Mark speaks with Dr. Jennifer Garvey Berger. Dr. Garvey helps CEOs unleash their teams' and organizations' complexity genius.

She is the co-founder and CEO of Cultivating Leadership, where they blend deep theoretical knowledge with a driving quest for practical ways to make leaders' lives better. She coaches CEOs and their executive teams and designs and teaches high-end leadership programs.

She has written three highly acclaimed books on leadership and complexity. Jennifer's newly released book, Unleash Your Complexity Genius: growing your inner capacity to lead.

Dr. Garvey lives in the French countryside, where she bought a house with 11 friends. Putting her expertise and insights into complexity and leadership, they live in a community while focusing on what works and developing more of that while letting go of what doesn’t. Jennifer is a coach for CEOs and various high-functioning teams, helping them unleash the power of the collective and how they can all thrive as individuals while working toward common goals. One of the fundamental questions Dr. Berger asks is how do we recognize the complexity and then work with it and harness it in some ways to create the lives we want to lead. 

 

Key Takeaways:

 

Looking at Patterns to Inform Actions: When we acknowledge that complexity exists within our relationships and the external world, we can lead with that awareness. One of the ways to enact positive change is to notice the patterns are working and focus on how to do more of that, as well as noticing any patterns that don’t work and leading our way through complexity together. 

 

Working with Complexity, Not Against It: It is essential to ask how we can work with complexity instead of against it. Using the metaphor of a wave, You can’t jump in a wave without getting wet. With the knowledge of the wetness of the wave, then you can ask, how do I work with the waves and do something cool with what's here? This makes any complex problem a different task and, in many ways, much simpler. We need to recognize complexity, work with it, and harness it in some ways to create the lives we want to lead.

 

Looking at Complexity as a Collective: To address complexities such as environmental concerns, human rights, and global politics it is important to recognize how we, as a collective, function. Once we can see the complexity within the collective, we can start to address how we as a collective can function better and better over time. In relationships, organizations, and communities, it is important to create the conditions for people to build strong bonds and trust one another. When people are bonded and trust each other, they can activate those things that make humans awesome at addressing and acting towards and within complexity.

 

Leadership and Environment: A leader’s job is to amplify the conditions where people can be diverse, individual, imperfect, creative, and energized in the workplace. Leadership is recognizing the individuals and cultivating something unique that each person brings to the group.