Throughout this season of On the Balcony, we’ve looked quite a bit at the distinction between leadership and authority, from the resources roles of authority can bring to the practice of leadership to what’s constraining about them. Being in charge can be a dance on a razor’s edge: on one side, the status quo and the risk of failure through complacency; on the other, too much change and the potential for resistance. This week’s guest, Jevan Soo Lenox, has spent the last decade of his career attempting to help organizations find their balance in this dance, utilizing the adaptive leadership framework to ensure both technical and adaptive work are included in their approach.
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 chapter seven of Heifetz’s Leadership Without Easy Answers into today’s world, sharing his history and experience to provide powerful lessons for executives and people developers.
In his reading of chapter seven, Jevan was struck by the common thread of failure resulting from an avoidance of adaptive work. 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: forward momentum is lost and opportunities are missed. Eventually people get frustrated with their executives and politicians and push them out.
Within organizations, much of that work has to do with an atmosphere of change, risk, and high emotion and that razor-edge dance those in leadership roles must do to maintain a balanced environment.
These emotions include the loneliness and pressure experienced by those in authority roles, who often feel the weight of responsibility and secrecy leaves them isolated. 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. He does this by discouraging an over-emphasis on technical expertise and encouraging adaptive collaboration—after all, it’s a very different feeling failing together than failing alone. And this encourages the kind of deep empathy Jevan sees as a fundamental part of the macro level of adaptive work, allowing those in charge to push their organization out of its comfort zone without getting dragged down by others’ fear and anxiety.
Explaining the challenges of adaptive work in a way that really lands for people is a core part of negotiating the messy business of growth. It’s important to give people the space and grace to evolve their understanding and capabilities so they can do the work with you and be excited to share in it. A classic example is inexperienced managers at high-growth organizations, who are constantly on the edge of their incompetence and lack of experience. Jevan explains that the adaptive challenge writ large is how to lift this new generation of managers and other leaders to where they need to be. And the key is to model a balance between technical expertise and adaptive ability to ensure authority roles are filled by those who can understand the job and the employees doing it.
