The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - Brené with Megan Reitz and John Higgins on Leading in an Age of Employee Activism

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

I’m talking to Megan Reitz, a professor of leadership and dialogue, and John Higgins, a researcher and author, about an article they published in the MIT Sloan Management Review titled “Leading in an Age of Employee Activism.” It’s a huge topic in every organization I talk to, and I can say, as an employer and an activist — leading a team filled with organizers and activists — that this is definitely an important issue. We talk about what it takes to make a difference, to do the internal work, and to give leaders the skills to lead with advocacy in the modern workplace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, everyone. I'm Brne Brown, and this is Dare to Lead. Very interesting conversation for us today. I'm talking with Megan Rates, a professor of leadership and dialogue, and John Higgins, an independent researcher, coach, consultant, and author. They've published several articles together, including the one that we're going to talk about today, which is leading in an age of employee activism. It's an article that I came across in the MIT Sloan Management Review. I thought it was so interesting. And as an employer and an activist, you know, my entire team is filled with organizers and activists. This is a really big issue. And mercifully, it's not going away. Unfortunately, not a lot of leaders have the skills to lean into it and lead through it. And a lot of organizations are, um, How would he say, not walking the talk and leveraging kind of the goodwill of some really important movements, but not doing the work internally.

And so we're going to talk about that today. It's such a compelling conversation. I'm glad you're with us. Before we jump into the conversation, let me tell you a little bit about our guests. Megan Rates is a professor of leadership and dialogue at Holt International Business School. She is on the Thinkers' 50 ranking of global business thinkers, where her work with John Higgins on activism was recently shortlisted as one of the year's breakthrough ideas and is ranked in HR magazine's most influential thinkers listing. Her recent books are dialogue and organizations, developing relational leadership, which draws on her doctoral thesis, Mind Time. And her most recent book is actually with John, called Speak Up, Say What Needs to Be Said and Hear What Needs to Be Heard, which was shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year. John Higgins is a researcher and to the use and abuse of power in the workplace. Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo! And how it shapes who has a voice and who gets silenced. He's worked alongside

Megan since 2013 or so exploring the realities of how truth gets spoken to power and what leaders can do to create and sustain speak-up, listen-up cultures. God, I'd love that. Speak-up, listen-up. Really, for the past several years, they've been working together to really try to really try to to understand what people mean by activism and how it plays out in the workplace. Alongside with Megan, he's co-authored a number of books, including the change doctors, reimagining organizational practice. His most recent piece is leadership unraveled the faulty thinking behind modern management, and he wrote this with Mark Cole. Oh my God, listen to this great title. His latest research with Mark has the working title, The Great Unheard. It takes a look at what it takes for those who find themselves

marginalized by mainstream habits to have a meaningful presence. Let's jump in. So Megan and John, welcome to the Dear to Lead podcast. I am very excited that y'all are joining us from the UK. We are extremely delighted and excited to be joining you from the UK, Bernie. It's lovely to be here. Okay, so I came across this article in the MIT-Sloan Management Review. The title of the article is leading in an age of employee activism.

And oh my God, every company I'm working with right now, this is the question. This is coming up every time I do work inside of an organization. So I want to start with this. I want to understand more about this. This is part of a bigger project that y'all have been working on about the experience of speaking truth to power. Is that correct? That's correct, yeah. We've been working together for years now, John, haven't we?

about eight, nine years, something like that. So 2014 is when the Truth to Power project really started. Yeah, exactly. So we've been looking at and examining what we call conversational habits. Like, who says what and what doesn't get said and who gets heard and who doesn't get heard? And how do those habits that we all have as individuals

and in our teams and in our organizations, how do they serve us? How do they get in the way? And how do we speak up in systems of power? So both John and I have a great deal of interest in how power is constructed, how we understand status and authority, and how that then impacts our habits

around what gets said and who gets heard. So this is so interesting. So the context for your work, for these past eight or nine years has been organizational. What's happening inside organizations for the most part? Almost completely. I mean, that's where our focus has really been on workplace experience. How can people make a difference and make sense of what's going on there?

Because quite early on in our work on that, in 2015, the VW mission scandal hit the thing. And so it moved, the corporate agenda suddenly crashed into the wider political agenda. We sought to have some perverse pleasure while everybody else is saying, the auto industry is poisoning people. We were going, yeah, great, what a wonderful example. But I think more importantly, the shift that we had was by and large people thought about speaking up in terms of whistleblowing. And a lot of our work, and this is where Megan's stuff about the conversational habits, was to try and shift from this quite legalistic and this focus on the least powerful people in the system, who are usually the whistleblowers, bearing all the

responsibility for raising the tricky topics. And so, So we actually wrote one article together recently, which is called if whistleblowing is the answer, ask a better question. And we were actually trying to get people to shift this away into a more systemic perspective rather than just focusing on heroic or non-heroic individuals. Ooh, let me tell you. Two things I want to say. One, that shift that you're talking about reminds me of a quote from James Clear.

We do not rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems. which I think is really true when it comes to speaking truth to power. The other thing I want to do just for people listening, can you just say a word or two about what the VW, the Volkswagen scandal was for people that are not familiar with it, they'll have that context? Well, it was the idea that it unraveled over time, but VW had found a way of evading the tests on whether their emissions

given out by the cars was or was not complying with legal requirements, And what happened was that they had a clever bit of software that could tell when the car was being in evaluation mode. And it suddenly got into then producing very low emissions. And when you began to dig into it, it got really interesting. What was the system that was going on there? And one of the stories that was out was that someone at a very senior level in VW said, look, we want to launch this particular new engine. We want to hit this deadline.

and some poor software engineer was just told, just make this problem fix it. And the problem was actually quite a fundamental one to do with the engine. And they found a way of gaming the system. And that's what you find more and more is that people get encouraged to game the system because that's easy than actually paying attention

to the underlying problem. In this case, there was a problem with the emission rate associated with this engine. What we find, Bernie, is when you look at the front page of the newspapers and you see organizations on the front page of the newspapers for all the wrong reasons, it's usually the case that somebody knew something but didn't speak up or somebody did speak up and they weren't heard. And I think the VW really hit home because they were put on a pedestal.

