The Power of Reflection

I’m still gleaning observations from my experience as a delegate to the New York Times’ New Rules Summit that was held in Brooklyn last June, where dozens of powerful and successful leaders from business, politics and culture explored challenges faced by women in the workplace and how to bring about change.

The impressive lineup of (mostly women) panelists included Susan Zirinsky, President of CBS News, Muffet McGraw, Notre Dame’s women’s basketball coach, Marin Alsop, Music Director of Baltimore Symphony, Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Goldman Sachs, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, President of StubHub, and many other impressive women and men who told stories about work experiences. As the day went on, I started to notice patterns forming – like different archetypes – representing different perspectives on how to approach issues involving women in the workplace.

The first archetype was “the MBA approach”. This was best represented, not surprisingly, by Stephanie Cohen from Goldman who was all about the data—measure, analyze, plan, perform—as she described a very analytical, data-driven, prescriptive approach to achieving gender equity at Goldman Sachs.

A second archetype was the “we’re to blame” approach that actually criticized women for being “too nice”, not competitive, not asking for enough (compensation, accommodations, etc.) too dumb about money — “are you a Miranda or a Carrie?” and, to top it off, raising our daughters to be too worried about perfection.

There were also the ‘radical teachers’ who advocated for subjecting men to “women’s work” through reverse mentoring, calling out bad behavior, taking legal action and going to court.

Many of the conference speakers talked about work in which they were actively engaged and, as a result, they were not very reflective. And, I’m not surprised by this. I know from experience that when you are in the midst of working in a system, any system, it’s hard to step away and see the bigger picture. Most references to systems were “how to cope”, “how to beat the system” or “how to game the system” – but very little talk about changing the system. Yet, without systemic change, the same negative behavior keeps being repeated over and over. Without intervention or disruption, the consequences of the negative behavior just accumulate and create even bigger problems.

With reflection, the strong connection between safe and equitable workplaces and creating value in business is more apparent. A safe and equitable workplace is where people can live their lives and do their work without always feeling like they are at the mercy of others.

The first step to creating a safe and equitable workplace is recognizing how every workplace has the potential for gender-based abuse of power, verbal abuse, unwanted attention, and other “bad boss stuff”. It affects who gets assignments, who’s invited to meetings, who gets recognized, who gets credit and quid pro quo subordination (code for getting ‘shit work’). This is more than getting rid of few bad apples.

A 2018 survey of Americans revealed that more than 80 percent of women and 43 percent of men say they have experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault in their lives. These statistics are alarming, but statistics aren’t reflective -they can’t tell the whole story.

Using the power of reflection, we can connect the dots and tell compelling stories, like how Google analytics determined that the most influential factor in creating effective and productive work teams is psychological safety. This is defined as having a work setting where people can take risks and speak up without feeling unsupported, insecure, embarrassed or fearful. Connect this to businesses success and it means that a safe and equitable workplace is a precondition for optimizing creativity and innovation.

With this view we can ask questions like, how does bad behavior get surfaced? How does it get dealt with before it’s a crisis? How can we address problems that everybody sees but no one talks about? Let’s also recognize the effects and acknowledge that abusive and exploitative behavior creates victims who deserve to be made whole.

This was Anita Hill’s approach — a reflective, systems-based view of the problem from the broadest range of perspectives. With this view we can see that gender-based inequities in the workplace create a constellation of ethical, safety, health, economic and management problems. This approach takes the long view to holding people accountable for their actions and thinking about reparations for the targets of their actions.

With a reflective, systems-based perspective we can connect the dots and show how there is a direct connection between a safe and equitable workplace, and a business’s financial success.