The Men are not OK!
Jim Bernardo
Top Competitive Strategist, Sales and Channel Expert, Group Facilitator, Trauma Coach, @ Independent Consultant | Psychology, Biology
It’s not hard to find a lot written here on LinkedIn about the importance of customer experience, the ongoing relationship between a vendor and their customers long after the sale is closed.? A solid ongoing relationship with customers leads to repeat and expanded business.? Happy customers are loyal customers!? What I don’t see is much about employee experience.? Happy employees are loyal employees, and look at work like a community, not a job.
It's easy in a wild job market to ignore the stuff that flies under the radar.? Who cares about happy employees when there are ten or a hundred or more eager and qualified candidates available on the market to take those jobs?? Who cares about the impression that job candidates leave the interview process with?? The insidious long-term effects of this lack of attention are only slowly being recognized.
?Now, I’m not an expert on employee experience.? I look to those (like you, Kevin Bowen ) who are much smarter about this than I am to learn what I don’t know.? But there is something that I do know that impacts one group of employees that I think is even more unrecognized than employee experience overall...
?There’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t see a video, or read an article, or a blog post, or a post on Facebook or Twitter or Tik Tok or Instagram or here on LinkedIn talking about men and their struggles, and the consequences that result in their personal and professional lives every day.? Whether it’s about their careers, their relationships both at work and outside, their search for meaning and fulfillment in their jobs and in their lives, their confusion about what’s expected of them, or the gulf between their professional and personal lives, and the resultant loneliness and isolation they feel, one thing is abundantly clear – to quote from one of my favorite YouTubers, Shoeonhead,[1] “The men are not OK!”
?Lest you think that this is an “oh, boo hoo, the poor little men” whine, I promise you, it is not.
?One of the (I believe) unforeseen byproducts of the women’s empowerment movement of the last 50 years is that while great strides have been made for women’s rights and their roles in society, their (often unique) value in the workplace, and what they should expect, and reject, about how they are seen and treated in the society as a whole, very little or no effort has been invested in how men’s roles are changing (and should change!) as a result, and what we should be teaching our boys about what it means to be an emotionally mature man in the 21st century.?
We’ve overlooked the importance of helping men orient to a world in which they are not automatically treated as superior to women.? They’ve been unfairly on top for so long, and it’s time they made way for women and other non-white males as equals. ?
?The effects of this lack of attention to the impacts of these changes on men are staggering, and mostly unrecognized.? Consider this:
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?These statistics (and many others, and much research) point to a mostly hidden problem among men, and to be fair, most of the men have hidden it well from themselves.? Their hyper-aggressiveness, anger, and generally bad behavior can almost all be sourced back to childhood trauma.? Internationally recognized therapist and author Terry Real describes, in his seminal work on male depression, “I Don't Want to Talk About It,"[2]
?We begin sending boys the message that they have fewer emotional needs than girls in the very first moments of life. One research team studied parents’ responses to newborns in the first twenty-four hours after delivery. The researchers selected newborns that matched in weight, length, alertness, and strength, so that there were no significant differences between boys and girls. Nevertheless, both mothers and fathers perceived newborn sons as: “more alert, stronger, larger featured, more coordinated, and firmer.” They saw baby daughters as “less attentive, weaker, finer featured, less coordinated, softer, smaller, more fragile and prettier.”
It should come as no surprise that changes to the dynamic of work that upend generations of accepted social structure are not just shifting the ground that women and other historically unequal groups are standing on, but the men are also experiencing a tectonic shift, with no guidance for how to act.? It’s like standing on a precipice, looking out over a landscape that is completely unfamiliar, and being told “You need to act differently now. Good luck."
So we must celebrate the positive changes that continue to develop in the workplace, and we must also help all of our employees to orient to those changes in positive ways.? Employee experience means caring for the whole person, not just the one who shows up from 9-5 every day, and that means caring for the men, too, not just expecting them to all of a sudden start showing up differently!
If you want to dive into this more deeply, want to rant at me, or get into a deeper discussion with me, drop me an email at [email protected].
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People & Culture Consultant | Employee listening, People Experience Lifecycle, Leadership training | We improve eNPS scores by 17%
11 个月Thanks for calling out this gap in inner work that many men are being called to do. I think a lot about how every organization is in the business in human development and we need to have trauma-informed people leaders that help us heal, while they care for their own needs. Appreciate you!