Harvard Business School Professor Nancy Koehn joins host Chris Linnane to provide a unique insight into how crisis brings out extraordinary leadership, revealing the true strength of self-awareness, emotional intelligence, ambition, and courage.
Nancy Koehn, Baker Foundation Professor, James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration
HBS Online’s interactive lesson with Professor Nancy Koehn (https://hbs.me/yck58wv9 )
Koehn’s latest book, Forged in Crisis (https://hbs.me/49ksds8w )
Related HBS Online blog posts:
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://hbs.me/ycxxw6pk
Editor's Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm and may not perfectly reflect the interview's audio file.
Chris Linnane (00:00):
The Parlor Room is an official podcast of Harvard Business School Online.
Nancy Koehn (00:05):
When you marry empathy with an interest, incredibly inspiring others, you really run right into that. What I think is this very dynamic and, and very robust definition of leadership, the ability to help others get stronger, do things they didn't realize they can do, which not only feeds their confidence, it feeds their trust in that leader, and it ups the ante in, in a sense of what they're willing to do for that person and in service to a big, big important mission.
Chris Linnane (00:48):
Welcome to The Parlor Room. My name is Chris Linnane. I'm the Creative director at Harvard Business School Online. What characteristics do you think define a great leader? Vision, empathy, communication. What is it about a crisis that brings out extraordinary leadership? I'm thrilled to welcome HBS Professor Nancy Koehn to The Parlor Room to discuss just that leadership in crisis. A few years ago, we created a short free lesson with Professor Koehn about the incredible leadership of Ernest Shackleton. This lesson was an adaptation of her book, Forged in Crisis. This still ranks as one of my all time favorite shoots at HBS Online. I bought a two-foot model of Shackleton's boat. The endurance we filled a baby pool with water and what followed, can only be described as the most incredible aquatic scene in the history of online education. But I digress. You can access the lesson on the HBS Online's website. This is our first remote interview in The Parlor Room. So, those of you watching on YouTube, you'll notice a super cool addition to the set, and we've got a lot to cover. So I wanna jump right in.
(02:05):
What are the most important qualities of a leader? And how have those qualities changed over time?
Nancy Koehn (02:11):
I've been studying leaders for 25 years, and the, the, the essence of those quality qualities begin with self-awareness and emotional intelligence. And this is across time and place, Chris. Um, this is not specific to our information tsunami-defined age, or our just in time behavior or our addiction to devices. This is true across times and across national boundaries. So, emotional awareness and an emotional intelligence. Why are those so important? Because a leader is a work in progress, a great leader. He or she knows that. They know that they have to keep rising for the challenges, often of high-stake situations. And you simply can't do that if you're not aware of your emotional hardware and you're not aware of how to use that hardware. Not only to make yourself better, but to affect, inspire, help others be better versions of themselves. So first two qualities, very much related: self-awareness, emotional intelligence.
(03:17):
The second, uh, if you will, cluster of critical qualities. Essential qualities is a willingness to keep rising first within yourself in terms of not only your ambition, that's a very common quality. But in terms of what you want to be for yourself, how do you want to find the strong, courageous, grounded, serious person inside who has a sense of humility and humor, who wants to inspire others to be better than they believe they can be? Which to me is a really important aspect of great leaders. What they do for the world, they do first through other people. So a combination of, I want to learn to make myself better. I want to then bring that kind of inspiration, that credibility, that kind of confidence and possibility to other people. So it's not a solid cystic ambition. I wanna bring it to others as I myself grow and change and become, in a sense more influential and, and better.
(04:25):
Um, the third, if you will, again, kind of cluster, is about courage. So courage is, is not as Nelson Mandela, the, you know, important reformist president in South Africa. And activist once said, courage is not the absence of fear. It's the willingness to walk into the fear and then discover that in spite of all that anxiety and, and how scared one felt, you're not only still standing, but you're tightening your core muscles and you're ready to take the next step. So courage, the willingness to walk into the fear and then take the step after that is incredibly important. And then understanding clustered width, courage is understanding that with courage, the willingness to step into a frightening situation for something worthwhile comes. Resilience. You know, a term that's used over and over and over again, but not very well understood. Resilience is the ability in the face of often unexpected great difficulty to find grounding, confidence, calm and, and, and a sense of, of practicable action. So that that resilience lives with that courage. And they, they often develop very much together. And both of them, this is absolutely essential, are like muscles. The more you use them, the more one calls on them, the stronger they grow, the more willing you are to move into the next situation, to find by fear the stronger the kind of resilience and fortitude you have as you walk into that situation.
Chris Linnane (06:02):
Fantastic. That was great. From your research, who is an underappreciated leader? Someone that we should know more about?
