How to Be a Corporate Rebel

It’s Thursday again, and this week, we have Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino telling us to pull up our bootstraps and be a corporate rebel (or a pirate!). Also, later today on my weekly show with Newsweek, Better, at 12pm EDT/9am PT/5pm GMT, I’m talking with NYT bestselling author Aubrey Marcus about how to optimize your life. Bring your questions for Aubrey as we take them live from the audience! For a calendar reminder to join us, click here.

Also, if you are a coach and looking to optimize your practice, I am leading a free masterclass with my business partner Alisa Cohn in partnership with the World Business and Executive Coach Summit called Counterintuitive Secrets to Growing Your Coaching Business. You can register for a free seat here to join us.

Francesca Gino’s book, Rebel Talent, is a guide for anyone looking to feel truly authentic in their careers and lives. Over the past year, we’ve all had time to think about how we spend our day, who we are, and what we want. Francesca offered powerful advice on how and why we should be our most authentic selves. To hear our entire talk, you can view the replay of our conversation here. Here are just a few thoughts she had on being a rebel:

The rejuvenating benefit of being a rebel:

“Being a rebel is incredibly contagious. And in fact, even if you think about these very different talents that rebels seem to share, the power of role modeling is so important. The one that comes to mind, since I've been looking at a lot of the data on this, is curiosity. Now we're all born with it, but as it turns out, it disappears as we grow older, which I think is a very sad finding. It raises all sorts of questions about how often we stop asking questions, even when we're really curious about them, because we fear judgment. Who taught us to do just that? And how is it that we can embrace this wonderful way of being in the world that we had when we were little kids?” 

The line between being a rebel and being contrarian:

“What I often see when rebels take things too far, or they become not that constructive anymore, is because they're frustrated the change isn't happening as fast as they would like to see it. Yes, there is a lot of curiosity, yes there is embracing novelty and authenticity, but they're not keeping perspective. Their ideas, for example, in a meeting, come in as arrogant, rather than ‘I understand what's there, and let me suggest, with respect, a different way of looking at this and moving this forward.’ So that's probably where I would keep my attention: Am I coming in with a broad perspective of where I have this sense of wanting to learn? And despite the fact that you might have a lot of experience, or even be the subject expert on the topic, you're humble enough to stay open with your mind and broaden your perspective.”

Why organizations should be more like a pirate ship:

“As I was working on the book, I went to all sorts of interesting organizations across the globe and organizations in history. One [of these] organizations were pirate ships in the 16th century. Here are two reasons why they are fascinating. One is that at a time about 200 years before slavery ended in the United States, they were the most diverse organization on the planet. They were hiring people to be part of the crew, not because of race or gender, but truly because of their skills and commitment to the mission of the organization. But they were also interesting for the way they were organized. The crew was in charge of choosing the captain and the crew, and could remove the captain if they were not behaving well towards the crew. To me, that really raised interesting questions that I think we would be better off asking on a day-to-day basis in our own way of being leaders: Am I the type of captain that my crew would choose as their leader today? Am I creating the conditions where people bring out curiosity? Am I role modeling this behavior for others? Am I embracing novelty? Am I asking questions to others in a way that broadens our perspective, rather than just being there to give answers?”

Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter! Please leave a comment below if you have additional thoughts on how being open-minded and authentic helps an organization. Next week’s interview will be with author Lindsey Pollak, and we will talk about navigating your career through changing times- For a calendar reminder, click here.

Please join us later today for my talk with Aubrey Marcus, and if you can’t make it, we always upload my weekly interviews to my YouTube page. If you’d like to be notified when the newest episode is available, subscribe to my channel and you’ll receive a notification.

Wishing you health and success - 

Dorie