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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Meg, I thought we could start by talking about leadership because I know that part of your work is helping individuals and teams evolve their leadership capacity. You have this really nice sentence on your website about helping us shift from independent leaders to interdependent leaders, and I know you’ve done a lot of research about this as well. So I was wondering if you could share something about what you’ve learned both from your research and in your own experience and work about evolving our leadership capacity and how do we move to this more interdependent kind of leadership?
Meg: Sure. I mean, research might be too grand a word for what I’ve done. I’ve done a lot of reading and thinking, and I also spent six months on this beautiful thing called a learning marathon. It’s called that because it’s 26 weeks and it’s like choose your own adventure mini masters for people who can’t quite get their head around doing a masters. So my question was around how do we support people moving from being independent to interdependent leaders. I spent six months, which was the middle of a couple of years of looking into this term.
When you look at adult development and some of the research that’s been done around adult development, there are stages that adults can go through—not all adults do—to change the lens that we look at complexity and mess through. When you look at young adults, so 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, there’s often a strong sense of wanting to belong and be part of something that already exists. Some people spend their whole lives with a reasonably contained worldview of knowing what the rules are, wanting to be able to be a good team member. There’s pluses and minuses to that.
Somewhere around the middle of people’s 20s, maybe later on, people begin to want to stand out for their expertise. So we begin to follow a thread, want to be seen to be doing good work, and so we move to a different phase which the literature calls “expert” where we have expertise and we learn about problem-solving and we learn how our style of problem-solving is. The people at this stage start to think in slightly longer time horizons of like three months to a year and are really good at solving problems. Lots of people stay there for a long time.
There’s a movement potentially then of developing more strategic thinking. One of the key authors in the field wrote a book called “In Over Our Heads” and that’s often the trigger for people to grow. I was just coaching a client yesterday and we were talking about how the fact that she felt in over her head didn’t mean she was failing—it meant she had potential to grow because those are the times when we’re going, “Oh, I’m at the edge of my current map, I’m at the edge of my current skills.”
The final stage of independent leadership is moving beyond expert to what there’s different words for, but I tend to think of it as “achiever.” These are people who, if you think in the Western model of what a good leader would be traditionally, this is your MBA thinking strategically, systems thinking, understanding that you bring people—you have to bring people on board your vision—like all those good things. That’s great. I like that, it means we need people who do that in order to run complex organizations. But still, at that stage, the leader is in the center. So they may be doing lots of consultation, they may be bringing lots of people in, but it’s still ultimately them making the decisions.
There’s something interesting, and this is the place where I’m often working with people, is in the transition when people get really good at hitting the numbers, getting stuff done inside their organization, and then they look up and see the rest of the world is broken—that there are so many bigger problems. They also often, and this is a key part of the transition, begin to do quite a lot of soul-searching around their place in the world and what their purpose is. With good nurturing or just a lot of soul-searching and maybe struggle, people move to an interdependent view.
The first of those kind of major interdependent lenses is often called “redefining” because you begin to want to change the system. This is maybe a slightly volatile stage because you want to just burn it all down and recreate it. But this does mean that people are having much deeper empathy for other people. They deeply realize that they only have one part of the truth. Where an independent leader at the later stage would bring people together because they understand that involvement creates engagement with their own vision, someone at the interdependent stage would bring people together because they just know that’s the only way we deal with complex situations. You have to bring the people together who are involved.
Now, my hunch is that we need more leaders who are at the interdependent stage in order to do all these things that we talk about—in order that we look at self-managed organizations. In order that teal, or whatever lens we’re going to look through organizational development, we need leaders who have this interdependent lens. There’s a couple more stages beyond redefining where people settle more, but that’s the common stage and that’s kind of where I tend to work with people.
Lisa: I’m wondering, given what you just said, do you think it’s possible if as a leader I’m at the independent stage and either I or someone in my organization chooses “we’re going to become a self-managing organization,” do you think that would be a catalyst for them starting to embark on a journey into the interdependent stage? And if so, what kind of support would they need or how could we help them navigate that transition?
Meg: Yeah, and this is my internal research question at the moment, my inquiry, and I have some hunches. Yes, I think potentially moving to more self-managed organizations could be a trigger. The problem—one of the problems—is that when you begin to do that deeper soul-searching work of finding who you are and what your place is in the world and bringing more people in and thinking with longer timelines, spotting more than annual patterns, people around you who are particularly strong in the independent lenses think you might be going off the rails a bit. It doesn’t look like leadership—you’re losing your edge, or you were so good and now you’re being less effective.
