Masculine traits. Feminine traits. Can we please stop gendering leadership skills and focus instead on the human traits that will enable us to thrive?
Today I speak with culture and leadership expert Moe Carrick about gender traits in leadership. We discuss the traditional leadership narratives and the negative impact that has on both men and women in the workplace. We talk about the crisis for men and boys right now and why men are falling behind in all sectors. Moe shares the difference between emotionality and emotional intelligence and how we can help debunk outdated myths of masculinity. And she shares some great stories from past clients and what they were able to achieve as a leadership team in tough times when they embraced emotional intelligence and vulnerability. We dissect the current backlash toward more “masculine” energy in the workplace, which will only hinder our innovation and success, and the role women leaders can play to encourage healthier, more emotionally grounded leadership.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
- Gender has nothing to do with being a successful leader. While some traits may be considered more masculine or feminine in energy, skills are not gendered – they are all human traits.
- There is a difference between emotionality and emotional intelligence. Emotionality is unmetabolized emotional expression. Emotional intelligence is a source of data helping us navigate the emotionality.
- Everyone needs to resist their own internal messaging about what good leadership looks like – it is not command and control or blaming and shaming. It is empathy and collaboration.
“If we’re going to encourage male vulnerability and male emotions in the same ways we experience and give women permission to express feelings, we need to be prepared to not jump into fixing and solving what they’re struggling with.” — Moe Carrick
Episode References:
- The Empathy Edge: Pam Fox Rollin: How to Grow Your Group Into a Team
- The Athena Doctrine By John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio
- Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown
- Richard Reeves: Institute for Men and Boys
- Suits
From Our Partner:
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Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.
About Moe Carrick, CEO and Culture and Leadership Pioneer
Moe Carrick is a pioneer in workplace culture and leadership, known for her award-winning frameworks that have helped companies like Nike, Reddit, and Amazon improve engagement, reduce burnout, and drive performance. A TEDx speaker and bestselling author, Moe’s work has transformed businesses across industries for over two decades. She specializes in creating environments where people thrive, rooted in her deep expertise in leadership, human connection, and innovative workplace practices.
Connect with Moe:
Moementum, Inc: moementum.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/moecarrick
Instagram: instagram.com/moecarrick
Culture Pulse Check: moementum.com/people-culture-pulse-check
WorkMatters Kit: moementum.kit.com/workmatters
TedX: Rethinking Women’s Role in Defining Masculinity
TedX: Workplaces Fit for Humans
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books on empathy: Red-Slice.com/books
Learn more about Maria’s work: Red-Slice.com
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with Empathy
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
Threads: @redslicemaria
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross, I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business, masculine traits, feminine traits. Can we please stop gendering leadership skills and focus instead on the human traits that will enable us to thrive? Successful leaders from social entrepreneurs to technology CEOs to championship NBA coaches know that it’s a healthy combination of ambition, accountability and empathy that creates winning teams. So what is holding so many male leaders back from embracing more emotional intelligence and striving for more connection in order to achieve results? Today I speak with culture and leadership expert Moe Carrick about gender traits in leadership. Moe is a trailblazer in workplace culture, known for helping top brands like Nike, Amazon and Reddit improve employee engagement and reduce burnout, a TEDx speaker and best selling author, Moe has spent over 20 years transforming workplaces to be more inclusive, innovative and human, centered. Her practical insights on leadership and culture make her a sought after speaker across industries. We discuss the traditional leadership narratives and the negative impact that has on both men and women in the workplace. We talk about the crisis for men and boys right now and why they are falling behind in all sectors. Moe shares the difference between emotionality and emotional intelligence and how we can help debunk outdated myths of masculinity. And she shares some great stories from past clients and what they were able to achieve as a leadership team in tough times when they embraced emotional intelligence and vulnerability, we dissect the current backlash toward more masculine energy in the workplace, which will only hinder our innovation and success and the role women leaders can play to encourage healthier, more emotionally grounded leadership. This was such a great episode. So many insights. Take a listen. Welcome Moe Carrick to the empathy edge podcast, where we’re going to talk about masculinity, femininity and de gendering the workplace in a way. So welcome to the show. Thanks for coming here today.
Moe Carrick 02:56
Thank you, Maria. Thank you so much for having me so you are a trailblazer
Maria Ross 03:00
in workplace culture. You’ve, you know, we heard in your bio, you’ve worked with brands such as Nike and Amazon and Reddit, helping them improve employee engagement. So tell us first before we get dive into our juicy topic today, what brought you to this work? What makes you so passionate about it?
Moe Carrick 03:19
Yeah, I mean, I’m passionate about it because I work, and I’m from the house of work, you know, I started working when I was 14, and I don’t know that I really stopped, even through the birth of three children and divorce and remarriage and cancer and all the things. I really believe that we spend more time at work over the course of a life than we do anywhere else, and we deserve to thrive there. So I think, you know, early on, my work as an internal consultant and external consultant to organizations very much focused on how to help them get results, which still matters, but also it’s my strong belief that we get better results when people are thriving at work, and it’s a win win all the way around. So a lot of my, most of all, well, all of my writing and my talks, my content and my and my work is really focused on how employers and leaders and systems can activate the talents of their people for success so that everybody wins. And you know, ultimately, I’m, you know, personally, interested in reducing job misery, because there’s too much out there, too much.