And for a moment there, we had a lot of organizations that we were working with in shock going, oh my goodness, what's going on in my organisation? But as John said, you know, there was an initial real interest in the kind of compliance issues. Let's get people to speak up if there's problems out there. Otherwise, they're going to bring down our organisation. But of course, it's much bigger territory than that. So if you haven't got people speaking up with ideas in your business and you haven't got people challenging or offering different perspectives, there's no hope for innovation. or agility. And of course, if you haven't got people speaking up, you've got no inclusivity as well, which is a major focus of the last couple of years. And what we've found is one massive mistake

that's happening is that we've got leaders who are out there and they're making these fabulous invitations. Well, stroke commands. They're saying, speak up, everybody. Bring your whole selves to work. We need that. And right at the beginning of our project, right, we were working with a leader that wanted people to speak up. And he knocked on our door and he said, Megan and John, got a bit of a problem. We've asked everybody to speak up and they, over there, they're not speaking up. Can you go and kind of make them speak up, please? Nudge them. Yeah. Nudge them. Yeah, do what you mean. need to do. They need to speak up. And so off we went and we spoke to they. And the very first quote we gathered in our research pretty much was what we were told straight off from they.

And that quote was, last time somebody spoke up around here, they disappeared. And so, of course, immediately... It's not funny, but it's funny. But it's funny. Immediately you realize, okay, speaking up and listening up is relational. In a wonderful interview I just had with Ian Wilkie, who is chair of an organisation called 50 million voices, which looks to transform the opportunities of the 50 million people of working age that stutter. He said in his interview with me, he said, how you show you.

up affects my voice. That's right. And so although our work is around speaking up, actually what John and I really explore in a lot of detail is how do you create the environment? How do you listen up? How do you show up in a way that others can find their voice? And if they can't find their voice, maybe should we just look at ourselves and figure out well, what am I doing that means that this person's voice is not coming?

And I think that's still one of the biggest issues we have, linking it to activism. Of course, again, now we've got leaders going, speak up, bring your whole self to work. And then we've got some employees listening to that invitation and they're saying, oh, okay then, I will speak up. Let's talk about climate change. let's talk about gender and race equity. Let's talk about sexual harassment. Let's talk about modern slavery.

Let's talk about executive pay. And you've got leaders who are sort of going, oh, hell. You know, when I said speak up, I kind of didn't really mean that. But we're opening up a much wider territory with these invitations that we're giving. It's so funny because I was a union organizer for a while. It seems like a different life, but in my wild path to where I am now. And I remember someone asking the question, is it hard to give voice to the voiceless? And I said, no, there are no voiceless.

The problem is finding ears for the earless. That's the challenge. It's the ears for the earless. Yeah. Okay, John, I cut you off. So tell me what you were going to say. I'm curious. No, no.

I'm now bowled over. I love the ears for the earless. But this whole thing of the dynamic of who's listening and who's speaking. and I was just reminded of one of the people we interviewed early on, which was just on the Truth to Powerwork, was a lay Benedictine monk, which is a particular Christian order based in about the 14th century. It was the rule of St. Benedict.

And this guy ran a headhunting firm based in the city of London. So this is a pretty hardcore operation. But his idea was that he ran his business by the rule of St. Benedict. And in the rule of St. Benedict, you always listen to the youngest monk in the monastery. And he said, you always therefore go to where that youngest monk is most comfortable. And so one of this whole notion of when you're wanting to listen up, rather than thinking me as a senior person, where am I going to feel comfortable?

We've written a piece recently about, well, some years ago about my door is always open and what a loaded phrase that is. But that whole sense of actually, I need to think about where other people are going to feel comfortable rather than sitting there in my executive suite and wait for people. to knock on my door. There's just nothing bad about the Benedict teens. I'm going to say that right now. The only part that I don't like is we have to be nice to people knocking on our door.

And as an introvert, I'm always like, ah, but you fail me there, St. Benedict. All right, I want to read some quotes. Let's jump into this article. This is, this is, look, I'm a CEO and an activist, and this shit is hard for me. So I can't imagine. And I'm very out with my political opinions and, what the hell's going on at the border and what about gun reform? So this is tricky.

Here's what you write in the article. We are entering an age of employee activism that may well upend our assumptions about power within organizations. Over half of the 1,500 employees we surveyed said they usually are always speak up to influence organizational action on wider societal or environmental issues. In a 2019 survey by the global law firm Herbert Smith-Freehehrie, Hills, over 80% of companies predicted a rise in workforce activism. Do you see it everywhere? Are you working with global companies? Yeah, we work across the globe. I think it's fair to say that there are some industries and some parts of the world that are seeing this more than others. And the US and tech industry in particular, I think has really been faced with employee activism in a different way

than organisations in other parts of the world and in different industries. But in pretty much every industry, and we have worked with, I think pretty much every industry, there are signs that employees now are much more willing to speak up. And there are multiple reasons for that. We have obviously access to technology and social media that means that people can speak up collectively now. And when you can speak up collectively, the risk, the felt risk goes down generally.

