A few years ago, one of our team members proposed a new day off for us… the day after the election.
That’s right, not the day of the election, but the day after, as it’s then that we need time to process the results.
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Something we’ve seen with our organizational clients is that traditional, top-down, hierarchical models of leadership continue to have a strong grip on many leaders.
This makes sense, given that traditional and dominant culture in the US, including corporate culture, has its roots in plantation culture.
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Authenticity is an essential inclusive leadership skill. It builds the trust and psychological safety needed for collaboration, innovation and impact. It’s one of the things that people need to do their best and most fulfilling work in alignment with the mission of their organization.
But if authenticity is defined as being true to oneself, how can you measure authenticity, particularly in the context of the workplace?
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One of the things that happens when we start to talk about privilege with people who are not accustomed to naming it, and especially about white privilege, is that the word “privilege” is experienced as an insult.
And that’s because the word “privilege” is often used as an insult.
That’s not what we mean though.
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I had a whole different blog post planned for today… and then the news broke. In fact, my 12 year old broke the news to us in the car as we driving home because his friends were texting him.
The 12 year olds are watching.
And yes it’s messy, and no America hasn’t been ready to elect a woman, let alone a woman of color… but we’d better get ready.
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We talk a lot with our clients about slowing down to speed up.
Spoiler alert: it’s a little bit of a brain hack because ideally the goal isn’t to speed up at all, at least not purely for the sake of speeding up.
However, we are so deeply socialized into the idea that “progress is bigger/more” and into a “sense of urgency” that the idea of slowing down seems so deeply impossible, ill-advised, and unsafe to the point of being ludicrous.
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I’ve been thinking more about transparency, and how it is related to authenticity. Why is authenticity so hard, especially across difference? Why is it often in the parts of our identity where we align with dominant culture that we struggle more to be authentic, at least in diverse spaces?
We often hear about fear from folks in the privileged aspects of their identity. White folks, for example, are often afraid of “saying the wrong thing” in discussions about race, or of “taking up too much space” or “causing harm.” This is not a bad thing, per se, but when it causes people to clam up or retreat it can further erode safety.
When we are afraid, transparency is often the last thing we want to lean into. We are socialized into conflict avoidance.
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We know there's a lot going on right now and something that has been coming up in our coaching sessions with executives, leaders and staff is stress and burnout. We’ve written about burnout before, deep into the worst of the pandemic, and revisited over a year later, the strategies (and science) are just as relevant today, even if our stressors have shifted.
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Earlier this year, we did a deep dive into people pleasing, and how people pleasing should not consistently traumatize the people you are trying to please.
We did several group sessions on people pleasing, and it seemed to open people up to thinking about people pleasing and its adverse impacts in new ways.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that people pleasing goes away overnight.
These patterns and habits are deeply ingrained in us, and are often rooted in strategies developed to respond to childhood trauma or harm.
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A question that comes up from time to time in our work is some variation on whether an issue we have raised is “DEI” or if it is “organizational management”.
It’s a curious question, especially when it only ever seems to come from white or white appearing men about our work as women and gender-expansive people of color.
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Something that often happens when leaders, white leaders in particular, “recognize their privilege” is that they react by concluding that what they need to do instead is step back, be quiet, listen to others, and let other lead.
While well-intentioned, the impact of this approach can also be harmful. When those who align with systemic and institutional power fail to use it, it leaves those who are less aligned with that power to do the work, often while feeling tokenized, unsupported, and under-resourced.
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I know we’re a few news cycles out from the Southwest Airlines debacle over the holidays, but this post from Southwest pilot Larry Lonero titled “What happened to Southwest Airlines?” hit home for me, and I believe it’s important to keep at the forefront of our minds as we move into 2023.
Oooof. I’m sure this situation rings to true to anyone who has ever had to deal with any kind of large and flailing system, whether it’s an airline, cell phone carrier, car rental company, hospital, health insurance company, public school system, bank, or pretty much any aspect of the government.
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Early in the pandemic, literally in the first month, a friend shared with me something that was really helping them during that time of global uncertainty, which was that “I don’t have to know what to do next.”
Somehow, over time, and through this pandemic, this has morphed in my mind into:
I don’t know what will happen next.
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Something we encounter in our DEI work with client organizations is what we have started calling “willing but unable” - folks who really want to do the hard work of integrating DEI into everything they do but are unable to do so.
Of course, every time we say that, I find myself thinking, but are they really willing, though?
And if they are so willing, what is getting in the way?
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There has been a post circulating about a certain CEO of a certain social media platform who seems to be rapidly running it into the ground, whether deliberately because of a hidden agenda or through sheer incompetence or both.
The post is by someone who was an intern at one of this CEO’s other companies, and they talk about how managing this person was a huge part of the company culture.
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We often hear about the damaging impact of silence from staff more deeply impacted by systems of oppression within our client organizations. Silence equates to lip service, failed allyship, cowardice, lack of engagement, lack of caring, lack of commitment, lack of safety, leaving the burden of the work to those less aligned with power and more.
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A pattern that we often see with our client organizations is where those more proximate to institutional power seem to “personalize” feedback from those less proximate to power. This is a form of defensiveness where feedback from staff, usually given in good faith and not meant as an attack, although often not with frustration, pain and anger, is experienced by leadership as a personal attack.
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It is interesting to me how defensiveness functions in an environment where the goal is to shift towards equity and inclusion. Defensiveness is a natural and human reaction, but it often functions in the exact opposite way than we intend and would like.
Perhaps within a hierarchical environment, defensiveness helps us maintain power by shutting down feedback or criticism that feels like an attack. We maintain credibility and trust by being able to shoot down other perspectives, thus proving ourselves to be “right.” In academia, you are expected to literally defend your thesis. It’s a pretty standard format in debate, courts of law, art school critiques and… well, pretty much everything.
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Leaders are often “visionaries” and “change makers” by definition. They have a vision for something that is different than currently exists, and they have the drive to make that vision a reality.
Not every leader is suited to driving change towards equity and inclusion however.
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Many of us, especially those who are “professionally” successful, have been trained to be perfectionists, over-achievers, and fixers.
If there is a problem, our immediate reaction is to ask - how do we fix this?
We see this all the time when we do DEI and culture work with organizations. At the end of our initial discovery phase we present our findings, and the desire to react with solutions, actions, next steps, and a resolution is so deeply engrained, it creates a palpable kind of fix-it itchiness in the room.
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