Maria Ross 04:24
I mean, yeah, that’s, you know, the thing when I began down the path of this work as well, from brand strategy work, but my change management work, even early in my career, it’s we do. We spend the bulk of our time at work. And so when I started in the empathy work, it was, why not make it a place where people can thrive and do their best work? And, you know, we heard, we heard so many attacks for the millennials and Gen Z about how they were trying to change workplace culture. And I was like, This is good for all of us, like they’re just asking for the things that we were too scared to ask for, right? Right?
Moe Carrick 04:57
Well, absolutely. And also, as you know. As a brand strategist. When we get culture right, it illuminates and enhances our brand, because there’s thinner and thinner barriers between our customers, our employees, and our identity as an organization, which is also how we sell, how we deliver against our mission, etc. So it all weaves up in the same direction? Yeah,
Maria Ross 05:21
I always say that culture and brand are two sides of the same coin, and if you really want to be an authentic brand, a believable brand and a sustainable brand, you have to make sure your culture is walking your talk as well. So I love it. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about gender. Because I get asked this always, you know, things like, are women more empathetic than men? You know, am I going to be seen as too feminine if I have as a leader embrace empathy? And I was sharing with you the story of how my first empathy book came to be the empathy edge, which was about empathy as a competitive advantage, and the fact that I had an agent who was interested but wanted me to change the book to be about feminine traits being strategic and competitive. And I said no, because my whole point was I was trying to de gender, the very human trait of empathy, because men are just as responsible for embracing it as women, and it’s a human trait. And when we give ourselves these excuses of saying, Well, this trait and this leadership quality belongs to this gender, and this leadership quality belongs to that gender. That’s where we we kind of give people identity crises, right when we do that. So talk to us a little bit about what is going on in the workplace. When we’re hearing all about we need more masculine energy in the workplace. How do you see the different gender traits playing out in the workplace, and what’s your perspective on how you balance those for a healthy culture? Yeah,
Moe Carrick 06:53
yeah. Such a good question, and there’s so much there. I think for me personally, I’m sensing with things like what you recently heard from Mark Zuckerberg around we need more masculine energy in the workforce. I think that’s actually very consistent with what we’re seeing on a meta, really global political level, which is a hearkening for what was once, for the way that things used to be. And you know, we’re seeing that in every nation, not only here, as we see rise of authoritarianism, whatever your politics are, we’re definitely seeing some leaning towards a harkening back to the way it used to be. And one of the things that I think impacts the work we’re talking about here is that we have historical notions of what good leadership look like that are biased through a gender lens. And I always think about the work. I’m sure you’re familiar with the work of Michael de Antonio and no, yes, and John girzima The Athena doctrine, which was a huge, big study, 100,000 research subjects looking at what are the important traits for leaders in the next 50 years. And then they asked the question, which of these traits do you see as masculine or feminine? And we know that the majority of traits that people saw as critical for success in business and organizations for the next 50 years fell also in the feminine categories of how they were described. So I think we’ve had attribution errors around what good leadership looks like that are based on historically, who were the leaders, right? And the leaders were men. They still are largely men in the C suite. Even though we’ve made advances, we’re still behind, and so we have there’s an enculturation around that now for me, unfortunately, that also means that we’re we have to look at the way that men and women are taught to be emotionally intelligent, and we are taught really different ways to be emotionally intelligent. Jennifer bosom, who’s the University of Florida researcher, talks about how men are given a much more narrow band of emotional expression, absolutely, and they’re really only given permission as little boys here in Western society to express one emotion, which is that of anger, and women are given almost the complete opposite messaging, which is, there’s one emotion we can’t express, which is anger. So when we look at that, it makes sense. Yeah, we have, we have, we have genderized what good leadership looks like, and that right now today, we have sort of almost like a whimsical look back of like, If only it could be clear like it was in the industrial revolution. And I think that’s what we’re getting when we say we need more masculine energy. If we think of masculine energy as things like decisiveness and logic over emotion and hierarchy, then yeah, that there’s some of that that has been attributed to masculine which doesn’t mean only men do that, of course, but it’s masculine energy. And I think it’s like we’re past that now, yeah, and I think we’d be past that now
Maria Ross 09:41
well, and also, you know, I’ve said this before on this show, women don’t always have a lock on it, either, and I, you know, two of my most psychologically abusive bosses, my listeners have heard this a million times were women, and some of my most empathetic bosses were men. So we need to let go of this notion that I get. To what’s the word I’m looking for shirk responsibility for being emotionally connected with my workers because I’m a man now that doesn’t mean I’m equipped, like to your point, if I haven’t been taught how to engage with empathy while still being decisive, being clear, making tough decisions. And, you know, that’s where I talk about my both and leadership all the time, that we don’t have to choose one over the other, which seems to be the false narrative that a lot of men are telling themselves. And also, you know, quite a few women are saying, I can’t be emotionally connected. I can’t be a good listener, because if I am, they’re gonna say I’m weak. So we’ve got to get rid of this notion, because we are whole human beings. And what I love about this is there is a business case to be made. There is data, there is research that shows that when you are an empathetic leader and you are compassionate, you can regulate your emotions. You can make tough decisions with empathy and support people and actively listen and put ego aside and all of those things. There’s a host of benefits that your team and your organization experience, including increased engagement, innovation, retention, loyalty, and then to your point earlier from the external point of view, when you can then carry that empathy through to your customers and your clients. You get higher revenues. You get better customer lifetime value. You get customer evangelists that talk about you because the bar is so low absolutely and they’re treated nicely. So totally. Talk a little bit about because I loved your TED talk, and I’m going to put a link to it about women’s role in redefining masculinity, but I want to talk about it specifically through the lens of work. Let’s talk about why men are falling behind in many sectors, and what has been the fallout of them subscribing to this socialization they’ve been given.
