711: Turning Down the Temperature on Outrage, with Karthik Ramanna

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
In a lot of ways, leadership is better than it was a generation ago. One way that it’s not, though, is figuring out how to lead in an increasingly polarized world. In this episode, what leaders can do to turn down the temperature on outrage. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 711. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:31]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. And one of the things that all of us are running into in many of our conversations and we’re experiencing as a reality of the world that we’re living in is a bit more outrage than we have dealt with in the past. And how do we, as leaders, do a better job at turning down the temperature just a bit on outrage? Today, a guest who’s gonna help us to do that, to take the first steps and be able to do that better for our organizations and hopefully a bit better for the world too. I’m so pleased to welcome Karthik Ramanna.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:19]:
He is a professor of business and public policy at University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, where he has served as director of one of the world’s most diverse leadership programs. Previously, a professor at Harvard Business School, he studies how organizations and leaders build trust with stakeholders. He is the author of The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World. Karthik, I wish that wasn’t the title of the book, but that is the reality of where we are, isn’t it? So I’m so glad to have you here.

Karthik Ramanna [00:01:49]:
It’s a pleasure to be here, Dave. And, indeed, it’s a sad time that we have to write a book on, subject like that, but, hopefully, we can make some progress on navigating these troubled times.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:59]:
Indeed. And I love the book. I really just I as I got into this, I thought, wow. Like, every single chapter, there’s so much practical things that we can do as leaders. And I was struck by a paragraph in the preface that you wrote, and I’m gonna read it. You write, “as an academic leader at Oxford, I increasingly found myself confronting individuals who were angry with, quote, the way the world works and what they saw as my role in it. One student bluntly declared, you are the system. As a brown gay man and an immigrant twice over, I was at once somewhat amused and astonished where I wondered that this kind of hostility against established institutions such as Oxford and those within them come from.”

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:45]:
You have been in the midst of this work for many years and looking at that, and I’m sure grappling with that question. And before we get into some of the details of how to do this better, I’m curious if you’ve come to any conclusions on that big picture question. Where did this come from?

Karthik Ramanna [00:03:01]:
Yeah. That’s a great question. And as it sort of implied from that paragraph that you read, this is a deeply personal book for me. I wrote this book in part because I needed it to do my job better. And for the past 8 years, I was the director of this public leadership program. We brought together a 1,000 public leaders from a 120 countries, incredibly bright people, people who are close to or will eventually become presidents and prime ministers and heads of government of their respective nations. They care deeply about good societies and about good government, but they believe in different things and sometimes irreconcilable things. And so the question on my mind was how do I, in convening these people, leave them better for that experience, and at the very least, how do I not screw it up? So that was what really got me to think about this question, and what I did is inside secret, what most academics do when they don’t know the answer to a question, they teach a course on it.

Karthik Ramanna [00:04:00]:
So I decided to offer a course called How to Lead in a Polarized World, and I decided to bring a bunch of experts from practice. These are practicing general managers, people who led complex organizations like the London Metropolitan Police or the head of a large alcoholic, brewing company or someone who ran one of the largest hospital systems in the world. And I brought them to my class as guest lecturers. And I said, bring a really hard management challenge to us and don’t tell us what you did. And then through collective wisdom of the classroom, we said, well, is there a way to navigate this difficult world and what does the difficult- why are people so charged up about the world, and what does that mean for us as managers? So that’s how we got into or that’s how I got into sort of the the subject that we then tackle in the book.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:50]:
You said the word irreconcilable a moment ago, and there’s 2 truths that you highlight in us thinking about dealing with outrage. And you say the first is no matter what you do, you can never fully address the demands made of you. And then the second is no matter what you do, you’ll be seen as part of the problem. What is it that caused those things to be truer today than they used to be?

Karthik Ramanna [00:05:19]:
Yep. So in my estimation, there are 3 broad factors that matter here. I mean, the first is that we’re living at a time where there’s a great deal of fear about what the future will look like. You know, just take something like AI and it threatens to disrupt society on a scale perhaps even greater than the industrial revolution did. You know, I mean, for 1000 of years, the world kind of looked the same and then the industrial revolution comes around and changes everything, and AI threatens to do that and in a much grander scale. And then you lap on to that things like climate change, shifting sort of monsoon winds, rising sea levels, add on to that shifting demographic patterns, so most western societies are aging very rapidly. So that gets people to be looking ahead into the future and worried, worried that the lives of their kids are not going to look at least as comfortable as theirs. And then, you know, if you just had that fear of the future, but you had deep trust in your institutions, if you had deep trust in society, if you felt like your leaders were really they had a great track record in making things work or making hard decisions for the collective good, then maybe it wouldn’t be such a big challenge.

