This week’s Podcast focuses on the topic of disruption within

leadership.

I believe that it’s no use talking about being disruptor

if you are not prepared to be disrupted yourself.  This is why we have appointed an ‘Expedition

Disruptor’ and very deliberately built diversity into the Expedition Team.

Our expedition disruptor is Lissa Young, who makes the

case for disrupting from the inside, something she has a long track record of

doing in the US army. She illustrates her case with the story of how gay and

lesbians became accepted in the military. An issue she was at the centre of.

Lissa also speaks on the topic of gender and describes

herself as a ‘gender outlaw’.

Diversity is built into our group of expedition members.

Here Camilla Pontual from Brazil makes it very clear that in her eyes

leadership is not what white western CEO women do, it’s what women in the favelas

do. And Katyan Guryeva  illustrates just

why diversity of age is so crucial and central.

Julia Middleton 0:24

Welcome, welcome. Welcome. Thank you so very, very much for all the wonderful messages you've been sending that made it possible to carry on doing this podcast. It's absolutely terrifying hearing your own voice. And anyhow, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to write. I cannot resist reading two of the messages I've got. One from Amy Stillman, who says the podcast is amazing. "It just knocks it out of the park. Your moderation is spectacular, polished, clear and you. I've shared it with lots of people and you'll see that I posted it on the Women Emerging LinkedIn page and on my own. Thank you. Spectacular, Amy, is something I'm gonna have to live up to. But thank you so much also for posting it. Because we need lots and lots of women involved in not just the podcast, but the actual expedition. That's what it's all about. And then there's a most wonderful message from Tracy Hupapa: "loving the Women Emerging podcast. The words I've written down as I've spent time are: curiosity intuition, love, trust, instinct, inclusive, mindful, caring, belonging, values, principles, resilient, ambitious, communicative, aligned, together, fun, heart led, soul-based listening, learning and leading by example. Thank you. And thank you back to Tracy. So very kind of you to write, and also to share this far and wide.

Julia Middleton 2:01

Last week's podcast allowed us to vent some anger about women. And I suppose venting anger allows you, to some extent, to put it aside, but then there's a real danger that you do put the anger aside isn't it? In the act of putting it aside, the result is that you don't disrupt enough. And there's always a danger that you're gonna get stuck — we're gonna get stuck in a sort of nice place with the 20 women all being jolly nice to each other. So I thought we'd devote this week to the podcast being about disruption. And we got some great people talking about disruption. But before we do, I think we should start with Camila in Rio. Camila works for the city of Rio. And if the expedition is about disrupting how we think about leadership and how leadership is done, I think we need to accept that we also have to disrupt some of the thinking about women's leadership, and the program's about empowering women. And the truth is that Camila has been on a lot of them over the years, an enormous number of them over the years, and has found them deeply, deeply frustrating. So I thought we should start by asking her what is it we need to actually disrupt.

Camila 3:36

The approach of leadership tend to be very stereotyped, tends to be put like a woman in traditional view, put as a woman leadership being so sweet and amazing and collaborative, and all these nice buzz words, then actually doesn't mean nothing. And on the everyday, what that means was that we connected to our struggles and our challenges, and so I tend to be very frustrated when they do that. And it's very common, unfortunately. Saying this tends to be is a very European and North American centric. So the perspective they have is very based on the common life, average lives of what it means to be American or European and so when we translate that to different cultures, Latin cultures, and all the pressure culture pressure that we face and the advantage and disadvantage, what means to be Latin or what means to be in a developing country, that do not translated well. That translate in a way then it doesn't resonated with our reality.

Julia Middleton 5:02

Give me an example. Give me an example.

Camila 5:04

It's put us in a way that doesn't understand that in Brazil, the majority of households are led by a woman, single woman. So in a way, we already are leaders here. But that is completely disregarded by our traditional perspective, or leadership. What means being a leadership, it traditional seems as you have to be the CEO, have to be the arm of the white guys stereotype in a board meeting. And if you consider like in favelas, the 9% of the women, they are the ones who are leading the communities, are the one who are leading the families and households. Being a leader is much more connected for me what it's been like that moment, than being like the CEO board meeting guys. So instead of we use the experience and the reality that we have here, and to understand and question what means leadership, we tend to use what means leadership in a very Eurocentric perspective, and just put it here, which is not resonated well.

Julia Middleton 6:16

And how does that play out in reality, in your day to day, so you come back from one of those courses, and then it sounds silly, but what's it you make you feel.

