‘We will never fulfill the potential in the Valley if people are only using half their personalities’
An interview with Leading By Example creator, Miki Johnson (that’s me!), by Cecilia Culverhouse, Bay Area Director of Advising at Pathwise Leadership.
Topics discussed: A lack of mental innovation in the Bay Area | Feminine and masculine paradigms | Metrics as an emotional fortress | Alternative role models to Steve Jobs | Leading by example
Read the introduction to this series here.
Cecilia: My first question is, what was the impetus for this project?
Miki: As I wrote in my introduction, there are a couple ideas that have just refused to leave me alone the last few years. But on a personal note, I realized several years ago that I had unconsciously absorbed this idea that the only way for me to be really successful was by proving that I could do everything “as good as a man could.”
It’s not that I wasn’t successful. I’d say I’ve done relatively well in male-dominated industries—journalism, photography, tech. But I felt like, to hold onto that success, I couldn’t ask for help, I couldn’t cry, and my emotions definitely couldn’t impact my decisions. Those largely invisible beliefs brought me to a point where I was pretty unhappy, having panic attacks and stomach problems, and that led me to start seeing a therapist.
That was the beginning of years of self-growth, which helped me realize I’m actually a very empathetic, emotional, intuitive person. I spent so long turning that part of myself off because I thought I had to in order to succeed. It really separated me from myself and what I needed. And it separated me from other people, which is the thing I regret most. I get great joy from feeling connected. It’s still really hard for me to think about the walls I used to put up between myself and other people—I can feel myself getting emotional just talking about it.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying that there are things I love about living in San Francisco and working with startups. This can be a very exciting, empowering place where there are opportunities to have a huge impact on the world. But I also see a lot of women — and men — who are in a similar position to the one I was in, where they’re disconnected from their true nature because they feel that’s the only way to succeed. I know personally how painful and unsustainable that is. So I’d like to help them see there are alternatives.
And at a larger scale, I fear we will never fulfill the true potential for change in the Valley if the people building these companies are only using half of their personalities. There’s a limit to how innovative we can be if we don’t also innovate how we think about leadership and success.
“There’s a limit to how innovative we can be if we don’t also innovate how we think about leadership and success.”
I think we see this starting to happen with the attention paid to the lack of women in tech. I’m really glad people are talking about it, but I’m constantly disappointed in the way it gets talked about. I think the way we talk about it is the real reason we’re not making as much progress as we’d like. I’m guessing it’s also why men often feel alienated and angry and attacked by it. Part of the problem is that, in my opinion, we’re using the wrong vocabulary to talk about these things. I think we talk about “men” and “women” a lot when what we mean to talk about is a masculine or a feminine way of doing things.
What about you? Does anything in there resonate?
Cecilia: Your story definitely resonates. I went to Barnard, which is a women’s college. It was a beautiful place, and very empowering. But even at Barnard, I saw that qualities I consider more masculine were valued. I was getting messages that, if I was going to succeed, I needed to be assertive and aggressive; I needed to be very analytical and detail-focused; I couldn’t show emotion.
In 2008 I had a health crisis when my thyroid stopped working. I learned that the thyroid plays a big role in keeping the body in balance. So I really took a look at where my life was out of balance. And it turned out, there were a lot of areas where I didn’t have what I would consider feminine energy.
For instance, I realized that my intellect was so highly valued, I had become disassociated from my body. I wasn’t able to use my body as a barometer to make important decisions. Everything was decided from my intellect, which is pretty good at analyzing facts and making cost-benefit analyses. But I believe that our brains, consciously or unconsciously, are largely driven by old operating systems that were instituted in childhood. This is the core of the Pathwise curriculum. Our bodies and intuition, on the other hand, can help guide us toward balance.
Miki: I feel like this might be a good time to talk about gender versus a feminine or masculine “paradigm.” People are probably like, “What the heck does that mean?” I know I didn’t really understand it at first.
And I just want to preface by saying I’m not convinced that “feminine” and “masculine” are the even the best words to use, because they are difficult to separate from gender and all the baggage that comes with that. Even thinking of it as a dichotomy feels wrong, now that we understand gender to be this incredibly fluid thing.
