When Leaders Dare to Rehumanize Work
BRENE BROWN
I first got acquainted with Brené Brown when people told me about her TED Talk on “The Power of Vulnerability.” As I watched it, I immediately made the connection between the importance of vulnerability and effective servant leadership. Brené and I agree that having a servant heart is definitely an inside-out job. In this essay she details how, when heart-led leadership prevails in an organization, shame will not be a factor. —KB
GIVEN WHAT I’VE learned from research and what I’ve observed over the past decade as I’ve worked with leaders from companies of all sizes and types, I believe we have to completely reexamine the idea of engagement. To reignite creativity, innovation, and learning, leaders must dare to rehumanize education and work. This means understanding how scarcity is affecting the way we lead and work, learning how to engage with vulnerability, and recognizing and combating shame.
Make no mistake: honest conversations about vulnerability and shame are disruptive. The reason we’re not having these conversations in our organizations is that they shine light in dark corners. Once there is language, awareness, and understanding, turning back is almost impossible and carries with it severe consequences. We all want to dare greatly. If you give us a glimpse into that possibility, we’ll hold on to it as our vision. It can’t be taken away.
Sir Ken Robinson speaks to the power of making this shift in his appeal to leaders to replace the outdated idea that human organizations should work like machines with a metaphor that captures the realities of humanity. In his book Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative,1 Robinson writes: “However seductive the machine metaphor may be for industrial production, human organizations are not actually mechanisms and people are not components in them. People have values and feelings, perceptions, opinions, motivations, and biographies, whereas cogs and sprockets do not. An organization is not the physical facilities within which it operates; it is the networks of people in it.”
Servant leadership and shame culture cannot coexist for a simple reason: the foundation of servant leadership is courage and shame breeds fear. Shame crushes our tolerance for vulnerability, thereby killing engagement, innovation, creativity, productivity, and trust. And worst of all, if we don’t know what we’re looking for, shame can ravage our organizations before we see one outward sign of a problem. Shame works like termites in a house. It’s hidden in the dark behind the walls and constantly eating away at our infrastructure, until one day the stairs suddenly crumble. Only then do we realize that it’s only a matter of time before the walls come tumbling down.
In the same way that a casual walk around our house won’t reveal a termite problem, a stroll through an office or a school won’t necessarily reveal a shame problem. Or at least we hope it’s not that obvious. If it is—if we see a manager berating an employee or a teacher shaming a student—the problem is already acute and more than likely has been happening for a long time. In most cases, though, we have to know what we’re looking for when we assess an organization for signs that shame may be an issue.
Blaming, gossiping, favoritism, name-calling, and harassment are all behavior cues that shame has permeated a culture. A more obvious sign is when shame becomes an outright management tool. Is there evidence of people in leadership roles bullying others, criticizing subordinates in front of colleagues, delivering public reprimands, or setting up reward systems that intentionally belittle, shame, or humiliate people?
I’ve never been to a shame-free organization. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but I doubt it. In fact, once I’ve explained how shame works, I normally have several leaders approach me and explain that they use shame on a daily basis. Most ask how to change that practice—but a few proudly say, “It works.” The best case scenario is that it’s a limited or contained problem rather than a cultural norm. This is also true in schools. Approximately 85 percent of the men and women we interviewed for our shame research could recall a school incident from their childhood that was so shaming it changed how they thought of themselves as learners. What makes this even more haunting is that approximately half of those recollections were what I refer to as creativity scars. The research participants could point to a specific incident where they were told or shown that they weren’t good writers, artists, musicians, dancers, or something creative. This helps explain why the gremlins are so powerful when it comes to creativity and innovation at work. We’re afraid to reopen wounds by sharing new ideas and taking creative risks.
When we see shame being used as a management tool in the workplace (again, that means bullying, criticism in front of colleagues, public reprimands, or reward systems that intentionally belittle people), we need to take direct action because it means that we’ve got an infestation on our hands. And we need to remember that this doesn’t just happen overnight. Equally important to keep in mind is that shame rolls downhill. If employees are constantly having to navigate shame, you can bet they’re passing it on to their customers, colleagues, and even families.
So, if it’s happening and it can be isolated to a specific unit, work team, or person, it has to be addressed immediately and without shame. We learn shame in our families of origin, and many people grow up believing that it’s an effective and efficient way to manage people, run a classroom, and parent. For that reason, shaming someone who’s using shame is not helpful. But doing nothing is equally dangerous, not only for the people who are targets of the shaming but also for the entire organization. Shame begets shame.
Several years ago a man came up to me after an event and said, “Interview me! Please! I’m a financial adviser and you wouldn’t believe what happens in my office.” When I met Don for the interview, he told me that in his organization you choose your office each quarter based on your quarterly results: the person with the best results chooses first and sends the person in the desired office packing.
