I’ve recently written a series of articles for women about letting go of the ‘Good Girl’ in ourselves. As part of my research, I had asked women the following question: ‘To move into health and happiness, what do you need to let go of and what is no longer serving you?’ A key theme emerged, what I call the ‘Good Girl Mindset.’ I have never yet met a woman who does not nod knowingly when I use this phrase. Three key aspects emerged:
Good girls are expected to give but not receive.
Good girls can cry but they must not feel or show anger.
Good girls do not listen to their inner truth…their intuition…and consequently learn to doubt themselves, which is manifested in over-apologising and low self-worth. Let go of the Good Girl and voice your truth
I received feedback from men that this concept deeply resonated with them too and I wondered if the concept of the ‘Good Boy’ is different for men. Martin, a former client and good friend, who is a partner with a management consulting firm in the UK, kindly agreed to be interviewed:
1. What would you say are the key aspects of being a ‘Good Boy’ that you internalised growing up?
Good Boys are valued for what they do, not who they are. They climb, construct, and compete. The more activities Good Boys do the better; in my early years, we’d joke in our family about how many half-day activities could be squeezed into one day of holiday!
Good Boys ascend hierarchies: progressing to the next level, climbing a league etc. Success is based on hitting pre-defined metrics and not what will make them truly happy. Hence, Good Boys will strive to achieve excellence and win the game, rather than playing to enjoy.
Good Boys are macho, sports-loving risk takers. To be part of the pack, Good Boys can be aggressive, excel at sport, or are daring to demonstrate their Alpha-male capabilities. Fitting in involves following a well-trodden path; it’s better for ‘Good Boys’ to stay in their lane, rather than stand out.
Good Boys don’t cry. They don’t show emotions or certainly don’t discuss feelings with each other! To do so would be considered a sign of weakness, and invite derision or bullying.
My formative years were in the North of England in the 1980s and 90s, and I’d like to think things are generally more enlightened now, especially since I have teenage children. As a parent and influencer of the next generation, I do worry that, whilst we’ve undoubtedly become aware and better in some areas, we may also be unintentionally creating new Good Boy/Girl mindsets.
2. A Leader cannot be a Good Boy/Girl. As a senior leader, can you say more about this?
I wholeheartedly agree! I found that as I progressed through management into more leadership roles, emotional intelligence (EQ) became a lot more important to build trust and support colleagues and clients. For now, at least, people run businesses and make trading, recruitment and investment decisions, so a strong understanding of both the intellectual and emotional decision-making factors is extremely important.
I’ve also learnt the hard way that you don’t succeed as a leader by just doing more, and that continuing to try to please others - or ‘fit in’ - is also career limiting for a leader. Whilst it can be tempting to work hard by doing more emails, presentations and meetings, it’s much more valuable as a leader to engage with insight, assess with perspective and act with authority. In short: to spend less time doing and more time being.
As I’ve grown as a leader I’ve defined my own path and become increasingly confident in how I show up, engage with other leaders, and make decisions. I value my own measures of success much more than the ones others have defined. I find one of the most thrilling parts of leadership is empowering and enabling colleagues to learn and be successful. Looking forward, I see leadership success for me increasingly as identifying and developing the cadre of leaders that I’ll be working with and will outlast my career. The current state and pace of our economy, technology and world need authentic and resilient leaders more than ever before, to not simply survive but to thrive and inspire in an uncertain, disruptive future.
3. How has the experience of working differently arising from the pandemic impacted you in all aspects of your life? What are your key learnings?
The pandemic was a massive shock to our lives, and established different ways of working, teaching, parenting / caring etc.
Much has been written about the impact of hybrid working, with a multitude of suggestions about how best to manage the intermingling of work on home and personal life, including managing time, setting boundaries, ‘virtual commuting’, prioritising mental health, disconnecting from the digital world etc.
Having rapidly made such unplanned and significant changes to our ways of working and living, the impact is only starting to emerge. Beyond the tragic losses and physical health impacts of Covid, a mental health crisis is unfolding, which many of us have been directly or indirectly affected by. As a consequence, I’ve needed to take time to recognise the impact this had on a personal level for me and also for my family, and on a professional level, an awareness that we need to be considerate and act with a great deal of emotional intelligence in our leadership of others through these times.