Cecilia: I agree. Black-or-white thinking does not reflect reality. Reality is paradox, reality is seeking balance. I think our attachment to binary is a very hard thing to challenge.
Miki: That’s one of my core struggles with this whole publication—I almost need to start with the false dichotomy of “feminine” and “masculine” because the human brain wants to understand things as opposites. But the truth is, it’s not really a binary. Feminine and masculine are not opposites in any way.
“The truth is, it’s not really a binary. Feminine and masculine are not opposites in any way.”
A question that constantly comes up for me is, how can we hold two things that seem to be opposite as both being true? That’s what I’m working towards. But maybe if we start by exploring these two points, eventually we can help people see they are two sides of the same coin. But we have to start somewhere.
So when I say something is “masculine” or “feminine,” I’m drawing mostly from native traditions and Eastern traditions. You see it in the idea of Yin and Yang. Or we could characterize it as sun energy and moon energy, which goes back to Egyptian times at least. But what it comes down to, for me, is a persistent idea that there needs to be a balance between different approaches.
I’ll throw out some concepts I associate with the feminine, but I just want to recognize these are influenced by my personal experience. I think of receiving, healing, intuition, the body, the earth. I also think about community and trying to find a solution that works for the collective. For masculine energy, I think more about the individual, taking action, making decisions. It’s also more about the mind and intellect.
Where did your ideas about this come from? What words do you associate with the masculine versus the feminine?
Cecilia: I agree with you that “masculine” and “feminine” are mostly shorthand for a group of characteristics. They speak to our human love of duality, which our egos create to help us comprehend our existence within a body in the physical plane. That’s where we get the idea of the spirit and the body being separate things. I think of masculine and feminine as just a starting place for a conversation about the characteristics we want to embody and to see embodied in our leaders.
“Masculine and feminine is just a starting place for a conversation about the characteristics we want to embody and to see embodied in our leaders.”
That said, the first word that comes to mind for the feminine is “softness.” I think I had a hardness about me before. Also receiving. Even things like receiving compliments, I wasn’t good at. I would always deflect them back on someone. I think of something primal, like earth, flowers, dirt, nature, and the ocean. Being vulnerable, like you said, a more collaborative style, being observant and willing to empower other people. Restorative, rejuvenation. And I also think of the feminine as more diffuse and expansive, rather than focused toward action. But again, I tread lightly calling something feminine or masculine. I try to always remember that it’s just a label and not to be attached to it.
Miki: Something that resonates with me is the idea of softness and receiving. I know I had this misconception before that I could either be strong or soft, not both. Today the idea of “strength with softness” is really important for me. I’ve realized that it actually takes an incredible amount of internal strength to be soft in a difficult situation.
Receiving was also a hard idea for me to wrap my mind around. The most tangible thing is receiving help, which I still struggle with. We often think that only the person giving help has the power, but there’s actually great power in receiving. It takes a huge amount of strength to be vulnerable enough to say, “I need help,” and to give gratitude in return. Brené Brown has a lot to say about this, and her work is a huge touchstone for me. Her whole thing is that “daring greatly” is when we choose to be vulnerable, to admit we’re not perfect and we need help and things are uncomfortable. In my experience, admitting those things can be much harder than being like, “Oh, I got this.”
And now I feel like I want to address the judgement piece. In my experience, the human brain loves to judge things, so when we talk about feeling an expectation to be aggressive, I worry that people will assume we mean that being masculine is necessarily negative. And that’s not what we mean.
“I worry that people will assume we mean that being masculine is necessarily negative.”
I want to make it really clear that each end of the feminine-masculine spectrum contains both a light and a shadow side. So maybe the shadow side of the masculine is being overly aggressive or not listening to other people’s needs. But there’s also a positive side, because there are really important moments where you can’t listen to everyone’s opinion and you need to just make a decision, move forward, experiment.
Cecilia: Maybe there’s a mom who we would think of as super feminine, but if the car is rolling backwards and about to hit her kid, is she going to summon super-human strength to grab her child or stop the car? Hell, yeah. And that’s going to be aggressive and fast and fierce. For the Star Wars fans, I think about it like The Force, how it is embodied in both the light and dark, and how those two sides are inextricably linked.
