Shame is not a change strategy
Transcript from speech given at The House of Beautiful Business
There is a lot of criticism of tech companies and rightly so but there is also shaming. We cannot shame people (tech leaders or otherwise) into acting differently. It’s not that people are not right to be angry or disappointed, but shaming is not a change strategy.
“I believe that if we want meaningful, lasting change we need to get clear on the differences between shame and guilt and call for an end to shame as tool for change.” ~ Brene Brown
It matters that we do not dehumanize the people inside tech (or elsewhere) because if we want them to change, then we must give them the space to rediscover their humanity.
What I see every day in leaders I interact with is overwhelm. And this is not just a tech phenomenon, it’s universal. Leaders in all walks of life are being challenged in ways they have never been before. These are unprecedented times. We need a new kind of leadership. Leadership, to put it simply, is harder than it has ever been because we need something different than we have ever needed before.
I believe what we are seeking are leaders who will do the real hard work — the inner work that is required to change. This requires creating conditions where leaders can embrace new mindsets so they can shift the systems around them, starting first with who they are. This is big, profound and necessary work.
And it is hard. Let me give you a glimpse into the lives of leaders that I know. They are dealing with everything from employee activism, leaks, diminishing trust and intensifying scrutiny. Leaders feel constrained, with competing pressures from every angle- shareholders, employees, society.
I am not asking for you to give sympathy but indeed, I am asking for your sensitivity. Because sensitivity can unlock deeper understanding and can put us on the path to progress.
As far as I can tell (at least I hope) the entire tech industry is going through a transmutation. Transmutation is defined as “the state of being changed into another form.” In this process, comes incredible and necessary tension. Many of these tensions are held by leaders, who at once need to manage team loyalty while building towards a society of which we can all be proud. Maybe you are one of these leaders.
There is some despair in all of this for all of us, but I trust there is also something beautiful to be uncovered. There is an invitation waiting to be taken — the invitation to reform.
It may surprise you to learn that I am actually not a tech optimist but what I am optimistic about is the capacity for humans to show up with nuanced sensitivity to the human condition. This is what a background in psychology will do, I guess!
It may also be a result of being raised by hippie parents. My father was deeply anti-establishment. I did not grow up with any sort of conception of what it meant to work for “the man,” except for the fact that it was bad. But what I did grow up to know was the importance of expanding perspective. My father had placed sticky notes around the frame of our front door with quotes he loved and one of them from St. Augustine read: “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
This is a reminder to me about the moment we are in. We must travel to others’ realities. We must seek to understand, we must not demonize. We must speak up.
And we must also quiet down. We must quiet down enough to listen the tensions we each face, expand our common ground and help leaders rise to the challenge.
Let’s find the moments to be in conversations, to create supportive conditions, to raise the hard questions, to be in the tension together. An example of this I admire is The Civil Conversations project started by American journalist Krista Tippet. The goal is to “plant relationship and conversation around the subjects we fight about intensely.”
Organizations do not change, people change. And there are humans at the center of all organizations. We can start the change by bolstering conversations and building new relationships.
Let’s challenge ourselves to move beyond dualistic thinking. Right, wrong. Good, bad. The situations we are facing are too complex for such simple categorizations. What is needed is more sensitivity - to see with more dimensionality.
Shame is not a change strategy but leaning in with more sensitivity just might be. To quote Da Vinci, “develop your senses — especially learn to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
Three Tips for Learning to See
- We can learn to see by noticing when we are trapped by a simple story. Notice when a dualistic judgement enters your mind. Just start cataloging and see what that list reveals. When are you most likely to revert to simplicity to make sense of a situation?
- Engage in new conversations by asking different questions. Engage in a childlike state of curiosity about the other, pondering what motivates them and why. Take a page from Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question.
- Embolden others to take the first step to reformation by looking at them as a whole person, as someone who may be embarking on an identity shift. Extend grace, as those attempts to change may be imperfect and clunky. Choose to be a coach, over a critic.