My instinct is that we need to hold a space to nurture people so they see there’s a path. Sometimes that’s what I’m doing as a coach, going, “It’s okay, you’re not broken. This is growth, and here’s the next stages.” In fact, when people come across the action logics model, the vertical development model which is kind of what we’re talking about, the people it really appeals to are people who are moving into redefining. In fact, sometimes one of the characteristics, unofficially, of people being in redefining is they become obsessed with the model and start seeing it everywhere, which is an important stage—and I went through it too—of really using it. You begin to see everything and you begin to see why you’re not engaging people and you become quite passionate about it because you actually see a path ahead for you.
It’s only when you really settle into the stage after that, which is reasonably rare, where you see the world is broken, you see how tiny a part you can play, and somehow you get some sense of that being okay. You’re much steadier. You don’t necessarily just want to burn it all down, though. I was just talking to a friend yesterday who said she was a bit lost, felt like she was shouting into the void, and like how could she find her place where she was making the most difference. I think that’s a question that happens with interdependent people: when people develop that more expanded worldview.
We have to be a little bit careful that it doesn’t become a hierarchy because it’s not a personality test, which is why they talk about vertical development versus horizontal development. So you’ll have all your Myers-Briggs, your DISC, your Enneagram types at all of the levels, all of the action logics. It really just depends on what life has pushed at you or where you’ve been over your head, and that forces you to evolve. Some people in quite technical environments—academia, engineering, the law—can live very happily as experts for the rest of their life because no one needs them to develop outside of that siloed thinking, and they do their job very well.
It causes a problem for organizations because sometimes there’s quite a lot of short-termism in terms of the timelines people are looking at. Just returning to your question: yes, I think it can be a trigger, being part of a self-managed organization, but I don’t think it’s enough without having a map to go, “These are some of the things that happen during change,” because otherwise that kind of organizational change can be wrenching.
Lisa: Hmm, and I think that’s when you get these knee-jerk reactions and these articles like “self-management nearly killed my startup” and things like that, where people express this ambition to become self-organizing and suddenly they don’t know what leadership looks like in that new world. The old paradigms don’t really work, but they’re sort of not sure what the next action logic is, I guess. Like, “Where do I go now?” And through that lens it’s very easy to see “this is chaos” or “this isn’t working” or “people need to be led” and go back to a kind of more traditional top-down hierarchy. People want that as well.
The other thing that occurs to me is I think you could probably implement a version of self-management in quite an expert way. You could read about it and get excited about it, and you could implement it in a way which was quite technical and didn’t necessarily have the soul of it there.
Meg: Yeah, you have to… There’s a kind of rule of thumb that we can tend to be able to see into the next action logic. Where we’re at, we can see people who have the next stage of expansion and even see some appeal to it, but the people who are one stage further on, so two stages away from us, they just become enigmatic.
I had a client who was deeply in the transforming stage, which is the stage after redefining, and I remember her saying that she’d gone into her exec board and was really excited about this study that an Indian soil scientist had done and how it gave really clear lessons for their business. The business that she was in was a professional services business—so lots of people who live in the expert zone—and they literally did not know what she was talking about. It was transparent. Like, “Do you see how the microbes in the soil…” and that’s one of the ways you can sometimes spot people who are at those later stages: they often use gardening, soil, and seeds as metaphors because you’re looking at a less linear approach. You’re looking at something that is more like nature, more about ecosystems and creating the circumstances for success, planting things and allowing things to grow over time, because you’re able to have those longer time lines.
But when your sense of self is very linked to the expertise that you have and you’re thinking in three months to a year timelines, and someone’s thinking in 10-20 year timelines, it can feel like things are totally out of control. It can have a bad effect on people’s morale. I’ve had that experience.
Lisa: I’m wondering what your thoughts are then about—as a group of people in an organization wanting to support each other and move towards a vision or a purpose—what can we do in terms of holding space for people who are at different action logics levels? I guess it sounds like you’ve been working with this, helping clients of yours and also have gone on this journey yourself. What would your advice be in that sense?
Meg: One of the things… let me see if I can find it this way. So I’m also a presentation coach and have been for a long time, just revisiting the book I wrote four years ago right now in a series of videos and seeing what I know and kind of looking at it through the lens of me having a different action logic than when I wrote the book.