So social media and technology has helped voice. It's helped that organizations haven't just faced pressure from employees. They face it from their other stakeholders and there's significant pressure from investors around ESG goals. And so organizations have, and leaders have tend to. to start to make commitments on things like gender equity, race equity, climate change. And most organisations have felt like they really need to make commitments and statements in some of those areas. And employees won't forget it. So we've got employees and other

stakeholders saying, hang on a second, you said you're doing this, but we haven't seen the action. And that, I think, as well has led more employees to challenge. And they're willing to leave their jobs if their organisations and their leaders aren't kind of true to some of the commitments that they're starting to make. And that's why we say it's a kind of power shift. Leaders, I think, very traditionally in the past leaders, good leadership has all been about knowing the solution to things, telling employees what to do, and in a defined area of business, and then employees go off and do it. And that has shifted. Leaders now don't know the answer to many of these, as we call them, wicked problems. They don't know the answer. They've got

employees that aren't willing to just tow the line. They will speak up. And so it's, fascinating for researchers like John and I to explore, well, what's going on with power? Because power and status and authority really influence the voices that get heard in organisations, and that's where we're seeing things really shift. Can I just come in saying there was one slight nuance on that is on the geography side, is that actually employee activism, say in China, is not quite such a thing. And particularly, I remember we had one of our co-opt of inquiry groups.

We had someone from Singapore. And again, activism was not a word that they would remotely ever use or want to have associated with. And I think if I got it right, Megan, you were once interviewing someone in Hong Kong who suddenly said, I cannot continue this conversation. Because, again, the surveillance culture is very extreme over there. So that particular rub needs to be taken into consideration. And I'm just thinking about recent things that have happened with, I can't remember his name now,

the very senior US banker making a statement about that his bank was going to last longer than the Chinese Communist Party. And then the next day, him making a public apology. Yeah. Because again, it's that we forget that we use a language that plays well in the global north. And activism, I think, is very much a global north phenomena. And we forget just how influential are things over in China and Russia are at most. So I have a couple of questions that I want to set before we dig into some of these things. These are the questions I had reading this. As an activist and as, you know, a leader who's leading, thank God, a team of, I don't think there's anyone on our team that doesn't have activism work, which is great.

Employee activism as a bucket. Does it include, I want to know. what you're doing about this pressing issue. Does it include also accountability? You know, boy, you were quick to jump on that Black Lives Matter, co-branding logo, but let me look at the stats here in our company around representation, promotion. Does employ activism include, I'd like to have time off to go do this, and I'll make it up somewhere here?

I mean, what else in the bucket? or what is the definition of employee activism? Okay, y'all can't see John, but he's laughing. Megan, do you want to jump in there and then you move on to the taxonomy of our six types? Oh, yeah. So this is one of the most interesting questions, Brenne, was to ask, I mean, thousands of people,

when I say the word activist, what comes to mind, what images? And this is something that really does vary across the world. And activism brings, all sorts of things to people's minds. And in fact, this is one of the things that we advise leaders think about first of all. It's like, okay, as a leader, just pause a second. When I say the word activist, what happens? And what we find is that some people go, okay, really positive, change, dynamic, influence, courage, got all these positive words. And then what you'll find that some people do is like, oh, protest.

violence, you know, it's got very negative connotations. Disruption. Disruption. My favourite is Marxist is in there. Yeah, we've had all sorts of things. And it's actually really important for people to just pause, first of all, in this conversation on activism and say, okay, this word means so many things to different people. And of course, there isn't a definition that everybody's agreed on. Something that we came up in our research was we describe employee activism as voices of difference that seeks to influence organizations on wider social and environmental issues. Okay, wait, can you say that again? Yeah, I'll say that again. Tell me how you define it. It's really good. So we define it as voices of difference that seek to influence an organization, their organization,

on wider social and environmental issues. And actually the extra bit of that is, and they are disrupting the status quo, they are disrupting power in the way that they're doing that. And the other thing I would bring in here, which we might refer to a bit later as well, because I love this, you may have heard of Deborah Mayerson and Maureen Scully.

They're two academics. They, back in the 90s, wrote one, wonderful work on a concept that's called tempered radicalism. And they talk about change in organizations. And they say, well, look, you can be radical. And to put it in our language, as activists, as activists, you can go in your organization and you can try and be really radical. So maybe you'll go out and protest. Maybe you'll do something quite explosive. Now, the problem is, is as if you're so radical, the system that you're in might actually spit you out. And you're maybe less able to influence.

So what we sometimes do when we're sometimes seeking change is we temper it. So we seek to, okay, pull back and we act in ways that challenge, but not so much that we get kicked out of the system altogether. And in terms of your question around, does this count as activism? Does this count as activism? Well, everything on that scale counts as activism. And if you're an activist, what you've got to watch and what you've got a choice around, actually, is how radical do I want to be here or do I need to be? If I'm too radical, I might not last. But on the other hand, if I'm too tempered and my radicalism is, you know, oh, by the way, I was just wondering, you know, have you heard of climate change? That might make absolutely no difference in the system whatsoever.

And so I think we've talked to activists that are all along that spectrum and cover all sorts of issues. But there really isn't a single definition. There's no right definition. But what you do need to do as a leadership team in particular is you need to ask one another, what's our definition? And what judgments and assumptions do we hold when we come to this topic? because of course that will colour our response.

Why interrogate? Why do we have to interrogate ourselves as leaders around what our gut reaction is to activism? It ties out back to your, if you haven't got ears. Yeah. So it's this idea of not owning the definition. And let's say I as a leadership group, I'm drawing on some work by some people,

Smythenberg wrote a really snappy paper called the paradoxical conception of group dynamics. You know, just flew off the shell. You can't stop people reading it. But it actually said a really important point, which is in any group, people get recruited into it for their difference. So if I'm an executive team,

I've read the news, I've read about the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matters movement, right, I better find somebody who's well-versed in that. So I invite that different voice into the group. Now, the trouble is that in group dynamics point of terms, in order for that person to stay in the group, to stay credible in the eyes of that executive team

who have not questioned their definition of activism or anything, I have to dial it down. I have to, in fact, go native. And that's the whole point, is that unless the group pays attention to its definition and that it has to do work in order to accommodate this voice of difference,

you don't get anywhere. Jesus, I see this all the time. Oh, my God. I mean, literally, I see this all the time. And that's why I love being external when I do organizational work, because I'm like, this is why you brought me. Like, I don't understand why you're wanting me to tamp it down a little bit. Let me read a couple of examples to you that I thought were so interesting.