Nancy Koehn (06:10):
So my favorite example of an underappreciated leader, a leader who's, you know, hiding under the covers, if you will, or, or not, not on everyone's, you know, top 10 list of great historical figures is a woman named Rachel Carson. If we were having this conversation with my parents, or perhaps your grandparents or some of our listeners' grandparents, they would remember Rachel Carson. She was briefly very, very well known in the 1950s and 1960s as a bestselling author. She was a biologist, scientist. And in 1962, she published a book called Silent Spring, which was about the dangers of, of synthetic pesticides. And it became a smash bestseller. It, it just absolutely rocketed through the chemical and other indu industries that were, in a sense producing all kinds of substances that were being widely used in households and businesses that hadn't been tested on a long-term basis in terms of what they meant, uh, for human and, and animal and climate health.
(07:19):
And so Carson, which makes her even more interesting, as an unappreciated leader who was a very dent, quiet introvert, a woman who really preferred walking the coastlines of Maine and combing for sea life. Although she had served in the US Fish and Wildlife Service for a long time in her thirties and forties, which is how she gained a lot of her biological knowledge or science to acknowledge, she then became this national figure, writing this book, right? Saying something incredibly well documented, incredibly well grounded, but also extra, you know, a really huge whistle blowing act that just threw the American government. John Kennedy was president, uh, through the American government into a kind of, oh my God, we need to do something about this. And they began holding hearings and, and, and a whole host of different kinds of legislation came out of her book. It was that important that Summer 62, there was a headline in the New York Times, right?
(08:27):
Silent Spring, noisy summer about the huge impact. Her book and her carefully, carefully done research had produced. But here's the other thing that makes her so important as a leader. She wrote the book as she was battling metastasizing breast cancer. She was diagnosed with, with cancer in the early stages of her work on the book. This is before chemotherapy. It's before a lot of important advances in cancer, and particularly in breast cancer treatment. And so, through those long years, she, she carried on, she found her strength to finish the book, speak at several really critical, important hearings and other forums in the year and a half after her book was published. And then she died in early 1964, right? Having made an extraordinarily important impact, really, as Al Gore once said, a one woman leader who created the modern environmental movement. Every single American and all kinds of young people around the world need to know more about her story.
Chris Linnane (09:37):
She sounds like an incredible person.
Nancy Koehn (09:39):
An incredible person. Again, shy, retiring, serious, you know, a cat lover. And, and the another wonderful takeaway from her story, not only the importance of a big, big, you know, worthy mission and how that can inspire you and raise the confidence and the possibilities of one's own game, even in the face of debilitating life-threatening illness. Another great takeaway is that great leaders coming all shapes and sizes. She's quiet, she's soft, she's very feminine. She's not hard charging. She's not, you know, charismatic except by virtue of her confidence in her work and her quiet. You know, again, calm delivery. But she's not what we usually think of when we talk about really effective leadership styles. And yet she was a really effective, really courageous, really influential leader.
Chris Linnane (10:35):
That was a great story. Perfect. What is it about a crisis that brings out extraordinary leadership?
Nancy Koehn (10:42):
So crises are, are like greenhouses or a miracle grow that you, you know, sprinkle onto a, a shrub or a rose bush. And then, you know, in the next few days, the planting, you know, just explodes. And I think the reason they're miracle, a form of miracle grow, right? These, these environments that really call forth the best in leaders is, is first the stakes go up enormously. That's the first thing that's really important. And leaders really realize this viscerally and in individuals who haven't been leaders realize this. So that's one of the reasons that I think crises often call forth new leaders because they like, oh my God, we gotta we gotta save this, we gotta do this. We gotta roll up our sleeves and somehow get through this in the storm. And so, all kinds of folks who hadn't stepped up to the leadership table do, and they learn by doing.
(11:42):
So the first thing is the stakes rise that almost intuitively reflexively calls forth a strength that people sometimes don't know they have and calls forth people who don't know they can lead, but recognize they have to be part of the solution. That's the first thing. The second thing is that there's no time to cogitate and, and perform cost benefit analysis about whether we should do this or do that, or you just have so much less time as a leader or part of a team that you, you have to act. And so in that action, in, in that, and then often in, you know, in, in that action, and then realizing actually we have to do something different, right? Then you learn a leader, a group of people, an organization, an endeavor learned in a kind of, in, you know, informal but very powerful way, oh, that's not the way we wanna navigate.