Moe Carrick 11:56
Yeah, the fallout is so enormous, is it? And I mean, and certainly right now, if you look at Richard Reeves and some of the work that’s coming out of the Institute for men and boys, men are not doing well right now. We have the highest opioid addictions, the highest victims and perpetrators of gun violence. We’ve got depression and suicide rampant among men, especially young men and men of retirement age. So like we’re just the community of men has fallen in health and well being as feminism has risen, those two things are not connected to me. You know, it’s I don’t think because women are doing better globally, that that means that men are doing worse. I just think we haven’t really, actually paid attention to what we’re investing in around the well being, and in particular to our the point of our conversation here the emotional capacity of men, because let’s face it, empathy is an emotional intelligence skill. It’s also neuro biologically hard wired in us to experience empathy. So young children experience all the same emotions and have the same skills innately that they’re born with as human beings. But what happens is that they become trained out of us, right? And I have an example I’ll share. Like I was in a session last week with a client a small group, and they were all leaders, and a man was describing something painful, which was the level of stress he’s been under in their environment recently, which has really reduced his mental health and his well being, and he was very tender around expressing it. Had some tears in his eyes, but as he was talking, a woman colleague of his began to outright weep, like I could see the tears rolling down her cheek, but then over time, like she was really emotionally impacted, and I asked her if she wanted to say more about what was going on for her, and what she said was, I just really feel with him. I’m really feeling with him. And what was fascinating to me was that it was actually easier for the group to handle the intensity of her feelings than it was his. Yeah, because his expressing this tenderness made everybody uncomfortable. Next thing we knew, everybody’s trying to help her feel better. And I thought, let’s just interrupt this for a minute. Let’s just hold biologically. What’s happening to her is biological. She’s feeling his anguish. She’s connecting it to her own experience of anguish, and she’s letting it show in a vulnerable way that’s we all have that hard wiring. But what’s happened is that we’ve given men a lot of messaging that they couldn’t, that they shouldn’t, and that they can’t actually act on their emotional states of being in a way that builds connection, which leaves them horribly alone and isolated. So this plays out at work over and over and over again around the mixed messaging. We hear it from women all the time. I know you’ve talked about this with women on your show, where women are given negative attribution for the same characteristics that men are lauded for. So Right? Are, you know, assertive are get labeled the B word, right? The same thing. Happens to men? Do you remember many, many years ago when Barack Obama was elected the second time he there was a video that was taken by a staffer in his office of him coming to his team and sharing his gratitude for their help in getting him reelected, and he shed a tear, one like one tear like the man was not weeping. He was just saying, you know, like, think he was
Maria Ross 15:24
having emotions.
Moe Carrick 15:26
He was having a human being. Yeah, right. Very appropriate emotion to the context, which had been a hard fought one. You know, as politics are moved by it. He was moved by it, and to his team in the room and to many who watched it, it created more confidence in him as a leader, more connection of his capacity to do the hardest job in the land. But there were people who took that video as weak, who chastised him as saying, This is not what a leader does when really to do anything but show up the way he did, would have been to miss the moment and be tone deaf, yeah, magnitude of what was happening with his team. So that’s the kind of messaging that has messed us up. I think Maria Yeah, around our natural ways of connecting, yeah,
Maria Ross 16:12
well. And I think that, you know, as a mother of a young son as well, and trying to help him with emotional intelligence and being able to express himself. You know as adults, I think we know enough now that when we do see men acting contrary to their emotions, they almost it’s almost less leaderly Because it reminds us of a toddler who can’t regulate their emotions. And by regulate, I don’t mean stifling it. Yes, you just can’t navigate your own emotions. If you are moved or you are upset and you shed a tear that’s showing a healthy adult emotional reaction, and if you have a leader who says that’s not appropriate in that moment, I would question decision making and the emotional maturity of that leader. And I’m hoping that more of us, as we start to get to exposed and we start to unpack emotional intelligence, will have that reaction, that negative reaction, to a leader who doesn’t own their emotions and regulate their emotions. Now that said, You know what I often do when I’m doing workshops and trainings, is also help people feel comfortable that when we’re talking about empathy at work, it doesn’t mean Everyone’s crying on the floor with each other, because I think that’s the other extreme they go to, right? So tell us some examples of clients you’ve worked with, or teams you’ve worked with, and what delta Did you see? What shift Did you see with some of the male leaders of finally understanding that point, and then what were the results on the team? Yeah, as a result of them finally being willing to reject those old narratives, yeah, and start to actually equip themselves to get in touch with their emotions.
