The second episode of the “When Everyone Leads” podcast explores what a more vibrant civic culture would look like.
The guest who brought the topic is Eric Liu, co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based nonprofit Citizen University. Liu also directs a program on citizenship and American identity at The Aspen Institute.
In its first season as the Kansas Leadership Center’s podcast, “When Everyone Leads” asks guests to bring a challenge to the center, which the hosts and guest then discuss and analyze through a leadership framework.
It is hosted by KLC co-workers Brianna Griffin, the show’s lead producer, and Chris Green, who also serves as executive editor of The Journal. KLC’s Maren Berblinger, Julian Montes and Neha Batawala also produce the show.
The podcast is inspired by the book “When Everyone Leads” by Ed O’Malley, president and CEO of the Kansas Health Foundation, the Kansas Leadership Center’s main funder, and KLC’s immediate past president and CEO; and Julia Fabris McBride, KLC’s chief leadership development officer.
The following is a transcript of the conversation with Liu, edited for length and clarity, followed by a discussion among the hosts.
Green: How would you frame the issue you’re bringing to us in terms that everyone can lead on?
Liu: The way we define our work at Citizen University is centered around changing culture. Our mission statement is to foster a culture of powerful, responsible citizenship. … We focus in particular on what is civic culture. How do we, all of us, change civic culture in the United States? And I think, broadly speaking, it of course varies from state to state, place to place even within a state, but what we mean by civic culture is the habits, the norms, the narratives, the mindsets of how we hold a community together, how we live together. And these are times, broadly speaking, where that culture has gotten more nasty, more short term, more selfish, more polarized, more tribalized, more cynical. And so our work is all about trying to activate culture change in a way that’s super-aligned with the ideas of this book.
Green: This is obviously your job, but my guess is it goes a lot deeper than that. What makes this issue so important? Why have you dedicated so much of your life and enterprise of Citizen University to it? Why is this the place where you’re making your stand in your life and career?
Liu: I am the child of immigrants. My parents were born in mainland China. They came to United States via Taiwan in the late 1950s and ended up in a suburb of New York, where I grew up, in the Hudson Valley. I grew up with this strong, mainly unspoken sense that all I had done was have the dumb luck to be born here, that they had done the heavy lifting, they had made the hard choices, the sacrifices. We were an IBM family, working for a company then at the very peak of its powers as part of an economy that was at the peak of its powers at a time of peak American influence and opportunity. I hadn’t done anything to earn that. I just kind of got plopped into it.
And so, I think a lot of the unspoken sense growing up was, How are you going to make this worth it? How are you going to earn all that you’ve been able to do here in the United states? And there’s a simple way to boil that down, which is: How can I be useful? And I think that deep ethos of be useful, be not self-centered, be not only focused on private benefit or gain. I would say organizationally for us, Citizen University—my wife, Jená Cane, is the other co-founder of Citizen University. … So, when we came together in life we also came together in our work.
Why does this book, “When Everyone Leads,” matter so much right now? Because our civic culture is sick. That is because our politics is diseased. It’s because as a country, people are talking more often about civil war than they are about civil discourse. We have both an opportunity and an obligation to bring to bear what we can where we sit in some way, in whatever way we’re able to, to be part of the solution. And that’s my motivation just as I think it is yours.
Griffin: It all started with ‘be useful’ and what you thought of as being useful was giving back to the community and finding a way for different communities to be able to live that. Not many people will say, OK, be useful; what’s the best way to do that? Connect.
Liu: Even the idea of everyone leads — once you come up with a notion like that, that becomes a North Star — it’s amazing how often you’ll start seeing it come up in your life.
Green: The thing that struck me from KLC the most from the very beginning was this conversation we call ‘the gap.’ So, we want to take a moment and explore the gap. You mentioned your concern about the civic culture being sick, but I love the results that come from this question when I ask: When you think about the future of our civic culture, what concerns you the most?
