Embracing Imperfection | Dr. Priya Nalkur | 554

Peter Winick: Many thought leaders begin their training in academia, but it's not the place where most end up practicing their craft. This episode is part of the series on Bridging the Researcher-Practitioner-Public Divide, which is an essential step to getting good ideas to scale and create impact. Today I speak with Dr. Priya Nalkour, the president of the Roundtable Institute and author of the book Stumbling Towards Inclusion. As you'll soon hear, Dr. Nalkour earned an Ed.D. at Harvard, did her postdoctoral work in science communication, and now has found her calling coaching. In this episode, we talk about making complex ideas accessible. We explore how to deal with adaptive challenges and how to co-create emergent knowledge. I'm Bill Sherman, and this is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin.

Welcome to the show, Priya.

Thank you so much, Bill. It's so great to be here.

So I've been on a journey to talk about the bridging between researcher, practitioner, and then popular. And one of the things that I've noticed is a lot of good ideas sort of drop off along the way, that what we know doesn't reach the people who need to know that. And I want to ask you this question: How do you cross that bridge? I know you've got a background in science communication. I know you do and have done research So how do you think about this bridge?

I've been thinking about this question for a long time, and I love that we're starting here because it really is about constructing a bridge. And if you think about constructing a bridge, it takes a lot of planning, a lot of strategy, and a lot of effort. You got to think outside the box to build that bridge. I remember being a doctoral student at Harvard. We were talking about how do we bridge practice and theory. So the first thing that comes to mind to me is language. The language of academia and peer-reviewed articles is not always accessible to popular layperson, you know, audiences. It's very heavy on big words, references, citations, and you need to sort of learn that language to be able to publish your work in peer-reviewed journals. Turns out—

it's very much like a secret handshake and almost, you know, prove that you've done your dues and joined the club.

Totally. And actually, that's a learning curve in and of itself. You start learning that when you're a doctoral student, and nobody really teaches you, except you have to consume a lot of other peer-reviewed articles for you to understand what your voice sounds like in that same language. So for me, I really had to leave academia and start to learn a new language to understand that these are two different languages we're speaking. Is there a middle ground? Is there a way to translate? Yes, it's through using different communication strategies, using different language, using different words. How do you learn that? By reading a range of different writing—fiction, non-fiction, popular press, academic press, published, non-published works—so that you can understand and find your own voice in all of that. Range. And once you find your own voice— and mine, I think, tends to be a bridge or a combination of academic writing and popular writing. I've even taken courses in memoir writing so that I can learn how to find my voice and use it in a way that is accessible to as many people as possible, which is my personal purpose. That may not be everybody's.

So you emphasized in your response something that I want to dwell on for a moment. The importance of finding your voice, not only finding the idea that you want to communicate and advocate for, but also your voice. You talked about that journey, and I think that acceptance that your voice isn't the voices that you've heard from someone else, and you have to embody that your voice is going to be different and accept that. And then learn to feel comfortable in that voice.

Does that resonate with you? Yes. So much of voice has to do with feeling, as you say, comfortable or congruent or authentic. Now, I can go take singing lessons to learn about the tonality of my voice. That's one aspect of voice. But the other aspect of voice is my ideas, what I stand for, the content. My background, my stories. How do I combine all of those with what I would learn in singing lessons to make it congruent, comfortable, and authentic? It means I'm gonna have to be brave because being different sometimes requires a level of courage so that sometimes when we're different, we don't think that we will be accepted or liked by everybody who is different from us. So it takes some courage to exercise voice. Courage means experimenting with it, finding places where you can use your voice in places where it feels low stakes, where you have good relationships with people who are going to love you no matter what. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Getting some validation there and getting some receptivity and feedback. And then stretching out in places where you may be different, you may be unique, you may be special, um, and using your voice there and experimenting, getting feedback and grappling with people's receptivity and your own, more importantly, your own awareness and how that felt for you to use your voice in different situations.

And with that, you talk about speaking to audiences where you may be coming in different because of the ideas or experience or background, etc. I often think that it's okay for you to stretch yourself and then go, hmm, maybe that wasn't the right audience for me. Because it's a journey in experimentation, right? And so finding your audience on that becomes almost as much a challenge as finding your voice.