Moe Carrick 17:56
Totally, yeah. I’ve got two examples that I’ll name that are, I think, particularly potent. And let me also offer a little bit of language around the dynamic you’ve been discussing, which is that I really love to differentiate with clients between emotional intelligence and emotionality. Well, emotionality is unmetabolized emotional expression. So you were talking about your son. I also am the mother of three, and I remember when my kids were little, when they felt something intense, they would lay down on the floor and wave their arms and kick and scream and get ready to face that. Why one child in particular, it was very sensitive child, it would be very it was quite intense. Yes. Now 32 Uh huh, and he does not when he has an issue at work, lay down on the floor, kick and scream and cry that is not what he does now, at the same time, he has learned through the school of hard knocks how to express what he needs and what he wants, which allows him to tap into those same feelings. He doesn’t feel anything different than what he felt at age three. He’s just learned how to take care of himself, to metabolize that emotionality and use that emotional intelligence as a source of data to say, Hey, boss, I’m frustrated. I’m worried that we’re not going to succeed with this, etc. So that’s really what emotional intelligence is all about. Is how do we navigate our landscape of emotionality, metabolize those emotions, which happens in our bodies, and then use our cognition to use them as probably one of the most powerful sources of data in the link, I
Maria Ross 19:25
love that, and I love that you talked about it as a source of data, because that’s the other thing I try to tell leaders is think of empathy as a method of information gathering and trying to just understand someone’s context and get information about it. So
Moe Carrick 19:37
I love it, yeah, and convey to them that what they’re feeling is also valid and real. So let me give you these two examples. I worked with a client. This was years ago. This was the energy sector CEO of a company. It was when solar was just starting to really grow, and they had the company had been acquired. They’d gone through some school of hard knocks. They were at about 800 employees. And they had to do a layoff, and the CEO was, of course, the one that would deliver the news to the workforce that was being retained, which is, of course, one of the hardest things a CEO does right is, how do I tell the people that are still here who have survivors guilt, that their friends and colleagues have had to be let go? So he, I was coaching, he and the executive team, and he did a practice run. I suggested he do a practice run to his team group of other C suite leaders, and he prepared his talk, and he gave it to them the day before he was going to talk to all employees. And I was so proud of one of it was his CFO, who, after he gave his talk, which was full of a lot of data, had a lot of compelling market information about why the layoffs were. Very logical, yeah, very logical. And it had a little bit of, like, I would call it hype up, that was a little bit tone deaf around, like, we’re gonna be fine, you know, we’re yeah through this together, yeah? But he gave his practice, and it was really, you know, he was working hard, and he was an articulate, intelligent leader that had actually quite a bit of respect in the workforce. But the CFO at the talk, said, You know,
21:03
I wonder
Moe Carrick 21:03
what you’re actually feeling. And the CEO said, I’m devastated. He said, I’m devastated, I’m sad. I’m in grief. I feel like a failure. Some of my friends now have to look for jobs to support their young families, and this is really hard for me emotionally, is what he said. And he again, he wasn’t in a he wasn’t histrionic, right? Like needing therapy, sharing what was happening for him. So the CFO then said, I think it’d be powerful, Greg, if you could bring a little bit of that
21:38
into your talk.
Moe Carrick 21:42
So they talked about it, and he reworked the talk. I coached him a bit. The next day, he gave the message to the employees, and in it he said those almost exact words, I’m devastated, and I feel like a failure. This is one of the hardest things I’ve done in my career. And he looked his words matched his affect, right, which was sort of sad, not hysterical, but also grounded. And this gets to the paradox that I love, that you’re naming of end, both because he appeared real, but he also appeared leader, like right, which was he said. And here’s the decisions my team and I have had to make and have made. Here’s the going forward plan. Here’s what I think we all can do to process the loss and to support our colleagues who whose jobs couldn’t be maintained. And so they his team, I think, saw him as both a real human, yeah, with feelings, feeling what they were feeling right, also having hope, which is one of the most important currencies in a time like that, and of course, that we’re living through right now. Yeah, of saying, and I can imagine a foreseeable future where we will be in stronger financial footing, and we can hire back the team, you know? And I think so, I think that’s a really good example of somebody who really pivoted, based on some feedback to create a more compelling, strategic message that helped the workforce stay really engaged and connected.