Camila 6:25

I mean, all of these courses, they have also good points. Like it's not all frustrated, of course, we have a good connection and a good network of woman. But if I go look at all my woman leadership approach, they tend to be very related to the elite woman in Brazil, which is in some professional ways, good in terms like I have a good network of professionals and I am not undermined. That that is a very good thing. But if you really want to make a huge difference, and like, kind of set the boundaries and understand much more about this, we cannot having this group of only white woman from middle high class in Brazil, sitting together and discussing leadership. So if you actually want to have impact in the country, that tends to have a huge rate of woman murders, like a woman being murdered by the husbands and their partners, and has a huge wage gap. Even with that scenario, we still have the majority of poor family being led by woman. In that scenario, we tend to have leadership groups only white woman from high middle class, that's not going to have an effective and long standing difference in the country.

Julia Middleton 7:52

So frustrated is the right word to describe you when you come back.

Camila 7:56

Yeah, I think they tend to, to promote really good stuff, but at the same time I don't think they are very effective in the way to create a huge social change in the country. And I believe we cannot have leadership without having social change. It's not possible for me to understand that it's normal to get like 10,000 USD as a salary when you have family like just three blocks away who are living with less than $1. That is not a reality, that we can normalise and can understand. And I think that tends to be the leadership approach — it's kind of like maintain, or how you get on the 10,000 USD dollar job, which is it's good because the skill that you learn is really good. But at the same time, it's how you connect, it's how you do that in such a huge different reality when like, as people just have next to you that are hungry with like, not possible. That's, that's not the way we have can live.

Julia Middleton 9:06

It is interesting, a lot of people keep on saying to me, 'Well, will you really, if there are 20 Women on this expedition, would you really come up with something that's a common understanding of it?' And I keep on saying I have a feeling that it'll be a sort of prism that we come up with. And it'll be a common prism, but each of the women in a different context will look at the prism in a slightly different way. And so we need to come up with something that's much more complex, and in a way, much more difficult. It's a much more difficult task for us all, isn't it?

Camila 9:41

Yeah, I think we tend to have like the bullet, like the gold bullet, the silver bullet that will solve everything. And we tend to think on that approach. And when when you tell me then people pass on what is outcome? Okay, so what is going to be like what's going to be the silver bullet that we're going to discover. I think the fact that there's no silver bullets, that's the outcome. The leadership is much more complex, and the reality is much more complex. And we actually want to have a different... want to really rethink and without the bias, and what it means to be woman leadership is actually to understand that we're not going to come out with a single view. And that's the way I think the major mistakes and many leadership groups tend to come is actually try to creating a simple pathway or silver bullet, and we'll talk about the issue, and the reality is much more complex and much more diverse and much more interest and actually having this approach, very binary approach of stuff.

So plenty to disrupt. If the expedition is going to disrupt, logic says that we as the expedition members actually have to be open to disruption ourselves. And that's why I asked Lissa to take on the task of being the expedition disrupter. She is not a member of the expedition, but she is on it with us. And her role is to watch when we're sliding into niceness, or when our logic doesn't quite add up, and to disrupt us. Lissa is well qualified to take on this task. She's in the US, she works for the US Army. And she is a disruptor in the US Army. In fact, she's got a long history of disrupting within the US Army.

I started by reminding her of some expressions that she's used to me over the months starting with, 'if you're going to change a system, do it from the inside'.

Yeah, so, I've been an organisational citizen for many years. I grew up in the institution of the United States Army, and, you know, joined it at a time, well, I can't really say... I was going to sort of, say at a time that it was not open to change, but the army, it always leads change in the United States. But there was still change to be had. And so what I learned about, you know, changing the army is that large, bureaucratic institutions can't hear complaints from the outside very well. And I think a more effective way of changing an institution is to do it from the inside as a member, as a legitimate respected member who says, 'Hey, I see a gap here. And I think we ought to, we ought to move in this direction.' It's much more effective, and typically, much smoother, than if someone's banging on the door from the outside, because it's too easy to ignore that outside effort.

But I think the ultimate type of change takes a little bit of both though, it takes some alliances from the outside, and a very carefully constructed strategy for change on the inside. I think it takes both actually.

So it's not just you need the outside, you're saying that if you're in the inside, you actually got to deliberately go and create the alliances with the radicals outside.

I think it's important to cultivate those relationships, because they're so informative. Typically, you know, how someone gets labelled a radical, of course, is that they violate so much of the culture of the inside. And by definition, the inside is not going to hear. I think if you carefully cultivate relationships with quote, unquote, radicals from the outside, you learn a lot about their perspective, and you get a deeper understanding of the change that they're demanding. In addition to that, you're able to then translate that demand to an internal audience in a way that it can be heard.

