Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Steve Kempster—the researcher Nicole cited for his work on good dividends for business—co-authored a book on small business growth through leadership development. It’s LEADing Small Business. You can find it at https://amzn.to/47mPUPv.

Robert Greenleaf is one of the founders of modern servant leadership, as referenced by Nathan. His seminal book on the topic is Servant Leadership; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/47obe7g, Kindle at https://amzn.to/3vj5AFX, and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3vh4GtA.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Jilly Truit murder mysteries by Beverley McLachlan:
  • Full Disclosure — https://amzn.to/46TxW6Q (paperback) https://amzn.to/46VDL3Q (audiobook)
  • Denial — https://amzn.to/46YCbhs (paperback) https://amzn.to/3GJc0AA (audiobook)
• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole
• Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
• Own the AI Revolution by Neil Sahota

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Nathan Eva is a Fulbright Scholar (2021), an Associate Professor at Monash University in Australia, and the Co-Director of Engagement for the Department of Management at the Monash Business School. His research examines follower-first leadership approaches that deliver organisational performance combined with inclusive and supportive workplaces. His peer-reviewed work appears in international outlets such as The Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Human Resource Management. His article on Servant Leadership in The Leadership Quarterly is the most downloaded and the most cited article in their journal since 2017 and his article on Psychological Safety in Human Resource Management Review received the journal’s Scholarly Impact Award for the most impactful article (2017-2022).

Nicole Ferry is an Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), where she draws on her background in critical cultural theory to explore the ideological and gendered discourses of leadership and leadership development in a variety of contexts. She has published in the Journal of Business Ethics, Leadership, Gender Issues, and the Academy of Management Proceedings. Her current research focuses on the competitive and cultural dynamics of the leadership industries and the critique of popularized leadership narratives and fashions. Since arriving at CBS, she has joined the Bowline initiative, which connects stakeholders in the Copenhagen restaurant industry with scholars and students to develop new forms of action research, learning, and collaborative engagement.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] Welcome. This is Innovating Leadership Co-Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. We’re recording this interview from the 2023 International Leadership Association Global Conference in Vancouver.

ILA is celebrating its 25th year of impact this year. Today we’ll discuss leadership development with Nathan Eva and Nicole Ferry. Nathan’s a Fulbright Scholar and co-director of Engagement for the Development of Management at Monash Business School, and Nicole is an assistant professor at Copenhagen Business School.

So welcome to both of you. We’re gonna start out with some of your work that explores developing collective leadership capacity rather than individual. Let’s start with why do we care about collective capacity? [00:01:00]

Nathan: Sure thing. Thank you, uh, so much for having us. We really appreciate being here. One of the things that really drew me to looking at collective capacity is that we focus on individual leadership development.

Yet we know with a lot of the problems that we have today in organizations in government, in non-for-profits, they require more than one leader, not one person. All the skills that they, um, need to have to manage things like new COVID-19 crisis. So when we’re looking at collective leadership development, how do we ensure that a group of leaders each has the capacity to lead the collective teams, be able to lead in particular areas and be able to work together.

Sometimes this is as simple as being able to pass that leadership baton from one person to the next. Other times. That’s going to be working really closely as a collective team to really hitting that sort of teamwork element. They’re able to achieve more than one individual cap.

Nicole: So what he said, and I’m really much more interested in this collective idea [00:02:00] of leadership to move beyond the individual because I think that fundamentally leadership and in organizational context, it’s a lot about relationships and how you’re interacting and moving and building with others.

And so I am interested in collective leadership development. And thinking about how you move through space with others and thinking about power, relationships, thinking about diversity and privilege and difference. And so if you just do individual based leadership development, you can miss a lot of those things where I think power dynamics are fundamental to how we navigate organizational spaces and work life.

And so doing leadership development from a more collective or relational perspective allows you to get at some of those relationships more clearly than just situating leadership always within an individual.

Maureen: A lot of our work is companies tailored programs. It’s been amazing to see the impact. Not to say that we’re brilliant, but working with folks across their teams, they develop common language, but they really start to build cross-functional teams.

They tear down silos. They [00:03:00] build, to your point, personal relationships with each other where the structure previously may have supported. Adversarial our team versus your team, or our department versus your department, and really create a cohesion across the leadership teams where they start working for common purpose.

