ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius.
ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right. I want to talk about leadership.
ALISON BEARD: Okay, let’s talk about leadership.
ADI IGNATIUS: I think there’s a special kind of leadership that’s required today. We are in a period of intense disruption, right? Geopolitical upheaval, technological change, shifts in cultural norms. And I’m not sure anyone has defined the new skill set that is required for leaders to succeed in this kind of environment.
ALISON BEARD: I think that’s right. We see all different models of leaders in business and politics today. We publish advice on specific attributes you need like the ability to lead with courage, to be a hands-on leader. But I don’t think that anyone has outlined what the whole package should be, particularly if you want to lead with … But I don’t think anyone has outlined what the whole package should be.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. Look, it’s hard out there and I think things are changing. So our guest today is trying to define all of that, right? He’s a powerful voice for consistent values-driven leadership, for learning to live with being uncomfortable as we sort through the complexity. So this is Darren Walker, who’s just finishing up a 12-year stint as President of the Ford Foundation, dedicated to advancing human welfare.
His background is inspiring. He was born in a charity hospital in Texas to a single mother with few resources. He made his way through the public school system, and he has devoted much of his life to philanthropy and public service. And he’s appealing to leaders to guide our institutions in a spirit of service to something more than themselves, to learn not just to manage, but to inspire, and that we need our leaders to help us understand this disruptive journey that we’re all on so that we can move forward. So here’s my conversation with Darren Walker.
All right, so Darren, thank you very much for being our guest on the IdeaCast.
DARREN WALKER: Thank you for the invitation. Delighted to be here, Adi.
ADI IGNATIUS: There are many things I’d like to talk about, but one is leadership. This is a moment where I feel like our leadership is often failing us. And I’d love your perspective on what is the imperative for leaders today? What does good leadership look like? What does good leadership require?
DARREN WALKER: Well, there’s no doubt that it has never been harder to be a leader than today. Part of the challenge is we are experiencing transformation. And in so many spheres of American society, we are looking to our leaders to help us make sense of what we are experiencing. And it is very hard for some leaders to do that.
Leaders today of my generation, I’m 66 years old, weren’t necessarily trained to be therapists for your employees to be expected to have a public position on just about anything of importance to stakeholders. And so this is not to excuse leaders or to allow them to not fulfill their responsibilities. I think today leaders need empathy, to have an ability to relate to people, to be relatable because for many reasons, Americans, and particularly younger Americans, are not trusting of leaders. We have got to be able to mobilize, inspire, help, give people solutions, not all the answers, but solutions and understanding of the context we’re in.
Whether you’re a public company and you’re talking about changes in trends, in consumer behavior and you’re a consumer packaged goods company, or you’re selling automobiles or real estate or you’re trying to run a school effectively, the demands on leaders has never been more greater, and the times we live in have never been more complex.
ADI IGNATIUS: So I feel like it’s a moving picture. And a couple of years ago I would’ve said good leadership absolutely requires empathy of course, but that leaders are actually required to take all of their stakeholders into account, are required to speak up on social issues that matter. Their employees demand it, their customers demand it. Now there’s been such a backlash to that. Where are we? I mean is there an ideal spot between where we were and where the backlash wants us to be in terms of thinking about stakeholders broadly, employee interests, customer interest? Have your views changed on that in the past couple of years?
DARREN WALKER: There’s no doubt that the past five years have felt like a whipsaw. I mean we have gone from talking about, in many spheres of business, being comfortable talking about Black Lives Matter, to now being afraid to talk about race. That’s a pretty remarkable arc in just five years in our country.
And I think that it is fair to say that some of the activities we saw in the wake of the murder of George Floyd generated responses that were not fully rational in my view. And in some ways, for some, became ideological. And I think now we are in the same situation where the response is not fully rational and is very ideological. And so for those of us who see the world not in black and white but in gray, and the gray space is actually where problems get solved and where people can come together, I think we have to speak to that part of the playing field where we can come together. We’re not going to come together in the extremes, which is I think what has happened over the last five years.
ADI IGNATIUS: So then what would be your advice to leaders who absolutely are committed to creating a more equitable culture, but who are afraid of the backlash or the culture war blowback, or maybe just agree with what you said, that there was excess on the other side beforehand?
