6 Reinventing Masculinity at Work

ED FRAUENHEIM

Confined masculinity isn’t working anymore at work. Just ask Travis Marsh.

Travis grew up with many of the beliefs and behaviors that define a traditional man. He was ambitious, he was a high achiever, he was self-assured. These traits aren’t inherently toxic. But they came packaged with self-centeredness and indifference to peers’ overall well-being. This confined masculinity combination proved to be poisonous as Travis pursued a career in business.

After graduating from the University of Florida in 2004 with a degree in mechanical engineering, Travis took a job at an electronics company, National Instruments in Austin, Texas. He did well initially, advancing from a support role to a sales engineer job to a sales manager position in four short years. That last promotion put him in charge of an eight-person team in his late twenties. And when he took the role, he managed people using a method that roughly fit into his version of masculinity: an autocratic, controlling, callous style.

Those weren’t the terms Travis used. Instead, he borrowed a widely used euphemism for constantly checking in on what those under him were doing. “I called it ‘visibility,’ ” Travis says. “But it was really micromanagement.”

He had no concept of work-life balance and expected his team to work the same long days he did. And while he said all the right things about supporting his subordinates’ progress, their triumphs took a back seat to his own goals of winning sales awards and climbing the corporate ladder.

“I wanted them to succeed,” Travis recalls. “But I had a pretty narrow definition of what success looked like—and it was what mattered for me.”

With this me-first perspective, goal fixation, and top-down mode of leadership, Travis’s upward trajectory hit a hard ceiling. His team was behind on its target and going in the wrong direction. This was the case even though they sold products in a fast-growing niche and several members of his team had such promise that they were selected for a leadership development program.

The Trouble with Travis— and with Confined Masculinity at Work

What was Travis’s problem? For one thing, a dictatorial style has long led to dispirited employees and mediocre results. Travis’s leadership approach also ran counter to the way the young people on his team wanted to work. Most of them were millennials, a generation raised and schooled to have a say over what they’re doing. Millennials also tend to prioritize a meaningful life beyond work, and often are willing to sacrifice promotions in favor of pursuing their personal passions and relationships. By prescribing how his young team should perform their jobs and forcing them to work soul-crushing hours, Travis killed their morale and creativity. As a result, Travis was failing to hit his sales targets and all but pushing his people out the door.

“They were not only disengaged,” he recalls, “but actively seeking new jobs elsewhere.”

Travis’s story is the story of an outdated masculinity. Confined masculinity, with its stoicism, fixed viewpoints, and isolation, no longer serves men individually nor our organizations. The business climate is changing in ways that require a different approach both to being a man and to working together.

While a debate has raged in our popular culture about whether men are getting too soft, a quiet consensus has developed in the organizational world: today, soft skills are success skills. Compassion and connection—along with their cousins cooperation, communication, empathy, and generosity itself— have become critical to individual and team effectiveness. Curiosity, which requires vulnerability, is also vital in an economy that demands constant learning and ever more agility. In other words, what’s called for today is a liberating masculinity.

Men are answering that call. Men in many professions, industries, and countries are showing the way forward. So are leading organizations. From professional sports teams to tech firms to construction companies, cutting-edge organizations are moving away from obsolete, demeaning, machine-like management styles. They are cultivating higher-performing, human-centered, life-giving cultures. In effect, men are working to reinvent masculinity at work—and it’s working.

This chapter documents the shift at work underway in the twenty-first century. It explains how a confined masculinity is poorly suited for the emerging landscape, both because it fails to prepare men to prosper today and because it all but prevents them from seeing positive solutions to our collective economic problems. Liberating masculinity, the chapter will show, offers a hopeful way forward at work—for men as individuals, for our organizations and for us as a global society.

Observing and Advancing the World of Work

I’ve had a front-row seat to the way work has been changing. And I’ve been working on work myself. For two decades I was a journalist focused on work, business, and technology. I’ve spent the past six years as a writer and researcher at Great Place to Work, a global advisory firm with workplace-culture expertise. We are best known for conducting the analysis behind the annual Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list.

At Great Place to Work, I’ve been able to study the very best organizations on the planet. The results of our anonymous employee survey show that people in these top organizations trust leaders, take pride in their jobs, and feel a sense of camaraderie. Along with several colleagues, I cowrote the 2018 book A Great Place to Work for All—which includes my interviews with employees ranging from executives to frontline workers in Brazil, India, and Italy, among other countries.¹

What’s more, in 2018 I cofounded the Teal Team, a group devoted to helping organizations become more democratic, purpose-driven, soulful places. I share more on this group later on.