I wanna make the distinction that often the lack of common purpose is structural. And these programs help them move beyond the structure. And some cases an outcome is they change the structure to support more cohesion rather than keeping in place something that is outdated.

Nathan: Can I pick up on something?

Mm-hmm. That you were talking there. One of those things that makes this work, so if we’re talking about collective leadership development or any leadership development is the structure of the organization. We can spend millions, billions of dollars taking leaders or collectives, leaders out into leadership training.

But if they’re walking back into an organization that doesn’t allow them to engage in that particular type. So you are talking about power sharing through there. If your organization is still set up in silos, if it’s still set up in one. [00:04:00] Team is working on one site, another team’s working on another site, and they have no clear communication channels.

All of that great work that you might do in leadership development is all for naught because the organization structure strategy, the way it’s set up, is going to stop those things coming through. Mm-hmm. And Nicole talked really nicely about. Power dynamics as well. And if you can’t address power dynamics through gender, race diversity as well, all of this training you might do mm-hmm.

Is still not gonna have an impact.

Nicole: Yeah. And fundamentally also then why you have to have a sustained kind of development. I mean these kind of one-off particularly, you know, in the mm-hmm. Diversity world, these kind of one-off unconscious bias trainings we know are not. Effective. I think it’s the same in terms of like leadership development.

You can’t just take people out into the woods, have them spend five hours climbing trees and say like, we’ve solved leadership. And so having a sustained investment, and that takes organizational buy-in as well as like for the people themselves. But you have to sort of doing these things over the long term because you’re working with human beings who are messy and maybe set in their ways, like their [00:05:00] habits and so mm-hmm.

You really have to have, as Nathan was saying, some kind of organizational structure. Yes,

Maureen: I’d love to get paid to climb trees and do ropes courses early in my career. That really was what I wanted to do. And for the reasons you suggest, it ended up not being what I do. To your point, humans are messy.

Nicole: Mm-hmm.

Maureen: It takes a while to change our meaning making. I can compel people to change behavior short term. Yeah. Especially in medical situations where people get sick. Short term behavior changes often. Long term. Yeah. Far less often.

Nicole: Yeah. It takes a long time to transition people out of the mindset that leadership is an individual skillset.

I teach classes on leadership and they come in and they think that I’m going to educate them on the seven steps that they need to do to become leaders. And we do this exercise, uh, myself and a colleague, Eric Guthy, where we just ask students, what is leadership? So we say, what is leadership? And then we just let ’em go and discuss and they come back with exactly what you’d expect.

It’s like an individual [00:06:00] who has a goal and influence and moves people towards achieving that goal, right? We didn’t ask them what is a leader? But that’s what they answer over and over and over again. They’re always situating. We asked them, what is leadership, right? And we also didn’t ask them what is a good leader, but they’re always giving positive answers.

And so it sort of unmasks that we have this very strong discourse about leadership being a good thing and being an individual thing. And so to change people’s mindsets to think like, well, leadership could be good or bad. But it could also exist within a group dynamic within relationships, or is a process a process of socially relating versus an individual person making a decision?

It’s, it’s a lot to change.

Nathan: Do you think that’s because we see leadership so much as positionality, as leadership, as a position.

Nicole: I do. I think it’s very much tied to that and also just how, what we see in movies and books and all the same movies, you know, it’s like it’s Gladiator. It’s not like Gladiator and his team, you know?

Maureen: Well, and it does [00:07:00] seem that societally we are starting to move toward acknowledging succession and co-leadership. I think Lencioni talks the first team, and the idea that especially in the C-Suite, my responsibility is to my colleagues around the table, not to my functional department. And as soon as I move out of, I have my department, you have your department, you have your department, and we’re hitting against hitting our numbers and giving people raises then.

If I’m committed to the vision, then what does that look like as a leadership team when I show those videos to my clients? It seems like invariably that’s a new idea.

Nathan: Mm-hmm.

Maureen: It’s a brilliant new idea, and this has been, this is not new.

Nathan: It’s actually when we introduce the concept of collective leadership, whether we’re introducing it at an undergraduate, a graduate mm-hmm.

In corporate training. For most people who have had a global Northwestern education, it is like, what are you trying to tell me? This concept is so far [00:08:00] away from what I am used to and just the pushback you get, which is really odd. I’m very, very lucky to be able to teach into a lot of indigenous masters programs, work with a lot of different groups.