One of the things that I’m aware of is that different things resonate with people when they’re at different stages. When you’re putting across your vision, for example, if you’ve got some people who are at the belonging stage, some people who are at the problem-solving stage, some people who are at the strategic stage, some people who are at the independent or interdependent stages who are more about holding the space and creating culture, then you really need to be able to code-switch. This becomes a skill, I think, when you really settle into your new vision of the world: you really are able to connect with the actual people who are in front of you. Otherwise, what are you doing?
So I think there needs to be an awareness that these changes literally don’t happen overnight. It’s three to five years for people to move from one stage to the next if they were on some sort of path, but people stay in some stages for decades or for their whole life. There will be people in your organization who are going to feel really unsafe if they don’t know what to do, how to be a good team member. So your self-managing vision needs to be translated into those terms.
Some people are very certain of their own perspective and they’re very clear on their expertise and really good at solving their problem, so they need to know how the thing you’re suggesting solves problems—and problems that are relevant for them. Otherwise they’re going to go, “This is all great, but we need to really just focus on the basics, we need to focus on the fundamentals.”
People who are more strategic need to know how this is going to lead towards business outcomes and business goals and hitting the numbers. And then people who are thinking about culture and beyond are maybe going to be easier to talk to when you talk about the circumstances for success.
But if you only hit one or two of those, you’re going to lose people. We have to be careful not to disrespect that people are at different stages. It’s just like you only evolve when life forces you to, really. It may be that people in their life stages haven’t just haven’t evolved, and so we, being human and humane, need to make sure that we’re bringing everyone along.
Lisa: It sounds similar to the spiral dynamics world and some of the stuff in teal. There’s a track there of saying, “Well, I’m teal and I’m more evolved than you,” when actually it’s about recognizing the value of all of the stages and respecting them. As you say, it’s not a hierarchy; it’s not a case of “I’m superior because I’ve reached this stage.” It’s about being really aware and compassionate that it’s natural and normal and totally okay for people to be at different stages depending on their life circumstances.
Meg: And people at later stages do have more options. I can’t ignore that—everything. It’s not random; there is a progression, there is an evolution. So there’s a kind of double challenge there of not being judgmental and also appreciating that, well, you do have more tools, you do have more perspectives. You’ve had hard-won changes in the way that you look at the world, but because you’ve got more options in the way that you approach things, you need to be the more flexible one.
Lisa: I want to shift to a sort of connected but slightly different topic. You mentioned about including everyone, and I know that you’re very passionate about power differences in society and how they show up in organizations—diversity and equity and inclusion. What is your take on all of that? What can we learn? This is a huge question, but what can we learn from—because I think this is a topic that’s coming up a lot more now in terms of organizations.
I mean, for a while you’ve had the traditional hierarchy-type organizations recognize that diversity and inclusion stuff is important for the bottom line and in order to be competitive and hire people, if I’d be a bit cynical for a moment. But I think also I’m hearing Frederic Laloux and a lot of other people talking about, in the world of self-organizing, that we need to shift more than just the manager-subordinate dynamic. There are so many other power differences and dynamics going on that if we can really shine a light on those in organizations—and perhaps they become all the more visible in the self-managing organization—then there’s some real gold there in terms of deepening relationships, in terms of creating spaces for people. What’s been your journey with that, and what learning can you share from that strand of your work?
Meg: So before I forget something I’ve been thinking about and talking about with friends: businesses tend to approach diversity, equity, inclusion, justice work in terms of the bottom line and diversity of thought, or even “we should do it because it’s the right thing.” Which I think is maybe a slightly better motive.
But the thing that you don’t know when you live in a reasonably monocultural environment is how amazing it is when you have an environment that’s really inclusive and you have people of color and queer people and trans people and disabled people able to be themselves. We bring—I say “we” as someone who has some marginalized identities and some dominant identities—and the environment is amazing. There’s some magic which is just missing from dry toast organizations sometimes. That’s really difficult to convey because the work there, if you’re really going to do it, is super emotional.
I do some of this work generally with my friend Sawyer. I share my business partner in a runaway at the moment. We kind of just exist as a hashtag (tick box, T-I-K B-O-X), but we started off doing anti-racism work with white people in our lounge. We invited some people around and we were experimenting with things, and we were talking the other day about how you move from ignorance—so literally not knowing or not caring—through to “should and shouldn’t 101”: should use this language, shouldn’t use that language. And that’s better than ignorance, so at least in an organization people are being respectful.