Miki: Love it. I also found that when I was trying to operate from a more masculine paradigm, it wasn’t conscious, so it wasn’t a choice. And especially when that masculine way of being wasn’t aligned with my inherent nature, it was more likely to go to the shadow side. For instance, I have a hard time gauging the “right” amount of aggressiveness, and I’d often end up really hurting people’s feelings.
But I want to clarify that we’re not saying that being emotionally vulnerable or empathetic is always the right decision. The shadow side of that can be wallowing in negative emotions, which can lead to depression or a lack of forward movement. It all comes back to the idea of balance.
I hear a lot of talk out there, from women mostly, who say, “The men have been running things for long enough — now it’s time for women to run things.” And that makes me so frustrated. We don’t need to trade one power structure for another — we need to create space for both ways, all ways, to work together. At least in my opinion.
“We don’t need to trade one power structure for another — we need to create space for both ways.”
Maybe it would help to give specific examples of when we made a decision to do something from a feminine place?
Cecilia: I see it in my work with Pathwise, where one of the hats I wear is business development. It starts with taking action, like reaching out to our membership, starting conversations. That’s the part that’s directed and focused and detail-oriented, what we might call more masculine.
But then there comes the time where you’ve reached out and you kind of take your hands off the wheel. You let go. You stop trying to force something to happen and you just wait and see. You trust. Trust that a relationships will naturally develop with individuals and organizations who are a fit for us. I don’t keep pushing. I don’t harass people with crazy e-mail campaigns.
“There comes a time where you kind of take your hands off the wheel. You let go.”
Miki: I love that your example is from the business world, because this discussion about “being your authentic self” is often relegated to the world of individual personal growth. I’d love to help it move into the public sphere, into the worlds of business and government and academia. As long as these larger systems are still operating from only one paradigm, it’s so much harder for us to make changes individually.
I also love your story because it illustrates one of the aspects of femininity I mentioned before, which is receiving. Or we could call it trusting. It’s the idea of putting something out in the world, saying, “This is who I am, this is what I do, and this is who I want to work with.” Then, like you said, you take your hands off the wheel. And believe me, that’s not easy. Especially when your livelihood depends on it. But we’ve done a very similar thing with Job Portraits and it’s worked out well. Plus, in a big way, that’s also what I’m doing with this publication.
Cecilia: Speaking of “Leading by Example,” who are you interested in interviewing?
Miki: I think the easier thing for me to answer is, what do I want to discuss? Something that’s grown out of our work at Job Portraits is that I’d like to highlight tangible ways that work culture can be more accepting of the feminine. Not to say that it should be all feminine, but, especially here in the Valley, most work cultures swing so far to the masculine side. I just want to help people understand ways they can move the needle back to the center a little. Lucky for me, it’s our job to interview companies about their cultural practices, so I get to see first-hand what works and what doesn’t.
Cecilia: Right. So you’d be interviewing people about how they integrate masculine and feminine in their workplace or how they embody in their leadership style.
Miki: Yep. I love that quote, “How you’re being is more important than what you’re doing.” Office policies tend to be very prescriptive. They talk about what you do, but not how you do it. And that often backfires. For instance, a lot of startups have unlimited vacation. But what ends up happening is people take less, not more, vacation. Why? I saw one study that said the written policies of a company have almost no impact on people’s actions. What matters is if people see their coworkers, especially those above them, taking time off. To address that, I’ve heard of companies implementing minimum vacation requirements. Another example is a company we worked with where the founders made a point of leaving the office every day at 5pm so everyone else felt like they were allowed to go home, too. I want to interview leaders like that.
I’ve also mentioned Brian Chesky, the CEO of AirBnB, as someone I’d like to interview. I don’t know him personally but I love his blog post, “Don’t Fuck Up The Culture,” and other things I’ve seen from him make me feel like he’s coming from like a more balanced leadership paradigm. Plus, I’m eager to interview men. I’m sick of these conversations about femininity happening mostly among women. A lack of choice about how you lead hurts men and women equally, just in slightly different ways.
“A lack of choice about how you lead hurts men and women equally.”