Being in Australia, and you see the ones who just get this like, yes, this is what myself, my family, my ancestors have been doing for tens of thousands of years. Of course, this is a natural way to lead. Being in a global Northwestern society, this idea of an individual leader just does not compute with me.

And so there is so much knowledge that we have from First Nations, so here in Canada, America, Australia, for example, that can inform our leadership practice. And the more and more that we’re engaging with different groups and engaging with different ideas of leadership, it’s just going to make us stronger.

Maureen: I wanna build on something you said, Nicole, that. People come in thinking you’re gonna give them the checklist. When we do training, I have a similar, like people will decide it wasn’t a good training because they didn’t walk out with the check sheet. Versus [00:09:00] I build self-awareness. I realize that I’m the instrument doing the leading.

I wonder how you navigate that as you’re building programs and critiquing programs.

Nicole: So a lot of the leadership development work that I do is deeply tied to diversity work as well.

Maureen: Okay.

Nicole: So when I’m building collective capacity, or I’m talking about leadership development, I’m also fundamentally doing inclusion or social justice leadership development because I, I’m not to take off topic, but I fundamentally believe that if you’re doing leadership development in the current culture, you cannot have a leadership development that doesn’t touch on power, privilege, and difference.

Just as much as people wanna say they’re a leader in seven steps, they would also like seven steps to solve racism. If we could do that, we would’ve done that already. You know? So bulk of these things about like thinking about yourself and thinking about in relation to others. They take time and space, then self-reflection.

No. I try to always situ it that they have to do self-reflection in relation to broader systems. So it’s never just, I think about me, Nicole, and who I am as a [00:10:00] Pisces, you know, in American Health, but it’s also me as a. White cis woman in relation to a broader context and what that sort of grants me and how I get to see the world and the world sees me.

That’s a really super unsatisfying leadership development course for people who would just like to get in, learn that like these are their negotiation tactics in this. But again, I think I do my best to situate it in relationship building and thinking about like you don’t just instantly just make a friend.

I mean, it sort of takes time and patience and it’s sustained over the long. Course, and most of them can eventually see that if they continue to do the work and always situate themselves within the broader context, that that does then connects them to leadership and to building different relationships that sort of carry into the future.

But I’m probably super unsatisfied to most of the leadership development people that I, I’ve worked with. Yeah.

Nathan: It separates the first one, getting people to the point where they believe they can be a leader. Mm-hmm. So, obviously you work with undergrads. I work [00:11:00] with undergrads as well. And you know, when we work with high school or secondary college students, there is a lot of, I see leaders out there, they don’t look like me.

Therefore, who am I to be a leader? Who am I to engage in leadership? And so what I try and do is if I’ve got them for an elongated period of time, start working on that first start to break down. Um, and Nicole, talk beautifully about it. Break down what we think about leadership and try and help people get to the point where they’re starting to feel, yeah, I have the self-efficacy to feel that I’m a leader.

Then start to build on that and going, okay, so here’s the skills that you can use from your toolbox. I like that you use this word unsatisfying because when you go into an organization and an organization wants leadership development training, you’ve got a whole heap of people who are in positions of leadership who have that belief already.

It’s like, oh yeah, I just want something for my toolkit around negotiational, how to deal with a troubled employee a lot of the time. If we’re trying to do that, absolutely they’re gonna be satisfied because Aha, fantastic. I’ve walked away with, you know, the ability to do X, but we haven’t [00:12:00] actually solved some broader issues that they have deep down in terms of their own leadership psyche, how they see followers, how they see their work, how they see how their work influences community.

I love getting to get engaged in that messy work of leadership, but often organizations don’t want paid to do the, uh, messy work of leadership. They just want you to do the shiny stuff. Yeah,

Maureen: exactly. I have the image of camping and a tent that’s built with poles all the same size, but I set it on the side of a hill and then my tent’s gonna be kind of crooked, especially if it rains without a level surface.

Any of these great skills will provide suboptimal results. Not no results, but certainly not solve the underlying business problems that many people are trying to solve with negotiation skills or conflict management skills. Then they wonder if the training was bad,

Nathan: not wanting to platform any. Bad leaders right now, but um, we do see quite a few negative immoral leaders out there who have some pretty strong leadership skills, have some pretty [00:13:00] strong charismatic skills that you go, yeah, there needed to be a lot of character based training that went into this before, that being able to develop these specific skills that are having some pretty negative impacts on people.