Liu: What concerns me the most is the continued creeping spread and self-fulfilling spread of cynicism. This is in some ways a faith-field enterprise, and I don’t mean faith in a deity; I mean faith in each other and faith that this thing can work and it’s worth trying to make it work. Belief is both so powerful and central and so evanescent. And when we’re in a time like this where you have leaders and you have people in authority and positions of public visibility embodying a sense of, it’s all a nihilistic game, it’s all just a joke, it’s all to own the other side on social media, then you get a political culture that is at best about watching this circus and chaos unfold. To me, at the very heart of civic culture is belief, and what I’m worried about is the way in which people have lost faith in democracy and each other.
Green: If you had to pinpoint a root cause that feels actionable, what do you think is driving that cynicism?
Liu: I think there’s two root causes at a tectonic plate scale making all of this happen. We’re living through a time of grinding inequality and concentration of economic opportunity. That driving force makes everyone hyper-status conscious, hyper-status anxious. And we are within sight of a day when this country becomes a majority people of color and Asian. That has created this great shift and set of cross-cutting tensions that mix excitement and hope about what we can be with a lot of loss and fear among whites who in the most extreme and noxious versions of it gravitate to “replacement theory,” that whites are being replaced. ‘You will not replace us’ as they chanted in Charlottesville.
But even on the side of people of color who are like, ‘hey, we’re approaching being part of a majority in this country and yet still we have by far a disproportionate burden of powerlessness, of lack of opportunity,’ that power itself remains far more white-dominated across all institutions in the United States. That’s a recipe for conflict and cynicism and for people checking out and giving up on whether change is possible.
But what each of us right now can do is to ask: How in Kansas and Washington, in Wichita and Seattle, how can we start making sure that more people get to be part of the opportunity circle? How can we start making sure more people get literate in the ways of exercising civic voice and civic power so we can have a more thriving democratic culture in our town, county, community? How do you bring this home? How do you apply the lessons of “When Everyone Leads” to these questions of dealing with inequality, with we don’t have a unifying story of us anymore as Americans? We are fracturing among ‘us and them.’ We are fracturing along lines of race and ideology. So how do we create a bigger, durable story of us just in my part of town, my part of the state? That’s the challenge and the opportunity for us right now.
Green: And if we got that right and made that happen, how would our civic culture look different?
Liu: What it would mean in the first place, is people in a community dealing with each other not the way they deal with each other on social media which is with the object of performance to own the other side and torch the other side and signal your virtue in a way that reduces people to this two-dimensional kind of avatar. Number one, what success looks like is people popping each other back into three dimensions and rehumanizing each other and looking for the complexity in you that reflects back the complexity in me and finding the ways in which you and I might have been shaped by the same kind of experience, by the same kind of trauma, by the same kind of mentor or by the same kind of tormentor. That’s one layer.
The next fractal scale, what success looks like is a community where everyone leads, where people don’t just sit back and say, ‘I can’t believe they haven’t fixed this yet. I can’t believe they decided to change the policy on x, y or z. I can’t believe they cut bus service.’ Success looks like a city, a town, a community where people realize the benefit of being in America in a democratic, self-governing republic is for better and for worse there is no ‘they.’ ‘They’ is us. And the more you talk about a ‘they’ and disavow responsibility and sit back like a spectator watching something unfold, the more you are failing to live like a citizen, the more you are failing to lead from wherever you sit.
And so, success looks like the inverse of that, and saying, ‘There’s no they; there’s me. There’s we. There’s us.’ It need not even be specifically on a civic or political issue. Just the art of forming book clubs, gardening clubs—whatever it might be—is building a muscle that has completely atrophied in American life in the last half-century. And so, success looks like a flowering ecosystem of people joining and rebuilding those, what Tocqueville called ‘little platoons of democracy.’ If we can do that where we are, in your part of Kansas, in my part of Washington state, then the national stuff will begin to take care of itself. We will get national leaders who will respond to our new ways of showing up, our new ways and our new norms and attitudes that there is no they, there’s we, and that we’ve got to take responsibility for what’s broken.
