Unifying Leadership in a Divided Time

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

Over the past decade or so, it seems like our debates over social, political, and economic issues have dramatically intensified. Around the world, people are at each other’s throats over everything from COVID restrictions to climate change, to campus protests. We see anger expressed on the streets and across social media. And increasingly, it’s spilling over into the business world in the form of consumer boycotts, employee strikes, and colleagues who struggle to collaborate. In this highly polarized time, it’s harder than ever to separate what goes on outside an organization from the work that needs to happen inside it.

So what are leaders and managers to do? Our guest today says there’s a way to break out of this constant crisis management mode. It involves strategies to take the temperature down, analyze the outrage, shape and bound the response, understand your power and build resilience.

Karthik Ramanna is a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. He wrote the book, The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World, and the HBR article, Managing in the Age of Outrage. Karthik, welcome.

KARTHIK RAMANNA: Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me, Alison.

ALISON BEARD: Taking a long view, there have been certainly other periods of vehement disagreement on issues in the U.S. You know, I’m thinking about the civil rights era, the Vietnam War era. So why does this age seem so plagued by outrage? What are some of the key factors driving polarization?

KARTHIK RAMANNA: In my estimation, there are three things that in some sense define this present age. And it’s the fact that we have all three of these things at the same time that’s really exacerbating the situation. The first is what we call a fear of the future. So between climate change and rising concern about demographic shifts and migration, the advance in technological innovation, particularly artificial intelligence and the prospect that it will radically change the nature of work. You’ve got all of these sort of developmental factors that contribute to people feeling like the future is not going to be as pleasant as the past. The lives their kids will lead is not going to be as comfortable as the lives they’ve led.

The second thing that matters is we’ve been through periods where we’ve dealt with technological uncertainty and where we’ve felt like we’ve got a lot to deal with as a society. But if we have a trust in our institutions, if we have a sense of confidence that our leaders will be able to navigate this, then maybe that fear will be somewhat addressed.

But we are also dealing with the second force, a perception of a raw deal. A sense that the rules of the game are somehow broken in say the western world, middle-income and lower-income individuals feel like they were really dealt the raw deal on globalization. That the establishment isn’t working for them, that the rules of the game are broken.

Now you put this fear of the future and the raw deal together and it sort of brings to light a third factor, which we call the ideologies of othering. So for a long time we’ve sort of felt like we’re in this together. We’re in this enlightenment project where through the pursuit of knowledge, we will somehow figure out the answers to all of life’s great challenges. But increasingly we are reverting back to our tribal instincts, to a sense that it’s us versus them. It’s this community versus some other community. And that ideology of othering when you laid onto the fear of the future and the raw deal, that really contributes. All three of these things together really contribute to the age of outrage.

ALISON BEARD: When did you realize that this was such a big problem you needed to start educating students in how to deal with it?

KARTHIK RAMANNA: Yeah, so about eight years ago, I was sort of plucked out of Cambridge Massachusetts where I was teaching at Harvard Business School to serve as the director of the Master of Public Policy Program at Oxford. Over the course of the seven or so years that I led that program, we brought together about a thousand public leaders from 150 or so countries around the world. And these are individuals who came from the U.S. and China, from Russia and Ukraine, from Israel and Palestine, from India and Pakistan.

They have fundamentally different ideas about what is the purpose of government. And I found myself at the center of this community with the challenge of trying to make their experience with us such that they left stronger for it, that they left in some sense with a greater capacity to build unlikely coalitions across all of the fractures in the world.

And speaking candidly, I didn’t know how to do this. So what I did is what many professors do when they don’t know the answer to something, they teach a course on it. I brought together about eight of my friends who are CEOs or COOs of businesses, of government agencies, of not-for-profits, and I said, can you come to my class as a guest speaker and bring us your hardest challenge. But don’t tell us what you did. Just describe the challenge and let’s see if we can work our way through it as a community, as a classroom. And also bring to us your favorite piece of reading, right? It could be something that you’ve read from poetry that’s really moved you. It could be some sort of piece of scientific reading about how the brain works that really moved you, but bring to us your favorite piece of reading. And at some point I said, well, are there lessons here that we can distill?

ALISON BEARD: And how do you see this age of outrage affecting the business world? Why is it so important for organizational leaders, team managers to think carefully about how they’re going to deal with it?