Karthik Ramanna [00:06:30]:
But we also happen to be living in a time where a lot of people feel like they’ve been given a raw deal. They feel like the narrative sold to them by elites on things like globalization or immigration haven’t really panned out, especially if you’re middle or working class in the western world. There’s also plenty of evidence to suggest that the very wealthiest in society, the point 0 1%, pay lower tax rates than most middle class and lower income people. That causes its own sense of frustration and sort of a rage against the machine, if you must. And, you know, perhaps because of these first two factors, the idea that we’ve got this fear of the future and a raw deal and, you know, deep distrust in institutions, We’re seeing a sort of a fracturing of the consensus, the sort of the humanist consensus or what we might call the enlightenment consensus, where we felt that somehow through the pursuit of knowledge and science, we would, you know, advance the human condition. We’re seeing sort of a broad retreat from that and in some sense, a return to our tribal instincts, the idea that it’s us versus them and we need to find our tribe and by finding our tribe and sticking together, we’ll do better than the next tribe and that’s the best we can do. So, all of these factors are sort of coming together and in my estimation characterizing this age of outrage. Now, Dave, you said something really important, which is, you know, we’ve always had elements of these sort of forces at play throughout human history, but I think what’s different about our moment is that they’re all present together and that they’re all present at the magnitude or the degree to which they manifest today.

Karthik Ramanna [00:08:07]:
And that’s what’s making this, especially, sort of difficult time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:12]:
There’s an element here of as a leader in an organization, especially in an organization that might be more prone to dealing with situations, elements of outrage. Although, I think almost every leader in every organization is prone to that these days. But that no matter what you do, you’re gonna be a part of the problem. And there’s an element here of, like, mindset for all of us, I dare say, that we have to sort of be a little bit selfless, like, even more so than we normally would as leaders of, like, it’s not really about us. I mean, it never was, but it really isn’t now. And being able to set aside some of our own personal stuff and the feelings, the anger, the the things that naturally come up for us as human beings and be a lot more conscious about doing that now that maybe we were 10, 15, 20 years ago.

Karthik Ramanna [00:09:08]:
Yeah. I think that’s right. It’s the sense that we need to be more self aware. We need to be more presenceful that our decisions impact the lives of people well beyond our immediate circle, and we need to also recognize that a lot of what we think of as reality is really just a product of our lived experiences, and there are different people whose sort of lived experiences being so different would look at that same situation completely rationally from their perspective quite differently. And especially because we have to share the world with them and, you know, especially, for instance, if you’re in a large organization, some of these people will be your fellow employees. Some of these people will be your customers. Some of them, they might be your investors or they might be in the local communities in which you operate or they might be your regulators. So this isn’t just about being a really good, and empathetic person for the sake of it, which is, of course, just a good reason to do it in itself, But it’s about being good for business.

Karthik Ramanna [00:10:09]:
I mean, it’ll be hard for you to be a successful business if you don’t have these active listening skills.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:14]:
Yeah. Indeed. The phrase that comes up in the book to me more than any other is the phrase turn down the temperature and you make that invitation again and again and there’s a distinction here from moving away from sort of the traditional heroic leader who comes in and saves the day right to really more of what what you refer to as a virtue of temperance. What’s significant about that distinction?

Karthik Ramanna [00:10:45]:
So the classical Greeks have always looked at 4 cardinal virtues as being the the sorts of virtues that in the pursuit of a good life, we aspire to. This is courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. But what’s happened over you know, starting as far back as, Plato and Aristotle and, certainly over the course of modern leadership education, we perhaps have emphasized some of those virtues more than others. And, you know, courage and justice and wisdom, certainly things that we see and hear a lot about in the context of being leadership virtues we ought to aspire to. Lots of business schools write case studies about the courage of leaders and about, you know, leaders seeking justice, whether it’s social justice or other forms of justice and so forth. And there’s this 4th leadership quality of temperance that somehow got, you know, short shifted in this. This is not to say that we haven’t written about it or we haven’t talked about it, but it hasn’t gotten the same kind of play or prominence that the others have. And and temperance perhaps has come to be seen almost as a as a dirty word.