Maureen: Let’s pivot slightly. How do you know what’s good leadership training? Good being, it actually delivers the ROI that the organization needs. And I think we’ve just pointed to one challenge that many people are trying to buy a spot solution to a bigger problem. And even that some of it is delivered in a way that doesn’t produce the results that they’re looking for.

Nicole: There’s two important things to take up. The first is there’s a lot of airport book, pop psychology, leadership stuff out there, like not research or evidence-based informed work, right? Mm-hmm. But more of what I, in a lot of my work, I call like a quasi therapeutic sort of approach to leadership, which is very much like in the same vein as sort of self-help, right?

And self-development, but not maybe informed by like psychological research, but more informed by like the 50 interviews we did [00:14:00] with 50 CEOs. And those are everywhere, and those are popular, and those give you the satisfactory thing that you’re looking for because it’s got 12 easy steps and you follow these.

Right? Avoiding those is maybe a good first step, and I’m sorry to everybody whose business I’ve just lost, but I think looking for more evidence informed. Practice is really good, but it’s also looking for development programs that we talked about that are like sustained over time, that are built on research that maybe don’t do the satisfying stuff instantly.

So that’s one. So kind of being a critical consumer of leadership I think is really important considering that everybody thinks they can do leadership and everyone can be a leader, and that’s be its own dangerous narrative. The other thing is exactly what Nathan said earlier, which is that it doesn’t matter what program you buy or what leadership development thing you do, if your organizational space is not ready to make the changes that need to be made, then it doesn’t, it’s not even about what you buy.

It also matters very much like the structure and the environment that you’re in. Whether anything that you do in terms of [00:15:00] leadership development will matter.

Nathan: Picking up on what you are saying when I get asked this question, I always go take a look at how people sell that leadership development program.

Maureen: Generally, all leadership programs are going to be rated highly

Nathan: in satisfaction because it’s about you and there’s nothing more important than you. And so, oh, I’ve had all this time focused on me. Of course, I’m gonna rate this highly. And generally there will be some beautiful quotes saying that this was the greatest thing since The Beatles ask, what has changed?

Have they done pre and post tests? Have they looked at things, you know, six months down the line, a year down the line? Have they asked the followers of these leaders what changes have happened? If we were going to look at publishing any leadership research on any leadership development, we need to demonstrate actual real change, behavioral change, performance change, attitude change.

If people are trying to sell these leadership programs to you, I’d be asking those questions. What has changed and how can you demonstrate that?

Nicole: Have the demographics changed in the top management team, for example, right? [00:16:00] Are there more women or people of color moving up in the ranks post this kind of thing, like that would be something I’d look for.

Maureen: Absolutely. Just thinking of one of our clients who have seen dramatic behavioral changes, unfortunately occasionally departures from the organization if it’s not moving at the pace that they wish, which isn’t what we put in the brochures, but this gets back to the foundation. If we create the expectation that this is what effective leadership looks like and your leaders aren’t doing it.

Then your most marketable leadership talent

Nathan: will go where they are working with leaders who are willing to make those changes. And I think organizations need to not be afraid of people leaving. It’s okay to lose people because they’re not fitting your culture. You’re not gonna hire people that don’t fit your culture.

And it’s okay as people build up as leaders and you’re like, Hey. They were good for us early on, but they’re not good for us where we are going now. That’s okay. It’s also okay that you’ve developed your leaders and they’re going on to other organizations. That’s fantastic that you’ve been able [00:17:00] to build these individuals up.

They might not have growth left in your organization, but they can go work for, maybe they’re different suppliers for you. Maybe they’re different partners. Maybe they go off and have these experiences at different organizations, maybe competitors, and then they’re able to come back and give you, um, stronger knowledge.

It’s okay to invest in people that might not be there five, 10 years from now.

Nicole: The cultural fit thing is really interesting too. There’s been a lot of studies on like cultural fit can be used to exclude certain kinds of, so I would say too, if they aren’t a part of your cultural fit or like eventually you know they’re leaving, also self-reflecting on like what is the fit that I have and is it inclusive for a lot of people?

There was a great story from my previous university, Washington State. They put their money where their mouth was and they decided to get more faculty of color out to WSU because it’s a rural area, predominantly white university. And so they really went out and hired a lot of faculty of color and got them there and within five years they had all left and it was because they didn’t adjust their [00:18:00] cultural fit or do anything within their space to make these really talented professors feel at home.