Green: I imagine that vision like you had laid out a few minutes ago of seeing people three dimensionally and of people being involved locally. I’m an optimist; most Americans, that would sound pretty good to them. If that’s true, why are we stuck? What keeps us from getting there? What would we have to work on to try to overcome, to get to that other side of that better civic culture you describe?
Liu: I think a huge word and idea is the word invitation. People, if asked, I agree, would be like, ‘Yeah, I’m down with that; I would like to see that kind of culture and society. Well, why don’t we have it? No one’s invited me to be part of it.’ There is a passivity in that. Part of what we’re saying is, be the inviter. Invite others in.
One of our programs that we’ve worked with you all on at KLC is called Civic Saturdays, gatherings that are essentially a civic analog to a faith gathering. And a Civic Saturday unfolds like church might unfold. You sit down next to a stranger and you’re invited to both greet each other and talk about a common question that goes past small talk. There are readings of texts that are drawn from different parts of the American tradition that you can think of as civic scripture. We rise and we sing together, different songs from different parts of the American songbook and tradition. There’s a civic sermon where someone from the communities speaks and tries to make some sense of our times and the moral and ethical challenges of everything we’re talking about, of making these choices in daily life. And then most importantly, at the end of this we form up in civic circles where people then sit in circles of four or six or eight and talk about: How do we take that inspiration, that motivation that came before in this hour and commit to each other in small circles to do something, to make something, to join something?
I tell you about this as one specific form of invitation. If you’re like, ‘That’s interesting but that’s not my cup of tea,’ then—back to the book ‘When Everyone Leads’—the question is, well what are you going to do? What form of invitation could you extend to others? You started earlier talking about a concept that is core to your book and to the work of KLC, and that is the gap, and you talk about the ways in which everybody intuits the gap. They know the gap between what’s promised and what’s actually happening. And people get cynical about that gap when they see that gap sitting unchanged for too long. For me, the gap between government of the people, by the people, for the people, and what we actually get, the gap between ‘All men are created equal’ and the society we actually have, the way that we close that gap is to invite each other to close that gap. We have to invite each other over and over again in small and large ways to close that gap.
Green: So, I convene a lot of conversations about difficult issues. When you think about who’s getting invitations to these conversations, who needs to be invited? Who is not getting the invitations they need? Because I can send out invitations and I can get the same people coming to my parties all the time.
Liu: Your point is exactly right. Don’t just keep on sending layering another layer of lacquer on those who already have. Ask how we can extend invitations to those who have not. And if you don’t know where to begin, everybody is one degree removed from being in the circle of that have-not equation. And being intentional about inviting community leaders, trusted elders, organizations that work in folks who traditionally haven’t been invited—that is what inclusive leadership is. This is something we deal with at Citizen University, because who shows up at Civic Saturdays? The usual suspects. You can fill a Civic Saturday always with white, educated, upper-middle-class women particularly who have time to volunteer. And you can hit metrics of attendance just with that alone. I’m not saying we figured this out. We’re always struggling to make sure we keep extending those circles of invitation, but that requires intent, commitment and trust.
Green: I like that we’re identifying factions here, and it’s not like a left, right or center faction. It’s the invited and the uninvited. What are the uninvited thinking when they see that meeting invite scroll across their email or Facebook feed? What are the stories they’re telling themselves?
Liu: They may be thinking cynically that’s not for me or that’s the kind of thing well-meaning white women go to. What would they think if someone they know and trust invited them to this? And I think that’s the key here.
Green: How do the invited get in the way?
Liu: One way the invited can get in the way is to think that it stops with simply extending the invitation. I invited them but they didn’t come. Well, that’s not quite enough. How did you invite them? Through what trusted relationship did you invite? Let’s imagine you invited the uninvited and they actually came. Another way the invited often get in the way is not making any adjustments to the way they’re holding space, talking and not creating any sense of belonging and welcome. It doesn’t have to mean a white leader saying hello, welcome, people of color, to my meeting. I will now spend the next 40 minutes self-flagellating and talking and talking about what a bad person I am because I’m talking about my part of structural white racism. That’s going to turn off POCs almost as much. ‘I didn’t come here for the white guilt, white absolution session. Now I see why I was invited … to make you feel better about yourself.’
