Photo by Felix Mittermeier.
You may have noticed that we’re doing more events lately. Events are a way for us to experiment. We get to play with new material and formats. We get to reach different audiences. And it means we’ve been reading a lot about gathering people together and making a thing worthy of their time.
We’ve mentioned The Art of Gathering before in this newsletter. If you are a person who gathers other people together, if you host or organize or facilitate, it’s required reading. You already know that.
But lately we’ve been devouring series of posts that applies a very different lens. Burning Man Journal’s 8-part commentary on transformation. (Yes, that burning man.)
It wrapped up last week. There’s a lot in it, but the piece that we keep coming back to is this idea of noticing. Specifically, to notice when your self-image, your story about who you are, no longer lines up with reality. It’s heavy, we get that. But it’s a really big deal. So big that he takes 6 posts to work up to it, and then another 2 to let you down gently afterwards.
Breaking out of your story about who you are is hard to do. Sometimes it takes a job change. Or a serious illness. Sometimes it takes a divorce. And some people will go through those things and still not notice that they aren’t the person they started saying they were 20 years ago.
What we realized as we read it is that this is something we’ve been grabbing for without knowing it. You can see it in some of our earlier writing (like the first few sentences here, or the title of this one). And as we’ve done more of our work, it’s gotten clearer. When we did our February event, we had a slide that said “Stop lying.” We sensed that we needed it to be there. We needed a way to say, “Hey! Stop doing this exercise based on who you think you are. Who are you actually?”
Melissa notes that Burning Man is happening right now. And Betterboss is happening in a few weeks. On most scorecards these two are very different events. But I think we’re after a similar thing. Because there’s something very cool about events: they can facilitate that noticing. Doing hard work, outside your normal context, surrounded by trustworthy, good faith strangers – it can help you notice. Notice things you used to believe but don’t any more. Things you used to be afraid of but aren’t any more. Stories you should stop telling.
Most of us spend more time at work than we do outside of it. We all have a library of stories about how we show up there, crafted and evolved over time. Which ones are you telling that no longer fit?
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
The Eternal Sunshine of Harry Styles
I ran marketing at Wattpad during the height of the One Direction fandom. As part of that gig, I ended up learning a bunch about fandoms, boy bands and, in particular, about Harry Styles. The last time Harry did a big Rolling Stone profile, I read the whole thing. And the thing that impressed me then was how genuine Harry was about his fans.
The last article was good but this was, by far, the best thing in the whole piece:
Styles is aware that his largest audience so far has been young – often teenage – women. Asked if he spends pressure-filled evenings worried about proving credibility to an older crowd, Styles grows animated. “Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music – short for popular, right? – have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy? That’s not up to you to say. Music is something that’s always changing. There’s no goal posts. Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me they’re not serious? How can you say young girls don’t get it? They’re our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going. Teenage-girl fans – they don’t lie. If they like you, they’re there. They don’t act ‘too cool.’ They like you, and they tell you. Which is sick.“
If you don’t have 1D fans in your timeline, you may have missed the new, massive Harry Styles article that Rolling Stones released earlier this week. And you’d be forgiven for wondering what any of this has to do with management and leadership. Don’t worry. I’ve got you.
One of the coolest parts of our work is that you can find leadership anywhere you can find groups of people. It means we’re not limited to studying companies and teams in a corporate or business context. And that’s part of what keeps it fun. You never know where you’ll find a bit or a piece that unlocks something larger. [Have you even seen the thing in this week’s intro about Burning Man?!]
So here he is. Harry Styles. In all his post One Direction, still very adorable glory. And the piece is all about vulnerability and art and slowing down and craft and collaborations. And while he doesn’t use the words “psychological safety“, well, you tell me what this sounds like:
“While I was in the band,” he says, “I was constantly scared I might sing a wrong note. I felt so much weight in terms of not getting things wrong. I remember when I signed my record deal and I asked my manager, ‘What happens if I get arrested? Does it mean the contract is null and void?’ Now, I feel like the fans have given me an environment to be myself and grow up and create this safe space to learn and make mistakes.”
And for all of us, every single one of us, grappling with how our values show up in our work and how we build more inclusive spaces, there’s this:
“I’m aware that as a white male, I don’t go through the same things as a lot of the people that come to the shows. I can’t claim that I know what it’s like, because I don’t. So I’m not trying to say, ‘I understand what it’s like.’ I’m just trying to make people feel included and seen.”
Anyway, maybe you’re too cool to read the entire 5000 word Rolling Stone piece about Harry Styles. Or maybe it’s exactly what you’ve been looking for, hiding in the last place you would have expected to find it.
What Johnathan’s reading
A quick one from me this week. And while you’re all welcome to keep reading, I’m talking to the men today:
Women don’t negotiate because they’re not idiots
As a psych undergrad, we were coached to hate Psychology Today, and not without reason. Accessibility of science matters a lot, but you can tip far enough into edutainment that you lose the plot. And PT has done that more than once. Still, this article from 2013 is worth it. Particularly if you’re a dude.
The headline is written to be punchy. Of course there are women who negotiate. The article is also nakedly self-promotional and the headline is ableist. Look, I told you we’re not supposed to like Psychology Today. But stick with me, guys.
The facts at the centre of the article are true. And if they’re surprising for you, that’s a really important thing to notice. Women are penalized for negotiating in ways that men are not. Whether they are friendly or assertive or (ahem) feminine in tone, people at the company are less likely to want to work with them once they do. And that effect is 5x stronger than any downside men get from negotiating in the same context.
In the work we do we often have leaders ask questions about this stuff. About bias in hiring, or in feedback, or in workplace culture. It’s clear from the questions that many of them are engaging with these ideas for the first time. And for me it’s a useful reminder. We’re all learning and we all started somewhere. I would always rather people ask those questions than not.
So if that’s you today, if you’re having a “Shit, really?” moment right now, then I want to say something: keep going. Keep going. Notice that you’re surprised about this and that it doesn’t feel fair, and dig deeper. It isn’t fair. Don’t let the cynical defensiveness in that says, “that study’s methodology was probably crap.” Just believe it and see what happens next. There’s a lot of unfairness under there, screaming to be noticed, but until you know how to listen for it, you’ll miss it.
I never know which piece it is that will connect with someone’s sense that “this isn’t okay.” There are millions to choose from. There’s so much unsaid in this tiny, imperfect article about a small piece of the problem. But sometimes that’s what makes it digestible enough to let it in. If this one got in for you: keep going.