KARTHIK RAMANNA: So for a number of reasons. One, managing in the age of outrage is not managing outrage, right? Managing outrage is just crisis management, and you can hire an external firm to do that. A communications firm, you can have your PR department, it’s important, but it’s firefighting. And then you go back to business as usual. The age of outrage is something that’s deeper and more structural. And managing the age of outrage basically says if you’re going to approach this as firefighting, you’re constantly going to be in firefighting mode. And that’s not healthy because then when do you actually take time to renew yourself?

When do you take time as an organization to do deep strategic thinking? When do you take time as an organization to do innovation? When do you actually grow? So if you’re in constant firefighting mode, you’ll very quickly wither and die as an organization.

And that’s why, for instance, we say resilience plays a huge role in the age of outrage. Because not only are you trying to figure out when to respond and how to respond and whom to listen to as you make these decisions, you have to figure out how to do this in a way that both you as an individual and the organization as a whole are really able to come out from each experience stronger for it, or at least not weaker for it.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Do you have some specific examples of scenarios in which polarization or outrage has derailed a team or organization because the leaders weren’t equipped to deal with it?

KARTHIK RAMANNA: In the book, we talk about two case studies. One involving Nestle. Early on in the history of Nestle’s engagement on this particular crisis with its instant ramen noodle product in India called Maggi noodles. Nestle was wrongly accused of having lead content in its noodles. And it took sort of a rather belligerent approach to that accusation trying to belittle the regulator and trying to take a confrontational approach with social media on it. And that backfired. The constituents that they were trying to reach, their customers, they weren’t in a mood for that kind of some sense, a haughty or disdainfulness on part of a large multinational corporation. And Nestle had in fact advertised this as a health food. And then what happens is the regulator doubles down and they say, well, actually, you Nestle have this claim of no MSG added to your ramen noodles, and it turns out that there’s MSG in the noodles.

Now, while the regulator was wrong about the lead, it turns out they were right about the MSG. So now they’ve gotten – Nestle had gotten themselves into even bigger trouble because now the regulator had them on something that they had genuinely perhaps misstepped on. So that now really sort of affected the trust they had with their customers. And the social media really took over, you know how it is with these sort of things that they becomes their own narrative. And there were posts on social media like Nestle has broken our Indian hearts and things like that. And it tends to get dramatized.

And the company then had to really sort of change the leadership in charge of the situation. In order to get a fresh perspective, they flew in the senior vice president for the entire Asia Pacific region to take a hold of the crisis. Over time, the leadership had to be turned over. It really required a complete renovation of their approach to engaging with stakeholders because they had let this get out of hand.

ALISON BEARD: So that’s an example of an external outrage. Do you have one where the outrage is internal, either it’s employees angry at the company or at one another?

KARTHIK RAMANNA: Yeah, that happens a lot these days. I mean, the world is a complicated place, right? And there’s a lot going on right now in the world that is caused for deep personal anguish, and there’s a lot of injustice that people see in the world. And they feel like people with the perceived capability to address that injustice should be standing up for it. So you have instances of, say, employees at leading tech companies saying, well, look, we are these powerful tech companies that have these sort of omniscient platforms. Why aren’t we doing more about this?

And why aren’t we perhaps more actively using our platform power to weigh in on what we feel is the right thing? It is for the management of these tech companies now to carefully navigate this. And on the one hand, they might be right to say, look, we are a tech company. We are in the business of say, social media connections or selling ads; this is outside of our core competence. But at the same time, these are knowledge businesses and their employees are so central to their existence. They have very few real assets outside of their employees. So losing the trust of their employees in this moment is something they can’t afford.

ALISON BEARD: Okay. So we’ve described a pretty dire situation, but let’s talk about solutions. What can leaders do first to turn down the temperature? You described that as the first step.

KARTHIK RAMANNA: So turning down the temperature is probably the first step when you’re in the crisis, but I’d like to actually even start before that. The first and most important thing is not to be surprised by the fact that you’re going to have these crises.

Start preparing for it today when you don’t have an immediate problem on your desk. It’s thinking, I’m going to have a crisis at some point and it’s going to blow up in my face because of something probably I didn’t do, but my employees are going to that I’m not being just in the moment or my customers are going to think that of me or my investors or someone else. Part of what managing the age of outrage entails is actually searching around through your stakeholders, particularly people who might be prospective antagonists in a moment of crisis. And building the trust with them when times are still okay so that when it is you face that crisis, you can call on them to advise you. You can call on them to tell you the things that you might not otherwise hear because you’re in this echo chamber.