Yes, I love where you're going with that because— well, so my book is all about that. It's called Stumbling Towards Inclusion: Finding Grace in Imperfect Leadership. So it means we're going to make mistakes. And we're going to be stumbling along the way. But when we stumble, we don't stop and stay on the ground. We get up, we look back. Why did I fall? What happened there? What were the conditions that made me fall? What are the underlying beliefs that caused that stumble? And can I learn from it and move forward? And I've learned, to your point, that yeah, there are some audiences who are going to love every word. And there's some audience who are going to be resistant and challenging to every word. And I've learned that I learn more from the audiences that are resistant because in that resistance is deeper shared wisdom for both of us if we're both willing to go to that layer.

So I think the piece that you're alluding to is almost constructive resistance where they're willing to engage in debate and share their perspective, their experience, their mindset rather than closed-mindedness, right?

I think so. And I believe that people are more willing to share if the other side is willing to listen. And if we agree that our relationship with each other matters, then we can have that conversation. We can have that constructive dialogue.

And I think some of that comes from modeling a little bit of vulnerability as well. And I would argue that in title of your book, things like stumbling, grace, signal of vulnerability, and an acceptance of imperfection, which a lot of— if you look at business and leadership books on the shelf are telling you how to be more effective, more perfect, rather than, look, you're probably going to screw this up along the way. Here's how you move forward, right?

Yeah, I think that's— I'm happy to be part of a wave of researchers and thought leaders who are really trying to evangelize this message of to be human is to be infallible, is to be imperfect. And it's an invitation, really, that to stumble is to be human. We're not perfect. And actually, the reason that has utility is not just for my own self, but when I make a mistake, it makes it okay for you to make a mistake too. We're like, oh, if she can do it, I can do it too. It makes it okay. It makes it okay for all of us to not have to be perfect.

So let's spend a few minutes in terms of going deeper beneath the title, right? So where is this work going? I know as we're recording now, you have the book that is out on pre-order, but give our listeners a little bit of a sense of what is the framework and what are the key thoughts in that book? Okay.

So I love that you framed it as go beneath the, the title, because I talk a lot about going under the waterline in this book. What I mean by that is we all know the metaphor of the iceberg. We can only see 20% above the waterline, but 80% of that richness and depth of our connection lives under the waterline. So the book is really how can we lower the waterline and get at those rich and deep real human experiences. It means we're going to have to disarm ourselves, and by disarming ourselves, inviting others implicitly to disarm themselves so we can have a different type of conversation. Disarming means starting with stumbling. I'm going to make a mistake, but that still was what makes me human, and it's what makes you human too. We can be human together in our mistakes. Can we repair from our mistakes, give each other grace? That it's not just okay to make a mistake, but once you make a mistake, you've got to repair. Repair takes vulnerability. It takes courage to say, oops, I messed up. Here's what I'm going to do differently next time. What do you need from me? Here's what I learned from our interaction. So all of it, you're right, takes an incredible amount of vulnerability. Which means I can only be vulnerable if you are willing to give me grace and I'm willing to give myself some grace. So all of it is wrapped up in the title. You know, I think every word of that title matters.

I think about what you explained, and I also think about it from a continuum of some of the research work that has crossed over successfully into popular business literature. So without things like emotional intelligence, without things like situational leadership, it would be hard to have a conversation around grace and stumbling because you need to have that ability to look inward first and foremost and almost see with a clear eye, what state am I in?

Absolutely. And so this builds on all of that fantastic foundational work. That has enabled this message to come alive, right? You're right. Without emotional intelligence, we wouldn't have the language to talk about self-awareness and to look at ourselves and to take perspective. Without the work on empathy and perspective-taking, we wouldn't be able to get to this place where we can give grace and have grace for ourselves.

So I want to ask you this question. Why is this work a passion for you?

So I've been thinking about this a lot. I can't get away from it. It feels like a responsibility to me. The reason being that growing up, I experienced a lot of discrimination. I grew up a child of Indian immigrant parents in Canada. It wasn't very diverse back in the early '80s. I was the only brown kid in my class. I accepted very matter-of-factly that my race would define me for better or for worse, and it turned out to be for worse in my early years. It was only later in life that I resisted that notion, that I, I didn't want racism to win. And I see it as I grew up and started to coach and coach leaders in corporate spaces. Started to see how in some cases racism was winning. And as a leadership consultant and coach, that felt very uncomfortable to me from a personal perspective, because I had seen how I had let racism win or sexism win growing up. And I thought, you know, in my early 30s, I was like, I can't do that anymore. I can't let that, I can't let that be my life. Where these systems win. So what can I do? Can I use coaching as a way to bring justice to leadership and to workplaces? And like I said, Bill, it started out as an experiment. Can we bring this conversation of identity into the coaching space? It wasn't something— we could talk about identity, but can we talk about social identity, like race? And gender. And it was a risk. It turns out that some clients didn't want to talk about it, but others were like, yeah, we need to be talking about that. And not just in this coaching relationship, but at work with the people I work with. And so it's a passion of mine because my personal story is interwoven with the work I do. It's about me finding justice in my own narrative. And in the narratives of people around me who have experienced injustice in their lives.

