A friend of ours, “Karisma,” last month attended a two-day course on lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) issues in the workplace, and left with her head spinning. What happened may surprise you.
She’s a counselor in a New York City high school, and two colleagues attended the learning program with her. We connected when she was somewhat distressed shortly after the seminar; the primary issue, in her words, was:
I tried to ‘come out’ at work during a two day training and it was a disaster for me. Internally I felt so upset I cried all the way to the ferry, obviously not a good look. I’m better now than I was, but I am still thinking about Monday and my re-entry to work.
Like many people, Karisma has preferred to separate aspects of her work life from her personal life, so the struggle to reveal her self to her coworkers is real. Still, by thinking hard about her actions and feelings in the context of her job, she’s well equipped to reap the rewards of revealing and engaging her whole self at work. Let’s look at how the events unfolded.
Karisma relates how the opening go-around began: Read more →
The foundation of our civilization is shifting. Feel it? NEW New York City, or Non-traditional Employment for Women in NYC, is paving the way (couldn’t help it) towards ground-breaking (stop us!) change in the limits we all place around professional development. Check out the organization’s mission:
Founded in 1978, NEW is a sector-based workforce development program that prepares women for careers in the construction, transportation, energy, and facilities maintenance industries. NEW focuses on skilled, unionized jobs in the trades with starting wages averaging $15 per hour, benefits, and a path to higher-wage employment.
Totally hot! Not only is the promise of career advancement exciting, this is an organization that clearly encourages every member to bring her whole self to work. In the construction field, we’re talking about revealing and engaging the full extent of your strength, stamina and dexterity, plus so much more.
Now women aren’t the only ones pursuing less traditional occupations. There’s an increasing number of men taking up the role of C.E.O. support system, also known as “husband of the C.E.O.” From the New York Times story on the men who support women C.E.O.s:
Asked at a Barnard College conference what men could do to help advance women’s leadership, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the landmark “Men and Women of the Corporation,” answered, “The laundry.”
When women and men eagerly take on non-traditional pursuits, we all benefit. These pioneers demonstrate the hard-won fulfillment and freedom that can come with eschewing the trappings of gender.
Watch the stories of some of New York City’s strongest:
This video almost brings tears to our eyes. It’s a shining example of bringing your whole self to work, for sure.
One of the more poignant stories we know about organizational dynamics goes like this:
A Black man in his mid-30s was hired as a business development executive in a large consulting firm. On his first day of work, his boss, a White man in his early 50s, said to him, “I’m glad you joined our team. Although I don’t want you to think that you were hired because of your race.”
To which he replied, “Why not? You were.”
Whether we’re comfortable admitting it or not, we all notice physical characteristics of the people around us, including:
skin tone
height
body shape
hair texture and color
nose width
fullness of lips, and
size, shape and color of eyes.
From this data, we make inferences about individuals’ gender, race and ethnicity. And from these assumptions we often form conclusions about one’s competence, work ethic, and likeability, for example. Indeed bringing your whole self to work involves having conscious awareness of how your gender, race, and ethnicity — plus other salient parts of your identity — impact your work.
Gender, according to Mr. Palmisano, did not figure into Ms. Rometty’s selection.
“Ginni got it because she deserved it,” Mr. Palmisano said, using the informal first name by which she is known to friends and colleagues. “It’s got zero to do with progressive social policies,” Mr. Palmisano added.
Just like the protagonist suggests in the story above, why wouldn’t gender be among the multiple multi-faceted factors that play into the selection of a chief executive?
Palmisano seems to be saying that Rometty’s promotion is not an affirmative action-related decision, which will ultimately help authorize her in her new leadership role.
We empathize with his need to be politic. Still, it would deepen workplace conversations if everybody acknowledged the role that gender often plays in hiring decisions. Not to mention provide significant relief in knowing the truth.
Up next: How gender impacts the world of journalism.
Who did you picture? Perhaps a White, physically capable, probably straight, man? If you did, it’s not totally your fault. In part because there’s an image of one to the right.
As consumers of media, we’re regularly fed subtle and powerful messages of what executive leadership looks like. Bill Keller (right), former executive editor of the New York Times, was recently referenced in the New Yorker as follows:
With his square jaw, neatly parted gray hair, dark suit, and pocket kerchief, Keller on this day could have passed for what his father was, the chairman and C.E.O. of Chevron.
With this physical description, he’s a natural ringer for a chief executive of a global corporation making several billion dollars in annual profits, including last year?
The picture of Keller immediately continues, with a rub:
Yet when he stepped to the microphone his voice quavered, and he occasionally paused to restrain tears.
His bone structure, fine hair, and formal dress could link Keller to the role of multinational chief executive, yet he cried, so no behemoth conglomerate chairmanship for him!
The additional message suggests that powerful executive men don’t express tender emotions.
These ideas reach us in a place under the conscious level, and they sometimes come from an unconscious place in the writer. Is the New Yorker writer Ken Auletta aware of his myopic view of executive leadership?
This description of Keller comprises just a few sentences within a 10,000 word essay, so it’s easy to miss the underlying implications. It’s one of numerous written messages we take in regarding who’s fit for leadership in our society.
