Rising Together

Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks go to my agent Jim Levine, who encouraged—indeed, hounded—me to write this book for ten years. And to Courtney Paganelli, who works with Jim and came up with the perfect title, while encouraging me to update my frame of reference.

I am also grateful to Edward Tivnan, who gave me timely and professional book doctor support when I needed it most.

Thanks to my superb editor Lauren Marino, who went the extra mile and broadened my sense of this book’s subject, and to publisher Mary Ann Naples, who saw the potential and offered support. I know from experience how strong the team at Hachette is, and look forward to working with you all as we move forward.

Huge thanks to my own team: Luke Joerger, Isaac Bush, and the people at Hastings Digital Media, as well as my sister Cece Helgesen, whose marketing insights set things humming. Thanks to my assistant Cynthia Gray, who wrangles logistics and so I have time to write, and to Robert Trevellyan, on whose tech skills I rely every day.

Thanks to all my colleagues in the 100 Coaches network, especially those whom I interviewed for this book: John Baldoni, Chris Cappy, Bill Carrier, Patricia Gorton, Ruth Gotian, Jeffrey Hull, Terry Jackson, Tom Kolditz, Lindsey Pollak, Diane Ryan, Molly Tschang, Eddie Turner, and Bev Wright. And to Scott Osman, who makes the network a dependable joy.

Special thanks to Nancy Badore, Tom Peters, Art Kleiner, and of course Marshall Goldsmith for their career-spanning support. And to the many clients whose stories inform this book.

I am so grateful to my husband, Bart Gulley; my peer coach and friend-for-life Elizabeth Bailey; and to Marilyn Bethany and the whole Tivnan/Bethany clan, who served as my family during the pandemic. And to my always-in-touch Helgesen siblings.

Finally, I am indebted to dear late friends and colleagues Stanley Crouch and Roosevelt Thomas, whose thinking becomes more prescient with each passing day.

A Note on Names

The stories in this book are drawn from my many decades of working with clients around the world. In these stories, I use only first names and have changed some details to protect privacy.

I also sought insights from dozens of leadership coaches, authors, and experts, drawn from my rich global network. These individuals are identified by their full names.

Foreword

by Marshall Goldsmith

Sally Helgesen’s amazing career has resulted in her becoming the world’s premier authority on women’s leadership and the #1 ranked coach for women leaders. Along with her classic works, The Female Advantage and The Web of Inclusion, she has most recently been the lead author of How Women Rise, one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed books for women in the workplace ever written.

With Rising Together, Sally takes her contribution to the next level, going beyond what women can do to succeed to focus on what we all can do to help one another build more satisfying careers and create a better world. Leaders everywhere who seek to move their teams, organizations, and relationships beyond infighting and blame and achieve positive partnerships can benefit from the wisdom in this book. Given today’s divisive environment, the timing could not be better.

Both Sally and I were mentored by the great Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management. Peter taught us, “We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We do not spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop.” In Rising Together, Sally does an incredibly thorough job of teaching leaders both what to stop and what to do by taking actions that create fruitful results.

In my New York Times bestseller Triggers, I show how our environment can set off positive or negative reactions that dramatically impact our behavior and how others perceive us. Sally goes well beyond my work to describe the most common triggers that inhibit our ability to form strong relationships across bounds. One of my favorite chapters, “It’s Not Fair,” graphically illustrates how our expectations can stir resentments that keep us, and everyone around us, stuck.

Sally also moves beyond buzzwords and exhortation to provide highly specific and original practices for creating what she calls cultures of belonging. Her emphasis on behavior as opposed to bias—on what we do as opposed to what we think–—has been missing from most diversity conversations and has the potential to transform them.

I’ve had the honor of knowing and working with Sally for over twenty-five years. She has never stopped growing as a professional and as a person. In Rising Together, she brings together decades of research, teaching, and coaching from every corner of the globe in order to build upon and extend her previous work.

To me, brilliance is the ability to create something that seems obvious and should have been done years ago—but has never been done. Rising Together meets this definition of brilliance. In hindsight, we should have had this book decades ago. It’s long overdue, but it’s just what our world needs now.

Thank you, Sally!

Introduction

The How of Solidarity

A few years ago, I was scheduled to deliver a women’s leadership program at the Construction SuperConference in Las Vegas, a premier annual event for the industry. Given that I’ve delivered hundreds of such programs at conferences around the world, I had a preconceived notion of what I would encounter. I expected a hundred or so women who worked in a heavily male industry where they struggled to feel noticed, appreciated, and valued. I anticipated that they’d be eager for insights on how to build their careers and forge needed support in the face of skepticism or indifference.