So there's a lot there to unpack, and I want to acknowledge that one of the things that I hear and is an unspoken sort of difficulty often is how do you navigate a homogeneous space? How do you thrive when you are different, right? That's a deep and profound question in many ways. And so where I'd like to ask the question is, how do you take what could be a very academic answer in terms of, you know, bringing your social identity into a work environment, inclusivity and welcome How do you bring it down to a practical practitioner language, let alone an everyday language?

Mm. One of the things I'm thinking about is that we don't have to stay in one homogeneous space. Luckily, we have intersecting environments and spaces and climates in our worlds. And where we can make choices to be in places where we feel seen and where we feel as though we belong and are valued, we can maximize those conditions and, you know, kind of the mindsets and skills that come out when we're in those really safe places. So my invitation to people is to find those spaces and to remember that you have a choice around how you use your voice, how you engage with other people, how you talk to people. You have a choice about how you reflect on yourself and what you're learning about day to day in the process. Now, it's easy to say we have choice because choice comes with, you know, privilege, and not everybody has as much choice as everybody else. So it's easy for me to talk about choice from a theoretical perspective. But what does it actually look like on the ground, to your question, practically speaking? I have found that having one person in our lives who's willing to listen, who's willing to provide space, and with whom we can listen and give space can do a world of wonders. Just one person. Now, if we have more, great. If we have one person in our lives who can listen to us and give us space, we can feel seen. And that's really the bottom line of all of this work is where can we feel understood and valued by one other person? Obviously, that starts with ourselves. Can I value myself? Can I see myself? Can I understand who I am? So I have a journal that helps me to do that because I often don't see myself. How can I expect others to see me if I don't see myself? So it has to start with my belonging to myself first. And as I'm working on that— and I'm telling you, like, I wrote the book on this and I still struggle with it. It's not like one day you finally belong and, and that's it, your work is done. It's an ongoing evolution.

So one of the things that I have heard from many people who have done the deep research, whether it's on the dissertation side or on writing a book, it's often a topic that's a passion for them. That they want to understand. And the book writing is part of the self-reflection journey to go, I don't get this and I want to get this. And so you keep grabbing pieces and trying to pull it together till it makes sense. Does that resonate for you?

Absolutely. I learned so much about leadership in just writing the book, not just through the research. But when you put your words down on paper, talk about using your voice, you start to see connections like, "Oh, no wonder that happened. That thing happened that year, and now I'm doing this work. That must have had something to do with it." So absolutely, writing is learning. Writing is not just sharing, it's very much learning.

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You mentioned some of of the pieces of framework you have on adaptive challenge. And I want to spend a moment there. Can you outline that framework and then talk about how you use it within the context of coaching or working with organizations? Absolutely.

So you can think of challenges in two ways. They're either adaptive or they're technical. Technical challenges are where there is a problem to be solved, and it can be a challenging problem, but there are processes, systems, and frameworks you can use to solve the problem. You can apply a technical solution onto that problem. An adaptive challenge is very different from a technical solution or a technical challenge. An adaptive one is, The problem requires new ways of thinking, new ways of understanding the problem, and it's— the problem itself is a moving target. And so it requires us to adapt, to change, and maybe experiment, try some things out, learn from that experiment, and try something else new. When I think of inclusive leadership, I really think of it as an adaptive challenge. That means there's no playbook that I could write and say, here, Bill, here's the secret to inclusive leadership. Follow these rules and you'll be an inclusive leader. It's not like that. And I don't mean to be so reductive, of course. But the truth is our psychologies intersect with our leadership. Our social identities intersect with how we lead. And that's what makes it an adaptive challenge. And society intersects. Like, the times are changing, what's happening in the world influences the ways that we lead. So I really think of it as an inclusive challenge. That means that I can teach you, and many qualified coaches, facilitators, educators can teach you the basics of leadership. For example, how to listen, how to empathize, how to speak, how to ask questions. Those things can be taught. Those are the technical pieces. Of leadership. The adaptive pieces are more emergent. You're going to have to live your life to let those lessons emerge. And that's why I come back to stumble. If you didn't stumble, you wouldn't have learned a lesson from it. So invite those stumbles, because each time you stumble, you get an adaptation. You get to adapt to that stumble so that the next time you have the same exact obstacle in your way, you're not going to stumble. And that's what it means to adapt.