Give me an example.

So I don't I don't know if y'all remember but you know, allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military is a pretty classic example where you had, you had all of these perceived radicals on the outside saying, you know, stop making being homosexual illegal, stop it, stop it, stop it. And it was very easy for the United States Congress and the US military to say, 'we can't hear you, you know, you don't understand our world. It's, you know, the, the wall will crumble if we allow gay people to be in the military.' And, you know, over time what happened is, people who were in the military — gay people in the military — began to become more visible. And because they were such a deep part of the culture, it was impossible for the military to reject them, you know, and not hear them. Now, initially, as you know, in terms of how this progressed over history, the military did reject gay people. But it got increasingly cumbersome to do so and morally not defensible. And it's because they knew and served next to these people and knew that they were great soldiers, and they couldn't justify an argument that they were not good for the military. So it was those those gay soldiers who were carefully aligned and in relationship with the external quote unquote, radicals. That alliance across that institutional membrane was absolutely critical for the ban on gay people to be lifted.

You've got the disruptors inside and the disruptors outside. It's very interesting listening to you. Because I mean, I've spent my whole life saying, 'If I had not tried to produce change from the outside, would I have achieved more if I'd been on the inside?' It's a really, really good question to ask, except that I am completely incapable of doing it from the inside. I can't bite my lip the way that you have to learn to if you're doing it from the inside.

Well, I think too, if you're, if you're...again, I think it takes both. And I mean, in order for it to be effective, it takes both I think. It's really tough to only try to make change from the outside, because you end up you know, you can be ignored, but it's also really tough to make change from the inside. Because you risk, you know, being rejected, or kicked out, if you will, like the institution, you know, there's a, they just say, we don't want your kind, so you're gone. So therefore you become worthless, useless, you know, with respect to the change. So I think it's really important for, you know, both insiders and outsiders to form coalitions across that institutional membrane.

You'd used an expression 'you have to create a hand grenade'. Can you remember what you meant by that?

I think, if we were talking about it within the context of organisational change, sometimes, and I mean, very seldom, you have to break things in order to open up the system to have enough oxygen, for the system to adapt. And that might be what I meant is, you know, you got to toss a hand grenade in the room and blow some things up to get the attention and the energy, you know, focused on the change. That might be what I had been talking about.

Can you think of an example of that?

You know, I think in the context of, you know, changing the the policy about gays in the military, an example of the hand grenade is soldiers starting to come out of the closet and saying, I'm gay, because that just completely blew away everybody, you know, all around them. They're like, what? And then all of a sudden, they had this cognitive dissonance. They had this respected, esteemed colleague, on one part of their brain. On the other part of their brain, they thought gay people were bad things and really bad for the army. So that cognitive dissonance, you know, it engenders a motivation, and you have to reconcile those two opposite perspectives. And it was in that reconciliation that people were able to hold in their hand, gay person, great soldier. And that's how change started to happen from the inside.

And I suppose that's therefore, not just putting in grenades, hand grenades, but it's choosing, it's the timing of when to throw in a hand grenade, must be the really tricky thing.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's why I think it's really seldom that it's effective. You know, there are some change agents that, you know, believe in just blowing stuff up, just so that it has to be recreated. But, you know, I don't... because I'm an institutionalist, like, I really believe in this in, you know, in the military. I don't believe in blowing it up. I don't, I don't, you know, I love it too much. And I think I can change it in easier ways and in more constructive ways than to destroy it and then rebuild it. And other people might feel that way about their companies or their organisations as well. And that sensitivity is... the outside agitator, if you will, doesn't have that same sensitivity. So they're, they're more likely to want to throw a grenade, I think, but I'm very, very reluctant to do that to break things in order to make them better, but I do respect that it can be a method.