Karthik Ramanna [00:11:50]:
It’s almost come to be seen as weakness in leadership because it’s seen as compromise. It’s seen as opportunism. A tempered leader is one who basically seeks out compromise, doesn’t really stand for anything, you know, is willing to listen to a number of players and then say, okay. Which way is the wind blowing? So that’s how we’ll make progress today. But that’s not what it is at all. It is, in fact, some of the strongest tempered tempered leaders that we’ve experienced in recent memory, might include Nelson Mandela or Yitzhak Rabin, and these are not individuals who you would for a moment look at and said, we don’t know what they stand for. I mean, they were very clear about what they stood for, but what they had built is a capacity and a confidence and a self awareness to say, you know, notwithstanding my views, which may be strong views in one direction, I’m perfectly fine creating a space for alternate views to emerge and for a process to determine how this sort of college or collegium of views would then manifest into public decisions. Take for a moment the decision of Mandela or the the kind of power Mandela enjoyed shortly after the end of apartheid when he becomes president.

Karthik Ramanna [00:13:03]:
He could have shaped that country any which way he wanted in that sort of glorious moment of power that he enjoyed, And someone like Mugabe across the border in Zimbabwe indeed did. He took it in a his country in a very different direction, whereas Mandela instead used his power in a way where he said rather than tell you all what to do, I’m gonna use my power to create a strong set of institutions that would allow us, for a long period of time, hopefully, have the confidence and the ability to figure out what we do given that we’re a very diverse country with very different priorities. Can we see more of that kind of leadership, not just in government, but also in business in this age of outrage? Maybe that’s the way to really deescalate this, especially if the goal is not to resort to something like a violent resolution of the conflict.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:51]:
Yeah. And what I’m hearing you say there is it’s not necessarily that those other elements, the courage, the wisdom aren’t still there. It’s just that we’re indexing a little bit more on that temperance that maybe we’ve all forgotten about a bit, and we haven’t seen modeled in the world. I mean, you exam mentioned a couple of examples of people who’ve done that of world leaders. And yet it’s sometimes hard to think of those examples because they are the exception. At least they’ve been the exception in modern history. And, like the invitation for all of us to think about doing that just a little bit more, moving a little bit more in that direction.

Karthik Ramanna [00:14:26]:
That’s right.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:26]:
And you make that invitation and some of the practical things we can do in order to do that. And there’s three elements that, really landed with me as the starting points for this. And one of the elements is a calming environment and beginning there. And and maybe even before we get into that, Karthik, when you think about turning down the temperature, I think a lot of times we think about this when we’re in the middle of a moment of outrage. Right? That’s when it becomes really apparent. Part of what I really hear the invitation though in thinking about these things is, yes, obviously, there’s a lot you need to do in those moments. But the real opportunity is before you get to those moments of actually laying the groundwork for how your organization is gonna respond to the inevitable outrage.

Karthik Ramanna [00:15:14]:
That’s absolutely right. And so there are 2 things that we need to recognize to do here. One is that sometimes we catch ourselves in the heat of the moment because no matter what our best efforts are, we are living in this age of outrage, and it’s not a question of if we’ll find ourselves in some sort of crisis, it’s when we’ll find ourself in some sort of crisis. So when we are in that crisis, it’s about recognizing that we, just as much as everybody else around us, are prone to an aggressive response. And so I wrote that part of the book about creating a calming environment, about turning down the temperature as much for managers to use on themselves as to you, apply to the people that they work. So there’s this tendency for managers perhaps to see themselves as somehow rational and above the fray, making wise decisions while everybody else is prone to outrage. That might be true from time to time, but it’s also the case that you’re a human being, and you’re likely to be prone to outrage just as much as the next person.