So I think that's a beautiful explanation of that. And you used a phrase when we were talking earlier about the possibility of being human together. And I think for me, that encapsulates that framework and says, OK, this is the why of why we are doing this work. It's so that we have those moments where not only each other sees each other, but then is able to bring out the best in ourselves and support each other.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think of it like the metaphor that comes to mind for me is like, okay, we're going to walk up this mountain together and there's going to be all kinds of obstacles along the way. So I'm at the bottom of the mountain. I've got all my gear. I've got a helmet. I've got walking poles. I've got hiking boots and all this stuff. And I'm ready to walk this mountain, but I stumble. I keep tripping. I keep falling. Every time I fall, I notice something that, oh, well, this time I tripped over my boot. This time I didn't use my pole the same way. I'm not going to do that next time. Pretty soon I'm like, I'm feeling pretty comfortable. Maybe I could remove this helmet. Maybe I could put my poles aside. I'm starting to disarm myself, but as I disarm myself, I see you also disarming yourself. And I realize, you know, what's going to keep me safe getting to the top of that mountain is if I walk with you. Because if I take off all of my gear, I'm not going to make it on my own. But I notice you taking off your gear. Maybe together we can make it to the top together without our gear. Putting all our defenses down and walking together, we can protect ourselves and be human together. I love that metaphor, Priya.

So I want to ask you a different question. Sure. You started from the work of academic researcher. Did you think you were going to go into thought leadership? Or, you know, when you were in the academic space, where did you see yourself going and how did you wind up here?

Thank you for asking me that. No, I didn't. I, you know, I started my doctorate thinking that I was— I had just finished an internship at the United Nations at UNICEF. I thought I was going to go back there. I had— I wanted to learn. I didn't think of it as a naive grad student. I didn't think of it from a perspective of contributing. I thought of it from a perspective of consuming and learning and growing and developing. And then I was going to go back to the UN and start developing interventions. But then you start writing and you start to see that your writing has influence.. And that when it influences someone else, they ask a new question, and it causes you to grow and learn more things and then make another contribution. So pretty soon my work became about contribution and about service and about learning from others in this very, like, you know, mutually beneficial way to every time I contributed, I learned, and that learning allowed me to contribute again. And so no matter what form my education takes, whether it's facilitating meaningful dialogue, writing, teaching, lecturing, keynotes, podcasts like this, if it's an exchange of ideas where I get to learn and you get to learn and we both get to contribute, to me, that's great service, that's great learning, that's where you and I get to be human together.

So you're on the— or you're in book launch cycle now. The books are in pre-order. Talk about that journey for a little bit in terms of how has that been from not only shepherding the manuscript but now going into pre-launch? It's amazing.

It's been eye-opening. Every day I learn something new. I will tell you, I wrote this book in response to a client saying, Hey, I've learned so much from your workshops. I need the companion book to go along with this so that I don't forget everything, and I don't like taking notes. So I was like, okay, cool, I'll write the book. The book, of course, became a bigger thing because the publisher asked for, you know, put a little bit of your personal story in and the genesis of this workshop and how it came to be. And so it became a bigger project, and I have loved watching it grow because I really thought Yay, the book is done. It's out of my hands. Turns out it's not. This is where the magic really starts now that the book is done, because what's happening is it's creating dialogue. It's creating resistance. It's creating agreement. And that's where the magic is, where it's like, remember I just told you the more I learn, the more I get to contribute. The more I contribute, the more I get to learn. And so this kind of dialogue that's yielding from the book so far is really fascinating to me, right? It's like, "Oh, you got that? That wasn't the intention, but maybe there's a thread there that I could pull on and we could both learn and, you know, create some new knowledge together." So it's been fascinating to me. And the other piece of it is, After I finished writing the book, I, you know, obviously we're continuing to do the research. And it's called Stumbling Towards Inclusion, but the research, as we're continuing, we saw that there were actually— we could name what those stumbling blocks are. It's not just some random thing that you stumble on. Turns out there are 8 things we typically stumble on. As leaders, and we can name those and identify those. And so we have now— the book has caused me to say, okay, well, now we need to tell people what these stumbling blocks are. And if you want to learn what those stumbling blocks are, we have an assessment now. So you can go to my website and take that assessment and learn specifically what your stumbling blocks are. And then you can take the book and say, how do I overcome those specific stumbling blocks that I have?