But in order to become someone who people with marginalized identities can relax around and bring the magic that they have, you need to go through a whole range of emotional work where you unpick the internalized programming that you have. It’s tough work and long-term work. It’s something that people underestimate inside organizations, and also personally. In order to create an organization where people with marginalized identities can bring their full selves to work, that’s a long-term cultural change. Just doing a little bit of unconscious bias training is laughable—we literally all sit down and laugh about it.
It also means, if you do have people who are different to you in fundamental ways, that you may lose some of the coziness of the organization. I went, ill-advisedly, to a networking evening in London by quite a posh organization, and nothing bad happened but I was not welcomed as a trans woman. I looked around the room and I should just have walked straight out, but I got the train all the way to London and got a new outfit because it’s quite posh. I looked around the room and something in the room—I knew that these people had not done any work to unpick their internalized transphobia. And you can smell it.
Friends of mine have talked about white ways of organizing, white ways of running organizations, and the thing that you don’t realize when you have a dominant identity is how much people with marginalized identities code-switch towards you, how much we’re working really hard, how much we’re pretending to be able to fit in, and how exhausting that is. The onus for the work needs to rest on the people with dominant identities, but it’s actually not clear how you do that.
Just empathizing your way in is only going to get you 10% of the way in. I didn’t know until I spoke to women friends of mine, and then more recently with the #MeToo movement, how much street harassment women experience—both cis and trans women. I kind of thought it was a little bit, and then how much was going on. I didn’t realize how many microaggressions—how many small (not small emotionally, but regular) microaggressions—happen to people of color in this country as they’re just getting on the bus and going to work and going to meetings, and how much people speak over people and for people and disbelieve people and disrespect people routinely every day.
I think it also has a link to the action logics, because if we approach diversity, equity, inclusion (and I think those are important distinctions) through an expert lens, it’s only going to take us so far. Really, in order for us to do this work, we need people to have a more interdependent action logic in order to be able to see the humanity, in order to have the humility to realize how much work there is to do.
I’ve also realized, as a trans woman—I just announced my transition on March 31st, which was Trans Day of Visibility this year—and I am still rooting out misogyny and transmisogyny inside me, even though I think, “Hello, I’m a trans woman.” It comes up in ways of processing and ways of educating ourselves. If we haven’t read 10 articles or two books on racism, ableism, trans and non-binary identities, classism, then we’re really not actually that bothered about them.
This is partly why I’ve been thinking about “Where’s my place in the world?” and I think partially my intervention point is nurturing people who are moving from independent to interdependent leadership. Because we’ve got two crises: we’ve got the human rights crisis or the human flourishing crisis, and then we’ve also got the planetary crisis that’s fast coming upon us. It’s only people who have longer timelines and more empathy and more ability to spot patterns and more humility that are going to be people who can bring about those two things, to avoid the possible coming collapse.
Lisa: Yes, so many great things in what you just said. Something that comes to mind is what you pointed out about—to really have these conversations beyond a kind of intellectual level, you know, “Let’s do an anti-bias training” or something—to really add a different action logic, having really human, compassionate understanding of what it’s like living your life as who you are. Really understanding that you do have to give up a certain level of coziness and confront some awkwardness.
I think the author says that in that book “Why I No Longer Talk to White People About Race.” A lot of white people say, “Yeah, but it’s a bit awkward to bring up race.” And it’s like, yeah, well, I think we can deal with a little bit of awkwardness for the greater good, given the kind of historical context.
Meg: And in addition to that, it’s not just awkwardness. White people, we respond violently—like, furious. I was talking to the head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at a law firm yesterday, and we were talking about why it is hard to talk to white people about race. If you’re in the UK, it’s good to read “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race” by Reni Eddo-Lodge, which frames it in the UK context.
Our response, the fragility of our ability to talk about race, comes out in fury and rage. That means that if we say, “All people should just speak up,” there are reasons why people aren’t speaking up, because it’s extremely unusual to find a white person who does not respond in a deeply defensive way. We tend to think of racism as saying bad things about Black and brown people, and it’s like, mildly deeper than that and invisible to us. Until we start doing that education, we don’t have a hope of creating an organization where not only are we going to hire people, but they’re going to stay and be happy.
That’s one of the important distinctions: when you’re looking at your organization, how you look at how many queer people, trans people, disabled people, people of color there are, but you also look at how long are they staying and how much are they able to be themselves. Even that question about “How happy are you? How much are you being yourself?” Are you creating an environment where it’s okay to tell the truth? Because there’s the conversations, the WhatsApp conversations that happen amongst marginalized people about their experience in the workplace—you would be amazed at the labor that goes on in order to just exist in the workplace, in the world.