(12:38):
We're actually gonna, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna tack a different way really quickly. And they learn something in that, in that switch, in that change, in that navigating point to point that is stored very quickly, not with pen and paper, not on a computer, not on a phone. It's learned, it, it's stored, and it goes into, if you will, kind of muscle courage, empathic memory for these leaders or this team. So that's really important. The very aspect of navigating point to point, the aspect of learning by doing is critical. So crises are really important classrooms for leaders.
Chris Linnane (13:17):
What advice would you give a young person who's looking to develop their leadership skills?
Nancy Koehn (13:23):
The first thing I would say to young people, learning to the wanting, learning to develop their leadership skills is throw yourself into a situation with someone you admire and respect. It's not quite the same thing as saying, look for a mentor. 'cause often the people that you admire and respect don't have a lot of time and energy and bandwidth to say, well, come here and be my, you know, my, my protege or my apprentice. Let me help you step by step. It just doesn't offer work that way. So the willingness to say, here's someone who's a, you know, active, interested, smart, busy, right? Taking on good, you know, big projects, and yet at the same time I can sense has a real humanity in them. You're not signing up with a high-functioning robot. You wanna sign up with someone who understands that humanity is always a core competency of great leaders.
(14:20):
So you, you sense that you don't, you don't, you know, kind of get that on a resume and you, you, you figure out a way to be useful too, and to fit in to that person's work. A huge amount can be learned that way. Not just in terms of what they're doing, but how they're doing it. What they're day is like, how they ground themselves, how they recover, right? Because no leader can go 12 hours, 14 hours straight. You have to recover, right? Physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, for many of us. So learning, uh, in, and if you will, like, you know, in in surround sound from that person can be incredibly useful. That's the first thing. Second, pick a challenge that seems like it may be just a little beyond your reach, just a little beyond your reach. Pick it, walk, grab it. And then, and then again, in conjunction with a leader and his or her team, right?
(15:22):
Take the first and then the second and the third step toward that big audacious challenge that you know, or you feel is just a little beyond your reach. You're gonna learn. This is a really important lesson that actually it isn't, but the only way you can learn that, and it can do, it can be a, it can imprint with you and your con sense of self and your confidence is if you choose something that you think is just beyond you first learn from your mistakes. We're living in such an age that now because of social media, because of our phones, is so camera ready all the time. You don't wanna be camera ready, camera ready. You need to, you need to present yourself. Well, there are times to where presentation is absolutely essential, but most of great leading isn't about being camera-ready, right? A lot of great leading is about, oh my God, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm here in this quicksand of some mistakes I made.
(16:13):
And now I gotta figure out what are the key lessons from those mistakes. All great leaders, right? Have enough self-confidence, develop enough self-confidence that they can take a mistake and go, God, what do I need to learn from that? I really, I messed up there. So that is really important. And the last thing is, there is no one way to be a great leader. Great leaders come in all shapes and sizes, and great leaders are always like all of us. Only I think great leaders are more explicit and self-aware of this fact. Great leaders are always works in progress. So own that, embrace that and say, I am beginning right, my journey. It's a lifelong journey. And even when you leave a big important position, you will continue on this journey to make myself the best, most resilient, most, you know, serious and decent leader I can possibly be. And there simply is no other work that is more fulfilling, more challenging, and more satisfying than that.
(17:37):
Chris, I wanna tell you a story that is really not very well known, but when I first heard it and then got interested enough in the person in this story to start digging, to start my detective work, um, it's just been, it's, it's, it's left an indelible imprint on me. And it concerns, you know, a, a great leader in 19th century America named Frederick Douglass. Many of your listeners know Frederick Douglas in, you know, in some measure, right? He was, as many listeners will remember, and for those that haven't met him, he's fascinating. And it's worth, it's, it's worth knowing. He was born a slave in Maryland in 1818, um, and he became, by the time he, his, his life was over. He was active in the abolition movement. He was active in the, the right, in the women's suffrage movement. He was active in politics.
(18:36):
He came to know Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln was present, he became the most famous African American of the 19th century, extraordinarily strong and brave and well-spoken. And just incidentally, the most photographed American of the 19th century camera was in its infancy. But he was, he was, he always understood the power of his own image. So Frederick Douglas was born in 1818 as a slave. He would escape in his twenties, um, to New York, and then move on to New Bedford in Massachusetts, where he would begin his life as, as a free man. Eventually, his, his, um, he would, he was, his freedom was actually purchased by admirers of his. But I wanna tell a story from early in his life while he was still a slave. This is a story from 1834, summer of 1834. He was 14, and his owner sent him to a man named Edward Covey, who ran a farm not too, too far from his owner in Baltimore.