Karthik Ramanna [00:16:14]:
And very often, the conditions under which you will be provoked or the conditions under which you will be triggered to aggressive responses will be those kinds of conditions that really exacerbate the problem. So finding yourself in a hot crowded room where people are talking over each other or jostling you, finding yourself in a situation where you’ve had a lot of caffeine, but don’t have food in your stomach. And those sorts of situations, just the biology of aggression is such that you are likely to be prone to a overreaction if you haven’t taken due care of your environment. And by environment, I mean not just your physical surroundings, but also your your body. And so it’s just sort of, you know, understanding the science of aggression and saying, okay. Therefore, what are the simple managerial implications, not just for the people around me, but for myself so that when I am confronted with this crisis, I take, maybe it’s 5 minutes, 10 minutes, maybe it’s the day, and put myself in the right state of mind so that I don’t overreact? So that’s sort of the first part of it. The second part of it, of course, is that let’s not be surprised that we find ourselves in this crisis, because after all, we are living in the age of outrage, and that’s what you were alluding to when you say we have to be prepared for it. Right? And that’s a key theme in the book.

Karthik Ramanna [00:17:37]:
It’s, again, going back to it’s not if we’re going to be in a crisis, it’s when we’re going to be in a crisis. And if I know and I expect I’m going to be in a crisis at some point, whether it’s 3 weeks, 3 months, or maybe we’re lucky enough and it’s 3 years away. But but if I’m going to be in that situation and when I’m going to be in that situation, I need to be prepared for it, and I can’t be then doing all the things I need to do. So for instance, if what I need to do is reach out to my antagonist and understand why it is they’re so mad at me about this, that, or the other, that can’t be the first time I know I get to know who they are. It can’t be that that’s the first time I say, okay. Who are the people in my company that are really upset with the decisions I’ve been making as manager? Or who are the customers who have been routinely complaining about my product or service? Or who are the investors who think that I haven’t been doing a good enough job in stewarding their capital? You need to be identifying those key antagonists, those key constituencies well in advance of the crisis and start building the trust from day 1, as ideally when you don’t have a crisis and saying, look, let’s just get to know each other as human beings. It’s not that we need to agree on everything. It’s just that we need to get to know each other and so that when it is the fact that we’ll have a big problem to solve, we’ll have had that trust to build on.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:58]:
One of the other invitations you make in this is to consider rules of engagement and ideally to do that before you get into firefighting mode of whatever the issue is that’s come up for the day. And I was really struck by what your school has done on thinking about this. And I’m wondering if you could frame the intention behind rules of engagement, but also just how you’ve all handled it internally and some of the rules that have emerged and how that’s helped.

Karthik Ramanna [00:19:29]:
Yeah. As I said earlier, part of writing this book was sort of helping me navigate the challenge of leading this public leadership program for this very diverse and capable group of individuals. So it occurred to me that as we were going to talk about all of the big issues that divide us, whether it’s globalization, or the war in the Middle East, or tax policy, or abortion, as we were going to talk about all these things, we needed some sort of norms as a community. We needed some way in which we could make sure that everyone was on the same page. These are not substantive norms, of course. They’re not about what to think about a particular issue that would certainly fall flat, but these are norms of process. And in our context, in our community, we came up with 3 norms. We said, 1st and foremost, look, everybody is here because they have something to teach us.

Karthik Ramanna [00:20:21]:
They have something to bring to the conversation. We are very fortunate as a community that we could keep our standards, our academic standards, exactly where they are and still triple the size of the program because we have this abundance of people who want to be part of this. So the fact that we have made certain decisions to bring these individuals and not others into the room means that we’ve identified that they have something unique and distinctive to teach us all, that they have some sort of distinctive set of lived experiences that will advance the learning of others. So it would be a shame if they came all the way, contributed their time, and participated in this program and felt that they needed to censor themselves. So that first norm is under no circumstances should you censor yourself. You should be able to speak your authentic voice on a particular issue. The second norm is simply the caller corollary of the first, which is to say that if that applies to you, if the sort of freedom of speech applies to you, it applies to everybody else too. So you can’t be so offended by something someone else is going to say because you’ve been given that right to speak freely too.

