On this episode of the On the Balcony podcast, Michael Koehler welcomes Lauren Lyons to chat about chapter four of Ron Heifetz’s legendary book. As an engineer and manager at SpaceX, NASA, and Blue Origin, she knows a lot about managing the expectations of her team and working towards change. Michael and Lauren open up the episode by talking about authority relationships as an exchange. As Heifetz puts it, “Authorities serve as repositories for our worries and aspirations, holding them if they can, in exchange for the powers we give them.” Lyons relates this to her professional experience working with two different generations of aerospace engineers.

She’s learned how to navigate her own biases, what it means to unlearn and relearn, and the importance of being vulnerable. For the remainder of the episode, Koehler talks to his coach Judit Teichert about his experience learning about his country’s past and sharing it with others. The pair close the episode on a positive note about courage. Michael recalls feeling fearful before chatting with others about his family and Germany’s history of injustice. He came to realize , that courage is fear’s antidote. 

The Finer Details of This Episode:

• Authority as a relationship : trust and power in exchange for services
• The bucket metaphor: Carrying other people’s waters
• Managing expectations
• New and heritage space
• Vulnerability
• Unlearning and relearning
• Lyons’ adaptive work in the aerospace industry
• German post-WWII leadership
• Why courage is fear’s antidote

Quotes:

“These were problems that did not just have technical components that could be fixed and solved with expertise. They were adaptive in nature, and required learning, unlearning, or relearning.”

“We learn about the role that good authority can play when people are confronted with adaptive challenges, but also how limiting it can be.”

“I am an engineer. I have a predisposition to look at things very technically. I work in a very technical industry, and that's how we do things. But I'm also a student of this Heifetz methodology. And once you learn it, you can't unlearn it.”

“Authorities serve as repositories for our worries and aspirations, holding them, if they can, in exchange for the powers we give them”

“You took it all on yourself. And it can be so seductive to do that, because people are looking to you as the authority figure, especially in these types of organizations where change is needed.”

“You'll have engineers that are used to the heritage space way of doing things, you know. They’re used to having very clear directions, they're used to a schedule that's very clear, and this is my budget…But what the new space world has taught us is maybe those aren't the right requirements; maybe we question those requirements. Maybe the schedule can be even faster than what we've been doing. Maybe we can skip that part altogether. And being a lead or a leader of a team, that's wrestling with that challenge.”

“That is what coaching is often about: creating new awareness, trying other things, and capturing the learning.“

“Germans have made it acceptable to talk about the past to integrate the past into our current DNA, sort of to increase our own understanding of what it means to be German, and what it means to have a democracy and civil society that is built on our difficult past.”

“I'm happy to tell that, despite the fact that took me a lot of courage to even put my foot in the water, it went surprisingly well.”

Links:

On The Balcony

Leadership Without Easy Answers

Lauren Lyons Homepage

Lauren Lyons on Twitter

Adaptive Leadership Network’s monthly gatherings

Mentioned in this episode:

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