And then I have a question for you, and I want to get to your taxonomy. And I love, let me just take a pause and say, I love, hey leaders, a little self-awareness here, interrogate your own reaction to activism before you respond. Like, understand what it means to you so you can understand how you're showing up in these conversations. It's so smart. So a couple of things.

These are examples from your article. In 2020, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of cryptocurrency trading platform, Coinbase, wrote in a blog post, this is quote, I want Coinbase to be laser-focused on achieving its mission. We don't engage here

when issues are unrelated to our core mission. He suggested that employees who wish to be activism focused and wanted the company to be that might be better off elsewhere. 60 people quit.

Base camp, April 2021, CEO Jason, is it freed? Freed. Yeah. Wrote to employees that there would be, quote, no more societal

and political discussions on our company base camp account. explaining that, quote, it became too much. It's a major distraction. This prompted an enormous backlash and roughly a third of Base Camp's employees quit. I'm not making any assumptions about who quit. That's just a hard stop and oh, wow, holy shit.

These people are not messing around. But let me ask a question related. Tell me about the millennials. Well, the millennials make up most of the workforce and what we know about millennials is that they are more likely to hold their organisations to account on the topic of wider purpose. And that's nothing compared to the Gen Zs that are following them. And the Gen Zs are even more likely to expect organisations to play a more participatory role

in wider social and environmental issues. And let's face it, the Gen Zs are the ones that are going to have to clean up some of the mess that's happening at the moment. So of course they're there going, what do you mean we're not talking about climate change here? How can you be running a business and not be engaged in climate change and not think that that is part of our role and responsibility? So there is a generational shift that comes along with the social and environmental issues that we are now facing. So it's certainly a change. And of course, for some perhaps older managers and leaders, this is quite a turn. You know, they didn't go to business school and learn about gender and race equity and climate change. You know,

they learn about shareholder value. And sometimes we have leaders that feel quite unpracticed. in conversations around this wider area. And actually, we're asking a lot of managers and leaders in many ways to be able to respond to some of these questions. But one thing that we mentioned earlier is, rather than the leader thinking, oh, God, I've got to have a solution here, I've got to decide what to do, there is a need to lean forward and be able to say,

this is a really wicked problem. I don't know. Let's get around the table and let's just, can we just, share information and start understanding what we're facing here. But as I said, that's a counterintuitive response, and that comes into the taxonomy that we've also written about in the article. There's one of the, I had gone into a really interesting conversation with an old school friend who is terribly senior, one of these big global consulting firms. And so he's a Brit, and he was trying to make sense of what was playing out in the Black Lives Matter movement in the

States and how that was playing out then within the corporate agenda that he was experiencing. And he found himself because, again, he's not as literate in the political sensitivities, the linguistic sensitivities. He took me to one side and said, look, I can't talk to any of my colleagues about this because I know I will be clumsy. And again, that's a one of the, so we've got the silencing of senior executives who, one, because they think they should be expert and should know the answer. And the other one is they're being invited in. into something where they know that they don't have the language or the felt skill about how to even begin to embrace or talk about some extraordinarily sensitive issues that if you get

wrong, you'll have the living daylights trolled out of you. But let me ask you this question. Do we not believe that good leadership is about being a learner, not a knower? You're smiling, John. You have to answer it. Now you're, I wish I could see John. Again, he's laughing, and now he's not only laughing, but he's taking a very deep breath, like that kind of breath. But don't we think about leaders as learners, not knowers? We're into this espoused versus actual divide. We have this thing that the learning organization, for instance, have been knocking around for what, 30, 40 years? 30 years at least, yeah. And it lives for about a nanosecond in any organization I've ever come across. It just has a brief flowering and then goes away.

that in terms of what it takes to learn, this is what makes this all such a tricky subject is this is about fundamental mental constructs. This is about deep held assumptions about how the world works. And I'd say that most of the leadership learning that is encouraged in the Vacklevich stuff is type 1 versus type 2.

So type 1 change, type 1 learning, is the stuff that fits within my established world order, which is it's got to be represented, it's got to have a bottom line impact, I've got to be able to work out a causal connection. The nice thing with the Vaclavich stuff was they identified type 2 change, which is type 2 learning, which is the stuff that doesn't make any sense. And it's like, this is why the diversity and inclusion stuff is so challenging for so many executives, which is I've suddenly got to learn the language of sociology. I've suddenly got to become properly psychologically literate. And I've suddenly got to engage with things like

class conflict, for instance. Now, these are things that I've never encountered before, and I don't even know how to learn about them, because in many ways, I've almost got preconditioned, always the film The Matrix, which is learning as a technical activity that just can be downloaded. And if you think that learning is actually something that happens in relationship, the lovely Joyce Fletcher work about growth in connection stuff, if you think that learning is a social activity rather than something that is individual skills. I think for a lot of executives, that's a huge shift. I don't know, Megan.

Don't have I sort of completely gone off on one there. Wait, I want to pause for a second, and I'm dying to hear what you have to say, Megan. I want to think about this for a second. I guess what I'm wondering right now is, is it about acquiring a sociology, language, or a deeper psychological understanding, or a sociopolitical grasp on class?

Or is the pain point about learning new things that leaders have not had exposure to? This is where I might challenge a little bit. Or is it about unlearning assumptions that prevent us from seeing the humanity in other people in any transactional relationship around these hard issues, if you get caught using the wrong word or the wrong turn of phrase, you could pay miserably.

But in real relational, transformational relationships between leaders and folks, isn't what's really scary for leaders is kind of the shame of privilege or the guilt about not knowing? I just think as an emotions researcher, When I go into organizations, what I see a lot is your activism is something that if I dig in and acknowledge it, I'm going to be faced with grief. I'm going to be faced with guilt.