Then step one is, as you say, turning down the temperature. Because when you are in that crisis… The way the science of aggression in our brains works, we are really provoked by things like ambient conditions. If you are in a hot crowded room or you are in a context where everybody is standing up and being jostled around and being fed tons of caffeine and so forth, then they’re just more prone to sort of be triggered and to get angry about a situation, et cetera.

ALISON BEARD: My husband jokes that I always fight when I’m hungry.

KARTHIK RAMANNA: Yeah, me too. And oftentimes there’s some simple solutions here. So when I was running the program for the public leaders that I mentioned, there’s a cake shop down the street from my office. And if somebody had… They were in my office upset about something, I’d say, well, first we’ve got to go eat some cake. And so I became famous at the cake shop because I would bring in people and say, well, pick your favorite cake and we’re going to sit down and we’re going to eat cake, and then we’ll figure out what we need to do.

ALISON BEARD: I love that as a management strategy. I think that’s fabulous.

KARTHIK RAMANNA: I like cake too. It’s a win-win. So it’s about sort of getting those ambient conditions right. And then it’s giving people the space to not let their initial instinctive reaction kick in. Oftentimes, you give people a hearing on the first day and then you say, okay, I need to sleep on this, and I’d like you to come back tomorrow. And actually then you give them a second chance to play the thing again, and you’ll see that they might play it very differently.

Because they’ve had a chance to A, play it out in the heat of the emotion and B, sleep on it. And then they come back with maybe a more structured sense of what it is you can address about the problem. And probably the most important thing in turning down the temperature is recognizing that even when we think we are seeing things rationally, what we call a rational analysis of the situation is really the product of our lived experiences.

So we all have different scripts that shape the way we look at the world. And so when someone sits down with you, it’s recognizing, well, what are their scripts and how are their scripts different from yours? And if this is something that comes down to a difference in the scripts and lived experiences that have been baked in over say 30 years, then it’s foolhardy, if not impossible to imagine you’re going to change it in one sitting. So let that not be the objective, right? The objective at that point is to hear it out and then to be able to take it back again to that group of trusted advisors that you convened in step zero and say, okay, here’s what I’m hearing now. Tell me what I can do about this.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah, that was the question that I had about analyzing the sources of outrage. Why is it important to still do that if many of the things might be totally out of your control?

KARTHIK RAMANNA: One, it’s important to know what is and what isn’t in your control. And if you are not seen to act on the things that are in your control, then you could get yourself into even more trouble. The second reason why you take the trouble to do that is in the process of that analysis, you might learn about who are catalytic forces or individuals in a possible de-escalation. In the book, we tell the story of the Commissioner of London Metropolitan Police. She’s dealing with a crisis in the early part of COVID during Black Lives Matter, where a report comes out that says that young black Londoners might be stopped by police as many as 10, if not 16 times more often than white Londoners.

This is obviously a real serious problem. And she’s trying to understand how in the context of the lockdowns where everybody was at home, this data suggests that there’s this extreme discrepancy and the number of stop and searches of young black men have actually gone up during lockdown. That’s counterintuitive. So she’s trying to figure this out.

But she’s also trying to figure out, well, if I’m going to have to manage the situation, who’s really important? And part of what that analysis will yield is, well, the head of the Met Black Police Officers Association is really important. Because if I, as the commissioner of the Met lose the trust of the head of the Met Black Police Officers Association, I’m finished. I obviously need the support of the black community. I need the support of my rank-and-file police officers, but it’s this particular constituency that’s at the intersection of those communities that is catalytic to anything I’m going to do. And so it’s that analysis that allows you to say in this moment, who are the really catalytic individuals or forces that need to be at the table? That need to be actively listened to, and that in some sense need to be perhaps more prominent decision rights in figuring out what’s next.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And then you talk about crafting a response. I think the language is shape and bounding. What do you mean by that?

KARTHIK RAMANNA: We sort of say that, look, there’s two forces here. The first is the force of recognizing when you might have asymmetric capabilities, disproportionate capabilities as an organization to help to alleviate the harm that people are experiencing and seeing in the world.

