. So, I think the human side, the leaders who excel on the human side rather than the technocratic side, are those who I would bet on.
Charles: (16:19)
And what do you think is going to get in the way of that? What makes that difficult for people?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (16:24)
Well, first of all, I think society has shown some positive trends in that direction, so I am hopeful. But, you know, we are, again, a highly technological society and with all the wonders of technology, I think we sometimes overestimate its ability to solve some basic human problems. And the human brain has in no way kept up, in an evolutionary sense, with the rapid acceleration of technology. And so I think that we have to be aware of the danger of overvaluing technology, as important as it is, and there are some basic human activities that can't be outsourced to machines and I think attempts to do that are profoundly dangerous, and so I do worry about that.
Charles: (17:13)
And what about the emotional side? I mean, leaders have always been seen, I think, traditionally, as the person who's out in front, the person who's willing to confront the challenges, I mean, sort of the archetype I know is a little cliché for sure, but, nevertheless, there are still attributes of that that I think are endemic to the modern view of leadership. The emotional challenges that go along with becoming more empathetic, more connected, are not insignificant. What do you see as the challenges that people have to overcome who have occupied a more traditional view of leadership?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (17:40)
Well, a lot of leaders, a lot of CEOs, a lot of presidents of countries, have this idea that being a leader means having all the answers and not showing vulnerability, and both of those ideas are profoundly wrong. Leaders don't have all the answers because they can't, and in fact, it's an act of humility to acknowledge that one doesn't have the answers, and humble leadership is strong leadership, in my opinion. And I think the ability to make oneself vulnerable is an obstacle for some leaders. It goes against their very grain, it goes against their being, to acknowledge that they may be struggling at times too, but, again, I see that as a sign of strength.
In fact, it's the leader's ability to reveal some vulnerability that creates the kind of emotional safety that makes organizations function better. So showing vulnerability is a strength and I think that for the leaders who have a hard time with that, I think they're going to really struggle.
Charles: (18:47)
And what kind of advice do you give to somebody who says, "I'd like to be more vulnerable, but I don't know how to do it," or "I'm scared of doing it,"?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (18:55)
Well, I have several answers to that. One is, try it, you might like it, and I don't mean that in as cheeky way as that might sound. I think it's really true, that there's no substitute for taking the plunge sometime and seeing that you actually can survive it and thrive after doing it.
But the other answer that I would say, which probably won't surprise you, is that talking to people like you and talking to people like me can be helpful to those leaders. I think that one of the other challenges of leadership, as you well know, is the inherent isolation that comes with the role and these days, when the conditions of leadership are so challenging, at the risk of sounding self-serving, I can't think of a time when having a confidant, someone who is a trusted advisor that leaders can open up to, someone who is not part of their reporting line, who's not an employee inside their organization, and someone who also brings, hopefully, a more thoughtful psychological perspective to bear on the leader's role and their challenges, is enormously helpful.
Charles: (19:57)
Yeah. And, at the risk of this becoming a mutually promoting episode, which is clearly not the intention behind it, the idea of creating a support structure around you has, seems to me, to never have been more important. I mean, I'm conscious of what we are asking our leaders to do and the evolution we're asking them to make in this challenging new world, is such a reach for so many of them, that the emotional challenges are going to be immense. I asked a guest on the podcast last week, “Who takes care of the leaders?” Putting aside the idea of having a confidant, having a coach, having an advisor, how else would you suggest leaders get the kind of support or create the kind of environment in which they feel sufficiently emotionally supported, whereby they can start to confront some of these kinds of changes?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (20:46)
Well, it doesn't have to be a coach or an advisor, although I do think that that's a special kind of role that is incredibly helpful to leaders. And it's heartening that the whole coaching and advising world has evolved in such a nice way over the last couple of decades, where, in the '90s, when it really started to take off, it was largely reserved for leaders who were in trouble, executives who were in danger of losing their jobs unless they got some remedial help, and that's when coaches were called in. Now it's almost 180 degrees different and no self-respecting CEO these days seems to want to conduct their role without having a coach or an advisor at their side, and I think that's a very healthy development.
But, certainly, spouses, partners can help. Other CEOs who've experienced the role can help. The best and most sophisticated Chief Human Resources officers, often step nicely into a consigliere role on internal people and culture matters. So those kinds of roles CHROs, other CEOs, partners and spouses, incredibly important.
Charles: (22:00)
And, if your clients were to say to you, as they look forward to 2022, "How will I know that I'm leading effectively? How will I know that making the kind of changes in how I lead?", what should they be looking for as indicators?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (22:16)
That's a good question. It would be intellectually unsatisfying to say that they will know it when they see it, but there is some truth to that. You feel it. One of the dangers of leadership, again, something you're well aware of, is that the nature of the leadership role is such that the power that's inherent in that level of authority is inhibiting of the upward flow of information, so it's really incumbent on leaders to make sure that they're getting feedback from below, and just asking someone who's a good friend, you know, "How am I doing?", you're likely to get, "You're doing just fine. You're doing great." That's not particularly helpful, even if it's true.
And so, leaders need to make sure they're hearing the bad news, the problems. If they're not hearing that, I think that's a sign that they're not doing very well, because there's always some problem, right? If they hear that everything is going well, that would make me really worried.
Charles: (23:12)
And, last question, if you had to give a leader a single piece of advice going into next year, what would it be?
Kerry Sulkowicz: (23:20)
It occurs to me, in response to your question, is that an analog, I suppose, to the societal change that I was talking about earlier, catalyzed by the pandemic, is on a much more personal level, that the pandemic has been a catalyst for individual self-reflection, too. At least I hope that's the case. It certainly has been in me and a lot of people that I know and talk to.
I think that self-reflection is a good thing, so if that is part of what comes out of this trying, turbulent, uncertain period, then that gives me hope. So, in answer to your question, I would say that leaders need to make sure they have the opportunity, the space as it were, to self-reflect on a regular basis. Self-awareness is something that you never fully achieve. It's not like you ever arrive at the Promised Land, but it is certainly something worth striving for and and I think it's important for leaders to do that.
Charles: (24:19)
Kerry, as you know, I've long valued your wisdom, your expertise, and your friendship, and I want to thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your insights with us.
Kerry Sulkowicz: (24:26)
As always, it's been a pleasure, Charles. It's great to see you again.
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