I'm going to be faced with things I don't want to feel. I don't know. Yeah. I agree. I mean, I think some of these issues open up. areas where that shame and that guilt definitely exist. I think what we need, part of what we need, is a leader to have a kind of insatiable curiosity,

a knowledge, a knowledge that their perspective on the world is their perspective on the world. And rather than panic about that, feel, oh my goodness. So what don't I know? What is it that I can't see? And how can I go and find that out? But it's so easy to say, Brene, and I think what you're getting at is the courage that's involved

in being able to open up territory. and to know that, you know, admit you don't know, but also go into territory which may bring up all sorts of challenges and impossibilities as well. So we can talk about listening so easily, the doing of it, the authentically doing of it, is an entirely different matter. That's interesting. John, what do you think? That's really interesting. It is, I think the shame it was a thing. And actually, I was just remembering a guy called Ben Fuchs, who he did some work on advantage blindness with. And he told us this great story of, you know, some global senior executive who went on these things. And he said, okay, what are all the attributes that give you advantage that have nothing to do with your professional competence? And it was all

to do with, you know, think great things like height, gender, ethnicity, what university you went to, you know, one of the things that gave advantage was did you have a stay-at-home wife, which meant that you could move around the globe and she would, normally she would take care of all those sort of domestic things. And he went and joined in this particular sort of know-your-advantage blindness stuff. And he lined up with everybody else. And at the end of the exercise, he was at one end of the room because he'd taken a step forward every time when you had something that gave you an advantage and everyone else was behind it. And Ben told the story that six months later, the guy phoned him up and said, that was the most.

shameful thing I've really experienced because up until then, he had thought that everything he'd achieved had been solely down to his own efforts. And certainly he worked hard, he was ambitious, he was bright, but it was a real shocker for him to realize quite how much of a head start he had, and it had nothing to do with his hard work or anything like that. Just as a qualitative researcher, I was like, damn, I nerded out on this. This was so good. The six-wee, ways that companies respond to employee activism. So number one, activism, what activism? So this is the first that we looked at the responses that leaders and organizations seem to have had to employ activist voices. And as you say, we identified six kind of categories. The first is

non-existent. So I, for example, was interviewing a chief executive from a big, quite a big organization in Europe. And I asked him about activism. I asked him about where was the organization on things like Black Lives Matter, climate change. And I was a standard because he looked utterly baffled. And this was about a year ago. This wasn't very long ago. And this wasn't very long ago. And he was like, well, you know, it's just not, well, we're not really, it honestly just wasn't on the agenda. So it's kind of what activism? It's not here.

It's just we, what? Why would it be? So that's, that's, that's, exists, believe it or not. So one is non-existent. So what activism made me laugh? I don't know why that made me laugh. I love qualitative. I love thematic analysis where it's named and then parenthetically, there's an example of what

it sounds like. That's like my favorite, like, qualitative trick. Number two, suppression. Expell it before it spreads. Yeah. And this is really interesting. There's the kind of very obvious suppression, you know, we're not going to talk about this. You're not allowed to talk about this. We are focused on our business mission and anything else we won't speak about. And then there's the sort of suppression that happens through avoidance or through this is really uncomfortable or through actually we have a feeling if we speak up about this we're going to be labeled a troublemaker it's that vibe you get in so many organizations that suppresses and and silences whether it's meant to or whether it's inadvertent so suppression is a fairly big category yeah and

you know whether it's overt or covert as an employee when your livelihood depends on it, you know. Yeah. You know. Number three, I've never even heard of this word before. At first I thought it said fascism. And I said, oh, yes. I was so excited.

I'm like, they're going there. But is it facadeism? Yeah. Like putting up a facade? Yeah. You haven't heard the word because we made it up. Damn it. I love that too.

You all are after my own. This is like, these are my people right here. Facadism. Let's just say the right thing. The next is defense engagement. Yeah. Pisses me off. So facadeism is something that we're hearing a lot about,

is we say the right things, but there's no actual action. So it's a facade. And that's where organizations are being called out quite a lot at the moment. And lots of organizations called out around Black Lives Matter. There was an interesting one actually just happened during the Olympics, which is listening to an interview with the CEO of a manufacturer of snowboards. And on the company website, the company said, more than a business. So the good, solid interviewer then said,

so how come you're snowboarding in the Ouija area? What's the company stand on the imprisonment and slave labor of Ouija's? And you could see the poor guy had no idea. Because obviously someone had popped it onto the website and said, look, this sounds good. But he was then going, well, we're a business. And you say, but your website says, we're more than a business. Ooh, man, let me just tell you this.

This is where I tell people all the time when I'm working with companies and they're like, oh, man, we are into the vulnerability thing. I'm like, you got to be really careful because the fastest thing to bite you in the ass is kind of this faux vulnerability. No one likes a liar. If you're not going to care, we respect you more if you just say, look, we don't give a shit about that kind of stuff. We're looking at market cap. We're looking at our investor call. We don't give a shit.

We respect that more than what does that tagline mean exactly? Oh, what tagline? You know, like, facadism, I'm going to start using it. I will send you a quarter every time. I quote you on it. Yeah, and again, Brenny, there's purposeful facadeism. There's genuinely, we're just going to say it, but we're not going to do anything. And then we're going to say it.

And we kind of mean it. But you know what? We just don't get round to doing anything about it. There's that sort of facadeism as well, which again is being called out. And that gets tricky too, because that facadeism can, be very difficult. So I had an incredible conversation with Ico, Bothea, who is a facilitator in our work and does a lot of work at the intersection of kind of daring leadership plus belonging equity representation. And she didn't use the term facetism because she will next week because I'll introduce

it. But she said, when you have things like employee groups like ERGs, but the time that people spin dedicated to leading those is not compensated. So that's facadism. To me, in a big way, like if you say you value something and the currency of the realm around how you value or not value something is money, then I expect to see resources dedicated to it. I expect time to be given to it. So facadeism is sneaky or can be. On that showing dedication of money, we came across a I don't know if you come across a fascinating operation called One Young World, which is a global outfit. They're all under 30, and it's people who want to have a corporate career

and want to be activists. And we just heard too many stories from them of companies saying, yeah, we're going to promote people who take on board these activist things, and then actually when the rubber hits the road, the people who get the promotions are everything are the ones who stick to the knitting and just deliver on the numbers. Stick to the knitting. It's a fascinating organization.

