Couldn’t Talk About It, If You Ain’t Live It
By Jared R. Francis | @jaredrfrancis
A few weeks back, the top executive of an industry-leading organization set up a camera in what appeared to be his basement. He was poised to deliver a message about racial justice and the urgent need for change in America. In his message, he acknowledged systemic racism, admitted to missteps that he had made on issues of race and pledged significant organizational resources into the fight for justice. He promised to listen to the voices of black members of his organization. His tone was sincere and heartfelt.
If, after watching his message, you laughed out loud, few would have blamed you, because the leader was NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Given the NFL's history of seeking to preserve segments of its fanbases' ignorance of police violence, Goodell's message rang hollow. In conspicuously failing to mention Colin Kaepernick by name, Goodell's mea culpa in effect, served as yet another insult to a man whose career was sabotaged for demanding that America recognize the humanity of black people. There is no way that Goodell or the NFL can credibly lead on this issue.
The deluge of public statements, financial commitments, and internal task forces to address racial injustice have been unavoidable in our organizational, civic, and commercial lives. But what comes next? As our organizations and teams move forward, leaders must prepare to take action to address internal issues of racial inequity and remain attuned to their credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of our teams. While many leaders are ready to address racial inequity within their organizations, others are likely to miss this opportunity. I suspect that many of our organizations are on the verge of a legitimacy crisis that will threaten the tenure of individual leaders and destabilize the health of their organizations. If you look close enough, the makings of this legitimacy crisis and its potential outcomes are in plain sight.
Leadership is about followership
The first thing to understand is the nature of leadership. As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall write, leadership does not exist without followership:
“This is the true lesson in leading from the real world: a leader is someone who has followers, plain and simple. The only determinant of whether anyone is leading is whether anyone else is following. This might seem like an obvious statement, until we recall how easily we overlook its implications. Followers—their needs, their feelings, their fears and hopes—are strangely absent when we speak of leaders as exemplars of strategy, execution, vision, oratory, relationships, charisma, and so on. The idea of leadership is missing the idea of followers. It's missing the idea that our subject here is, at heart, a question of a particularly human relationship—namely, why anyone would choose to devote his or her energies to, and to take risks on behalf of, someone else. And, in that, it's missing the entire point.”
Leaders would do well to interpret the line—"why anyone would choose to devote his or her energies"— as such: why should top talent work at your organization rather than your competitors? As skilled as we may be as leaders, the team of people that work with us enable us to succeed. We are unlikely to achieve our mission to the extent that we are unable to attract, develop, and retain top talent. A leader's credibility and legitimacy support the establishment of team culture and trust—they contribute to why that drives our teammates' performance, dedication, and effort.
The adage that "people quit bosses, not jobs" is instructive as we consider the potential outcomes of the emerging legitimacy crisis.
Give it to the young to carry the wave
The necessity of leader credibility to ongoing followership provides part of the picture of what is likely on the horizon. To bring the rest of it into focus, you have to ask why every major brand and your organization have spent the last few weeks making their stances on racial justice clear. The answer is related to the impact of demographic change in America.
The evidence is clear that racial attitudes among both Millennials and Generation Z differ from the older generations of Americans. Younger Americans are more likely to view systemic racism as pervasive and in need of redress by public and private institutions. This trend is particularly noticeable among college-educated, white professionals—the kind of folks that a) have the discretionary income that consumer brands seek to capture, and b) reside in our major urban areas, which are hubs for industries and talent.
Also at play is the increasing racial diversity of the workforce and evidence that points to the positive impact diversity has on organizational success. While systemic racism continues to limit the number of people of color who enter the professional class, and undermines the career prospects of those who do, their importance to organizations is more evident than ever.
Skepticism about appeals for racial justice is warranted (especially from less than credible messengers), but in context, it is not surprising that organizations or brands in the market for both customers and talent are comfortable making public appeals for racial justice—it's in their interest to do just that.
The coming legitimacy crisis
Insofar as leadership is derivative followership, and leader credibility sustains followership, shifts in the racial attitudes of younger professionals create the potential for legitimacy crisis at many of organizations. Younger professionals are more likely to expect their organizations to act consistently with their values. In this context, they are looking for leaders not only to speak in favor of racial justice in the world but also to address issues of racial injustice internally. The public statements and internal memos in response to the murder of George Floyd, will be the basis many will use to evaluate organizational leaders' credibility in the future--internal examples of racial bias or another televised murder of a black person will prompt people to look back on those promises and statements.
What will happen then? Retraumatized, staff of color are likely to feel resentful and gaslit by yet another round of commitments, memos, and statements. Devoid of credibility, leaders will face internal criticism from staff of all races, decreased morale, and, in some cases, their removal. A second-order consequence will be the reduced capacity of the organization to attract younger, more diverse talent. People talk, networks matter, word will get around about organizations that are expert at releasing well-crafted statements, which ultimately result in little to no action on internal issues of racial inequity.
We don't have to look further than Facebook or The New York Times to observe leaders who had long ago lost credibility on this particular issue, struggling over the last several weeks. Their prior statements and espoused values are nakedly inconsistent with their actions in the eyes of their staff, resulting in organizational turmoil. It's also why Democratic mayors who fashion themselves champions of social justice, were able to sustain stay at home orders for eight weeks, yet were unable to get citizens on board with curfew orders.
Leaders who do not use this moment to examine the racial inequities in their own house or fail to use their power to enact concrete policy or personnel changes will erode trust on their teams, undermine their credibility, and ultimately hasten their own departure--a fate that can happen to both white leaders and leaders of color. America's history tells us that the fight against racism will last beyond this moment— we will bear witness to smaller instances of racial discrimination and even uglier tragedies. When that dark hour comes again, if the promises made today were not followed by concrete internal action to remedy racial equity within our organizations, future declarations will ring as hollow as a Roger Goodell anti-racism tweet.