Well, and I love here because there's the thread of the research mindset as well, saying, okay, and it fits with your mountain climbing metaphor too. If I'm tripping, do other people trip over this as well, or is it just me? Right. Oh, there's a pattern here. Let's unpack the pattern and identify it and then equip people to have the tools that they need so that they don't stumble. Right, exactly.

And sometimes even if I tell you, hey, there's this stumbling block coming up in your line of walking, you may say, okay, thanks, Priya, for the advice. You may still stumble because—

Oh, yeah, that sounds a lot like being a teenager and listening to mom and dad and air quotes listening. Yeah, exactly.

What a good example. Yeah, I can think of that with my 12-year-old right now. I'm like, I told you this, but Yeah, you have to kind of experience it for yourself.

Right, right, right. And as long as you can survive your mistakes, a stumble along the way is a good thing. But then hopefully over time and experience, you go, hey, somebody's saying there's a stumbling point here. I don't need to discover it myself. Right, right. I can listen to others.

Yes. So even if you know what your typical stumbling blocks are, just be aware of what the other 8 are. Just being aware of them can change the way you lead.

Exactly. So as we begin to wrap up, I want to ask you a few questions. Sure. First being, if you were to go back to your days back in academia, what advice would you give yourself then for preparing for a role in communicating these ideas at scale? So what advice would you give yourself for the practice of thought leadership?

I would tell myself, so back then, you know, you're a doctoral student at Harvard. Everyone around you expects you to stay in academia and be a professor. And I would tell my younger self, there are so many ways that you can teach. There are so many ways that you can share and learn with others. Do not limit yourself to academia. And in fact, you might have more reach when you share in various ways. And so it's going to require you to stretch yourself. It's going to require you to play different roles in different environments and be adaptive to different audiences. And that's really the exciting piece. So I would tell myself there's lots of ways to contribute. There's lots of ways to teach. You can teach through writing. You can teach through facilitating dialogue. You can teach through coaching. You can teach through consulting and talking to people. Don't limit yourself is what I would tell her.

And I, having gone through academia myself, the treadmill, if you will, of what are you taking next semester, what are you teaching, what are you working on— you've spent your entire life from kindergarten thinking in terms of an academic sort of sequence. It is hard to step off that sort of conveyor belt, right? And to realize there's a whole big world out there.

Yeah, it's a— you're right, it's a risk. It's scary to do that. I needed some guidance. I had a really great mentor who said to me, you know, you do these office hours, they're fantastic. The students leave feeling so empowered. My students leave my office hours just like learning the things they need to know for the midterm. What are you doing? Go make a career out of that. And it turns out it was coaching. And he helped me. He said, I think the thing you're doing is coaching. I, you know, it's, it's a form of education, but it's certainly not the didactic teaching I do. And I loved it. It was not data-centered. It was magical. It was not logical. It was intuitive. It like really blew my mind when you're used to a certain way of thinking and being, to expand and to have a mentor like him say it's okay to do that. In fact, it's beautiful, go do it. Somebody like him to give you permission can really expand your horizons.

That's a great gift. That's a great mentoring gift. Last question: whose thought leadership work do you love that you wish more people were aware of, either reading or watching or however that person is communicating. Whose, whose work do you love that needs to be more popular?

So I can think of 3 people. Uh, Dr. Purnima Luthra has written some really fantastic work on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Aiko Bethea has some really nice work. I think everybody should follow these 2 thought leaders. And of course, Lily Zheng, their work and their whose voice I think I have learned so much from in terms of authenticity, courage, inviting resistance and challenge, and being in dialogue. So these 3 people are certainly people I would follow. I would read their books and everything they post on social media. And I find these 3 people very willing to be in dialogue. So you don't just have to consume their knowledge, you can engage with it and you can be in conversation with them and send them, you know, comments on their posts and send them letters and things like that. Speaking as an author myself, you know, I used to think that I couldn't reach out to authors because like now that they've written a book, maybe they're less accessible. Are you kidding me? I love hearing from people. I want people to text me, email me, call me. I want, you know, I love being in dialogue with people. So I want to invite people to my website where they can do that. And my website is priyanalkor.com. Just be in conversation. That's why I'm doing this work, so that we can be in dialogue together.

Priya, thank you very much for joining us today. This has been a wonderful conversation.

It's been such a pleasure. Thank you. Your questions are so great. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Bill.

My pleasure. If you're interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL newsletter. Each month we talk about the people who create, curate, and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website orgtl.com and choose join our newsletter. I'll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.