I was sitting here realizing another thing I want do is create a space where we celebrate people talking about the emotional side of starting, or working at, high-growth companies. I read so many blog posts about growing your business, and even building strong cultures, but they’re mostly focused on process and numbers.
I think most startup leaders are afraid to admit they don’t have all the answers. Maybe that’s why there’s such a focus on metrics right now. Because numbers feel safe. They feel stable and knowable and precise. But in my experience, and the experience of people I’ve talked to, starting a company is one of the most ambivalent, unclear, confusing things you can do. There are no clear answers and no one can even tell you if what you are doing is right or wrong because you’re probably the first person ever to do it. I think it’s one of the most emotionally difficult things a person can do.
When we fail to recognize that aspect of business, we see people falling back on numbers and metrics to try to make things feel solid and sure. I feel like these founders are trying to build a fortress around themselves. That way they can say, “I made this decision based on the numbers, and therefore you can’t criticize me for it.” In my head, I’m like, “Come on, you made a decision based on a gut instinct and you’re using numbers to feel validated.” Maybe if we valued instinct as a valid way to make decisions, that wouldn’t be necessary.
“I feel like these founders are trying to build a fortress around themselves.”
Because, really, no numbers are going to tell you what to do. And that’s super uncomfortable. As humans, we hate not knowing the answer. But if there is one place in the world where we should be helping people get more comfortable with not knowing, this is it. It needs to be something we celebrate. This is why San Francisco is so special — you have this incredible support for innovation alongside incredible open-mindedness about all kinds of other things.
Let’s not forget, this city was a hotbed of experimentation in drug culture, music culture, sex culture…every kind of counterculture. People here have always seen the world from a different perspective. And they still do. There’s got to be more coaches and therapists per capita in the Bay Area than anywhere else in the world, right? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that exists side-by-side with the highest concentration of startups. It’s obvious to me that, in order to support a community of people building businesses that completely reinvent our world, we need not only financial support but also the emotional and spiritual support, to help survive the challenge of getting up every day and feeling like you have no idea what you’re doing.
“To support a community of people building businesses that completely reinvent our world, we need not only financial support but also emotional and spiritual support.”
Cecilia: So you want to help normalize that experience. To help people admit that running a company can be emotionally challenging .
Miki: Yes. I’d also love to provide founders with other options for heroes besides Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk and Travis from Uber. I’m sure those guys have a lot of positive qualities, but, at least publicly, they’re known for being difficult to work with, for stealing other people’s ideas, for being aggressive and competitive and having that “win at all costs” mentality. Basically the shadow side of the masculine paradigm.
I’m not saying what they built isn’t important. Each of them has definitely “left a dent in the universe.” But I want to provide another take on the stories people tell about them. For one, people consciously or subconsciously assume that since they were successful being, frankly, jerks, you have to be a jerk to be successful. I heard a great interview with Adam Grant recently where he asked, what if those guys were successful in spite of being jerks, not because of it?
I think there is this idea that being feminine is nice and all, but you’re not going to “win big” that way. I want to shine a spotlight on incredibly successful leaders who are also kind and collaborative and forgiving and emotionally open. Dave Goldberg might be a good example — how sad that so many people, myself included, didn’t know about him until he passed away. That’s the thing about more balanced leaders, they often aren’t widely known, their power is more behind the scenes. All the more reason I want to bring them into the light.
Cecilia: Do you want to end by explaining the title of this project?
Miki: Good idea. For me, “leading by example,” speaks to the idea that there is not one “right” way to lead. I think part of what you and I have been reacting to is this idea that leadership looks a certain way, often a way we don’t identify with. I’d like to redefine “leadership” as just being 100% yourself. By showing up in the world in a way that’s in alignment with your own beliefs and convictions, you actually create more positive change than trying to be a certain way that other people have prescribed.
“I’d like to redefine “leadership” as just being 100% yourself.”
I also like “leading by example” because, in my experience, no one has ever convinced another human being to do anything by telling them they “should.” The only thing that works is to be the change you want to see in the world. When I think about the times my mind was changed, it was because someone was just living their life in a way I admired, and I was like, “Maybe I should try that.”