Listening to you I am reassured that we have chosen the right disrupter for the expedition, which is fantastic. I'm immensely grateful to you for taking on this role. But in that context, you also used an expression when we talked that you're a gender outlaw. What is a gender outlaw? `

So I don't mean to, I want to be really careful about respecting, you know, the, the originator of that term. iIt's not an original term, but what I meant by it is I sort of use it as a metaphor, if you will, because I feel like I just I really eschew the concept of gender writ large. And I think it creates, it creates constraints. And, and I think that, and I don't like the constraints that it creates. It creates... gender places demands on people that are just ridiculous I think, and, and I think it's from everything to you know, how you speak to how you dress, or how you present to how you feel to what your life's opportunities are going to look like. And it just drives me insane. And I don't like the fact that we gender attire, and we gender toys, and we gender, I mean, we gender, everything. Now, I respect where it comes from, like 8 million years ago, it was functional, but I'm just not sure in a complicated society that it's that essential that we gender things. And I think we're coming to terms with it now with how much visibility transgender folks have, because the reason there's a transgender movement is the fact that we are so attached to our concept of gender, that we will not allow a human being to express their own gender, and especially if it violates their appearance. I think that kind of violence focused on innocent human beings who are, you know, it is not a choice, it is, you know, they're born with this, the fact that we will ostracise them and blame them and kill them, like, we kill transgender people, right, because they make us so uncomfortable. And if you interrogate that discomfort, it all boils down to our expectations of gender and gender roles. For me, I'm just tired of it. I'm really, really, I think it is, it is an irrelevant construct in my world.

And, and the other the other thing I want to say, and I don't mean to be rambling, but you know, gender was always, I didn't really know gender until I tried to do something that quote unquote, boys do. And this was back in the 70s. And, you know, when I wanted to play baseball, and for heaven's sakes, you would have thought that, you know, I wanted to, you know, murder people in the town centre. Everyone was horrified. You know, you can't do that you're a girl. And so that was my first taste. And then, of course, I go to the United States Military Academy a couple of years after they open it to women. And I was flabbergasted about how relevant my femaleness was all of a sudden, and I think that began my journey of, of experiences when I was flying helicopters in the army, same thing. I was definitely treated differently on the flightline. And it was only because I was a girl. So anyway, that that really brought me to a point, you know, as we have old age and treachery, you know, overcomes youth and skill. So, as I got older, I just decided I'm not honouring that construct anymore. And I will do everything I can to eliminate it from my life, and anybody else's life who's suffering from it, you know, from the insistence on gendering things.

So we need to be really careful on this expedition that we don't actually lose our disrupter.

Right? That's right. You know, I told you in our in our first interview that gendering leadership is just not my thing. Yeah, cuz I think for for every individual out there, regardless of their gender, leadership has a different impact. But what I do believe in is that there are some overarching principles that appeal to everybody regardless of gender. I think there are right ways to do things and leadership and there are optimal ways to lead teams, regardless of the gender of the team members and regardless of the gender of the leaders, and it's going to be really interesting to hear these women's truths about leadership and, and knitting them together.

Okay, so I leave this, leave this conversation. Do you know after each person I speak to, I either feel 'we can do this' or I feel terrified.

That's good. You're right where you need to be then.

I am, one, terrified and two, hugely reassured that we have you Lissa, as a disrupter. Thank you very, very much.

Absolutely. I'm here to make you feel uncomfortable.

I've been thinking a lot since interviewing Lissa, thinking a lot about myself and whether you disrupt from the inside or the outside. And maybe that decision is very much framed by your own character. But I think probably the big aha for me is, whichever position you take, you need to make the links with the disruptors in the other position. If you're disrupting from inside, make links with disruptors outside. And if you're disrupting from the outside, make links and relationships with the disruptors inside. Hugely helpful.

So Lissa has got the role of disrupting us. But of course, the other huge and important part of the disruption, of us as members on the expedition, is the fact that the group is so diverse. Diverse in sectors, in backgrounds, in belief, in life experiences, but also in nature and character. Some of the women on the expedition think big, some of the women on the expedition like to think much more detailed. Some are very quiet, some are very noisy. But there's another piece of the diversity within the group. And that is age, something which I get frustrated that people forget how important age is in diversity. Having young people on any expedition means that older people get reminded about what they've forgotten, and shown things probably that they'd never dreamt of. We need a mixture of age on the expedition group, and we have it.

Katya is the youngest. She's also a student. And I often get frustrated when people talk about young people and use the word 'harness' — harness the talents of young people, as if they've forgotten what a harness looks like, and what it's for: a large piece of leather strap round an animal's neck to force it to do something it doesn't want to do, or to prevent it from doing something it does want to do. The last thing we will be doing is harnessing young people on the expedition. And Katya certainly has no intention of being harnessed.

Katya, you're the only student. I think I'm probably the oldest person on the expedition. And I suspect you are the youngest person on the expedition. And you're a student. Why do you think it's so important that that a student is on the expedition?