My expectations were confounded when I arrived at the hotel conference room to discover a huge, standing-room-only crowd that was around 60 percent male. I’d been told, as I had on many similar occasions, to expect men in the audience. But typically only a handful showed up.

Given the high male turnout in Las Vegas, my prepared program felt misjudged, so I asked the male participants what had inspired them to attend this session. A forest of hands shot up. “A lot of the best talent these days is female,” a burly project manager explained. “But we have a hard time hiring women. And the ones we do hire often leave. If we can’t figure out how to become better places for women to work, we’re not going to have much of a future.”

One executive was particularly blunt. “We hope you’re not going to waste your time making the case for why developing and retaining women is important for our industry,” he said. “We know all about the whys. What we don’t know is how to do it. We haven’t got a clue.”

Rising Together is my response to that executive’s plea to provide some hows.

And the hows matter. Because when it comes to building honest and fruitful relationships across potential divides—not only of gender but of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and by generation—everyone is seeking clues.

Given the increasing diversity of the workplace in every corner of the globe, we all need to develop the skills required to build strong relationships with people we may view as different from ourselves. This is true whether we’re senior leaders, managers, individual contributors, new hires, entrepreneurs, professional service providers, supervisors, or gig workers.

The ability to adeptly build such relationships gives us a way to demonstrate appreciation and goodwill in situations that might otherwise be awkward, volatile, or confusing. It keeps us engaged and in the flow even as the world shifts around us. And it helps us create the kind of harmonious all-hands-on-deck teams that high-performing organizations rely upon.

This is to everyone’s advantage.

My purpose in writing Rising Together is to address the challenge of building broad, resilient, and diverse webs of relationship in two ways.

The first part of the book identifies eight common triggers that undermine our ability to connect with people whose history and values may be different from our own. These triggers get activated when situations, expectations, misapprehensions, or fears prevent us from responding in ways we intuitively know would serve us and those around us. Instead we retreat to our comfort zone, which keeps us stuck.

But identifying potential barriers is only the first step. We also need to take positive action. That’s why the second part of this book offers simple and very specific everyday practices that enable us—as individuals, in our organizations, on our teams—to create cultures of belonging.

This term, culture of belonging, may sound fuzzy or idealistic. And yet it can be clearly defined.

A culture of belonging is one in which the largest possible percentage of people:

The key question is: How can these feelings, beliefs, and perceptions be instilled?

In my experience, behaviors and actions are the key. This contrasts with the emphasis on mind-sets, assumptions, and the search for unconscious biases that has become the dominant means for addressing diversity in organizations in recent years.

Viewing inclusion as a practice, a how, enshrined in specific behaviors, makes it concrete and achievable rather than a vague aspiration or a well-intentioned expression of generalized goodwill. It also makes it measurable:

THE FIERCE URGENCY OF THIS PARTICULAR MOMENT

The need to create cultures of belonging is urgent now, given the unprecedented willingness of people to walk away from workplaces in which they feel undervalued, disconnected, or burnt out. Yet the pressure on retention, which is rooted in widespread disengagement, is hardly new. Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace poll found that only 15 percent of employees reported feeling actively engaged by their work in 2019. So it’s hardly surprising that the added pressures of the pandemic would set off the exodus of workers that’s become known as The Great Resignation or The Great Attrition.

This was a crisis waiting to happen. And it’s created a fresh imperative for organizations, and for every one of us, to get better at inclusion and belonging. This is the challenge of our historical moment.

The practice-based approach I advocate in this book derives from my direct experience. I have spent the last thirty-five years working in thirty-eight countries around the globe, always with a dual mission. I help women and other traditional outsiders to recognize, articulate, and act on their greatest strengths and identify the internal barriers that could hold them back. And I help organizations build inclusive cultures that enable the largest possible number of people to contribute their best talents.

This work has given me the opportunity to interview thousands of people in wildly varied settings.

I’ve spent the afternoon in a courtyard on Zamalek island in Cairo where women arrayed from head to toe in sky blue shucked corn as they discussed their professional aspirations.

I’ve sat up into the wee hours in Tokyo sushi bars where senior executives loosened their ties, ordered another round of sake, and bemoaned the cultural constraints that keep their organizations stuck.

I’ve listened to female artificial intelligence engineers in Silicon Valley and Singapore—among the most educated and skilled women on the planet—describe their fear of being perceived as “too ambitious” if they speak directly about their skills and aspirations.

And I’ve been approached by African American men eager to compare their experiences with traditional white male leaders to those faced by the women Marshall Goldsmith and I describe in our book How Women Rise.