DARREN WALKER: Well, I think we have to first ask the question, are leaders really committed. I mean, I think it’s one to talk about fairness because I think that is universal. I think it can be fraught in the way it’s implemented. But I think fairness is the right frame from which leaders should speak. And I think we have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And I think leaders have to be able to be authentic. And that is one of the challenges, Adi, because there are some leaders who authentically don’t believe or authentically aren’t able to communicate, articulate, in a way that is persuasive and that comes across as believable.
ADI IGNATIUS: Well, so you’re getting at the question as to whether these are true values that a leader has that an organization embodies or whether it’s performative, or at least that’s what I’m reading into that. So is that correct or is that just really, does that come down to who you are inside?
DARREN WALKER: I mean, I’ve been in rooms with CEOs reading off of a talking point that their communications office has generated for them. So there was a lot of inauthentic, performative acts by leaders during that period. Now I think it is also true that leaders are in some ways remaining silent when their true values are not what’s coming out. What’s coming out for many is silence. And that too is inauthentic. I regret that we live in a time when leaders can’t be who we need them to be, when leaders can’t talk about service.
When was the last time, Adi, you heard a leader say service – service to community, service to country – must be our imperative? We live in a time when it seems that it has been normalized to say service to myself must be my priority, and that’s deeply regrettable.
As an American person who came up in a country, although I was poor and had certainly a lot of disadvantage, I lived in an America that believed that little poor kids like me should be able to dream. And I had leaders saying to me, “You should dream. America is cheering you on and there is a mobility escalator for you to get on if you’re willing to work hard and sacrifice.”
And leaders today, I don’t hear that message. I don’t hear any of our leaders giving us hope and speaking to us in a way that reminds us that we are a community and that we must be on the same team. It doesn’t mean we’re going to agree, but we’ve got to have a sense of some shared values.
ADI IGNATIUS: My father just passed away a few days ago. He was 104. And he was a representative of the values you’re talking about. I mean old school in the best possible way, believed absolutely in public service, in private-public partnership, in understanding the difference between right and wrong and not exploiting the gray areas for profit but steering clear of them. I feel like that approach, you’d almost be viewed as a sucker today if you weren’t sort of trying to exploit the gray areas, so.
DARREN WALKER: Well, I’m sorry to hear about your father, but how fortunate and blessed. 104, that’s amazing. There is, in my view, a real need not for nostalgia, but for truisms of how we need to live and be in this place called America if we are to make it a success. And part of that challenge today is our leaders are part of a culture and a part of a system that has so prioritized capital as the currency of everything. Of course we’re being nostalgic here, I just said we shouldn’t be, but I will say, but when I was growing up, there was something about service to community and service to our country that our leaders talked to us about.
I was inspired by Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. I was inspired by Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Those were the words that inspired me. I worry that today too many of our leaders look to Ayn Rand as the north star.
And that’s for me at least deeply troubling. And so yes, leaders today, and we are generalizing here, but I’m particularly talking about leaders of influence because yes, there are many leaders, but particular industries have outsized influence. And when we begin to actually talk about the quality of empathy as undesirable in our society, I worry that America has lost its way and that our business leaders have lost their barometer for morality.
ADI IGNATIUS: One of the things that’s kept me going at Harvard Business Review is I am probably an idealist myself. And governments break your heart and NGOs can only do so much with all due respect. So at times I thought, “Well, maybe the way positive change happens is within companies, companies that are directed by leaders who have a certain level of enlightenment or thinking broadly about stakeholders or thinking broadly about the planet.”
And I guess I still believe in that. But again, the last year or so, I mean you mentioned it, the silencing of, let’s say, the CEO class in America is striking, is alarming, and it’s so different from what we thought a couple years ago where we thought, “No, no, no. CEOs have a voice, need to have a voice. We need to hear from them. It’s part of the conversation, it’s part of the social experiment.” And almost overnight, it’s like, “No, these guys feel intimidated and that voice is erased.” I mean, is it better quietly behind the scenes in corporate America, in the corporate world than the picture I’m painting?
DARREN WALKER: Well, first, I agree with you. As a capitalist, I’m a firm believer in the idea that enterprises can provide many solutions to society’s challenges. And I often say on the corporate boards I’ve been on or in other settings with CEOs, think of yourselves as problem solvers also. I do think that leaders find it harder now because the consequences, regardless of your position, can be fatal. And I don’t believe that leaders of companies need to have a position on every social issue. I think that is a mistake.
I think however, leaders do need to have a set of values, principles, a framework from which they lead, that would make it clear or at least rational to a stakeholder why or why not they’re taking a decision. And I think that’s what’s hard for leaders when they fear that simply taking a position means that they might imperil their career.
