How to Lead in the New Era of Employee Activism | Megan Reitz | TED

Speak up.

Bring your whole selves to work.

Be the difference that you want to see.

Sound familiar?

Started to sound very familiar to quite a few employees.

Now many leaders are asking voices of difference to speak up.

And that's because what gets said, and what doesn't, in our workplaces

has a huge consequence for things like ethical conduct,

innovation, inclusion, talent retention.

So more and more employees at the moment are starting to speak up

about social and environmental concerns.

And this is great, but it's not always going quite to plan for everybody.

A finance director I've been working with,

he's been asking his employees to speak up for quite a while,

and now they've started to.

So they're saying, OK, let's talk about race.

Let's talk about gender equity.

Climate change, I want to talk about that.

Modern slavery.

And this finance director came to me somewhat stunned and said,

"You know, Megan, I've got to admit, when I asked people to speak up,

I was kind of thinking that I'd get more transparency around compliance issues

and a few good ideas.

I didn't really bank on getting everything else."

But this is an era of employee activism

and that's great,

but why does it end up on the front pages of the newspaper

for the wrong reasons sometimes?

Employees walking out, getting fired,

taking to social media.

Organizational reputations destroyed

or investors seeking change at the top of organizations.

So my research over the past few years with John Higgins

has involved interviewing hundreds of activists and leaders

and activist leaders.

And our work’s in service of enabling voices of difference

to make a difference in the workplace.

Now today, I'm just going to draw out four key findings,

and I'm also going to go through a few dos and don'ts

for leaders who want to navigate this territory proactively, productively.

So let me start with a question.

When I say the word "activist,"

what comes to mind?

What images, what thoughts, what assumptions?

Well, we've asked thousands of people that question,

and I can safely say that the words "activist" and "activism"

are loaded terms.

They mean everything from progress

and courage and passion and change

through to protest, rebellion, violence.

It's quite cool to be labeled an activist in some parts of the world

and in relation to some issues.

And in other parts of the world and in relation to other issues,

being labelled an activist is life-threatening.

So we need to understand the assumptions

and the associations that we bring to activism

because of course that affects how we respond to it.

I was working with the board of a health care organization.

And in the coffee break,

they started to talk about an employee who'd been pretty vocal

on the internal comms channels about climate change,

and he was quite critical of what the organization had been doing.

It was really interesting, because some of the executives

labeled him as a troublemaker,

kind of wanted to get rid of him.

But there were a few executives that saw him as a trailblazer,

and actually a couple

that wanted to invite him into the board to educate them.

OK?

So we've got to the first key point for our leaders

is to understand that activism is in the eye of the beholder,

as Ruchika Tulshyan, an author and activist, told us:

“What looks like rebellion to you is another person’s basic human rights.”

So the first thing you've got to do is really become aware

of the kind of assumptions and judgments

that you and your colleagues bring to activism

in order that you can then respond

with more awareness and more mindfulness.

Second point,

leaders can find themselves in an optimism bubble,

we sometimes call a “delusion bubble.”

As you get more senior,

you overestimate the degree to which other people are speaking up.

You overestimate your approachability,

and you overestimate your listening skills.

And that all means that you underestimate

the strength of feeling that might exist with some of your employees.

Now, one of the key reasons for this

is something we call an “advantage blindness.”

So when we have the labels and titles that convey status and authority

in a particular context like hierarchy, for example,

we're often the last person to realize the impact that those labels have

on how other people are able to speak up to us.

In fact, it's not until we don't have those labels

that we can kind of look at them and go,

"Gosh, they make a difference to how people can voice around here."

So this point for leaders is all about understanding,

you know, are you in one of these optimism bubbles?

Are you a bit detached?

How do you know what your employees

find matters in their organizations?

Do you? How?

I was talking to the head of a retail organization,

and she was saying that her leadership team

spend a lot of time in stores, listening.

And she said something I thought was really interesting.

She said,

"You can't delegate your listening responsibility to pulse surveys."

You've got to show up with your ears wide open.

So what this means is, don't assume you know what matters.

You know, sharpen your antennae.

Try and figure out.

We've written about lots of ways that you can do that.

But underlying all of those methods

is an understanding that it’s almost inevitable that you’re detached a bit,

and you need to do a lot more work, actually,

to really find out what matters to employees.

So third point,

inaction is as political as action.

We’ve met quite a few leaders that say that they’re neutral on certain issues

or apolitical.

There's no such thing.

Inaction on things like climate change is as political as action.

I was working with an HR director in the construction industry

right at the moment where a competitor had said

some fairly disparaging things about women in the industry.