(19:41):
And he took him, he sent him to this farmer because Edward Covey was also what was called a slave breaker. Slave breaking is not very well known among American students of, of slavery or the history Americans who know the history of slavery at all. But it was a small cottage industry, a terrible cottage industry that grew up in the 18th century in the 17 hundreds to do just what it says, to take slaves that weren't as obedient and as respectful as their white owners felt they should be. Bring those enslaved African Americans to a place where they would basically be worked and beaten into submission. So it's just a horrible, if you will, horrible kind of secondary enterprise that, that attended the terrible, you know, humanity, robbing, freedom, robbing institution of slavery. So, uh, Frederick Douglass was sent in 1834 to Edward Covey's farm, and he cowered from Edward Covey for the first few months he was there.
(20:48):
Covey beat him. Douglas grew depressed. Douglas wrote about this many years later in his first, uh, autobiography. And eventually, uh, Douglas, the young Douglas runs away from Covey's farm back to his master and says, please, I can't take this anymore master. Please let me come home. And the master says, no, you must go back. And he goes back and he hides and cowers from Covey for two days in a cornfield. And then on the third day, Covey finds him in a barn. And here's what happens. And this is the core of the story. A flash, Fred, the young Frederick Douglass decides not to cower not to run, not to take the beating, but to fight Covey. And so he basically puts up his fist, and the two men wrestle for well over two hours in the bar, in the hay. They're rolling, the one's up, one's down, a number of other enslaved Americans are on Covey's farm. Come and watch this. No one jumps in. They watch it happen. And after two and a half hours, basically a draw is declared, right? Covey says, we're done. Douglas says, all right.
(22:03):
And Covey never ever laid hands on Douglas again. Now, okay, well, and good. What are the, what, what, what's really going on here? Well, what's really important is that for the first time in his life, right, Frederick Douglas, who later talked about it exactly this way, right, stepped up to someone who had, you know, really tyrannized him, right? Had, had the power, had the, had the weaponry, had the authority to own him, and to beat him, and to try and make you more submissive. And said, right, I will fight you. As he said in his autobiography, you have seen how a, how a man is made a slave. Now you will see how a slave is made a man. Now think, here's where the real juice is. Here's where the real takeaways are. Think about the power of that statement, right? He's saying underneath the self-doubt and the fear and the respect that he had for this, you know, tyrannical, cruel person that by law could do this to him.
(23:12):
There was a courageous, serious self, right? Self-loving individual, self-respecting individual that could stand up and take this man on and in a two and a half hour draw, achieve a phenomenal victory. It may have been a draw from a wrestling standpoint. It was a phenomenal victory for Frederick Douglas. And the lesson here is underneath all of our outer layers of self-doubt, the varnish, if you will, of self-doubt and fear, and, and a sense of diffidence, and, and, and a sense of right. Being hemmed in. And we, you know, can't, shouldn't, wouldn't, couldn't. Underneath all those doubting voices in our head, lies a strong, decent, self-loving person who abides there. And Douglass discovered him that day. He discovered him, and he never looked back. He would say in later years that that single moment was what empowered him to escape slavery. To begin his own newspaper, abolitionist newspaper, to go on the speaker circuit, telling his story in northern states about the evils of slavery. It was such a profoundly important moment. And we, none of us may have a moment like that, but we, the, the critical takeaways are, we're stronger than we know. We are more self-respecting and, and self-loving than we know. We are capable of what our dreams suggest we are capable of. If we can systematically or in some dramatic fashion, strip off some of the varnish of what society and our more fearful selves say and believe about us.
Chris Linnane (25:10):
Are you ready for the learner questions?
Nancy Koehn (25:12):
Yeah, sure am.
Chris Linnane (25:20):
This question's from Roberto. What's the most surprising or little-known fact you've uncovered in your historical research?
Nancy Koehn (25:28):
What comes to mind immediately is, is Lincoln's both depression, which has been written about a little bit, but not from a leadership standpoint. I mean, Lincoln suffered--Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president, suffered from, at times almost paralyzing depression; today, we'd say he was chronically depressed. So, I, it has always surprised me, continues to surprise me. I've been a student of Lincoln for 25 years. I'll be a student of, of Lincoln till I die. How he led through the troughs of his darkness, his own darkness. 'cause he had to, and he had, and he really battled it during the White House. So that to me is extraordinarily surprising and interesting, never written about right. The leader battling his own depressive, depressive demons. Um, that, that just stays with me. So that's one thing that's, that's been really interesting and surprising to me.
