Reimagining Systems
As a management consultant, college professor, and interfaith minister talking about compassionate masculinity, I can’t help but integrate head, heart, and spirit into the mix. All three are integral and integrated into the mix. I was called to this work while I was an internal change agent at EILEEN FISHER, a role that required me to be in my head and think strategically about interventions. The heart-centered leadership and organizational culture at EF really showed me the power of coming from the heart in the work. Coming from Wall Street and being a college professor, I was fascinated by the ways the culture was created from the feminine. The business model was built on feminine energied principles that were operating from the feminine. In a majority of organizations, women are operating from the masculine, because the system and culture requires them to show up from a more masculine energy to succeed in business.
I often say, in so many organizational cultures, that women operate from a wounded masculine and feminine while men operate from a more hyper-masculine and anemic feminine. Now this is a gross generalization, but at the same time, this is what most organizations reward and cultivate the culture and the systems support it. When we look at the messages that we receive as leaders in our development and growth, we begin to see the ways we are being conditioned to wear a mask, where we become less risk adverse, where we go with the flow to succeed, and we lose our sense of self in the desire to excel and succeed.
Working at EILEEN FISHER, showed me what feminine and compassionate leadership looked and felt like. So the company had about $460M in revenue when I left, about 4 - 6% turnover, and was named a Great Place to Work 10 years in a row. So the company was successful and it was also a caring and nurturing place.
Working at EILEEN FISHER, and seeing the impact on men drew me to this work. I began to see how men were being transformed. I would ask men in the company how they were being transformed. They would say, their wives would tell them, that they:
were more patient
listened differently
let go of the need to be right
became more curious
had more access to their full emotional expression
were more creative and solved problems differently
So EILEEN FISHER started to show me the head/heart integration. While I worked at EF, I was sent to an artist community in Canada to learn how to incorporate the arts into creative facilitation. The facilitator would say two things that continue to stay with me. 1) the room can only go as deep as the facilitator is capable and 2) creativity and play are doorways to the inner-life. It was at this facilitator training that I realized my calling was to work as men and developing them as heart-centered change makers and bridge builders - even more so than mere leaders.
Taking these two ideas, I knew that if I was going to work with men, I’d need to get an even deeper understanding and training to support men. Given that I was surrounded by spiritual teachers/guides at EILEEN FISHER, I decided to attend an interfaith seminary in NYC. A few months into the training, it became clear that compassionate masculinity was the work ahead. Compassion is the work that operates on the spectrum of the secular and spiritual where everyone can have access by opening up the heart to its fullest level of empathy and compassion.
As I talk about men’s work, compassionate masculinity, and the need to bridge build across gender to begin to reimagine systems, structures, and leadership models, it is this blend between the secular and the spiritual. This is where we begin to see the transformation. This is taking men to their core essence by dismantling beliefs of self and the conditioning they have absorbed and internalized as young children.
If we look at the possibilities in this work, we can begin to introduce creativity and play into the model for transformation. By giving men permission to get creative and play, they are able to begin to get back to seeing the world from child-like wonder. When stop telling men to change and forcing ideas upon them because it’s the right thing to do, which has a place, don’t get me wrong, I believe there is another way. When we create an invitation another way to come into their best selves by doing the healing, integration, and transformation work. Then we can begin to engage the systems level conversations, the role we play as men, and how power dynamics are at play.
While I value DEI work, I don’t think this is solely the answer. I believe DEI work raises awareness and is designed to shift behaviors. However, does it really shift hearts? I’m not so sure. In a world, where we are always asked to show proof of concept and where we’re asked to show evidence-based effectiveness and efficacy, are we really able to create the types of transformation that is needed? Transformation has a very different set of measures and metrics that will show results in a different time frame.
I offer that we begin to really take a step out of the systems so that we assess the true efficacy of the systems rather than being so immersed in the systems that we can’t be objective. I hear this metaphor of fish swimming in water, the fish don’t know they are in water until they aren’t. And for many, it might feel too daunting to step out of the systems, but for the courageous few who do, we can offer a different insight/perspective into the system. I offer this work to men who are in the system and often at the top of the system to take a step back and look at the system differently. The work I’m suggesting is a system by system approach that looks at systems through a head/heart/spirit and offers a new way of reimagining those systems that will come from a place of inclusion, integration, consciousness, compassion, and connection.