They are trying to push against the facadeism, and that's the generational stuff kicking in as well. I mean, I have a 22-year-old and a 16-year-old, so I'm knee-deep in Gen Z, and I just cannot wait until I'm driving like a Winnie Bego around, visiting grandkids and watching them change everything. Okay, I want to get through these because I want to have time to get through kind of your framework.

Defense engagement, what do the lawyers say, which is you right here, leaders undertake the bare minimum of activities such as training and DEI and reporting on diversity numbers. This is the legalistic, John, you made a reference to this before, kind of like, you know, yeah, boo.

Dialogic engagement, let's sit down, talk, and learn. I'm warming up to these as we get higher in the numbers. So Dialogic, here's what you write. Leaders recognize that their perspective is incomplete and seek out different views and experiences from employees throughout their organization. decisions on social issues are made collectively with employees. I love that.

So there's a big step change. That's where the step change happens between this defensive engagement and then dialogic engagement. There's a real one, suddenly it becomes more proactive. It becomes actually, stop a second. Let's really, I'm now really interested. Let's get together. Let's learn.

There's stuff to be learned and shared here. Let's share some of that information. And let's actually, in many cases, share decision making. In other words, what are we going to do about this? Let's decide. And we're doing quite a lot of research. And how do you create spaces inside, I don't just mean physical spaces. I mean, spaces inside organizations where those sorts of conversations happen.

Because those are the conversations that get squeezed out in our busyness and our seeking to kind of get to the solution really, really quickly. So that's kind of around dialogue. I love that. And the last one, how does that lead to stimulating activism? This is a big one. Let's be the activist. Now, when you say that, I think of Beninjerys,

who y'all mentioned in the article. But is there something that's not as Ben in Jerry's as Ben in Jerry's? Are there any examples? I mean, Patagonia. Who else? Yeah, those two are the postings. are organisations for stimulating activism. And we come across kind of teams or particular individuals that are stimulating activism. But those two are the ones that often come to mind.

And this is where their identity, the organizational identity and the identity of people in leadership roles is as activists. It's sort of proudly worn. And they show it by what's going on in their organisations. So they're promoting activists. They're recruiting activists. They're keeping activists. And as we put in the article, they're sometimes paying the bail for activists. And it's not that we're saying with the taxonomy that you're supposed to get to that stage. I think that's important to say. It's important for organisations to kind of take a pause and say, actually, what is that? What are we actually doing? And where should we? be here. And can I make one really important point on this, Brene? If you ask the more senior

people in an organisation, what's your organisational response to activism? Guess what? They tend to be rather more optimistic than if you ask junior members of an organisation. So in other words, the more senior you get, the more likely you are to say, we're in dialogue. and even we stimulate activism. Whereas when you tend to ask more junior people, they kind of look at you and go, call that dialogue. That's not dialogue.

And that brings up one major area in our research, which is we call the optimism bubble. As you get more senior, you think people are speaking up. You think that you're approachable more than they are and more than you are. So you underestimate the unspoken challenges and differences that are out there. That's kind of a big issue.

It's a big issue because leaders think, you know what? We're doing all right. We're in dialogue. So we don't need to do anything further. We don't have more work to do here. And meanwhile, that antennae that picks up how the organization, the rest of the organization, isn't working. And so you get this rift and we've seen this. with so many organizations we've worked with,

we've got a gap between perspectives, which is a real trap and one to watch out for. God, that scares the shit out of me as a leader. I've got to tell you, for sure. I mean, that can really scare me because I want to sink into everything's good. It's all good. I'm listening.

I'm the most listening person. I'm the listening learner. Defy all of the learning things, you know, but I'm in my game. Okay. I really love this article. And for those of you listening, you'll want to read it. I will link to it. And it's really great because you can buy the PDF.

It's very nominal fee. And you can buy the PDF. I mean, I think it's like seven bucks. I don't know exactly what MIT Sloan's revenue mechanism is, but it's not this article I can tell you because it's inexpensive and accessible. This is the kind of article that would make for an amazing lunch and learn. Let's all read it. Let's talk about it. We're going to end with the act if framework. So this is a framework that y'all came up with this together? Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely.

Okay. We like our mnemonics. And it identifies the factors that affect personal and organizational responses to employ activism. So it's act if, A-C-T-I-F, authority concern, theory of change, and then if identity field. Let's quickly go through, because I really try to keep these dare-to-lead kind of short so people can listen to them on lunches and do them as teamwork. and this is especially good one that we'll push out for that reason. So authority. So the active framework, actually, you can look at it from the activist perspective and also the kind of response to activism perspective.

Love that. A stands for authority. So if you're the activist, one issue to consider is how much authority do I have in this system? Where is status and power? And from a kind of leadership perspective, again, where is authority? where's power and how will that power be exercised? That's a really important part of it. So if I'm in a situation where I have authority, how will I be using that? And we use a quite well-known concept, which is called power over, which is when you kind of compel others to do things, or power with,

which is more around how do I share voice, how do I use my power to amplify others' voices as well? So our authority and status in the system is a big determinant on whether we're on how we'll act as an activist, but also what our response is as well to activism. So I love this so much because I'm not talking to anybody else about organizational change or leadership theory that does not have an active understanding of how power works. Anything that doesn't look at power is bullshit in my mind, just to be honest with you. Like power over, power with, power to, power within. where is power and how is it used? I love this. The other important thing, and we're both heavily

influenced by the French school of thinking on this, Michelle Foucault, and the relationship between power and truth is so important. And we obviously can run a three-day seminar on that, but the whole notion of that somehow what people will say, what counts as truth is somehow separate from power is absolute BS. The point is that power and truth in social settings are completely entwined. And that is why it really matters what senior people say, because they are influencing what counts as real around here. Damn. Boom. And Foucault, like, all in one, like, yes. I knew we wouldn't get through the conversation without John mentioning Foucault. I would hope not. Like, yeah, like Foucault is like the cornerstone of my dissertation. Like, yes,