Karthik Ramanna [00:21:27]:
So those are just two sides of the same coin. The third norm is what really makes this work, and that is to say that we are a learning community. We are a leadership development community. We’re not a debating community. We’re not a community where you show up and drop the cleverest argument you can find and watch your opponent humiliated picking up the pieces. That’s not leadership. Because if you are a leader or a manager, you’re responsible not just for what you say, you’re responsible for how your words land on others. You’re responsible on for how others are able to take those words and become stronger for it.

Karthik Ramanna [00:22:04]:
Imagine if you’re managing a team. You know, you don’t just drop a commandment and then walk away and hope that the team understood you and pick up what it is that they did or didn’t understand and go on with it. You work with them to make sure that they did understand you. And in the same sense, we say, we want you to take accountability for how others experience you. Now they may not be convinced by you. They may not change their mind, but that’s part of what makes us a learning community and a leadership development community. And it’s these three norms that really emerge bottom up from the sort of over the years from the participants, from the practitioners themselves saying, you know what? If we don’t have these norms, it will just completely fall apart. So the the norms are very sensible.

Karthik Ramanna [00:22:43]:
They are norms that sustain the community, but they’re also norms that are owned from the bottom up. That’s they’re norms that the community itself says, we’ve got to preserve, protect, and cherish these, and each year, these norms are a gift from one set of participants to the next set of participants so that, you know, it’s look. We figured this out over the course of the year. It’s gonna take you a while to figure it out, so here, take this for the 1st few months and work with it. And invariably, the next group says, you know what? This roughly works, so no need to tweak it so much. Of course, they’ll have different substantive debates. They might come out on different positions on the big issues like wars and peace and so forth, but the the rules of engagement remain where they are.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:23]:
And again, to back to your larger point of let’s do this before we ideally get to the outreach situation. Let’s take the time to actually establish these norms, build these rules of engagement. And another element of this is what you call a prearranged work group. Like, being able to establish that, a helpful point in this. And there’s so many wonderful examples in the book. What does this look like and what works to make this add value in a situation like this?

Karthik Ramanna [00:23:51]:
Yeah. So, again, I think the value of this prearranged working group is, let’s imagine you’re a company and you’re trying to deal with a particularly challenging situation. Let’s say you’re Google and your employees are you know, they’re used to having a outspoken, culture at work where they have these sort of boisterous town halls where they question the CEO on on matters of strategy and corporate purpose and direction and so forth. And then the war in the Middle East comes along, and they say, well, why is Google not taking a side in the war, and why are they not doing x, and why are they not doing y, or why is they appearing to be partial to one side or the other? And the CEO suddenly is like, woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. We’re a business.

Karthik Ramanna [00:24:33]:
We can’t talk about all this at work. But that jars with all of the other sort of culture of openness that you’ve created so far. So that’s part of then the challenge that you’re facing in that environment. Now imagine if you said for a moment, well, we’re a knowledge company. We’re living in a polarized world. It’s gonna be no surprise that we’re gonna have to deal with these kinds of issues. So maybe we should identify who are some of our most thoughtful employees, some of our most, outspoken employees on some of these matters, and let’s create a working group where they start to think through what is the best solution for the company as a whole in the context of this scenario. So we empower them to have these discussions on behalf of us all.

Karthik Ramanna [00:25:18]:
That’s what we mean by this pre agreed working group, and that’s what we mean by temperance because, of course, the CEO can in the last minute come down and say, no. Yes. We may be a family, but we’re not gonna have these discussions about the war in the Middle East and the company. That’s like, you know, the head of the family saying, we’re not gonna have that discussion at the dinner table. That jars with the culture you created of open dialogue. And so if, on the other hand, you said, well, now we’ve built this trusted pre agreed working group, and let’s see what they have to say about it. Then you have to really trust what the outcome is because if you trust the process and you think you have the right employees, then you have to trust what they will determine. And chances are, they will agree with you on the matter of strategy, and if they don’t, let’s say they come up with a different solution, then maybe you have the wrong process or maybe you have the wrong employees or maybe you’re the wrong CEO for that company.

Karthik Ramanna [00:26:07]:
You know? Those are a whole host of hypotheses you have to confront, but the idea that you can suddenly shut down debate at odds with what it is you’ve tried to create as a company culture, that’s going to be really jarring. And so this pre agreed working group is something that will help you navigate that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:23]:
And we’ve seen so many examples in the popular media of organizations that have attempted to shut down debate, and boy, that does not work well at all, in almost every situation. Who have you seen do this well that has really taken this taken this invitation and really been thoughtful about putting together a prearranged working group and and and where it has really helped?