These and thousands of other disparate encounters have convinced me that there’s never been a better time for us to collaborate broadly on helping one another to rise. Given the whiplash instability and economic tensions that have been a hallmark of the 2020s so far, this may strike some as wildly optimistic, especially given the very real divisions that the disruptions that the last fifteen years have kicked up.

Yet as I saw in Las Vegas, and as I hear on my travels, organizations have grown increasingly serious about doing what it takes to engage the broadest possible range of people. Leaders no longer expect, as many did even twenty years ago, that a highly diverse workforce will simply adjust to business as usual, or that people will repress what is distinctive about themselves in an effort to fit in. As the chief information officer (CIO) of a Fortune 100 manufacturing company based in the Midwest recently confided, “We’ve finally gotten the message that we need to meet our people where they are. And that we have a lot to learn from them.”

Just as important, individuals in companies who once may have felt like outsiders, unsure of their role or their prospects, have become far more assured of the value they have to contribute and more determined to be recognized for their potential. Growing confidence at all levels is in fact one of the primary reasons that people are increasingly willing to abandon jobs that may look good on paper but which they perceive as demeaning, unsatisfying, a poor fit for their talents, or a potential dead end.

This strengthened confidence has also led to greater solidarity as those who in the past were perceived as outsiders have become more eager to support one another and more skilled at doing so.

Solidarity is an old-fashioned word, long associated with labor or student strikes, that needs to be retrofitted for an era when the forces of division are active but the benefits of coming together are obvious and strong. Solidarity arises when we focus on what we have in common and what we are trying to achieve—our shared roots and shared purpose—rather than highlighting what divides us or where we may feel shortchanged. Although solidarity is often born out of painful experience, it always looks forward to what can be done.

Social movements such as Black Lives Matter and MeToo have been key to strengthening solidarity in our era, giving public expression to bitter forms of exclusion that were rarely shared and routinely glossed over. So too have the networks, initiatives, and employee resource groups that have evolved in organizations around the globe. They have given a voice and a forum to those who were formerly expected to simply adapt.

In the past, many who held senior positions were reluctant to join or even publicly support these initiatives. For example, during the 1990s, I was often asked by client companies to try to drum up support from high-level women for network events that served female employees at less senior levels. The majority who declined noted that they had “worked hard to be seen as a leader, not a woman,” and feared that signing on would undermine their hard-won status.

Today, senior female leaders are more likely to view supporting women at less senior levels as an opportunity to distinguish themselves, enhance their visibility, and build useful connections. In sum, a good career move. And because many senior women have by now benefited from these initiatives, they regard participation as a way to “pay it forward” by actively advocating for those who are coming up. I see a similar evolution in networks that serve people of color and sexual minorities.

History teaches that solidarity is powerful, with amplifying effects that can transform even situations that seem hopelessly entangled. Whereas mighty organizations—or nations, for that matter—can be quickly paralyzed by infighting and division, extraordinary things can happen at warp speed when people come together and focus on the we instead of the they.

BACK TO THE HOW

As noted, Rising Together identifies both the triggers that can undermine this evolution as well as the practices that support it. I believe this practice-based approach is powerful precisely because it is rooted in everyday experience rather than policy or theory. It offers a bottom-up path to change that gives every one of us the opportunity to shape the cultures of which we are a part.

It’s also more helpful than the mind-set or unconscious bias approach because it relies upon the observable truth that people are more immediately affected by how we behave toward them—our actions—than by whatever happens to be running through our minds at the moment. In addition, it’s usually easier to try out new behaviors than to attempt to shift our internal thoughts. Practicing new behaviors increases the likelihood that we will elicit different responses from those around us, which in turn can result in our having different experiences. These experiences may then start to shift our thinking in a more organic way.

We’re all familiar with how this works.

For example, we think we don’t like a particular person. In response, an unconscious bias may kick in. As a result, we find ourselves meditating not only on why we don’t like this person, but why we don’t particularly care for this kind of person.

Then we have an encounter with this person in which we try, however awkwardly, to act in a more open and affirming way. We get a positive response, and soon discover that we have a number of things in common. We begin to revise our previous opinion of this particular person. And over time, we may begin to rethink the assumptions we’ve been making about others whom we’ve assumed to be in some way like them.

This mental evolution reflects a simple truth: that it’s easier to act our way into a new way of thinking than to think our way into a new way of acting.

This is why Rising Together asks us to consider how making small behavioral tweaks might support our ability to expand the workplace relationships that shape our careers and enrich our daily lives. Such an expansion can broaden our influence while also making us bigger people—more capacious, more open, more at ease in the world.