One of the lessons I’ve learned from observing and advocating for great workplaces is that work matters to men. By and large, men want to do a good job. And they want their work to be about more than a paycheck. Author Studs Turkel had it right in his book Working: work “is about a search ...for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”²

These elegant words fit what I’ve noticed about men across the globe. I spoke with a hotel concierge in India who took it upon himself to travel hundreds of miles to return identification papers to a guest who’d left them behind.³ I’ve written about security guards in Peru who transformed their profession from a low-status role to one full of honor, integrity, and playfulness—complete with a hip music video. I’ve spoken with Jeff Green, a U.S. executive who protected the dignity of his employees by firing a manager who treated her team poorly, even though she herself got great results.⁴

“It was one of the toughest conversations I’ve had,” said Green, CEO of advertising technology firm The Trade Desk. But Green made the hard decision based on a vision of his nine-hundred-employee company as a close-knit family. “We’re building something of a home,” he told me. “This is where we live. And this is where we want to be for a long time.”

Confined Masculinity at Work

Despite heartwarming anecdotes like these, the history of the work world has been disheartening in many ways. It is rife with exploitation, wasted human potential, and environmental destruction. The grim story has much to do with a confined version of manhood.

After all, our organizations for centuries have largely reflected a traditional, confined masculinity. Companies have featured strict hierarchical structures defined by a command-and-control approach to leadership. Those at the top—usually men—have established competitive cultures that prize efficiency. Emotions are all but forbidden and employees often vie against each other for ever-higher positions of authority. Overall, the goals of capitalist corporations have matched those of confined men: maximum profits and power—typically defined as market share—with minimal concern about people or planet.

To be fair, such organizations have generated great wealth and created products and technology that have enhanced human well-being. They have built soaring cathedrals, helped send men to the moon, and created miniscule computer chips that now power ever-more-advanced artificial intelligence.

But all the progress in creating miraculous machines has come at a cost. We have treated workplaces themselves as machines with little room for our humanity. For more than two centuries, people have decried the dehumanizing, degrading quality of industrial capitalist companies. The eighties rock group The Police nailed it in their song “Synchronicity II,” which lamented the life of a suburban company man: “Every single meeting with his so-called superior is a humiliating kick in the crotch.”⁵

Such problems have persisted as the economy has shifted to the Information Age. Only about one-third of American workers are engaged on the job, a number that drops to about 15 percent when you look at employees worldwide.⁶ In effect, the bulk of organizations in the United States and across the globe are deadening places for the people who work there.⁷

A Masculinity That Makes Less Cents

Thankfully, the days of “military general” CEOs, sterile environments, and isolated and irresponsible enterprises are drawing to a close. Simply put, confined masculinity makes less and less sense—and cents—in the twenty-first century.

In the Industrial Age, there was some logic to treating the men and women operating factory equipment as mindless cogs, as worker ants. But the opposite imperative exists today. As we enter an era of digital disruption and advanced robots, human qualities such as creativity, passion, and collaborative spirit are increasingly vital, since organizations aim to constantly innovate, adjust to fast-changing market conditions, and provide personalized, memorable experiences to customers.⁸

Traditional organizations are increasingly at risk as the business climate becomes flatter, faster, and more fairness-focused. Organizations find themselves challenged to become more diverse and inclusive, more attuned to the needs of their communities and the environment, more willing to distribute power, and more capable of sensing and responding to emerging signals. Those demands, in turn, put authoritarian chains of command at a disadvantage. Top-down structures are proving to be too slow in a quicker, more complex commercial arena.⁹

In other words, the confined masculinity style of bosses giving directions will have to give way to providing overall direction. Leaders will need to concentrate on painting the big picture, connecting employees to that purpose, and trusting people to make good decisions and generate good ideas.

As it stands, the average American company operates at just a fraction of its potential to innovate and grow. My colleagues and I at Great Place to Work learned that just two U.S. employees have many opportunities to innovate at work for every six employees who have few to no such opportunities. Great Place to Work also discovered that the organizations racing ahead in terms of inventions and agility—such as computer chip maker Nvidia and grocery chain Wegmans Food Markets—act more like a flock of birds or a school of fish than a rigid pyramid of management layers with a boss at the top.¹⁰ They are moving away, that is, from a business model that resembles confined masculinity.