And let’s be really clear here, this is not about right or left. This is about a culture of intolerance where we are unwilling, regardless of left or right. I’m not making a judgment here. I am observing that we have become, as a society, intolerant of positions and people we disagree with. And that is antithetical to our very founding as an institution, as a country. We need leaders today who can speak to those values, that framework, and it’s harder to do that when we are pulled apart by the extremes.
ADI IGNATIUS: So having seen you speak, having read your writings, I view you as a hopeful person sort of by nature. And so assuming that’s right, how does one sustain hope as a leader in moments of polarization, fatigue, discouragement, really everything we’ve talked about? How do we hold on to hope?
DARREN WALKER: Well, first of all, for me, I have no choice but to be hopeful. I was born in a charity hospital to a single mother. I never knew my father. I didn’t grow up with any real advantage. And yet I have prospered in this country not because I went to private schools. My entire education from head start through law school was in public institutions because in a democracy, the strength of public institutions is the indicator of the long-term sustainability of that democracy.
So my own journey from that dirt road in Ames, Texas to the Ford Foundation leaves me no choice but to be optimistic on this country. And secondly, I would say, as a person of African descent, as a Black American, I stand on the shoulders of people who knew in their day they would not find justice or fairness or real opportunity for them. And yet they believed in America.
Fannie Lou Hamer, the great civil right activist, she marched across Mississippi carrying the American flag, and she was beaten, spat upon. And yet she never let go of that flag because she believed in America and she was hopeful. And so when I look at my heroes like Langston Hughes, the great poet of Harlem in the 1930s when he wrote, “Let America Be America again,” and he was so angry in the opening stanza. He said, “Let America be America again. America never was America to me.” And he was his frustration and rage at being dispossessed in his own country. And yet he ends that poem, the final stanza, “But oh yes, one day America will be.” He is speaking to me today.
And so I, on any given day can be depressed, dejected, dispirited, but I am hopeful. And my hope is what leads me to speak out, to take opportunities like this, to hopefully share my perspectives and make my very modest contribution to public discourse.
ADI IGNATIUS: I think you used the term earlier, discomfort. And I think you’ve written that significant change requires discomfort along the way. So what’s your advice to leaders on building the muscle to sit with discomfort, to learn from discomfort, to move forward from the discomfort?
DARREN WALKER: I think naming it is exceedingly helpful. And I think often, leaders aren’t comfortable talking about their discomfort or aren’t comfortable saying, “I may not be familiar with this, but I want to be helpful.” Or, I’m not sure I have the answer, but I do want to say I think it’s hard for leaders today because the stakes are so high and the risk associated with a misstep are high. And so when you say get uncomfortable, I mean when I talk about being uncomfortable, part of that comes from the ability to be comfortable in your own skin and to engage in a lot of different places and to be comfortable and sometimes saying, “I’m not a 100% comfortable, I’m not really sure… But I’ll need your help here.”
And I just think we don’t condition our leaders to be human beings. We don’t extend to them grace. We are not tolerant when they make a mistake. And so we need leaders today to be courageous more than ever. And at the same time, we dis-incent courage on the part of our leaders. So we, the public, need to also acknowledge our culpability in the very problem we’re diagnosing. And when we see people canceling leaders, not making a distinction between a felony act and a mere infraction, I think it is upon us as the citizens, as the consumers, as the employees to speak to that.
ADI IGNATIUS: Let’s shift the topic to philanthropy. We’re approaching Thanksgiving in the U.S as we record this. You’ve been running a $16 billion organization that gives out money to make a difference. I’m interested, how has that mission changed in this climate we’ve been talking about that’s become more difficult, that’s shifted in ways that we all perceive? How has that mission evolving?
DARREN WALKER: Well, I think making the connection between our mission, which is in part to strengthen democracy, and what are the drivers of the disintegration of our democracy. So Henry Ford II said the Ford Foundation’s mission should be in part to make democracy in America and the world stronger. What are the barriers to that?
What we’ve identified as the barriers to that are a lack of economic mobility, growing inequality. Those two things are at the heart of the crisis of hope and purposelessness that we have in our society. What we’re seeing is particularly among working class whites, but for most groups is a widening of a gap, the gap between those who are prosperous, those for whom this economy has worked like me, and most Americans who are feeling increasingly left behind.