like truth and power. Who defecchio? Who defuncts? finds what's real here. And then if it's real for you and it's not defined as real, it's crazy making. Okay. See as concern whether the specific issue matters to me, us, or stakeholders, and whether I or we even know whether it matters. There will be more energy for some issues and less for others. Yeah. So I like our caveat on that. So concern is what matters to who in our stakeholders. And don't assume you know that. back to that optimism bubble. One of the biggest traps is that we speak to executive teams

that think they know what their employees care about. But actually, they've just been looking at the Pulse Survey. You know, that doesn't tell you what matters. You have a line in here about the Pulse Survey. It may be even quoting someone else where you said something like, don't say you're listening and then be like, because I read the Pulse Survey. Like, yeah, this is.

good. I've been thinking a lot about in my work, we talk a lot about employees and leaders and values alignment. And I think one of the things that we underestimate is concern alignment. We don't talk about, do my concerns align with the concerns that are getting the space, the time, the funding, the conversation? Like, it's concern is huge. Do you have more Foucault for us, John? Well, I was just thinking, it's interesting you said concern alignment. And part of this is actually, how do you listen, how do you engage with dissonance? Because actually, there are very different priorities. These are value clashes. So it's actually, how do we have difference nice? And actually part of the challenge that I think we really face is

the last, again, last 20, 30 years, we've been hammering on about alignment in organizations. And all it's done is push a whole load of the concerns under the radar. And so there's a whole lot of hidden conflict, which is there. And what we're now doing, I think, is that this conflict is now becoming visible. And as a side on... That's good, right? Yeah. I mean, because it's been rotty.

I tend to think that if concerns sit there and rot people, it means you've got this internal dialogue going on inside you the whole time, which means you're not listening to what else is going on. So at least when things get aired, it means that I'm not having the fight internally. I'm not investing all this energy on keep pretending doing that job of, yeah, I'm going along what everybody else says, but actually inside me, I'm saying this is BS, this is nonsense, this is nonsense. There's some very serious alignment here with Estre Perel and how marriages work about that

kind of underground conflict that gets worked out in really scary ways. Yeah, it's just human systems in general. The conflict needs to come up, so we're not ingesting it and metabolizing it in ways that are really, I love this. All right, let me get to theory of change. you got to have some Foucault for me here, come on, man. Just like, Stella. Shall I read a lead?

We're not being so Fucaldean on that. It's more of a sort of critique of the Milton Friedman stuff, which is to say, do organizations exist independent of society, or are they part of society? And that is, you know, people, and I have a very strong view, I don't understand how an organization cannot be seen as part of society, but there is a considerable body of people

who do have a belief that an institution, and much economic theory is predicated upon the idea of the company, the institution, being basically an independent entity that just operates without external context or external consequence. And that has been the dominant theory. And I think that is what a lot of the activism stuff is beginning to challenge, which is to say, actually, where does an organisation begin and end? Where do I as an employee begin and end? because actually I arrive with all sorts of social experience, all sorts of economic experience.

And traditionally we've said, you leave all your baggage at the door as you walk in. That's the theory of change. And that allows people to get into quite an instrumental approach to change. And then they wonder why, because I've been instrumentalized you into this thing to fit in with this very narrow, bounded view of what an organisation is, then I wonder what's happened to all your discretionary energy. Because I've treated you as an object to be treated as this as a social, a historical being. And then we wonder, well, you're now confused because you don't seem very enthusiastic about this organization, but you're saying, well, I'm not enthusiastic about it,

because it's pretending that it has no wider social purpose. And you create this ersatz purpose instead, which somehow again exists outside of complicated political discourse. Yeah, it's that counterfeit purpose that I think is so, yeah, kind of. this is so good. Identity. So identity from an activist perspective, do I regard myself as an activist? Do I wear that label? Am I proud of that label? We're always quite interesting. Most of the activists we interviewed kind of don't call themselves activists, but we look at them and go, you're so an activist. And they're like, oh no, in order to be an activist, I need to be protesting, or I need to be doing this, that, and the other. Actually, so what's core to how you think of yourself?

I use somebody we say in the article, are you a rule maker or a role taker? Do I fit in? Do I rebel? How do I see myself? And of course, this is also a question for organisations. Do we see our organisation as a rule maker or a rule taker? Do we stick to generally the rules of the game here? Or is our identity, a la Ben and Jerry's, Patagonia, is our identity, is our identity? around being the kind of rebel or being the participative organization in the world and with some of these issues. So identity is, again, I can say that really quickly, but it's a massive question for individuals and organizations to grapple with. The last one in our active and your, not our,

I'm just assert myself, the three of us have been working on this for years. In your active framework is field, what has happened or what's, happening globally, locally, and organizationally that's influencing our agenda and license to operate, whether an issue is prominent in the news and whether we expect to have to pay attention to activists in the future. So what is field? Is this vision? It's what's going on in the world. You know, what is going on right now that affects whether we're going to act or not going to act.

From an organizational perspective, the Black Lives Matter movement is a good example. following George Floyd, the killing of George Floyd, that was going on in the world. That has to impact many leaders' choices around, right, do we take a stand here or don't we take a stand? In different parts of the world, you've got, in South Africa, we've interviewed people that obviously have the history of apartheid, and that, of course, has a bearing on whether they make a stand on race equity issues. the reduction of union power in the UK means has an effect on organisations and power structures that have implications of what we make a stand for and what we think we have to get involved in. So what is going on in the world and what has been going on in history, of course,

affects the choices that we make right now. And similarly, if you're an activist, what's going on in my territory right now? And have I got capacity to act? Do I need to act? Have I got the right opportunity suddenly in front of me to act? So what's happening that affects our choices? You know, and I think, too, I think if people are listening and thinking, you know, like, I lead a small team, I'm not the leader of this multinational corporation that I work for. I think this act if framework is still important. And I'll give you an example.