Confined Men of Steel

Not surprisingly, other companies are following innovation leaders like Nvidia and Wegmans. And this transition is difficult for men bound by traditional man-rules. Many of these men, especially in leadership positions, have tried to be like Superman at work. They’ve aimed to be strong, confident, virtually invincible, and able to save the day single-handedly. But when men emulate the man of steel, they often act in ways that no longer serve them: with emotional indifference, hyper-competitiveness, aggression, and isolation.¹¹

Consider the example of Travis from earlier in this chapter. He was trying to do it all as a young manager. But his brashness and ambition, combined with little regard for the input or work-life balance of his team, made him a horrific supervisor. “I was a world-class asshole,” he admits in retrospect.

This was the case despite good intentions. He wanted to be a great leader for his team. But the confined masculinity norms he had absorbed while growing up got in the way. Norms about superiors and subordinates. About those rising up being able send orders down to those on the front lines. About obedience. “I didn’t even realize these were the norms that I was internalizing,” Travis says. “I espoused caring about an inclusive environment. I just didn’t know how to do that and also deliver results.”

What Travis didn’t understand at the time is that the best results today are coming not from heroic leaders but from effective teams. Work today is becoming a team sport. The most innovative discoveries and most nimble operations require breaking down silos in organizations and bringing together people with diverse perspectives and talents. This means collaboration and persuasion are more productive than solo displays of dominance.

The key to successful teams at one of the most successful companies in the twenty-first century—Google—turns out to be “psychological safety.”¹² Caring, rather than scaring, produces the best results today.¹³

From Confined to Expanding at Work

Consider the profile of success in the workplace that’s emerging. It’s long been true that emotional intelligence and self-awareness are more important to leaders as they assume higher-ranking posts.¹⁴ But amid the growing importance of soft skills, more and more companies are seeking vulnerability, empathy, and listening skills in leaders and front-line employees alike.

Organizations also are looking for generous spirits. Scholar Adam Grant has found that the best performers today tend to be people who give more than they take. The most successful “givers” outperform not only “takers” but also “matchers,” those who try to mirror the generosity of others. “Givers succeed in a way that creates a ripple effect,” Grant writes, “enhancing the success of people around them.”¹⁵

Another emerging requirement is sensitivity around working with people of different backgrounds—and awareness of one’s own privileges and biases. Even though men and women have been expected to treat each other fairly and with respect for decades, those expectations have intensified. True workplace equity increasingly isn’t seen as just the right thing to do, but as providing a boost to business results thanks to better ideas and decision-making.

The new approach to success at work is captured by the concept of the “for all” leader. My colleagues and I at Great Place to Work came up with this term in the course of studying 10,000 managers and 75,000 employees. We discovered that the most effective, inclusive leaders—whom we dubbed “For All Leaders”—had traits such as humility, the ability to build bonds of trust with and among team members, and a focus on a bigger purpose rather than immediate results.¹⁶ This is a far cry from the kind of combativeness, bravado, and stoicism that confined masculinity calls for.

Confined men are often stiff, cold, and isolated in a work world now calling for flexibility, warmth, and connection. More and more, men trying to follow the rules of confined masculinity in the emerging workplace are finding they don’t fit in. Many are limping along. Some are being let go.

A Confusing, Frustrating Economy for Confined Men

Confined men not only are struggling in today’s organizations, they are experiencing our wider economy as confusing and frustrating as well. The trends of globalization, automation, and decreasing unionization have led to increasing job insecurity, personal financial instability, and overall economic inequality. Men with less formal education especially have felt the brunt of these big forces. Manufacturing jobs have been moved overseas or eliminated by robots. Entire communities in developed countries like the United States and the United Kingdom have felt their economic foundation shaken, and seen social problems like opioid addiction rise.

Add to this something that must feel like an insult on top of injury to men constrained by traditional views of “men’s work.” Many of the new jobs replacing factory jobs and other blue-collar positions are in “helping” professions historically associated with women. Job growth is in fields like nursing, education, customer service, and hospitality.¹⁷

A winner-take-all economy, the prospect of mass unemployment thanks to automation, shattered individual dreams, and frayed social fabrics are all real problems. Reforms are needed. These include stronger safety nets, more-progressive tax schemes, fairer international trade rules, and labor protections for people forced into the “gig” economy—that is, into insecure, contract jobs like Uber driving.