And so the Ford Foundation is working on those issues of economic mobility of what is happening in the heartland, which for too long, too many of us and particularly big foundations, have ignored rural America. There are parts of rural America that I have visited that have indicators of well-being that look like some of the developing world where I have visited.
And so those Americans rightly are angry. I don’t blame them for being angry. They have every reason to be angry because they are being left behind and we aren’t doing enough to help them. But part of the reason for that is because they are increasingly marginalized in an economic system which has placed less value on their labor and on their contribution.
And so we need to understand that at the core of our ethic is hope. And inequality is the enemy of hope because a hopeless people will do irrational things that make no sense to people like you and me who have a lot of hope. So sometimes I hear people say, “Well, why did this group vote that way? Or why did this group take this position? Don’t they see it’s against their own interests?” Well no, actually. Maybe they can’t see because they are so angry that they aren’t able to always be rational. And that anger is justified. I just think we need leaders to speak to that anger in a way that helps them be hopeful, not hateful.
ADI IGNATIUS: So beyond the mission of the Ford Foundation where you work, I’m thinking about our listeners now. Does philanthropy, as we practice it generally, does it work? Does money get moved to the right places?
DARREN WALKER: Well, we should acknowledge that there is no more population of people on the planet more generous than Americans. There are a group of philanthropists, mostly women now I’m going to name, but Mackenzie, Scott, Laurene Powell Dobbs, Alice Walton, Melinda French Gates, Barbara Hostetter. I mean there are some extraordinary philanthropists doing remarkable work in a way that actually is respectful of the communities and not patronizing. And I think that we need to follow those models more.
Unfortunately for too many philanthropists, the issue of control, the need to not fund institutions, but to fund my project is the priority. And I believe at the end of the day in the democracy, we don’t need strong projects as much as we need strong institutions with strong leaders and boards. And when we have that, they will know how best to deploy the philanthropic capital they’re given.
ADI IGNATIUS: So getting back to you and your experience as a leader, what’s the hardest leadership lesson that you have had to learn in your career?
DARREN WALKER: I think the hardest lesson I’ve had to learn is people will make assumptions about you. And I think this is true for all leaders. I am a Black gay man. People need to have assumptions about me based on that you are a straight white man, married, whatever. As human beings, our brains are wired with a sorting mechanism. And because we get so much data and stimulation on a regular basis, we need to sort. And I think as leaders, we sometimes get missorted. And I think for a lot of leaders, regardless of our identity, regardless of our background, it is easy to mistake.
And for me, again, candidly, I think there are probably people who are Black who make certain assumptions about how I will be and comport myself. I think there are probably certain gay community who think there’s a particular way I ought to be in the world. I think there are others, conservatives, who might look at me with a particular lens.
And again, this isn’t just political. I simply am saying, as leaders, we are monitored, we are judged. And that is part of what makes this such a high-stake thing today to be a leader. And it’s not like being a leader 20 or 30 or even 10 years ago. I mean the level of what social media has done to paralyze leaders, because you are so mindful that you are being monitored. Even private meetings, you may be videotaped. I mean, these are the realities. So I’m very empathetic and sympathetic to the plight of a lot of leaders. And again, we get into this circular thing where employees and stakeholders are like, “Why can’t you be more courageous? Why can’t you be more…”
And the answer is because you make it harder to be courageous stakeholders. You make it less possible for me to be able to really authentically engage with you. Because if you don’t like what I say, just because you don’t like it or don’t agree with it, you may want to turn it into some major kerfuffle that ultimately then becomes a huge distraction and takes me off of my game.
ADI IGNATIUS: So if people are listening to this and think, “Okay, I’m inspired, I would like to be a better leader or a more courageous leader,” what’s something they can do right now to be on that path?
DARREN WALKER: Talk to your team, talk to your stakeholders and say to them, “I want to be the best leader that I can for you, but I hope that you will extend to me grace and generosity because there will be times when I’m not perfect and you may disagree with me.”
ADI IGNATIUS: Darren Walker, thank you very much for being on the HBR IdeaCast.
DARREN WALKER: Thank you.
ADI IGNATIUS: That’s Darren Walker, the outgoing President of the Ford Foundation. Next week, Alison will speak with Ayelet Israeli about fastvertising, rapidly created advertising that responds to the moment to grab the attention of customers.
If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You’ll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to hbr.org/subscribe.
And thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Dooe, 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 Adi Ignatius.