Karthik Ramanna [00:26:44]:
Yeah. So the person that I thought did this really well was someone who was introduced to me, thanks to the Ford Foundation, is a woman called Priscilla Ancote. Priscilla was the, then at the time, the CEO of his organization called the Kaduna State Peace Commission. And she’s sort of a technocrat, someone who’s worked and built a career in peace building operations. She’s from Nigeria. Kaduna State, to which the peace commission applies, is a state in North Central Nigeria, so she’s ethnically from there. But she most of her career has been in the east of Africa, so completely different side of a very large continent. And what Priscilla does is when she’s given this job, she starts looking at, well, why is there a peace commission in Kaduna to begin with? Well, in part because there’s a lot of violence.

Karthik Ramanna [00:27:32]:
Okay. But why is there violence? So she starts looking at the time series of violence in Kaduna, and she notices it’s not sporadic or random. Rather, it’s almost like a sine wave. It’s almost predictable, and it’s predictable around times of elections. So a lot of the violence that she’s there to help placate is the result of sort of almost manufactured outrage at the time of elections in order to intimidate outcomes. So what she does is start identifying who are potentially catalytic forces in driving, you know, communities towards violence around times of election. These might not be, people doing this maliciously. They might be just people active on social media who feel very passionately about one side or the other, and she starts reaching out to them in an ad personum capacity.

Karthik Ramanna [00:28:19]:
Importantly, she doesn’t reach out to them in their ex officio capacity. She doesn’t say, oh, well, let’s bring in the head of, I don’t know, the Christian Association of Nigeria or the Jamaat e Islami or so forth, because, of course, those institutional organizations might have different incentives. But she reaches out to the protagonist as people, as human beings, And she creates this organization called the House of Kaduna family, which quite frankly, when I first heard, I thought it was kind of corny. But then as I sort of understood what they were doing, I was like, wow, this is really powerful. So what she’s done is taken these potentially polarizing figures and she started to create human relationships across them. Right? And she started to humanize them to each other. And there’s this great line from Michelle Obama where she says you can’t hate someone when you know them. Right? And that’s part of what is happening here.

Karthik Ramanna [00:29:08]:
She creates the conditions where the members of this House of Kaduna family start to humanize each other. And that doesn’t mean, of course, the violence magically disappears. It means that when election time comes around, there’s actually a stronger basis of trust on which to call upon someone and say, do you really wanna put it that forcefully or is there a way to put it in a way that might be less triggering to certain communities? And now you have the trust to do that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:33]:
I learned so much reading this book, not only from your expertise and looking at the research and literature, but also just the incredible intentionality you’ve brought to the diversity of different geography and ethnicities and cultures around the world to bring in. And, like, as we are often reminded how much we do share despite our different context and cultures of best practices of being able to do better at as you invite us to temperance in so many ways. So I hope folks will go get the book, and especially if you are a leader who’s dealing with this right now. And and it’s we’ve said today, we all will be if we’re not today, but especially if your organization is in a place or stakeholders where this is a struggle right now. I hope you’ll lean in on this book. Karthik, one last question for you. As you’ve been doing this work over the last few years, you’ve, of course, talked with so many leaders. You’ve heard so many stories.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:27]:
What if anything in doing this work has caused you to change your mind on something?

Karthik Ramanna [00:30:33]:
Yeah. So I’d say I I go back to one of those axioms that we talked about earlier, which is no matter what you do, you will be part of the problem. Right? And connects to that line you read at the beginning about being sort of experienced completely inadvertently, I mean, certainly not by any malicious design on my part, as part of the system. And so that really provoked a sense of reflection and humility that, look, the problems are so complex and so interwoven and so deep that I’m not gonna be able to solve it all, and I don’t need this to be a popularity contest. I don’t need to be liked by all people all the time. I can leave a situation better than I found it. And if I reach the limits of what it is I can do in a particular context, then I need to have the confidence to step away from it and say, now it’s someone else’s responsibility to take this to the next stage because I can’t be able to engage in it without the risk of doing more harm than good. And it’s that sense of humility, that sense of perspective, that sense of sort of saying, look, this is my moment to lean in because I think I can do something about it, But then when I have reached the limits of what I can do, to lean out equally.