So your cultural fit is also not just something that you need people to fit into, but I think you also have to self-reflect on like what does that fit and how am I losing excellent leadership capacity because of the decisions I’m making about what the norms are in the environment?

Nathan: Great point.

Maureen: That takes us back to the Intacct leadership programs when we add new people to the organization.

One, including them very quickly in programs so that they feel like they are included and so that their concerns

Nicole: Yeah.

Maureen: Are integrated into the culture that, that they’re being addressed. Not because they’re a troublemaker or a squeaky wheel, but

Nicole: Right.

Maureen: They’re part of the team that’s running the organization

Nicole: and to Nathan’s point earlier that they see themselves as a, can be leaders in, in all that.

I think that’s very important.

Maureen: I’m curious about some of the work, Nathan, you’re doing with First Nations people, because as you said, growing up in more of a collective environment. Can you [00:19:00] share what we can take away from their wisdom that many of us, especially. Folks coming out of North America just aren’t socialized that way?

Nathan: That is a really good question, and I’m gonna preface all of my answers by saying that I am white. I’m coming to this space as a learner, and my role within these education programs is to bring that leadership professor angle. I have great First Nations lecturers who I work with, uh, throughout that. So everything I’m gonna say is through that particular lens.

A couple of things here. One, I think there is this notion of how we look after each other and look after the land that we have. The way which is described to me is mob, looking after mob, how we’re able to develop each other, how we’re able to look after each other, and not just professionally within that workplace, but also personally understanding that things are tough at home.

Our First Nation, people in Australia. Have gone through generations of trauma that has been caused by white colonialism, [00:20:00] um, in Australia. Understanding that a lot of mob die young and looking after people who are going through, sorry, business. One of the things that I, I think we can get better at as organizations is giving people that space to grieve, giving people that space to process what’s going on.

The other part of that is that impact around community. The organizations that we have, the businesses that we have. It isn’t solely about making money. The whole point of having business is to help community. How do we help strengthen and grow the communities around us? And how am I using my business, my organization, the role that I’m playing in my organization to help the community around me, whether that be local, state based, or more Australia based.

Maureen: Is that sentiment

Nathan: of community and corporate profit common, or is that an emerging belief for business more generally? I would like to think that we’re slowly moving towards this idea of how we’re building community, but I don’t think we’ve moved there [00:21:00] as quickly as we think we have. I would say even pre pandemic, I felt we were getting a lot closer.

It almost feels like we’ve gone into the pandemic and coming out of it. We’ve just been so focused on ensuring business still exists that that idea of helping build community seems to be more secondary, which is interesting to me. We’ve talked about corporate social responsibility programs and whether they are good for business or whether they ’cause business is actually looking to actually do good for the community.

And I’m starting to wonder, coming into post COVID where this, a lot of CSR programs are purely just talk rather than actually helping the community.

Nicole: Yeah, I wonder that all the time. Of course there’s pinkwashing and woke washing and greenwashing and you know, all sorts of things that you know you need to be suspicious of.

I think within organizations, I will say that I have more and more hope within the leadership studies community in terms of. Trying to move their developing leaders towards understanding leadership as more than just a way to boost profit. [00:22:00] So Steve Kempster, I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work, but he’s got this great stuff on good dividends and he essentially just breaks down that, of course, as an organization you have the profit, but you also have.

Community. You have all these kinds of ways that you can see as successful for your organization. And so just changing the mindset, I think, within organizations to see that there’s a lot more than just the bottom line. More and more leadership studies are moving towards helping contribute to that narrative as well.

Whether not organizations are taking it up is a different thing, which just comes back again to like the structures that they have in place, but it’s at least gaining some traction.

Maureen: The idea of conscious capitalism in the US gained some traction. I dunno how much shit.

Nicole: Yeah. And if that’s an oxymoron to it,

Maureen: it’s not

Nathan: just profit, it is profit and community and employees and all other stakeholders.

I’m a servant leadership scholar and I look back to Robert Greenleaf’s original work on servant leadership, and he talks about the importance of leaders [00:23:00] being able to lead their organiz. So they make profits so they’re able to help communities and help followers and help broader society. There is a imperative and importance for organizations to still be profitable, to be able to do these things.