He shook his head, and his voice cracked a bit when he said, “Given that I’ve had the best numbers for the past six quarters, you’d think I’d like that. But I don’t. I absolutely hate it. It’s a miserable environment.” He then told me how after the previous quarterly results were in, his boss walked into his office, closed the door, and told him that he had to move offices.
“At first I thought my numbers had dropped. Then he told me that he didn’t care if I had the best numbers or if I liked my office; the point was to terrorize the other guys. He said, ‘Busting their balls in public builds character. It’s motivating.’”
Before the end of our interview, he told me he was job hunting. “I’m good at my job and even enjoy it, but I didn’t sign up to terrorize people. I never knew why it felt so lousy, but after hearing you talk, now I do. It’s shame. It’s worse than high school. I’ll find a better place to work, and you can be darn sure I’m taking my clients with me.”
In I Thought It Was Just Me,2 I tell the following story about Sylvia, an event planner in her thirties who jumped right into our interview by saying, “I wish you could have interviewed me six months ago. I was a different person. I was so stuck in shame.” When I asked her what she meant, she explained she had heard about my research from a friend and volunteered to be interviewed because she felt her life had been changed by shame. She had recently had an important breakthrough when she found herself on the “losers list” at work.
Apparently, after two years of what her employer called “outstanding winner’s work,” she had made her first big mistake. The mistake cost her agency a major client. Her boss’s response was to put her on the losers list. She said, “In one minute I went from being on the winners board to being at the top of the losers list.” I guess I must have winced when Sylvia referred to the losers list because, without my remarking at all, she said, “I know, it’s terrible. My boss has these two big dry erase boards outside of his office. One is the winners list, and one is for the losers.” She said for weeks she could barely function. She lost her confidence and started missing work. Shame, anxiety, and fear took over. After a difficult three-week period, she quit her job and went to work for another agency.
Shame can only rise so far in any system before people disengage to protect themselves. When we’re disengaged we don’t show up, we don’t contribute, and we stop caring. On the far end of the spectrum, disengagement allows people to rationalize all kinds of unethical behavior including lying, stealing, and cheating. In the cases of Don and Sylvia, they didn’t just disengage; they quit—and took their talent to competitors.
Here’s the best way to think about the relationship between shame and blame: if blame is driving, shame is riding shotgun. In organizations, schools, and families, blaming and finger-pointing are often symptoms of shame. Shame researchers June Tangney and Ronda Dearing explain that in shame-bound relationships, people “measure carefully, weigh, and assign blame.” They write, “In the face of any negative outcome, large or small, someone or something must be found responsible and held accountable. There’s no notion of water under the bridge.” They go on to say, “After all, if someone must be to blame and it’s not me, it must be you! From blame comes shame. And then hurt, denial, anger, and retaliation.”3
Blame is simply the discharging of pain and discomfort. We blame when we’re uncomfortable and experience pain—when we’re vulnerable, angry, hurt, in shame, grieving. There’s nothing productive about blame, and it often involves shaming someone or just being mean. If blame is a pattern in your culture, then shame needs to be addressed as an issue.
Related to blame is the issue of cover-ups. Just like blame is a sign of shame-based organizations, cover-up cultures depend on shame to keep folks quiet. When the culture of an organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of individuals or communities, you can be certain that shame is systemic, money drives ethics, and accountability is dead. This is true in all systems, from corporations, nonprofits, universities, and governments, to churches, schools, families, and sports programs. If you think back on any major incidents fueled by cover-ups, you’ll see this pattern.
In an organizational culture of servant leadership where respect and the dignity of individuals are held as the highest values, shame and blame don’t work as management styles. There is no leading by fear. Empathy is a valued asset, accountability is an expectation rather than an exception, and the primal human need for belonging is not used as leverage and social control. We can’t control the behavior of individuals; however, we can cultivate organizational cultures where bad behaviors are not tolerated and people are held accountable for protecting what matters most: human beings.
The four best strategies for building shame-resilient organizations are:
1. Encourage servant leaders to courageously facilitate honest conversations about shame and cultivate shame-resilient cultures.
2. Make a conscientious effort to see where shame might be functioning in the organization and how it might even be creeping into the way we engage with our coworkers and students.
3. A critical shame resilience strategy is normalizing. Leaders and managers can cultivate engagement by helping people know what to expect. What are common struggles? How have other people dealt with them? What have your experiences been?
4. Train all employees on the profound dangers of shame culture and teach them how to give and receive feedback in a way that fosters growth and engagement.
We won’t solve the complex issues we’re facing today without creativity, innovation, and engaged learning. As servant leaders, we can’t afford to let our discomfort with the topic of shame get in the way of recognizing and combating it in our schools and workplaces.
Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston where she holds the Huffington Foundation-Brené Brown Endowed Chair at the Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past sixteen years studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy and is the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers: The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, and Rising Strong. Her latest book is Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone.
1. Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2001).
2. Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (but It Isn’t) (New York: Gotham, 2007).
3. June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing, Shame and Guilt (New York: Guildford, 2002).