Maria Ross 23:13
Okay, so that story just encapsulated my entire most recent book, because it’s, it hits on kind of all the five pillars of being both an empathetic and an effective leader. And I just want to unpack that for a little bit, because number one, it was, it was self awareness, to understand his own emotions and name them yes, and to be present in the conversation. I call that being confidently vulnerable, right? Yep, he was. He didn’t fall apart as he was being vulnerable. Self Care was obviously around, you know, being able to make sure his capacity was full when he delivered this talk, and could do it from a place that wasn’t full of defensiveness and fear clarity, which was, I’ve prepared. I know what questions they might have. I want to give them as much information as to what is happening next, decisiveness being, you know, transparently communicating why the decisions were made, so that people understood, even if they didn’t agree, they could understand. And maybe not the joy piece as much, but a little bit of the joy piece in terms of the hope. So I love all of that. And I just want to point out, as I always do on the show, just because he was feeling those things and just because it was a hard decision, empathy doesn’t look like changing your mind. So, you know, some people think, well, if I’m being empathetic, I just don’t do the layoffs. No, you still have to make the decision, but the way you do it to your point the way that it’s done with compassion. I was a recipient of an empathetic leader who had to do layoffs of a team right in my past, and that’s why he’s still a mentor of mine to this day. So I love that example, and what I love the most about that example was how it happened in that group, where there. Was safety for another man to communicate. We want to hear how you feel. Yeah, so I want to pick that a little bit. How did they as a team get to the point where they had enough safety and they had enough self awareness among each other that you had another man pointing out, maybe you want to bring more feeling into this to another man, like, what happened before? Like, what was the behind the scenes of how they even
Moe Carrick 25:28
got to that point? Right? So the behind the scenes was that I was called in, as I often am, at the point at which a CEO has assembled their team of experts. They’re usually in a scaling mode, and they find that these thoroughbreds cannot work together. That was why I was initially called in. And so we had done a series of Team advances, which are team retreats, basically, but I prefer the word advance if we’re going to use military, militaristic terminology, to really create the essential ingredient for high team performance, which is vulnerability based trust. Trust that’s based on the knowledge that we have each other’s back, even when we’re imperfect, and that we are interdependent. You know, I think oftentimes executive teams, because they’re all running their own function, whether they’re 10,000 employees or 100 employees, they have their own function, and so they tend to think of their team as their downline, but their team ought to be their colleagues at this, at their leadership level, in my opinion, because that’s the group that they can really be themselves in. That’s where they can garner support, that’s where they can stay and do the hardest things, and where they cross functionally have to come together on behalf of one organizational mission. So we had done a lot of work on self awareness, on emotional intelligence, on Team agreements, which included talking to each other, not about each other, describing emotions as a valuable source of data, deep listening and curiosity. And so those behaviors were present in that team which facilitate the conditions where, by the CFO, who wasn’t, you know, just a super hardwired touchy feely guy, yeah, he knew enough to be like, That talk’s gonna fall flat, yeah, yeah. And he knew that partly because he had delivered similar talks and I did not go well. So he was like, I really want to help my colleague here has a better impact than we know some things now we’ve got some tools and some skills now that are about how we have committed to be as a culture.
Maria Ross 27:29
I love that, because that kind of speaks to this idea I have just within a leader and their own team building, like a code of conduct, a code of like, here’s how we work, beyond the job description and often, to your point, often the executive team gets left out of any sort of team building, team bonding, team dynamics. They just sort of assemble these top performers at this level and expect them all to work together well. And I love your phrase about there are a bunch of thoroughbreds and they
Moe Carrick 27:59