Lisa: What would you—in your experience, what can we do in organizations or communities to create safe spaces and to create an environment where people have the courage to speak the truth and not in sort of corridors or WhatsApp chats, but to really kind of have it be heard?
Meg: I mean, fundamentally it’s about who you’re employing. In senior roles—and maybe we don’t have senior roles in self-managing organizations, but who’s actually making decisions about inclusion? You’re not just including people, but people are actually making their own decisions about inclusion.
I’ve been thinking about this in terms of me coming out as a trans woman. I identified as non-binary for three or four years, and then before that as a gay man. I’ve been thinking about why I felt—some people have said, “Oh, you’re really brave,” and I don’t feel brave. I’ve been thinking about why is that, why didn’t I feel—I mean, sometimes I do feel it’s not totally straightforward—what made all my clients been lovely. Both coaching clients and corporate clients.
I suppose I’ve seen people respond consistently positively to stuff around trans identity in my circle, and so it became less of “What will people think?” I already knew. But that meant that there was a consistency of response to things. I suppose I also did it gradually. I began to experiment with a bit of makeup, and then I was wearing gender non-conforming clothes and dresses or more clothes from the women’s side. So for several years I had a slightly mixed fem and masculine presentation, then I came out as non-binary.
I saw that people still kept me as their coach and clients still brought me in to run interventions and facilitation and culture working, that they were still staying in contact with me. Then when I came out, clients emailed me to say, “I’ve seen your blog post and I just want to say I’m really proud to have you as a coach.” That’s an incredibly precious thing and very rare for trans people, particularly trans people of color, to have that.
I’m also older—I’m 44 on Friday—and so I have the protection of whiteness and I have the protection of age, and I have the protection of choosing whom I work with, which lots of people who work for organizations don’t have insurance. Though also when I’ve had candid dialogue with some people who are clients, people have said to me, “Well, I like you, but I think God thinks it’s wrong.” So there are those decisions to be made with organizations: Are you okay with just having a baseline of overtly respectful behavior towards marginalized people, or do you really want to win hearts and minds? Winning hearts and minds is a whole different challenge.
Lisa: That blog that you’re referring to is just gorgeous. I’m going to put the link in the episode when I publish it because it was really powerful. You wrote on your website as well a phrase which I really like, about “As a trans woman, I know a thing or two about transitions.” So I’m curious, this kind of deeply personal transitioning that you’ve gone through and are going through—has that impacted the way that you view your work and world and how you approach these ideas that we’ve been talking about?
Meg: I mean, on one level they do, because they’re part of me. I’m talking a lot to leaders about—I had a coaching client yesterday who was talking about finding their way of doing things. They were saying they were working in a particular field and they feel like they want to develop their expertise and become someone who really knows this area, which they’ve only recently moved into. But they’re not really book-reading; they know that they’re going to read a page and wander away.
So I was talking with them about, “What would be the thing? Could it be podcasts? Could it be audiobooks? Could it be you follow a bunch of people on Twitter and then follow the links and have conversations? Are you more of a real-life conversation person, like you want to have meetups and subscribe to new things?”
I suppose I’m answering your question backwards, but as someone who’s talked about that for a long time, I realized that I needed to be modeling that. This is a way of modeling it: if we potentially have some really serious stuff about to happen in the world, and actually there’s a whole bunch of stuff which is happening for millions of people, this is not the time for us to not be bringing every ounce of magic that we have involved. This is not time for us to be allowing capitalism, allowing the corporate life, to stop us bringing everything that we can to the challenges that are in front of us.
Maybe you can’t be at the frontline of dealing with the climate crisis or changing policies for marginalized people, but can you moment-to-moment bring a genuine awareness and a compassionate awareness? Are you listening properly? Are you being as present as you can be? Are you dealing with your own stuff? Are you educating yourself about people who are different than you? Because we need more people who are doing that kind of internal revealing.
Being a trans woman, it feels—it’s really funny, I’ve got a meeting with the doctor today after we’re talking about supporting me in hormones. I expected when I got to this stage that I would feel different, and actually I just feel more me. So I still have the same brain and same heart and the same that I had when I was living as a gay man.
There’s a magic in authenticity, which is an overused word, but there’s a magic in being present and in being able to walk through the world fully as you and then bring in as many people as you can, and be humble.