Number one, welcome people. Number two, think about how to do that authentically and with humanity and make it not about you.
Our colleagues and friends at an organization called More in Common did this poll that had this remarkable finding that every demographic—Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, black, white, Asian, poor, rich, urban, rural—the one throughline that is true across every demographic right now is that Americans feel disrespected. Unfortunately, we have to get back to basics, and the basics of leading others humanely is setting a tone of welcome and belonging and trying to respect one another. You don’t have to have a title. You don’t have to have ‘that job.’ This is where everyone leads. And this is the way that together we can change the culture from inhumane to more humane, from discourteous and angry to civil and caring, and from super-polarized to more complex and nonbinary in every sense where we can actually begin to rehumanize one another.
Post-podcast discussion excerpts among hosts and producers
Green: You want to fix national politics and American democracy, but don’t look to do it at Congress or the White House or those big things we all talk about all the time that don’t affect our lives as much as local. Getting involved in local things, inviting people locally starting with people you have relationships with. Someone who is part of the uninvited isn’t going to come because of an email or a Facebook invite. They’re going to come because someone they know who they trust says that you’re invited.
Another thing where leadership is risky is going to places where you are uninvited. That’s a challenging and difficult concept because some places you’re uninvited to might be particularly unfriendly or dangerous, and I don’t think we want people to go to those places. But we should be going to talk to people who make us feel uncomfortable, who make us feel like we don’t have the right answers, like we may not have everything quite figured out and those things that we thought were central to who we are and the way we think the world works—that there’s another side of those.
So much of what Eric brought to his personal mission was related to family, to his parents and this obligation he felt to them, that his parents brought to him and cultivated in him. Even his work with Citizen University had origins in his work with his wife. And I sort of feel like Eric is one of America’s preeminent family counselors trying to help us talk better as a family and see ourselves as a family.
Griffin: Inviting the uninvited is so much easier said than done. Not everybody has skills to market themselves to get others involved. The uninvited will come only if a trusted person invites them, but the uninvited have to care about the issue.
Green: How clear are people about how an issue affects the life of an uninvited person they’re talking to? I bet you feel invited to some conversations and uninvited to others. What’s the deciding factor that makes you feel that way?
Griffin: When people invite me to things, they might need a helper to take notes, not to express my voice. That makes me not want to go to things I’m invited to.
Green: Invitations and how I might be getting in the way: One way I think about it is that because of my status and how I do my job, my invitations to people are influenced by a tremendous incentive to invite people I know will come. If the seats are not filled up, that’s a reflection on me. There’s a huge risk in inviting them because if they reject it, then you might have to think you’re not as good at your job as you want to think you are.
Griffin: But then you’re just lying to yourself. You’re inviting the same people and you’re hearing what you want to hear in this echo chamber and not allowing people to tell you what it’s really like.
Montes: Short-term fixes don’t help traverse the gap. The pressures people in authority might be under or any one of us in the roles we play in democracy—what do those pressures feel like for everybody? Also, what’s the role people play, the exercise of leadership versus the roles they play? How do we show up in democracy in different ways? Do I show up in a dissenting way?
Griffin: Are the invited people trying something else, following up with those who didn’t come?
Green: You need validation that you’re really wanted to be there.
Berblinger: The comment I’ve heard Eric say: ‘How do we live with each other well?’ I just think that’s a beautiful question to ask.
Griffin: Reach across and talk to somebody who thinks differently than you do.
Montes: I hear the competing values of wanting community with one another and doing things together versus American exceptionalism and individualism, that it’s on me to do this.
Green: Approaching with the attitude that everyone doesn’t think like us. Everyone has unique experiences and we should be very careful about thinking those experiences are always shared.
Griffin: How many stories have we heard within the past few years where people are like, ‘I’ve known this person for years and I just realized you believe this. I don’t even know who you are anymore.’ That’s really sad to think of, because nobody thinks a hundred percent the same.