and thoroughbreds. If you ever see I’m a horse person on the racetrack, when they’re near each other, they’re horrible. Yeah, they’re horrible because all they want to do is run. So we’ve got to find a way to help these high performing individual leaders move away from what they’ve been trained, which is rugged individualism, interdependent, shared problem solving, rather than heroic problems. Right now, let me give you a second example, because it might be an interesting one, and it’s not. It doesn’t involve an act of a man, but it involves an act of movement away from historical notions of what leadership looks like. So this was an example in healthcare situation where a nurse leader, a senior nurse leader, was working with her, with she was working a couple levels down because there had been some problems in one acute care area, and it was actually somebody had a nurse that was on duty that day had actually sent a patient home with the wrong prescription. Not a good thing to do, and realized their mistake and came up because there was an absence of the right leadership level for her to go to Shin going right to this CNO and said, I’m panicked. I just sent someone off of this, you know, prescription. And the CNO had been working with me as a coach around emotional intelligence as well, because her challenge was what is true, I think for many of us, in terms of outdated notions of what good leadership looks like, was to be a problem solver who unconsciously cut off her team’s engagement and accountability at the knees, so she was literally dying on the vine. She was so burned out and her team was checked out because they didn’t really do anything serious, because they knew she would take care of it, she would ride in on her white horse and fix everything, which they resented, but it also made their jobs a lot easier, right? So when this nurse came to her in a panic, she had had this coaching, she had some self awareness, and she stopped herself from doing what she later told me she. Desperately wanted to do, which was to pick up the phone and fix the whole thing. She was like, I want to call the pharmacy. I want to call the patient. I want to make sure that this and so she but she didn’t. She knew enough to be like that is not going to help me lead in this situation. So she asked this nurse really important question, where do you want to go? First of all, she said, that sounds really hard. Yeah. She acknowledged the feelings, the feelings that made medication mistake. It happens, and it sounds really hard. I can see that you’re really anxious about this. So empathy first. Then she said, Where would you like to go from here? Or something like, what happens next? And this nurse had it all figured out. She said, Well, my next move was going to be to call the pharmacy, or to call the patient on their cell. Then I was going to call the pharmacy and make sure that that prescription is no longer the system. The CNO was like, great. That sounds awesome. When do you think that needs to happen? She’s like, right away, the nurse leader, then the CNO said she was a little anxious, because she she knew it had to be done, like, within the next few minutes, right? So her problem solving got the best of her, and she said, Do you want me to call? Uh huh? And the nurse lady said, no, no, this is mine to do. What would you mind if I called from here? Nice. And what was so powerful is that this new nurse who had to make this call and apologize and say, I’m so sorry, sent you home with the wrong dosage or prescription, and I’ve remedied it, and here’s what’s happening. She got to do that while being born witness to her boss, who was nodding and listening and saying, Good job. Yeah, that nurse is not going to make that mistake again. Yeah, she was held with care and compassion, and the messaging she got from her boss’s boss’s boss was good job. Yes, mistakes happen. Good job for the CNO, the learning was also palpable, because she got this meta messaging of like, oh, actually, it’s so much easier when I don’t have to be the only one with the answers. Yeah, right, I’m less tired. I didn’t have to make five extra phone calls. My employee Did it, and now I’m very confident that she’s not going to make that mistake happen again. Yeah, win, win, win. And that wasn’t her being more of a woman, that was her resisting her own internalized messaging about what good leadership looks like. Well,
Maria Ross 32:15
that could be done by a man or a woman. This is my point. You know, it’s we don’t need it to be over aggressive. We don’t need it to be shame and blame. Because if we can just take a pause and remember, what is the goal here? The goal here is not just to keep the patient safe and keep the hospital out of a lawsuit. The goal is also to grow our teams as leaders, absolutely. So how do we accomplish? All of that command and control is not going to help accomplishment. Blaming and shaming is not going to help accomplish. It. It’s empathy, it’s collaboration. It’s that self regulation, that self awareness. That’s that first step of being able to show that empathy in a productive way and practice that empathy in a productive way. So what a great example. And I just really quickly wanted to just go back to the point we were making earlier about executive teams often not taking care of themselves as a team the way you would if you were just like the head of marketing, and you had a marketing team or the head of engineering. And I am going to link back in the show notes to an interview I had with Pam Fox rollin about how executive teams can work on their own team building, and why those that shouldn’t be left out of the equation. So I just, I wanted to mention that because I wrote down her name as you were talking.
