Welcome to Leadership from the Balcony.
My name is Shawn Griesemer with my co-host Justin Dorroh. And each week we bring you a new leadership concept to inspire your growth and effectiveness as a leader in every area of your life.
On today's episode, things are going to be a little different. Leadership from the Balcony was started to raise awareness of leadership concepts in an effort to help leaders continue to grow and develop on their leadership journey. Every other week, we'll be highlighting a resource, a book, an article, a tool or another podcast that has impacted us and we feel will be beneficial to you. These episodes will be shorter and aren't seeking to inform you on all the findings in the resource, but to raise your awareness and pique your interest in what's out there.
As always, thanks for joining us on the balcony. We trust you will enjoy this format and today's episode as we review Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey and peer over the railing to gain an expanded leadership perspective.
Today, we're excited to share an overview of a book that has been deeply impacting for us as a team. It's called Immunity to Change, written by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, and we're excited to introduce it to you, our valuable listeners. If the insights we discuss today pique your interest, you can find a link to the book in the show notes so you can take a deeper dive into its invaluable content. Kegan and Lahey are probably two of the most influential people in our world, at least for the last five years, but they've been influencing people for the last 50 years at Harvard University, both as professors and researchers. And in writing this book, their intent is to help us as leaders to understand what's going on inside our heads. People are resistant to change, not because they don't like change, but because they fear the pain of loss. And it's not the loss of actually going through the change, it's what they are going to lose in making that change.
Yes, what loss does the change bring? They essentially created a methodology that has science behind it for finding your resistance to changing and how to actually change when you're ready and committed to do so. It's truly quite fascinating. They go through this process utilizing two different applications. There's personal transformation. Immunity to Change explores how individuals can uncover and overcome their hidden barriers to personal growth and development. It provides a framework for understanding why we often resist change and offers practical strategies for personal transformation. But they also utilize a lot of the same methodologies for organizational change. The book extends its insights to this realm of organizations and teams and highlights how institutional cultures can also be resistant to change. And Kegan and Lahey provide valuable tools for leaders and teams to identify and to address a collective immunity to change, not just on the personal front, but an organization's collective immunity to that change, fostering more adaptive and resilient organizations. And here again, we're back to adaptive leadership like we've talked about before. Kegan and Lahey's work emphasizes the importance of adaptive leadership in addressing personal and organizational challenges. And by understanding and working through immunity to change, individuals and leaders can cultivate greater self-awareness, greater empathy, and effectiveness in navigating complex change processes.
The book concludes with an extensive hand-holding user's guide to work you through your own immunity to change. And as you work through it, you're going to surface and work through those hidden belief systems, both at a personal level as well as an enterprise level. And one of the fundamental practices that Kegan and Lahey advocate for is running experiments. And if you've listened to our podcast for any length of time, you have heard us use this terminology. We love this language of running experiments. It also comes from Ronald Heifetz and his use of that term in his book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. We advocate running experiments. It's where all the learning happens.
The reason that we so highly recommend Immunity to Change is for its insightful exploration of why change initiatives frequently fail, both for individuals and for organizations. The book offers invaluable practical tools for identifying and addressing the concealed belief system that undermines those efforts to drive meaningful change. Their methodology is truly so simple to apply. It's almost hard to believe that it's as effective as it is. However, gaining awareness is truly the easiest part. Actively experimenting and affecting change is what separates people who make an impact and those who are just happy to coast.
We appreciate you tuning in and hope you enjoyed the show. Before you take off, do us a quick favor. Please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. If you try our Leadership Challenge, send us an email and let us know how it goes. To stay informed, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes. We look forward to seeing you again on the balcony.