Well, I think, first of all, I think it's it's a big responsibility and a big privilege to be able to represent students and people of my generation on the expedition. I think it's important to have students and it's important to have young people, because I think we ask a lot of questions. And we are less likely to take things at face value. I think we're still learning about the world, we are understanding both our place in the world. But also, I think it's a question of not only what the world is, but what the world can be. And I think that that's something that guides many of us as students and as young people in terms of the next steps that we take. So when it comes to big questions, it's less about why things are the way that they are, and maybe more so how can we change things that aren't working? And I think it's that, the energy I think that our generation has and the sense of responsibility that our generation has to make the world a better place. This is something that I've seen with many, many, many young people, whether it has to do with the climate, whether it has to do with something else. I think young people feel, feel a sense of responsibility for the way that the world is going. But also I think that we do overall have hope for a future that is better than than the world we have now.

Honest answers to honest questions. I suppose the generation that you come from, could occasionally justifiably be quite annoyed with my generation?

Well, I think when it comes to things like climate, I think we've seen that my generation feels as though we've inherited a world that wasn't taken care of, and that it's, you know, as a result, it's our responsibility to carry the burden of a world that is, you know, polluted and so how do we fix a world that has gone for so many years without, you know, being being cared for? But I think beyond that, and this is something that I find quite important these days, is the fact that many people from older generations I think. grew up with very specific ideologies and views of the world I think even my parents' generation grew up in, in a world where there were very distinct systems, very distinct boundaries. And I think we're possibly, you know, I think there's a danger that we go back to some of these boundaries. And we go back to some of these lines. But because we've grown up, because my generation has grown up in a world that is that has been more open, and that has had more communication across countries, across cultures, because of the internet, amongst other things, I think we are less willing to go back to a world in which those lines are drawn. So I think that annoyance is also maybe you know, to do with people who want to stick to those lines and want to stick to those divisions. And I think our generation, I can't speak for my whole generation. But I do think that overwhelmingly, people want to move past those boundaries.

A significant amount of your education was in the international contex. How much did that frame you? And I suppose it can't have been easy over the years being Russian in that context. Endless questions, no doubt. But the international context of your education, how much did it influence you?

Massively. Between the ages of 16 and 18, I studied in in a school where the premise was to sort of have young people together from not only different countries, but different socio economic backgrounds, countries that have also historically been in conflict with each other, in the hopes that by living together, studying together, sharing meals together, we build friendships that are beyond typical sort of interactions between people of different countries. And that experience really shaped everything in my life since then. And I think, because of that experience, every time I read a news story, or every time I hear about something that's happening in the world, I associate it with a person that I knew or know from that country. And I think that that has allowed me to humanise things in a way that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. And that's also why I'm very careful now also about sort of seeing things in a black and white sense. Because having gone to a school like that, and having engaged with people with different backgrounds like that, I understand that there are so many truths behind every conflict, behind every version of history. And I think that this acknowledgement of nuance is something that I continue to carry with me. And that's very important to me. And back to your question about being Russian in those contexts. Again, I think it depends on, you know, what sort of international context you're in, but I do think that it allowed me to understand how Russia has interacted with other countries historically, how other people view Russia, but also being able to adopt an identity that I am comfortable with being Russian, despite all of those other things. So I think it's definitely still a process. But I think that it taught me again, going back to those nuances, that there are many ways of being a citizen of any country. Andit comes down to who you are as an as an individual as well.

So, we will be disrupted, we will be disrupted by our expedition disrupter and we'll be disrupted by our own expedition diversity. And with all of that, I hope, believe and know that we will innovate, because all that energy from difference produces new ideas. I deeply believe that innovation comes from what I would call, well-led discord. We've got all the ingredients. Now we just need a good leader. And I hope I can do it.

So last thought, as we finish on the issue of disruption is that this isn't disruption for disruption's sake. This is more than that. The expedition isn't even really about women. It's about the fact that things have to change. And they won't change if we just have the same leaders leading us. We need new blood. We need a flood of women. That means that we need more women leaders and to have more women leaders, I think that we need to develop an approach to leadership that resonates with women. So that many, many more women say, 'If that's what leadership is, I'm in'.

I'm sitting here I've just been eating ice cream with my granddaughter. She calls me pop pop.

Pop pop...Pop pop.

I've never known quite why. But I've been wondering, maybe it's because I'm a disrupter.

Thank you for listening to the podcast. Your voice and perspectives are crucial to the success of the expedition. And we would love you to become a partner to Women Emerging. You can do this by subscribing to this podcast and joining the Women Emerging group on LinkedIn.