As a Professional Services leader, I’ve seen some tremendous positives to working life post-pandemic, with increased flexibility and a greater recognition that everyone has the right to balance their lives inside and outside of work, be that maintaining personal wellbeing, parental or caring responsibilities and pursuing personal goals. It’s great that we now talk about this openly, along with other individual drivers and factors. I make it a point with every new team I work with to get to know and understand what’s important to each person and we develop ‘Manuals of Me’ to share and ‘Charters’ to define how we’re going to work together with each new team.
I’ve also enjoyed playing a greater role at home as a husband and father of two teenagers. Being present during lockdowns and subsequently with hybrid working has given me closer proximity to everyday family matters. It’s overwhelmingly positive with more day-to-day connection from school runs and meals together to just being more present for the good and tough times together. But I also think I slept-walked into some negative impacts, including sometimes applying a work mindset to family matters, and bringing work stresses into the home. If I’m really honest, pre-hybrid I found ‘escaping’ to the office created a helpful, healthy separation and focus. Working from home and context-switching between home and work can impact productivity and energy levels, especially when there are difficulties in either world. It’s possible to fail to be fully present for either, the worst hybrid outcome!
Most significantly, whilst we now coach on wellbeing at work, even with a career of working on the road locally & globally, I still find varying hybrid weeks more exhausting than traditional commute or working away. I know I’m better off doing one thing, consistently for a period of time, be that a task, meeting, personal / social engagement, or school run. I frequently under-estimate the mental drain of context switching within a day and each day between locations.
My overarching learning is that effective hybrid working is more than just about choosing where to work from each day. Thought and planning is required to consider the impact on self, colleagues and family to make intelligent decisions about personal & business effectiveness and productivity.
4. You mentioned in one of our discussions that, ‘Given the current economic climate, we have to learn to be simultaneously highly competitive and successfully collaborative.’ Would you expand on this, Martin?
The rebooting of our global economy has put enormous strain on businesses, exposed weaknesses and a lack of resilience in the system. The economic, social and environmental crises, global political instability, and disruption from an impending technological, i.e. Artificial Intelligence, revolution and before we’ve normalised the last one, creates a phenomenally challenging business environment.
As a Transformational Change Leader, I believe that delivering the systemic changes being envisaged by Boards, whilst navigating this ‘high VUCA[1] environment’ is the defining, exciting challenge for leaders of our generation.
I also believe that successfully delivering these changes needs leaders to step up and adopt practices and behaviours that are fit for this environment. Effective high VUCA transformation leaders absorb high pressure for change and channel it across their organisations and into their teams with ‘positive energy’. For example, by employing only healthy competition, good governance (minimising politicking) and leadership alignment for the common good (not individual outcomes). I believe that the best leaders through this environment will succeed through collaboration, harnessing the ideas, skills and capabilities across traditional team, organisational, sector, social and geographic boundaries.
5. We’re in the middle of a very exciting Paris Olympics. The Olympic values are Excellence, Respect and Friendship. As a high achiever, how can we create excellence without compromising on our fundamental values?
As I write this we’ve already seen wonderful displays of success on both individual and team levels at the Olympics in Paris. I find it deeply inspiring to see the personal, family and team endeavour put in by each Olympic-level athlete, and heart-wrenching witnessing the brutally clear outcomes in real-time, determined in fractions of a second, marking the difference between success or failure.
Inevitably, the highest levels of competition brings out both the best in people and also the worst; an unfairly or cruelly won medal is fool’s gold. Yet showing the whole of humanity - and highlighting the best - is incredibly valuable at a time where fundamental human values are being compromised on a daily basis.