We offer managers a series of questions that help them identify their capability asymmetries. But the challenge with that is that it sort of leads you perhaps in the direction of overreacting almost to a situation and feeling like, I’ve got to do something here.

So there’s another countervailing force you need to balance here, which is the force around managing shifting expectations. And that actually pushes in the opposite direction and perhaps pushes you in the direction of underreacting. Because you say, when I make a commitment, I need to not only authentically deliver on that commitment, I need to anticipate how this is going to change. How the expectation of my delivery is going to change as the world evolves.

Because if I act today and then the crisis grows and I fail to act tomorrow, I’m going to be in even worse trouble than I am in today. It’s these two sort of countervailing forces of acting on your capability asymmetries and acting in some sense to recognize how expectations are shifting around you, and therefore you should be bounding your response. We give managers a series of all told seven questions that allow them to navigate these trade-offs.

That then helps you say, okay, where in this particular moment do I need to land? What are the boundaries of my commitments? I have to make a commitment, but what are the boundaries of my commitment? How are those boundaries communicated to the people that I’m impacting today? How have I anticipated how their expectations might shift? And how have I incorporated that into my plan for delivery? That’s all part of what you’re doing in that stage.

ALISON BEARD: What if you as a leader have a really strong view on the issue yourself? Is your job to be completely impartial and ignore your own personal views?

KARTHIK RAMANNA: So that’s a question that comes up a lot, right? And oftentimes people feel like, oh, my God, I am being expected to somehow put my own values aside and listen to people that I have these sort of very strong disagreements with. I think there are two things that leaders need to hold in mind. The first is that your responsibilities as a leader are different than perhaps your responsibilities as an individual citizen. And there’s this great line from Socrates where he says, “The privilege of leadership is that it is better to suffer an injustice than to perpetuate it.”

That part of what being a leader is, is being able to… This is a moment where I have to recognize that I’m acting in a separate capacity from what I would if I were not in this position of power.

But there’s this other element to it: leadership is leaving a situation better than you found it, right? That doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning your values, but it’s saying, well, how do I recognize what might be the way in which I can manage this particular situation so that tomorrow we can have a more robust conversation about those values? Because if I try to force my values on this particular scenario in this moment of divisiveness, I probably won’t get much done in terms of healing the community. I won’t leave it better than I found it.

ALISON BEARD: So talk a little bit about how power, whether a leader has it or doesn’t, affects their ability to change the situation, to bring the temperature down to find solutions.

KARTHIK RAMANNA: So in the book, we talk about the various sources of power that managers enjoy, with a view to particularly home in on one type of power, which is this sort of reciprocal relational power that you want to use in a situation like this.

Because trying to affect the outcome that you want by, in some sense, commanding people to do it, that actually diminishes your power for the next time you need to use it. But if on the other hand, you can create the institutions or you can create the community where people through a deliberative process are able to give you the answer that you think is the right answer for the community. That they think is the right answer for the community, because you’ve created the right relationships within the community. So now it is in some sense turning over your power to your community in the spirit of trust and having them tell you what they think is the right answer.

Now, of course, you can’t be leading the witness on that because if you’re leading the witness on that, people will feel managed and you’re not going to get what you want. They need to genuinely feel that you’re going to give them the bandwidth to make the mistakes that they might make. But at the same time, they need to feel empowered by the shared sense of values that you think will allow them to get to that right decision. You step back as the leader. You become sort of the active listener, and you let the community with the right set of shared values discover what might be the right answer to navigate this organization forward.

ALISON BEARD: And you talked at the beginning about the importance of preparing for these events to come up over and over again, so that requires resilience, and how do we build the personal fortitude first that we need to be able to manage in that temperate way you just described?

KARTHIK RAMANNA: It’s interesting that when I profiled all of the leaders that I mentioned in the class, people who were CEOs, COOs of businesses, government agencies, et cetera. I started asking them what sort of philosophical reading had really helped them navigate this particular moment at this particular age? One sort of particular philosophy kept coming up, which is stoicism. People think of stoics as sort of emotionless and lacking empathy in a situation. But that’s not really what stoicism is, and it’s not what these leaders mean by stoicism.