But confined masculinity inhibits a clear view of our global socio-economic system. Instead, an isolated perspective, a penchant for competing rather than cooperating, and a mindset of scarcity is pushing many men deeper into a defensive crouch. A cynical, dangerous crouch. Many men are adopting an us-versus-them mindset and demonizing others, including rival political parties, immigrants, and foreign nations. Confined men also balk at the need to build an economy that addresses the climate crisis. Indeed, many deny the human-generated impact on the environment and reject efforts to prevent a planetary catastrophe.¹⁸

Liberating Masculinity Gets to Work

It’s a different, more hopeful story with liberating masculinity. Men with this version of manhood are better able to understand today’s growing economic complexity. They are inclined to see the interconnections of people, companies, nations, and the earth itself. With this systems perspective, they are more equipped to propose solutions that account for our interdependence, and that leave no one behind.

While working on the larger, societal level to fix problems, liberating men also are finding success in the workplace today. Men like Paul.

Paul is a longtime member of M3. When he first joined more than twenty years ago, Paul was working as an accountant, following a typical male path to career success. But he hated the job. His calling had always been to be a nurse, and the men of M3 encouraged him to be true to himself. So, a few years into his participation in M3, Paul made the switch to nursing.

And he has thrived. Not only does Paul love his work in a New Jersey hospital, but he has advanced professionally. While continuing to provide nursing care directly to patients, Paul also took on managerial responsibilities. One of his initiatives was to encourage EMT professionals to demonstrate more compassion in the hospital. He had noticed EMTs in the ER—around patients—using dark humor and acting callously, behavior Paul chalked up to self-protection amid much suffering and sadness. He says his efforts to promote greater kindness at work, and ultimately more effective healing, stem from how he has matured as a man.

“I wouldn’t have pushed for this change if I hadn’t experienced the benefit of trying to become more compassionate myself,” Paul says. “Most of us, men and women, can treat one another better. And it makes a difference for patients.”

Paul isn’t alone in bringing a liberating, expanding masculinity to work—and finding greater happiness as a result.

Some of these other men fly in the face of stereotypes that say only college-educated men can escape the plight of confined masculinity. Take Greg, a sensitive and competent owner of a construction company who moved into his family’s business after completing high school. Greg is another M3 member who has infused his work life with a bigger way of being a man. He has changed as a boss over the years. Having regular conversations with other men about hopes and fears, joy and sadness prompted him to view his thirty-five employees—who are mostly men—in a different light, and to manage with a lighter touch. “I definitely went from being ‘balls to the wall’ to actually thinking about the guys,” he says. “You step back from being the owner or the boss to thinking, ‘Well, there’s a little kid that wants their dad to show up to tee-ball or their band concert.’ ”

Liberating Masculinity, at Firms Small and Large

It’s not only at small businesses where men are leading in new ways. You can find liberating masculinity taking root at the world’s largest organizations.

Consider Chuck Robbins. Robbins is the CEO of Cisco Systems, the data networking and communications technology company that employs 74,000 people across the globe. Not long after he took the reins of Cisco in 2015, Robbins had a vivid and disturbing dream. In it, Robbins visited a homeless encampment, where he saw the faces of his pastor and his father. The dream inspired him to take action on the homelessness that plagues San Jose, the Silicon Valley city that Cisco calls home.

“The next day, I called the mayor,” Robbins told me. “I said, ‘I want to get involved in solving this problem.’”¹⁹ What happened next was a surge of social responsibility at Cisco. For starters, the company made a $50 million, five-year donation to Destination: Home, a nonprofit group devoted to ending homelessness in the San Jose region. And Robbins’s commitment to giving back proved contagious. Or, to hear him say it, his visibility on homelessness simply prompted Cisco employees around the world to share with others what they were already doing to serve their communities—as well as to increase their efforts.

“There’s this immense desire to give back,” Robbins says. “We just made it okay. People have embraced it. It’s blown me away.”

Note that the philanthropy hasn’t distracted Robbins from traditional business goals. Under his leadership, Cisco launched a new subscription networking gear service—the fastest growing product in the company’s history. On the strength of the new service, Cisco stock rose to its highest point in twenty years.

Robbins says the business boost was fueled by doing the right thing, because employees everywhere are fired up to work at a company they’re proud of. Indeed, Cisco became Great Place to Work’s #1 World’s Best Workplace under Robbins’s leadership. And in the long run, Robbins argues, if powerful organizations like Cisco don’t take the lead on social problems, our global future will look more like a nightmare than a dream.

“We have to cultivate healthy communities,” he says. “Or it’s not going to work for anybody.”