To pick one athlete in this context, many of us have been wowed by the US gymnast Simone Biles. Beyond her awesome achievements in her discipline through extraordinary skill and effort, there are undoubtedly leadership parallels and lessons we can draw, including:
Her mental struggles at Tokyo 2020 with the ‘Twisties’ when ‘mind and body fell out of sync’; a description similar to anxiety and the disconnection which can occur to any of us
The support of her teammates who gave her the courage to stick at it throughout her recovery
How she’s stronger after the episode, having recognised her capabilities, options and through redefining what success means to her personally “showing up, being in a good head place, having fun out there, and whatever happens, happens.”[2]
In my world, I think it’s important to have a clear, holistic view of success. When we think about goals, it’s important that they’re balanced and sustainable, acknowledging collaborative / team ambitions and allowing for talent, leadership and personal development. HOW they’re going to be delivered is equally important as WHAT they are. Whilst this can be stated publicly, the culture leaders establish through the ‘tone from the top’ is critical. As are visible demonstrations of alignment of leaders’ actions and behaviours with stated values.
Our workforce is increasingly mobile, much more engaged in ethical and sustainable outcomes, and unlikely to tolerate working for organisations (and leaders) that don’t ’walk the walk’. We are also experiencing increasing (and sometimes brutal) transparency with shareholder activism and other campaigners. Developing objectives which align with these broader stakeholder groups - and living and breathing them by our actions - is becoming essential, to avoid losing our all-important followers. To quote the West Wing “Otherwise, you’re like the French radical, watching the crowd run by saying ‘there go my people. I must find out where they’re going so I can lead them!”
6. One of the surprisingly positive outcomes arising from the pandemic is that more men are more open about their vulnerability and mental health. Why do you think this is Martin? Can you give examples? And in what other ways are men changing from their father’s and previous generations?
I grew up with a fairly stereotypical Gen X male attitude to emotions: compartmentalising and sealing with a tight lid thoughts and feelings which were ‘best left unsaid’. My working life had also evolved very separately to my home life, i.e. neatly compartmentalised. Covid brought these worlds closer together through enforced home working and the shared illness, worry and grief between colleagues. Sadly, enduring post-pandemic impacts however for some include Long Covid and a plethora of mental health challenges. I’ve needed to check and improve my emotional intelligence and resilience and found opening up at both home and work mutually beneficial. Speaking up at work about these topics has empowered others to do the same, with unexpected benefits to both individual colleagues (including myself) and teamwork.
In recent years, stereotypes regarding gender’s emotions have been well and truly busted, along with assumptions about genders themselves. I believe successful leaders of all genders need to be increasingly emotionally aware to understand, connect and inspire their colleagues. This is particularly the case considering the leadership of differing generations - and their expectations of the workplace (please forgive the stereotype), and certainly the differing ways groups and intersectional groupings of people were impacted by the pandemic.
7. The words, ‘Kindness, Beauty, and Truth’ are engraved on Einstein’s Memorial in Princeton. These come from his statement: ‘The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.’ So, as your final question: ‘You are on your deathbed, many, many years from now. You look back at your life and say: ‘That was a truly successful life!’ What does true success look like to you, Martin?
Well thanks for that one - especially for giving me ‘many, many years’(!)
At this time of global crises, individual suffering and near-universal struggling, I’d like to be remembered first and foremost as someone who helped others, showing kindness and generosity of spirit to improve the world around me, the lives of people close to me and those I could reach.
I’m very aware and grateful for the privileges I’ve had and feel a responsibility to make the most of the capabilities I was given, leaving an enduring positive impact on my family, friends, industry and society.
I hope my son and daughter (who I already consider upgrades!) always feel supported and empowered to develop their authentic selves (standing up to the Good Boy / Girl pressures) and live their best lives.
And finally, I hope I never look back and think I accepted an imperfect status quo. I find it hard to answer this question specifically, or to define long-term goals, but I know I always want to be developing myself and improving the world around me. I like the quote “success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” and since you only learn from trying and failing, and I know I’m happiest when I’m doing something to my best, I’d be happy to die an enthusiastic failure!
1.VUCA is an acronym to describe the Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity of conditions and situations, arising out of the US Army in the late 1980s
2. Interview with Simone Biles on letting go, twisting again, and having no regrets, Scott Bergman, 27th September 2023
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