(26:32):
Um, a second, a second really surprising element in, uh, about leaders is come to me in this project that I'm working on, on John Lewis, the American Congressman and Civil Rights activist. Most, most Americans today, and certainly most, most people from other countries, don't know very much about how he got its start. But he was one of the most important of a, of a, of a group of 10 to 15 really important students in the late fifties and early sixties who launched the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King was important, and he's who whom a lot of people around the world know. But he's by no means the whole story at all. And King couldn't have done anything like what he did without people like John Lewis, CT Vivian, Diane Nash, these are, these were students, uh, college students, graduate students who found the bravery over and over again. I'm talking about bravery, like we couldn't be killed if we do this march kind of bravery. And then found the strategic discipline, strategic discipline, not two words we use very often together to, to, to make their protests into leadership tools for political and policy ends. And they did it brilliantly, both the courage and the strategic discipline. And we never, we never talk about these people in that form at all. And we need to,
Chris Linnane (28:07):
All right. Our second question comes from Sophie. What modern leader do you most admire, and what can we learn from their approach?
Nancy Koehn (28:16):
I, I'm a great admirer of Gloria Steiner, who is a writer and an activist, and a speaker and a lobbyist, and a woman, a leader who's, who's lobbied and worked and agitated for civil liberties for all people, regardless of race and gender and religion. And she's best known as one of the real leaders and activists in the early women's rights struggles of the 1960s and seventies. But she's, she's still very much at it. She's still going strong. She's, I believe, in her late eighties or early nineties right now, and still agitating and still working, and still bringing all kinds of different people together in interest, you know, in, in, in, in, in unity around this incredibly important, you know, truth, which is talent is widely distributed, but distributed talent, gifts, humanity is extraordinarily, widely distributed, but opportunity is not. So how do we build a world where possibility is as widely available as, as talent and gifts and commitment and integrity and Steinem just won't quit?
(29:46):
And so I really admire her resilience, her persistence, her eloquence, and her ability, and this is true of all great leaders, her ability to keep a affecting the, her, her, her world as it changes. I mean, things look very, very different in this country, for example, with respect to women's rights than they did in 1968. And Gloria Steinem has, has moved right, with the changing context, the changing world in which she lives to stay relevant, to stay inspirational, and to stay effective. So she's just a phenomenal, phenomenal leader who doesn't, I think, doesn't get the attention that would benefit a lot of us, so that we can learn from her.
Chris Linnane (30:36):
Awesome. This question is from Kiki. What book or movie about leadership most accurately captures the challenges and rewards of being a great leader?
Nancy Koehn (30:47):
A great question. I, I, I keep returning. And when I think about movies, about leadership to Steven Spielberg's movie about Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis plays Lincoln, um, and it's set during the war. It's not about Lincoln's life from, you know, his, his birth in a log cabin in Kentucky through his time in Indiana and his political and legal career in Illinois. It takes place right in the last few years of the war, but it's such an extraordinary representation of a leader under siege from the, the extraordinary exigencies of the war, the, the, the stakes of the war, right? Originally, Lincoln was president, was elected president of someone who was gonna stop the spread of slavery. But he, he, he, he said there on the campaign trail over and over and over in 1860, I won't touch it where it's legal, where it legally exists. Um, originally when the war broke out in 1861, all kinds of folks predicted on both sides, the confederate and the federal side.
(31:54):
The war would be over really quickly. It wasn't over. It took forever and ever and ever. And so, you know, as the war winds down in this movie, Lincoln has this huge task, which is how now it's clear by the end of, uh, 1864 that the government will win. But Lincoln has this huge task, which is how do we, how do we make this war of extraordinary bloodshed and tragedy and death and destruction and huge, huge, huge casualties. It's not just deaths, it's casualties of how do we make this war have meaningful impact so that those that died haven't died in Vegas, as he said in 1863 in the Gettysburg address. And, and how he does that, right? In crafting the 13th Amendment, uh, abolishes slavery for all times, and then in laying out the outlines of the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment right, which would guarantee civil liberties for African Americans and guarantee the right to vote to black men in the 15th Amendment. How he does that and the strength it takes him to do that, and the political deafness and the diff, the way he juggles the different factions and the strength he draws from his children, even though he lost two children by that time, two sons and his wife. It's just, it's just such a full embodied representation of a leader under siege and not bowing before. Talk about resilience, the challenges before him. It, i, it, it still, to me is, is an astounding work, and I never tire of watching it.
Chris Linnane (33:33):
That is a wonderful way to close it, Nancy. Thanks so much for being on this show. Yeah, pleasure. I really appreciate it.
(33:43):
If you'd like to learn more about Professor Koehn or her book Forged in Crisis, please visit theparlorroompodcast.com. You can also follow HBS Online on Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and X. My name is Chris Linnane. Thank you for listening. If you are enjoying the part of the room, please share the show with your friends and subscribe, rate, and review it wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.
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