Absolutely, and I am at least hopeful that maybe through a lot of pink washing, greenwashing, et cetera, that maybe it just becomes so natural of what we do, that it gets in, that it does get ingrained whether it’s deliberate or not. At least. At least something’s happening.

Maureen: What do you imagine? Is possible for the field of leadership development and required in this very complex time.

Nathan: That is a really, really big question. I’m given a lot of hope when I start to see the different types of leadership programs that are starting to emerge in the different leadership research around development that starts to emerge. I’m the fundamental belief that. The problems that we are in right now will not be solved by our traditional leadership curriculum that is [00:24:00] very 1980s based.

Very white male, MBA based. I’m really excited about the different organizations and different scholars who are looking at specific gender-based leadership development programs. L-G-B-T-I-Q-A, leadership development programs, um, indigenous, uh, leadership programs that are starting to address what it means to do leadership in.

A female form in a black female form, in an indigenous non-binary form. And they are just beautiful programs where they’re able to talk about different leader identities. How we show up, how we address these barriers and how we work with organizations to reduce barriers and reduce stigma and engage in different forms of leadership.

Acknowledge that leadership looks different to different people, and that different types of leaders are needed for different situations. So I think that we can push forward with leadership thinking, and I think we can push forward with leadership development, but it is going to require a whole of [00:25:00] system change.

We need to change as universities and how we educate leaders, that needs to trickle down into how we’re doing it in high schools and how we’re doing it in primary schools. Because when our first implicit leadership assumptions are generally coming when we’re very, very young and looking at the leaders up there and saying, who is the leader?

Who isn’t? What are the leader, those leader behaviors? What are the leader behaviors of, you know, a school captain of a junior school? And we need to start to shift all of those mental models.

Maureen: Many of our listeners are those people up there who were educated in the eighties with MBAs. I would be one of those.

How do we connect all of these new ideas for people already in seat who are working in the context where that 1980s MBA mindset is still prevalent across the ecosystem? And if I change while I’m running an organization. Do I actually make my organization less effective because the ecosystem hasn’t changed?

Nathan: Really. Tough question. Again. You have the [00:26:00] experience that I’m never going to have. You’ve led these organizations and you’ve led these organizations as a woman and you, you’re going to have this knowledge about the barriers that you have faced, what’s worked and what hasn’t. I think that a lot of that change has to come from senior management, and I don’t think that it should all just have to come from women.

I don’t think it all should have to come from people of color. I think that white male leaders have to step up in these spaces, have to train themselves. We have plenty of allyship programs out there. We have plenty of diversity programs out there. I do not see enough. White male, CEO C-suites willing to put their hand up and say, I don’t know what this experience is like, and I don’t know what I don’t know.

How can I go and change this to make this better? I think a lot of that does need to be led by this group of senior white men who have the power to be able to make these broad changes around hiring practice, around performance practices, around promotion practices.

Nicole: Okay, so now you got me excited. One of the things I’ve been working a lot in terms of just thinking and research [00:27:00] is our gender-based leadership development.

So we know we have a booming industry of women’s leadership development, and we do understand why historically and even currently, this is like a necessary thing to have, right? If women are what, I think 21% of senior positions globally, I mean, it’s still, there’s still a gap, right? And so we can understand the importance in the historical situation of, of women’s leadership development.

I’m sort of toying with the idea that we also need, if we have a women’s leadership development and we don’t have a men’s leadership development, then we’re coding leadership development as by andfor men, which has been sort of a long, there’s been a long history of, of that for a long time. Right?

Because we know that leadership has been historically a masculine performance and, and an endeavor and all that. And so I am toying with the idea that we develop a men’s leadership development program, you know, and start doing these because women’s leadership development programs. Come in many, many forms from like a very more traditional add women and stir to all the way to like a, maybe a, a more like feminist [00:28:00] oriented model.

But in the end it’s about putting gender at the center of the discussion and thinking about how leadership development happens therein. So I would love to do that for men and think about the ways in which we could talk. Let’s say masculine. ’cause masculinity is most associated with the male body. So we have masculine performance and how that affects their leadership, you know, and to get them to think about who speaks first at the meeting, who interrupts more?

Is that the best way to lead? And so to kind of do the same thing that we do for women, but we also do for men, but in a critical sort of feminist way that says not to make people feel guilty and not to change men or fix the men in the way that maybe we’ve tried to fix women for thinking Sandberg and lean in.