Moe Carrick 33:33
Sometimes the way I think about that, Maria, I will listen to that episode. I haven’t heard it, but I sometimes say it this way, and you know, the bad stuff flows down. Yeah. So if you’re not working in vulnerability based stress, able to tell you the truth and hold accountability as peers at the senior level, how can you possibly expect that the teams below you will do that? They won’t, because they’re copying and indexing you, right?
Maria Ross 33:57
You’re modeling so I wanted to ask a follow up question on, really, both of these examples, and we’re talking a lot about, you know, we’re talking about, well, I have two follow up questions. One is, how can male leaders, male identifying leaders that are listening? Where can they start on increasing their capacity for emotional intelligence? And then I have a follow up question related to your TEDx talk, which is, what role can women leaders in the workplace play in helping them? Because, you know, rising tide lifts all boats. So yes, it’s definitely for men to work on that skill and work on that capacity for themselves, but there’s also a role we can play as women in the workplace, in leadership roles to foster that adoption. So let’s, let’s dive into the first one. How would you advise, I know, you know, in a pithy tip, it’s really hard, but where’s kind of a first step you would say, would be good for a man who’s like, I know I need help with this. And I don’t know where to start. I think
Moe Carrick 35:01
my first recommendation, I have two that are probably equal. The first one would be to begin talking about your own emotional experiences with other men. I think that’s one of the fastest places to start, because men, supporting men is critical to finding the way that works for men to do that so that can include things like, how do you handle this hard situation? Or, you know, it can be at home, my wife’s really angry at me for watching the game all weekend. Do you ever get that like, how do you I feel frustrated, but also I want to be supportive for her. Like, begin talking with your friends and your colleagues at work about your emotional experiences. Now, many men when I say that, of course, they look at me like I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t know what I’m feeling to which I say, all right, start with the body. Begin noticing in positive or negative attribution, emotions, so joy, sadness, loss, exuberance. Notice what’s happening inside your body. Heart’s racing, your palms are sweating, and then begin to try to connect, asking yourself the question, what might I be feeling? We often use the feelings wheel. Some of you, I’m happy to share that in the show notes. I think that Dr Brene Brown’s book, The Alice of the heart is a great place to start, oh, yeah, begin to study and name and understand. What are the emotions? How do I put words to those physical sensations? I think that’s really important to do so talking with other men about that, beginning to normalize, that the second thing I think men can do is to begin leveraging other media that they consume, so movies, television shows, books, podcasts, and notice when their emotions get activated, and again, try to name what might be going on with me. Feel better now that that movie is over that I did when I started. Why? Why made me cry? Why I’m
Maria Ross 36:59
laughing? Because that was one of the tips in my empathy edge book around strengthening your empathy as a leader, was to explore with your imagination, and it was my license for people to binge on Netflix right and practice in a safe place of what am I feeling right now, and also practicing the what might that person be feeling right now,
Moe Carrick 37:20
totally, yeah, one of my favorite characters around indexing there is Harvey in suits. No, his, you know, his partner, the redhead, whose name I can’t remember, is
Maria Ross 37:33
always Donna. Donna, I’m in the middle of binging it right now. Donna
Moe Carrick 37:37
is always taking care of Harvey’s emotions, and as the show progresses, she gets better at standing on the balcony and allowing him in particular, I’m struck with that show. You might not have gotten to this part yet, but where he begins to heal his relationship with his mother. I haven’t gotten to that part yet. No, and, okay, it’s a beautiful scene where Donna says, this is yours to do, basically, yeah, this is yours to do. Well,
Maria Ross 38:01
that’s a great segue to the second question I asked. Part two of that is, what can women leaders do in the workplace to help men foster that capacity and build that capacity? Because again, it makes our lives easier as women leaders if we’re working alongside male leaders who have higher emotional intelligence. So it’s in our best interest to help each other. So what can we do and what should we not do? Yeah, I think one
Moe Carrick 38:28
thing we can do, of course, make sure we are becoming as emotionally intelligent and resilient as we can be, because we’re not. We don’t have a lock on it, as we don’t know and we’re, you know, we have our own stories of behaviors that limit our capacity. I’ll speak for myself. For example, I do not love being vulnerable. It’s not fun. I don’t like to cry. I don’t like to tell people I need help. So that’s an ongoing journey for me around like, how do I actually let people in my life see me the way I really am, and that’s because of how I was enculturated? So whatever your work is as a woman, I think do that. I think in addition, something that we can do as women is to hold space for men’s feelings without judgment, and also to notice our own attachment to how they’re feeling. And I’ll give you an example. So I’m the mother of grown children now. My youngest is 23 is 23 My oldest is 32 my stepson is 37 and I can remember feeling as a young mother, and I still feel this. Sometimes today, I feel anxiety if they are not doing as well as I think they should,
Maria Ross 39:35
right. Welcome to my world, exactly, exactly. My son’s 10 and a half. And yeah, welcome to Marriage. Just at the beginning. Welcome just at the beginning. Oh, my god, yeah. Well, I have several
Moe Carrick 39:46
of my children have had struggled with substance use disorder, with depression and anxiety, and so one of the things that I’ve had to learn, and I think we learn as women, is how to bear witness, whether it’s, you know, die. Agnostic, or it’s just having a bad day or struggling with a big feeling to bear witness to men’s experience, and boys experiences of that without having our anxiety force them to do a certain thing, and way we do that is with things like when boys are little and they get hurt in a game, we say, brush it off because we’re uncomfortable. Don’t cry because we’re like, I have my kids. You know, he was being Ferdinand in the ball, and he got hit in the head. Like we have our own difficulty. We also, I think, in primary relationships, particularly, I think for people who look like you and I, Maria, as white women, we have learned about this is probably a bigger topic that we can open today, but I’ll just say it anyway. We’ve learned about adjacency to power as part of how we get power. So noticing if a man, if we’re working with someone and he’s feeling anxiety, let’s say about something, we may have empathy for him, but we may also feel like, Come on, dude, get get with it. Get it together. Yeah, we need you to be strong right now, when that puts an expectation on his strength to manage my anxiety, what I’d rather have women do is be like, actually, I’m anxious too. Or what can I do to be in empathy for what he’s experiencing, knowing that he will get strong again, rarely anxious. Yeah, I don’t need him to be the strong one. Dr Brene Brown has this wonderful story. She tells I was certified in her work for many years, dare to lead, and she’s told the story one time about a man who waited in line to sign books, one of her books, and his he was at the end of hundreds of people, and he came up to her and he said, Thank you so much. Dr Brown for your books. My wife and daughter came through the line earlier, and I just have one question for you. And she said, yeah, absolutely. What does he said, Well, I wonder if you could do more research with men. And she’s like, Well, I do research with men. What do you mean? And she and he said, Well, my my wife and my daughter, they’re all about wanting me to be vulnerable, wanting me to show what I really feel right up until the point where I fall off my white horse, then they that much, uh huh. So I think there’s something really powerful there around if we’re going to encourage male vulnerability and male emotions in the same ways we experience and give women permission to express feelings, we need to be prepared to not have to jump into fixing and solving what they’re struggling with.
Maria Ross 42:28
My goodness well, and your example with the nurse leader reminded me of that, of not jumping into fix, as women are conditioned to do, even with our male counterpart, our CO leaders, and letting them deal with the repercussions of their emotional intelligence or lack of emotional intelligence, in a healthy way, like, not in a way that’s going to, like, blow up the team, or blow up the quarter or anything like that, but that we don’t have to be the ones to fix it. We don’t have to be the ones to smooth over a conflict that they have with someone else.