Karthik Ramanna [00:31:43]:
You know, we hear about this again in the classical Greek traditions, heroes like Cincinnatus, etcetera, that, you know, there are moments when they sort of lean in and there are moments when they say, you know what? I now need to be a citizen. I need to be a follower. And so that’s kind of what I’ve learned from this journey, from my own experience in leading this program, but really also from the experience of so many others, really, really much more effective leaders than myself who have done a wonderful job navigating this age of outrage.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:12]:
Karthik Ramanna is the author of The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World. Karthik, thank you so much for your work.

Karthik Ramanna [00:32:20]:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me, Dave.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:28]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, 3 related episodes I’m recommending for you also. One of them is episode 192, how to create team guidelines with Susan Gerke. You heard Karthik and I talk about the importance of establishing rules of engagement outside of the moments of outrage and also having some of those prearranged work groups that can help lead to a path forward. Susan and I in episode 192 talked about how do you actually do that logistically of creating some of those guidelines, those rules of engagement. It is such a critical step for a team. If you have not done it before and you are starting with a new team or maybe you’ve had a transition with a team or maybe you just are deciding, we as a team need to work a little bit differently. We need to handle situations effectively when they come up. Episode 192 is a step by step exactly where to start to begin to create team guidelines, and almost any of us can facilitate it and start from there as a beginning point on how to do better.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:31]:
Again, that’s episode 192. Also recommended episode 529, the way out of major conflict. Amanda Ripley was my guest on that episode. Her book, high conflict, one of the best books I’ve read in recent years, so powerful. The message she has on thinking about conflict and the systemic nature that it tends to take hold of us. And we see that so much in the news right now and in our societies. Like, when conflict becomes the norm, how difficult it is to pull out of that. And if that is the experience you are having right now in your organization or industry, I am so sorry you are dealing with that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:07]:
And episode 529 would be a starting point to begin to frame the complexity of that. More importantly, where do you start? And Amanda’s book, a great starting point for that. It’s a wonderful compliment to Karthik’s work. And then finally, I recommend episode 669, 3 practices for thriving in negotiations. William Ury, one of the leading researchers on negotiations for many decades now, talk with me about when you’re going into those situations where there is inevitably gonna be conflict and negotiation is one of them where it almost always comes up and outreach comes out in those situations very consistently. How do you handle that? What are the mindsets and the practices that you can utilize in going into those tough situations so that you can find a better resolution for all parties? Again, that’s episode 669. All of those episodes you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website. And if you haven’t yet, go over to coachingforleaders.com, set up your free membership.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:06]:
It’s gonna give you access to the entire suite of benefits inside of the free membership, my book and interview notes, the weekly guide that comes to you on email, access to all of my audio courses that are there, tons of free resources beyond that, including my library as well with all the links that I’m finding for you regularly and sharing in the weekly leadership guide. All of those are benefits inside of the free membership, completely free. Just go over to coachingforleaders.com. Set up your free membership. And when you do, one of the first things you can do is go into the episode library and find what’s relevant to you. Searchable by topic. A great starting point for tracking down what you need to hear right now. And if you are looking for a bit more or perhaps you are at an inflection point, you already know that leadership gets harder at inflection points, whether it is a promotion or maybe you’ve moved organizations or you’re taking on a new team or there’s a new project or initiative.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:06]:
These are the inflection points that come in all of our careers, and they bring a challenge, a challenge Marshall Goldsmith has highlighted in his work many times. What worked yesterday doesn’t always work today. It’s the point in our careers when it is important for us to shift our behavior. It’s doable to do that alone, but it’s easier and so much more successful with support. The Coaching for Leaders Academy provides the community and structure to accelerate your movement on the behaviors that are most critical right now. If you’d like to discover more about our academy, go over to coachingforleaders.com/academy, and you’ll see a button there where you can request an invitation. The next time that we open up the academy for applications, we will make sure that you receive an early invitation. Just go over to coachingforleaders.com/academy.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:01]:
Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. I’ll be back with you next Monday for our next conversation on leadership. Thank you as always for listening. Have a great week, and see you back Monday.