If you were diagnosed with breast cancer, how would you raise the issue at work? It’s a painful scenario to imagine, and yet it’s something thousands of cancer survivors have done, including two prominent television journalists.
Linda Hurtado, a health reporter for WTFS in Tampa Bay, Florida, in a recent newscast tearfully announced she had breast cancer and would undergo a bilateral mastectomy to prevent its spread. On the air she poignantly grappled with bridging her personal journey with her professional work. She said:
I was diagnosed with breast cancer about two weeks ago… I’ve struggled since then with what I should say to all of you… How much to share, if I should share anything at all… And now I’m going to be gone for a while. I’m the health reporter, it’s breast cancer awareness month, and over the last 17 years I’ve asked so many of you to share your truth with me, so I can’t just disappear for a while without sharing mine with you.
She comes out in part to align her life with what she espouses in her work as a health reporter, and in part to deal with the practicality of her subsequent temporary absence.
In 2007, Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts also came out at work with breast cancer. She shaved her hair on television so the world could witness the loss that can accompany the disease. In the video below, she relates:
When you’re first diagnosed, one of the first thoughts is about…the side effects of chemotherapy. And the one side effect that comes to mind, just like that, is one of the most visible: loss of hair.
There’s nothing to be ashamed about. It’s not like I’m trying to fool people by wearing the wig, because in the line of work that we are in, we don’t want to be distracting people from our story and what we’re talking about.
Roberts works openly with the public nature of her job in our lookist society. See the moving video for yourself:
Roberts and Hurtado are brave to reveal themselves so nakedly, and in doing so they help educate millions of people about the early detection and treatment of breast cancer. Even more important, they serve themselves by coming forth with their truth, and thus from a situation that weakens some physical capacity, they derive strength.
We could also call this post “Come Out at Work: With Depression, Part 2″ as we uncover more about the positive attributes of mental illness at work, now as it relates to leadership.
Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi, author of A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2011), wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal about the benefits of mental illness, namely depression, for people in leadership roles. He writes:
In business, for instance, the sanest of CEOs may be just right during prosperous times, allowing the past to predict the future. But during a period of change, a different kind of leader—quirky, odd, even mentally ill—is more likely to see business opportunities that others cannot imagine.
Ghaemi sheds light on the nature of depression, in particular, relative to leadership greatness:
Depression has been found to correlate with high degrees of empathy, a greater concern for how others think and feel. In one study, severely depressed patients had much higher scores on the standard measures of empathy than did a control group of college students; the more depressed they were, the higher their empathy scores… Depression seems to prepare the mind for a long-term habit of appreciating others’ point of view.
He then looks at the example of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who attempted suicide in his adolescence and experienced severe depressive episodes as an adult:
Nonviolent resistance, King believed, was psychiatry for the American soul; it was a psychological cure for racism, not just a political program. And the active ingredient was empathy.
As a society, we can help ourselves by removing the taboo associated with having depression. And as an individual, if you’re in a leadership role and live with depression, it’s sounding increasingly wise not to spend energy hiding it. Rather, determine how to overcome any embarrassment about being depressed so you can leverage what’s natural in you and become a better leader.
What gets in your way of coming out as depressed at work?
Revealing your internal world on the job is usually a product of your own efforts. Your environment can play a part in your opening up, too, and some organizations are better at this than others.
Enter Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) contribution to the “It Gets Better” Project, started by Dan Savage to help prevent the suicide of teenagers and young adults who feel threatened because of their sexual identity.
Employees of Apple have created a truly heartfelt video, one that dares to depict the pain–and tears–of coming out to oneself and to others. In doing so, they’ve produced a powerful recruiting tool, as elements of Apple’s culture are fully on display.
What company values are inherent in the 6-minute segment?
Community service. Apple dedicated financial, personnel, and technological resources to offer their take on a societal problem.
Verbal ability. Everybody is so well-spoken, to be a member of the organization is to have top-notch oral communication skills.
Integration of multiple identities. Within the lesbian, gay, bi and transgender population at Apple, we see diversity in visible attributes such as race, age, gender and ability. It sounds like every individual’s voice is heard, too.
In this manner, the executive leadership encourages employees to “bring it.” Bring your invisible identities, bring your life stories, bring the intensity of your feelings–so profound!–and bring the corresponding tears, too. The prompt to bring all of your strengths and vulnerabilities must bring about a certain freedom in employees. Now when was the last time you felt free at work?
Indeed the open culture pays off. Apple maintains legions of consumers who breathlessly await the launch of the next uber-cool product, the iPad2 has been an instant best-seller, and the stock currently hovers around $330 a share.
UPDATE 5/2/11: Even though in 2010 Apple took over Microsoft as the world’s most valuable technology company, in the first quarter of 2011 it surpassed Microsoft in net income, too. Not surprising from a company that encourages employees to leverage their full humanity on the job.
A friend of ours, “Karisma,” last month attended a two-day course on lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) issues in the workplace, and left with her head spinning. What happened may surprise you.