The day after George Floyd was murdered or the first time we were back together as a team, it was the first thing I talked about as the leader. Because what we were, say here is what a leader brings into the room is allowed in the room. What a leader does not bring in the room is not allowed in the room. And so whether it's Breonna Taylor's murder or it was, if you don't bring that into the room as a leader, it's not like you're, oh, I'm not going to bring it up, but I'm happy if someone else. It doesn't work that way. It's what we bring into a room, especially if there's a power differential, is what's allowed in the room. And if it's another Tuesday at work for you, and that makes me sad?

That after that murder, it's another Tuesday at work for you. But if it is, that is. But for the black people in the room who are afraid for their children and who barely got out of bed and who looked to get another dead person at the hands of police violence, this is not another Tuesday at work. And so I don't want people who are listening to think, this doesn't have to do with me. This has to do with every single one of us. Yeah.

This is huge. I would really emphasize that, Brennan. What we know is that probably the most important thing about whether an employee feels like they can speak up and feels like they're heard is their direct line manager relationship. Say that again. When you ask employees, are you able to speak up around here? Do you have a voice? Do people listen? Yes, of course, it's important what the top.

leaders have said in the press, but actually what it comes down to, how people formulate their response to that question is, what's my manager like? Does my manager, is my manager interested in me and my voice? That's how they come to understand whether they can speak up and whether they get heard and therefore whether they stay and whether they're going to contribute ideas and whether they're going to speak up with a problem that might bring the organisation down. So those line managers listening, it's a big, big, important role. Okay, last word, John. Before we get to the music. It was actually, it was tying back to the way the issues, and I was really struck by this thing

of what either the manager or the leader bring into the room. Because one of the areas we stumbled into was, for instance, the role of domestic abuse. We went into an organization that had about 4,000 people. And they'd suddenly discover, when you look at the stats, how many people are in abusive relationships? You know, it's somewhere between, you know, one in 10, one in 20, but it's a significant number. Yeah.

And it's this idea of that's walking in the door every day. If you've got 4,000 people, you've got tens of people there who are living with the consequences. More worryingly, of course, you've got people who are the abusers in these abusive relations. Perpetrating, yeah. So it's this idea that actually, in terms of what, in the field, you don't know as a manager, and it can be quite scary. Because suddenly, do I have to

become a domestic abuse expert? No, but do I have to realize that how do I make it okay for people to bring up an issue like domestic abuse? And I actually say, there are going to be days where, quite frankly, I can't function at the moment because things are really bad at home. I talk to teachers about this a lot, the number of millions of kids coming back to school after COVID having lost a parent. We got to bring humanity in the room. All right. I want to ask each of you one rapid fire question and then get to your playlist. Okay, ready?

You have to fill in the blank for me. Megan, you're going first. Fill in the blank for me. Vulnerability is. Vulnerability is surrendering to what? what it is to be human. And it's the doorway, actually, to understanding the depth and possibility of human relating,

I think. It's beautiful. I love it. Okay, John, vulnerability is... The word butterfly is coming to my mind. It is that sense of butterfly in the stomach, and it's also that sense of being a butterfly in motion and knowing that around you there is the risk

that some bugger is going to try and pin you down. God, that's beautiful imagery. Thank you both. Okay, so I always give you, you can listen to all the old archives. I always give academics this qualifier. I don't want to run on sentence here. No, semi-colons, m-dashes.

A simple sentence. Megan, you first. Oh, God. Okay. You gave us five songs you can't live without. Santa Maria, which is the music for the tango and shall we dance. Oh my God, we could be best friends. Amazing Grace by Lady Smith Black Mambazo.

Oh, my God. Waterfalls by TLC. I'm smiling. Imagine by John Lennon and dancing in the street by David Bowie and Mick Jagger. In one sentence, what does this playlist say about you? Can I put lots of punctuation in the sentence? Well, aside from being very eclectic, there's all sorts of manners of expression in there, from wonder through to imagination, through to presence, through to sheer passion,

and a big theme on dance. And for me, dancing has always played a really important role in my life. It brings me alive, it brings me into this moment. And so that's a theme there. I gave you a lot of leeway, but that was worth it. I know. I know you did. Thank you. Okay, John, heroes by David Bowie? Oh, hurt by Johnny Cash. You're just flirting with me now.

I want you to want me, letters to Cleo version. Love will tear us apart again by Joy Division. And locomotive breath by Jethro Tull. One sentence. What does this playlist say about you? The bright of the light, the dark of the shadow. And let me tell you how Foucault that actually is. That is just perfect.

He nailed it. That was a lot more succinct, John than me. Foucault meets young in the end. It's so perfect. Thank you all so much for joining us on Dare to Lead. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Brennan. Thank you.

Thank you. And thank you for your good work, and we'll have you back. Oh, yes, please. Look, any conversation that has a mention of Foucault is gold for me. Like, I loved this conversation. I love the thoughtfulness. I do really think we need to think about, you know, is activism really about giving voice to the voiceless

or is the bigger problem ears for the earless? And, you know, as someone who's been an organizer and activist for a long time, I think the ears part is way tougher. You can find Megan and John's book, speak up, say what needs to be said and hear what needs to be heard everywhere you want to buy books. Are you like to buy books? We love the Indies.

And you can find the article that we talked to. about today leading in an age of employee activism on the MIT Sloan Management Review site. All the links that you need for books and articles are on the Brunet Brown.com episode page for this podcast. Really appreciate you being here. These are the conversations I think we need to be having. I'm so grateful that I get to have them with y'all. We are definitely a learning community here to get it right, not to be right. And I'm grateful. Stay awkward, brave and kind. Deer to Lead is produced by Brunei Brown, Education and Research Group. Music is by The Sufferers.

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