It's a huge controversy.

And this HR director really didn't want to get involved.

He just wanted to avoid the conflict, stay out of it.

But his employees wouldn’t let him

because his silence would have communicated complicity.

Now what I am not saying,

even though I am often accused of saying it,

what I am not saying is that therefore you need to act

on every issue that's out there.

Of course you don't.

And of course you can't, it's infeasible.

What I am saying,

as a leader, is that you need to make conscious, coherent,

authentic choices

about what you will make a stand on and what you won't.

And do that in conjunction with your stakeholders and, of course,

your employees are one of your key stakeholders there.

Final point is that it's useful to understand

what your employees think your response has been

to activist issues so far.

Not what you think it is,

but what do your employees think it's been?

And in our research, we came up with a kind of taxonomy

of different leadership responses.

It starts with nonexistent

or, "Activism?

What activism?"

We talked to a chief executive in the manufacturing industry.

And midway through our conversation, I asked him about climate change

and his strategy and stance on environmental issues.

And he looked at me utterly baffled.

It was nowhere on the agenda.

Now, that looks increasingly inconceivable, actually,

but it certainly still happens.

And then you get suppression.

Or, "Let's just expel those voices before it spreads."

Now this is where leaders explicitly silence or implicitly,

because employees know that if they do speak up,

it will probably cost them their next promotion.

Or indeed, if they do speak up, they might be ignored.

We surveyed just over 3,000 employees in a recent project,

and just over one in five employees

expect to be ignored if they speak up

about wider social and environmental concerns.

After that comes something that we call "facadism"

or, "Let's just say the right things."

This is when leaders make proclamations about what’s important,

and they may even say what they're going to do about it,

but nothing happens.

In the wake of George Floyd's murder,

there were many organizations that made statements of support

for the Black Lives Matter movement.

When the American Marketing Association investigated things shortly after,

they found that less than one in 10 had made any concrete changes.

Then you get to something we call defensive engagement,

or, "Let's just do what the lawyers tell us."

Now, this is where leaders do engage on a topic,

but only because they really have to.

Again, working with a senior team recently in the farmer industry,

the issue of diversity and inclusion came up on the agenda.

It was dealt with in about five minutes.

And essentially they said,

"Let's send everybody on a course and count the number of women."

That was kind of as far as it got.

They did the bare minimum.

And then there's a step change to what we call dialogic engagement

or, "Let's sit down, listen and learn."

And the reason why it's a step change

is because leaders here know that they don’t know the answer,

and they really want to find out what they don't know.

OK?

So we talked to an entrepreneur

who had taken over ex-UK car manufacturing plant.

And the workers there were very upset about working conditions.

And so this entrepreneur decided in, General McChrystal's terms,

to share information until it was almost illegal.

In other words,

he'd gotten the employees and opened up the books,

shared information and shared decision making with them

about what they needed to do.

And that was a vastly different leadership style

from the ones that they've been used to.

Now right at the end, we've got stimulating activism.

This is when leaders say, "Let's be the activist."

This is the Ben and Jerry's and the Patagonias of the world.

And they recruit activists.

They promote activists.

They keep hold of activists in their organizations.

Now, there's many things that I could take out from this taxonomy.

Let me draw just two key learnings out here.

First of all,

you need to know where your employees think your response has been so far,

not where you think it's been.

Because guess what?

Let's go back to that optimism bubble.

The more senior you are,

the more likely you are to think that you're in dialogue.

But if I ask a more junior employee,

they're more likely to say, "No, that's a facade."

Or even actually, "I'm scared to speak up."

And the second key point is dialogue is messy.

It's jam-packed full of vulnerability,

ambiguity, disagreement.

That's why leaders try and avoid it so much.

But you can't avoid it any longer, that's not a sustainable strategy.

So we need to get far better at experimenting,

at expecting fallout,

about learning from mistakes.

So in summary, we are entering an age of employee activism.

And if we can't or won't hear voices of difference in our organization,

we need to consider that like the canary in the coal mine.

In other words, a signal of danger.

Because if we can't talk about stuff that matters to us,

but that we differ on,

that spells disaster in our organizations.

For things like ethical conduct, innovation, inclusion,

talent retention, performance.

So maybe in the face of some of these enormous social and environmental issues,

maybe we're finally starting to reassess what good leadership looks like.

Maybe we're starting to see leadership as activism.

And in doing that,

maybe we'll enable voices of difference

to make a difference in the workplace

by allowing them to speak truth to power.

Thank you.