Robbins isn’t the only captain of industry to define social responsibility as a business priority. He’s a member of Business Roundtable, a group of CEOs who in 2019 declared “a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders”—not just shareholders.²⁰

From the Man of Steel to Men of Teal

In the growing conversation about elevating the way we work—a discussion in which people of both sexes and all gender identities are weighing in—it is encouraging that men are playing constructive roles. Men, in effect, are rethinking workplaces that often benefited them to the detriment of others. For example, men are actively promoting the “Agile” approach to work, which replaces top-down agendas with collaborative teamwork. Men are also central to the Conscious Capitalism community, a network of business leaders who are “dedicated to elevating humanity through business.”²¹

Men also are key players in the “teal” movement to transform our workplaces into soulful, life-giving places. As author Frederic Laloux writes in Reinventing Organizations, a teal mindset involves a “deep yearning for wholeness—bringing together the ego and the deeper parts of the self; integrating mind, body, and soul; cultivating both the feminine and masculine parts within; being whole in relation to others; and repairing our broken relationship with life and nature.”²²

Laloux was building on various scholars’ work exploring the stages of human development. Within that scholarship, teal is part of a color scheme describing levels of human consciousness and refers to an awareness that all life is interdependent. A teal consciousness also aims to replace our deep-seated fears with a mindset of trust—both trust in each other and trust in how life unfolds. Organizations embracing teal principles put purpose ahead of profits, enable employees to manage themselves, and honor the holistic needs of people and the planet.²³

Teal companies have shown great success in conventional terms like revenue growth and market share. They also are attracting people who want out of the rat race and the way it can reduce us to our worst instincts.

The movement toward teal organizations, in other words, overlaps closely with what liberating masculinity looks like at work. You could say we need to stop trying to be the man of steel and start becoming men of teal.²⁴

A Tealy Travis

Perhaps surprisingly, one man who made this change is Travis. His journey out of a confined masculinity began at a low point, when his sales team was dysfunctional and at risk of missing its goals. Travis did some soul-searching, read more about management, and decided to experiment with a radically different approach.

Instead of telling his team what to do and how to do it, Travis decided to listen. He shared the overall challenge they faced— the fact that they were 20 percent below their six-month sales target. And he asked for their ideas. The main choice boiled down to concentrating on a small portion of customers that generated the bulk of the division’s sales, or continuing to knock on a wide variety of doors—even though most of the other clients provided much lower revenue on each sale.

Travis’s own analysis suggested doubling down on the big-ticket customers. But his team as a group preferred the other strategy. Despite deep doubts, Travis gave their vision the green light. And then he watched the green come rushing in.

“Holy hell, did they make it work,” he recalls. The team made up the deficit, raking in about $10 million in a half-year period. Travis chalked up the success to a fire in the bellies of his colleagues, who finally had a say in the direction of their unit. “The wrong strategy with energized people becomes the right strategy,” Travis says. “It was the hustle that made it happen.”

The power he’d unleashed with a different kind of leadership prompted him to move toward a different kind of masculinity at work. He discovered Laloux’s book, and found it so inspiring that he in turn cowrote a book, Reinventing Scale-Ups, about how start-up company founders can embrace teal principles as they grow their business.²⁵

Later, Travis became a business coach, and recently he joined a group I cofounded called the Teal Team. We are a group of business consultants and researchers, about ten men and women, who support each other’s personal and professional growth, study teal ideas, and give workshops on how organizations can evolve to match today’s complex needs.²⁶

Travis’s story captures how men today are reinventing masculinity at work. It’s still early days in this transformation away from confined ways of behaving, leading, and organizing our workplaces and economy. But men embracing a liberating masculinity are already making a positive difference. They are moving us toward a way for work to work for us all.

THINGS TO PONDER AND DO

CURIOSITY: What masculine style do you tend to bring to work? Can you think of a time you acted like a confined man? What about a time you embraced liberating masculinity?

COURAGE: How can you be more vulnerable at work? If you are a leader, can you ask a member of your team for help, or give them more discretion in their job? If you aren’t a leader, can you share a concern or a joy with a coworker?

COMPASSION: Can you be more aware of the hurt, disappointments, or troubles others are experiencing at work? If a colleague is hurting in some way, offer your support and care—even just in the form of listening.

CONNECTION: Who is someone at work you would like to know better? Reach out and deepen your personal relationship with them. Don’t let potential prejudices or barriers— like differences in rank—get in the way.

COMMITMENT: Can you pledge to show up more as a liberating man at work tomorrow? Intentionally practice becoming more flexible, warm, and connected.

Soul in Motion