Moe Carrick 43:03
Totally, absolutely. We don’t have to run in between run interference, and I think sometimes we do that by just holding our own curiosity, you know. So let’s say, let’s say I’m working with a colleague, and he says, and he’s really behaved badly in a meeting, and I’m degriffing with him afterwards, and I say, Hey John, you know what’s going on? He says, I’m just pissed. Then instead of being like daunted or intimidated or whatever, feelings come up for me when someone’s angry, what would happen if I said, Man, that sounds tough. What else? Right? Because I know that anger is a secondary emotion, so I’m curious, what else is going on for him, right? What’s the root cause? Yeah, absolutely. Let me stand in that fire with him, right, and then be looking at it and maybe even saying words like that. Sounds really interesting. I look forward to hearing how you work that through, right? No where. I’m not going to take it from him, because he’s uncomfortable because, again, as white women especially, I think we’re we are hardwired to support, yeah, I can remember when my boys were little. One my middle son, he had a really hard time expressing his feelings, and I wanted to put the words in his mouth, yep. Are you sad? Are you mad? Are you this? Are you that? So I ended up because I didn’t want to do that. I knew that wasn’t a good idea. I put a bunch of emotions in. We were just laughing about this. Oh, yeah, emotions on slips of paper, and I put them in a jar, and I said, just pull out the slips until you find the one that you think fits right. And he has benefited. Both of my sons have benefited greatly from working with other men in men’s groups. Just put a plug in there
Maria Ross 44:30
as well. That’s great. That’s great. Yeah, finding those groups and finding those trusted those trusted people to talk to, because I feel like women have those groups. We have those social circles of other women that we go to and we talk to, and we gossip with, and we share with, and all those things. And I there’s not a lot of men that I see have that same level. They might go out for beers with other guys, but what are they really talking about? Right? Well,
Moe Carrick 44:56
right? I don’t feel like we’ve been as permission giving, and I think it’ll be. Is one of the wonderful things about feminism that I know has benefited me, which is gathering other women. I’m in a women’s incubator. I I have been in book groups. I’ve been in quilting groups. I ride my horses with my gal friends like those are all communities of women who support me in my own growth. And I think we could do a lot more to facilitate men having those kinds of connective conversations
Maria Ross 45:22
well, and I might just add one thing that might make us take a hard left on this, but hopefully not really. You know, recently, this past year, I don’t even know how many months of ago it was, you know, there was this meme going around about, you know, as a woman, if you were alone in the forest, would you rather run into another, a man or bear? Remember that whole trope that was going around, and most women said the bear, right? And I got it, obviously, as a woman, I understand that, and the way it got really it got so much play, it got so much air time. And I remember my young son seeing those messages, and I didn’t like that he was seeing those messages, because then he got some sort of an assumption that he was inherently bad. And again, I tried to thread the needle of yes, there are men that do prey on women, that take advantage of women, but when we start to lump them all together and say, just because you are a man. A, you are expected to act a certain way, as we’ve been talking about, but B, you are also a danger to me simply because of virtue of being a man. That message to our young boys, I think, if it’s not tempered and it’s not explained, is really dangerous. And I felt like I was in the minority trying to express that as a woman, that I was sort of, you know, I was going against my sisters by saying that. But for those of us who are raising men and boys, we also have to remember that if we’re giving them a narrative that this is who they are, then that’s who they’re going to be. And it holds true whether you know you cannot cry, you cannot have emotions, if we keep telling them that message, that’s who they’re going to be, if we keep telling them that you are dangerous, you are a threat, you are an aggressor, that’s who they’re going to be. That’s right. So I you know this is not to say that women don’t have their right to their feelings around how they feel about men or or the threats they feel from men. But we also have to remember that we are creating those narratives that young boys and men are hearing our future leaders absolutely
Moe Carrick 47:34
and I would say, I would add, Maria, thank you for that wisdom. I would add that it’s not even necessarily only that they will become more like the bear, for example, they will what we’re seeing play out actually is what they will become. Is not that they will become victims of predators on the internet. They will become lonely, isolated, depressed and kill themselves. They will become addicts. They will become people who can’t get jobs and can’t love their partners, they will become beaters, so So and they will become, usually, what we’re seeing, of course, with the rise of the loneliness epidemic, they’ll become really unhappy, sad people. And you know, as I say in my TED Talk, like wherever we go, we go together, whether we are heterosexual or gay, whether we’re trans or cis, we are in community with people who identify as men. We I think our society at large, especially perhaps right now, we have such big examples of a few very bad and very rich men that are not reflective of the experience of the majority of men who are good humans trying to be in community with us, at work and at home. And so I think we have to be really cautious not to over index and like you. I don’t, you know, I don’t disagree that women are vulnerable in some cases, but we also mean to remember that the majority of the people we work with and that we live with are just like us, to connect, seeking to feel seen and to do the right thing in partnership.
Maria Ross 49:14
I love that, and I just, you know, as we wrap up, I’m just going to add that, you know, and that’s where all my men listening, you know, embrace your empathy and your compassion as a strength, not a weakness, and know that it doesn’t have to go completely to the other side of the pendulum, where you are, you know, an emotional mess. To your point about the difference between emotional intelligence and emotionality that you can show your emotions, it will actually benefit you as a leader. It will benefit your team. It will benefit your engagement, your productivity, your output, if you are able to be your whole human self at work. And I just want to encourage men listening to recognize that, and hopefully, if you’re listening to this podcast, you are that kind of man and. That kind of a leader. So yes,
Moe Carrick 50:01
and I would add, and when you do so, you help the world change the messaging away from that those incredibly powerful behaviors are weak, but that, in fact, they are a single and unifying source of strength.
Maria Ross 50:18
Put a pin in it. I love it. Moe, thank you so much for your insights today. What a great conversation. Thank you for having me talking I know exactly so we will have all your links in the show notes. I’ll also put all the links to different things we referenced through our talk today in the show notes. But for folks that are on the go, maybe listening on their treadmill or on their peloton. Where’s the best place they can find out more about you and your work? Thank
Moe Carrick 50:44
you so much for asking. I think the best place would be to find me on LinkedIn. I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn. If you’re listening and I’m always sharing our resources, our newsletter, our tips and tools for people via that medium. You can certainly go the website too, but LinkedIn is probably the best way to be in community. I
Maria Ross 51:00
love it. And as I always say, if you connect with Moe on LinkedIn, make sure you write a personalized note that says that you heard her on this show. Otherwise she’s going to think you’re trying to sell her something. So
Moe Carrick 51:13
thanks again. Moe, thank you, Maria, so great to talk with you. And
Maria Ross 51:17
thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the empathy edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate, review and share with a friend or a colleague, and until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy. Visit the empathy edge.com there you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria, never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