There’s a beautiful phrase that a mentor of mine uses: “Being vulnerable to transformation.” Are you being vulnerable to transformation? In fact, when I was on the learning marathon, a friend crocheted some phrases for each person on the learning marathon, and the one that she crocheted for me was “listening to transform.” Because I talked quite a lot about the levels of listening that are in theory—you know, listening about just waiting, listening for debate, listening for dialogue (which is better, to listen to the feelings of the other person). But are you listening in that deeper way where you’re allowing yourself to go, “How might I change in this conversation? How might I change?”
Today I’ve got a little badge from an author (his name is going to escape me), but it says “Everything changes, today is the day everything changes.” I can’t remember… but it just reminds me sometimes to go, sometimes we look ahead at a day and think we know how it’s going to go, and if we can hold a space to go, “I don’t know who I’m going to be tonight,” then it allows some magic, even if we’re doing really ordinary things.
Lisa: I had moments of nearly crying now as we were talking. I think you model so beautifully all the things that you’re talking about. It really comes across with your just energetic me. Had to back up such a profound conversation.
I suppose, like, I’m thinking about people who are listening who are on transition journeys of their own, all kinds of different transitions I imagine, whether it’s personal transitions, whether it’s transitioning to a teal or a self-managing organization, whether it’s transitioning to a new action logic. What sort of parting advice or words of wisdom or encouragement could you offer listeners?
Meg: When I first started my transition, when I first came across non-binary people—so people who don’t identify as male or female, or who aren’t male or female in their own sense of self—I thought it was just ridiculous. I was just at that stage where we talk about the ignorance and rolling your eyes, like I just thought it was silly.
Then I gradually followed a bunch of people on Twitter and got to see that there were a whole bunch of people who were living that way, and not just young white people either, but a whole bunch of people. Then I became a roller derby referee—roller derby is this wild sport that started off as a women’s sport but is very gender-inclusive. I was a referee because I just loved roller skating, and there were a few people there who were trans and non-binary.
So I was getting to see people around me, and then there was just a whisper inside me that my body wanted different fabrics on it. I felt like I wanted something swooshy, and then I began to realize that I would really quite like to wear some mascara.
[Sidebar: I understand using the tools of the patriarchy that oppressed me to express my full self. Trans people are very aware of this tyranny, and I’m constantly at the moment navigating between—if I express myself in a very feminine way, I’m worried that women are going to say, “You know, being a woman isn’t all just having painted nails and wearing heels and having makeup on.” Whereas if I don’t, then people will treat me like, “Well, you really want me to treat you like a woman, but you don’t look like one.” There’s something where I’m planning what I want to wear today, how do I want to present. It’s just another example of people policing how women appear, how non-men appear.]
Then began to be this whisper of “I wanted this thing” and I didn’t know what it was. Then over time, I started talking to my partners about it and friends, just saying, “I really think there’s something here,” and they followed it. I listened to my body for a while, and then last July I went to an event with some trans women and something in my body just called out to the way that they were. That’s when I knew. It took me another nine months of thinking about it and doing therapy to own it.
The thing that I learned from that is it was seeing people around me who were fully expressing themselves that allowed me to fully express myself. Now people are messaging me to say, “You being so fully yourself helps me to be fully myself.” I think that’s that funny thing about the human journey, isn’t it—that the more we model how we want to be in the world, the more we can be a model.
I’m really, super aware that I stand on the shoulders of decades and decades of gender non-conforming people, and then particularly on the shoulders of young people who are existing right now, who are really pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a human in terms of gender.
So if you do have that inkling, allow it to grow slowly. Don’t ignore it. If you are going, “I really have an instinct that this is what I want to do with my life” or “This is how I want to begin to change my organization,” it’s probably important not to jump in with both feet, but to listen quietly to that and go, “What’s my next step? What would be a small step to test this, to see what people’s responses are?”
Ironically, that also means people are probably going to come along the journey with you if you’re allowing them to catch up. People need time to process sometimes. It’s something that I forget—that I’ve been thinking about this for years, and for some people it’s brand new. There’s an element of me having to be a little bit patient with people. So if you’ve been thinking about self-management for ages, or you’ve been thinking about doing something that seemed a little bit out there, then you may have to remember that other people haven’t been thinking about it for so long. So go slowly so the people who can stay with you do.
Lisa: Yeah, so listen to the whisper and follow it step by step. Meg, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. I’ve learned a lot, and I really appreciate you sharing both your knowledge and your personal experiences in a way that for sure is going to model something very inspirational for people listening. So thank you.
Meg: Well, thank you. It’s been an honor to be here because you’ve interviewed a bunch of people whose books I have, who were my mentors and people who I really admire. So it’s really an honor to be amongst them.