I think what they mean is a sense of recognizing that there are things that you can control and there are things you can’t control. And being at peace with the things that you cannot control and making a deliberate effort to affect the things that you can control. It also means having a sense of almost conversational sophistication, a dialectical sophistication where you don’t overuse your words, where you don’t sort of overplay your emotions, but you’re an enabler. You’re allowing people to, in some sense, discover for themselves what is the right response in the situation. And letting the process then play out as it must.

ALISON BEARD: And that’s obviously good role modeling to not be outraged yourself, but how do you transfer a broader resilience to the team or organization? What do you do on an ongoing basis to make sure that everyone can make it through the next big news event without some big divide?

KARTHIK RAMANNA: So the really great organizations we’ve studied in this have done two things. One, that they have allowed organizations to, they’ve delegated in some sense, deep within the organizations, the capacity to make the decisions at the location of the organization where it’s most impacted. So you have to push the decision down to the place where the impact is felt most greatly. Now, that of course requires a deep trust in the people that work for you and you say, I’m going to give them this power to do this thing, and I’m going to trust that they’re going to do not just what’s right for them, but that’s what’s right for our collective purpose.

ALISON BEARD: So is there a lot of training that they do for these managers? Okay.

KARTHIK RAMANNA: Yes. Exactly. And because you can’t delegate without, in some sense, preparing people to make the right choices, right? You need two things to delegate. One, you need to prepare people to be excellent at what they do. You need to align them on values. You need to give them the skills and competencies they need to really perform at the level at which you’d expect them. And two, you need to give them the freedom to fail, right? And they need to trust that you will have their back if they do fail, notwithstanding the fact that you’ve given them a great training and so forth. And it’s those two things that the organization is holding in balance as they’re delegating this down. And by delegating it down repeatedly, training people really well, aligning people really well, and giving them the freedom to fail, the organization over time, builds the right kind of values to manage in the age of outrage. The organization itself is telling you, okay, look, on this particular flare up point of the world, we shouldn’t necessarily have a view because we figured out that actually there’s no upside to doing that. Now, you as the CEO are being told by your organization what that answer is rather than the other way around. That’s resilience.

ALISON BEARD: What do you say to managers who might push back and say, well, I would just prefer to say don’t bring your political issues into the workplace. Let’s just not talk about it here.

KARTHIK RAMANNA: Yeah. I think in this day and age, if you can as a manager afford to say that, more power to you and go ahead and do it. Because you might be in a particular position of strength to be able to do that.

But again, if you are working in a sort of competitive labor market economy, if you’re working in an environment where you’re working hard to acquire and retain any customer, you need your employees fully committed, fully bought in. That they are there because this is a shared venture. Otherwise, they’ll find the next thing, right? And so if you’re in that situation, which quite frankly most businesses are in this environment, then you can’t afford really to be so command and control about this. And again, because if you are command and control about it, you’ll very quickly lose the ability to use that the next crisis and the next crisis because it’s an ongoing crisis.

ALISON BEARD: Is there anything else that you’d recommend to all of us, not just leaders, to get better at dealing with the next event that might spark our outrage?

KARTHIK RAMANNA: So two things have really worked for me and with people I work for at every level of the organization. The first is no matter what, recognize that you’re not going to solve the whole problem in front of you. That sense of perspective, that sense of temperance will actually allow you to be thoughtful about the parts that you can address. It will you to be deliberate about delivering success on that well-defined nature of the problem that you did bite off. Just recognize I’m not going to solve the whole problem. That’s step one.

Step two is to recognize that if you are in a capacity to actually address part of the problem, you’re also going to be seen by some people as part of the problem. Because the power that you have to make a change is itself what is dividing people in this moment. And that’s important because you cannot be liked by all of the people all of the time. And if that’s something that is how you go about managing, then you’ll find yourself again, very quickly depleted. So recognize that, look, there’s just going to be some people because of the nature of the decisions I’m making, because I’m taking say a more temperate route to this, I’m taking a route which is about building rather than polarizing coalitions in this moment, there are going to be some people who will be upset by me. You just have to come to terms with that.

ALISON BEARD: Well, thank you so much for being with me today. Fingers crossed that we can bring down the level of outrage.

KARTHIK RAMANNA: Yes, make a small difference.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Karthik Ramanna, professor at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. An author of the book The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World. We’re nearing in on our thousandth episode, which means we have many more shows to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search HBR on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager Ian Fox and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.