But just do that kind of critical gender work and have them do those kind of self-reflection so they can understand the way power privilege works, and then go into their organizations and do something differently. I think that’d be exciting. I’m invoking a problematic binary when I say, let’s have women’s leadership development in men’s leadership develop because there’s all sorts of genders that should be included, but I’m doing it to sort of make a point because it’s when you flip it on your head that you start to see the power come to light.

What I would [00:29:00] like is that we do away with gender-based leadership development, and instead we have all leadership development be gender informed so that you’re getting an education about, mm-hmm. Gender within the leadership development and the dynamics there, as well as race and power structures, things like that.

I do this activity in class with my students, where I have three people who are. Identify as men. Three people who identify as women come up and I give the women, they’re the interviewers and I give them a set of questions. Then I prep the men over here and I say like, just prepare like you’re going in an interview ’cause they’re the interviewees and we come together.

And the questions, what I’ve done is I’ve taken the ones that women are traditionally asked and I flipped them for men. So it’ll be like, what’s been your biggest barrier as a male leader? Or, oh, that’s like a nice fitting shirt. Do you think it’s gonna be distracting for others in the office, or do you have any problem working in a female dominated team?

The first one, I think is how has your gender affected your leadership style? I think like women have been trained to, like, I know exactly like what it means to be a woman leader, right? And like how to answer that question. It’s not to to hate on the men at all, but, but they have this kind of embodied experience where they [00:30:00] realize like they’ve never had to answer that question because they don’t lead as male leaders.

They just lead once you flip it. So if you had a men’s leadership development, once you do this kinds of thing, that’s how you kind of come to see. Where the power lies in a way that, again, power and privilege are working if you don’t see it. If, if it’s invisible, right? And so you bring those things to light and that can be really effective, I think, for developing leaders and also for, like you said, like young men who are trying to figure out like where they fit.

I mean, doing these kind of embodied exercises within leadership development gives them more perspective. On how they navigate space and make relationships with others and things like that.

Maureen: We do an IT training program and so it’s technology people from across different organizations and we ended up in one of the classes talking about women cry when they’re angry rather than, so if you see a woman crying, it’s not ’cause she’s helpless and wants something, she’s pissed often.

It’s just how our physiology works and it led to such an interesting conversation. Both for the women to say, yep, that’s just what happens, and I’m empowered to be okay with [00:31:00] that for the men to say, okay, I don’t have to stop and fix you or cuddle you or something. It’s just, are you okay to continue and deal with the discomfort?

Both genders just haven’t had permission to have this kind of open conversation.

Nicole: Women have been socialized that it’s okay to cry. Men have been socialized if they’re frustrated to like punching a wall. Both are emotional experiences or emotional reactions. And just to frame women as the emotional creatures when like punching the wall is pretty emotional, you know, I think does a disservice to understanding how humans work.

Like we have the full range of emotions, all of us. And so looking at how we’ve been socialized to express them in an appropriate way, and then also ’cause we’re breaking that down and being like, men, if you wanna cry too, and all those kinds of things. I think it was just really important for leadership development, which is not normally associate.

Maureen: Interestingly, in this program we’ve had two male executives also in tears.

Nicole: Yeah.

Maureen: Both in senior executive roles, sharing experiences they had over their careers. Fortunately, no one’s punching stuff ’cause that would make me [00:32:00] uncomfortable. Yes. Gets

Nicole: me too.

Maureen: But that we have created the space for everyone to be authentically emotional as they talk about big life and career experiences.

Nathan: Nicole was talking before about a men’s leadership development program, so a about a year ago, a year and a half ago, uh, Monish Business School, we got approached by a consulting company, people Measures, and by Kohl’s, which is Australia’s largest supermarket. They wanted to do a men’s leadership allyship program for their senior leaders.

I will say this is really difficult for me as a leadership educator and I actually really grappled with this idea of should we be investing this money in? I was turned around on this program as talking to the women who were leading at Francis, um, Finster in particular, who really addressed this idea of power dynamics.

In the workplace and what it meant. And so the senior men went through multiple, multiple months. They had multiple follow-up, one-on-one follow-ups. They had to go out [00:33:00] and do a particular gender-based project within their organization. So one of them that comes to mind was this group was working in HR and looking at their hiring practices and really analyzing their hiring practices from a gendered lens and start to understand, well, what questions are we asking?

What are we expecting? When are we setting up these meeting times? In doing the evaluation for this program. What really struck me was these areha moments. This, oh, I didn’t realize how by doing X, it meant Y. I thought I was a great advocate because everyone on this program are advocates, right? You wouldn’t sign up if you weren’t.

I thought I was a great advocate, but I wasn’t doing enough here and. One quote in particular is just sort of stuck with me was he didn’t realize how gender roles were playing out in his home life as well, and it made him reevaluate not only what was going on at work, but also what was going on at home as well.

He reports in starting to even out that housework, evening out the [00:34:00] child activities. There are a lot of benefits with these sort of programs. Yes, this is a pilot program. Yes. That it’s small, but I’m excited to see where this might go. The changes it’s going to have within these organizations.

Nicole: Yeah, I’ve been reading about that.

’cause I’ve been trying to do this research and see what’s out there and I’m, I use them as a great example of doing this kind of work in a way where, to your point, it’s, it’s not to recenter men, that’s the key. ’cause that’s where you get a little conflicted, like, oh, leadership’s already for men and now we’re gonna make a program for men.

And that just seems like. The discussions that you have when you talk about educating white people on racial privilege and things like that. So you don’t wanna recenter them, but you do wanna bring them into the conversation because if you don’t, then all modes of trying to gain equity fall on women’s shoulders once again.

And it’s just the same thing we’ve seen over over. You have to get those in positions of power and privilege into the conversation and then to see it expand beyond the, the professional life to the personal life, I mean, I think is a great thing for everybody. Win-win.

Maureen: I love the aha moments. I work with a lot of men who are really significant allies and [00:35:00] yes, we continue to have the aha moments.

They are consistently working to improve and improve their workplaces. I’m really encouraged. I’m glad that we’re not just bashing white men and people in power. It’s interesting that the system that got people to where they are needs to change. Yet, how do you change in the system and the system and yourself all at the same time?

Those who do it really well will attract and retain best talent. So there is a business case?

Nathan: Oh, absolutely. We’re both university professors. We know who our top students are. We know that we’ve got a larger percentage of women coming through. We’ve got a larger percentage in Monash University, Australia.

All my top students are generally, uh, Asian females. There is such a untapped talent market throughout China, throughout Japan, throughout India. That is just going to absolutely lead the world and lead this next generation. These organizations aren’t set up, are [00:36:00] absolutely missing out.

Nicole: Yeah, I mean, if we have to use the business case to get in there, as I talked about earlier, then I will absolutely use business case, you know, whatever gets me in the door, and then hopefully it’ll become more than the business case.

Maureen: Our listenership is often senior business leaders. For our listeners, I’ve got so much going on, I can barely keep up with my day. Why would I take on one more thing and why would I prioritize this?

Nicole: You can lose that leadership capacity. You’re losing great leadership talent. Some of the work I do is on sexual harassment.

If you do not address that in your organization, you’re not only losing the people in your organization that might have experienced sexual harassment, but people not wanting to come to work for your organization because of these kinds of things or, or wanting to have corporate jobs or engage in industries where it’s predominantly high.

I mean, there’s so many. You’re just losing talent. Talent will leave and all these kinds of things. If you don’t address issues of power,

Nathan: this generation of new employees coming through, they talk, they know exactly what’s going on, [00:37:00] and they’ve got choice for the first time in generations of work where they can choose who they’re gonna go to and they’re making their choices of the organizations that are, that they’re not gonna get abused, that they’re not gonna be, um, work to the bone, that they’re going to have an actual impact in their work.

Nicole: Yeah.

Nathan: How would we find out more about your work?

Nicole: I don’t have much, uh, social media, so LinkedIn is probably the best way to connect with me. Nicole Ferry, N-I-C-O-L-E. F-E-R-R-Y, like the boat.

Maureen: Beautiful. Thank you. And Nathan.

Nathan: Nathan, Eva, E for egg, V for Victor, A for apple, so you can find me, uh, Monash University on what used to be Twitter and obviously on LinkedIn.

Maureen: On that note, I wanna thank you both Nicole and Nathan for a very enlightening conversation. To our listeners, thank you to ILA, thank you for hosting the conference and inviting the two of you to the conversation.

Nicole: Yeah. Thank you. It’s been a great time. Thank you so much for having us.

Maureen: Thank [00:38:00] you.