‘Nurture the people; protect the business’

Upwards of 80% of HR professionals are women. When I first came across that number, what unsettled me wasn’t the stat—it was how quickly my brain accepted it. Of course HR is mostly women. That’s the department where “people” and “culture” live. Where feelings are attended to. The nurturing department.

The moment I noticed I’d reached for that word, I realized the number wasn’t showing me a labor-market pattern but, instead, my bias—about which work is considered feminine, and which workers get feminized in the process.

The chief human resources officer holds one of the most impossible jobs in the C-suite. They’re asked to be the company’s emotional infrastructure (protecting the humanity of employees, holding space for grief and growth, stitching culture together) while also serving as the organization’s compliance shield (responsible for investigations, terminations, and the legal bulwark against the very employees they’re meant to represent). Nurture the people; protect the business. It’s a textbook example of a double bind, and historically it has been paid like one.

But the double bind isn’t just the CHRO’s to carry. Every leader who has ever tried to facilitate real community inside an organization has walked into some version of it. The research is unambiguous: Community at work drives engagement, retention, and performance. Yet the leadership psychology most of us are trained in doesn’t produce community—it produces efficiency, urgency, and scale. It rewards what gets done, not what gets held. The result is a C-suite that talks about culture while practicing velocity, and then wonders why the teams below it feel uncared for.

We invited Felicity Fellows onto the From the Culture podcast to sit with this tension. Fellows grew TEDx from a Sydney side-project into a global community of thinkers—a feat that required her to codify something intangible (belonging) into a system portable enough to cross every continent. Somewhere in our conversation, she mentioned, almost in passing, that after a grueling stretch of work and heartbreak, she’d put herself on what she called a “masculine cleanse.” Not a detox from men, but a detox from a way of being. This phraseology landed in the room like a bomb, because, as it turns out, that’s exactly what most organizations need—a detox from the orthodoxy.

Let me say the obvious part out loud: A masculine cleanse is not a male cleanse. I mean, I’m a male, and I certainly don’t want to be erased from work. As my cohost, Amanda Slavin, called out in the episode, this detox isn’t about scrubbing men out of the room, or out of the room’s leadership. Masculine and feminine, as we’re using them, are psychological registers that every person of every gender moves between. The problem isn’t the masculine register itself—it’s that we’ve built the workplace almost entirely inside of it, and then been surprised when the people we tasked with bringing community into the building couldn’t get a fair wage for doing it.

As we uncovered in the conversation, work, as a system, was designed by a very narrow demographic for a very narrow demographic. And when everyone else was finally allowed in, we didn’t redesign the system—we just kept appending people to a foundation that was never built for them. Hence the double bind for the CHRO and the exhaustion of every leader who has been asked to “prioritize culture” while being measured on quarterly velocity. This system was architected decades ago, and we’ve spent the years since decorating the walls. It’s a social construction.

Our conversation, instead, offered a different metaphor, which suggests that we could be glass, which is hard and easily broken, or clay, which is soft and strong. Corporate life has historically rewarded glass—the rigid org chart, the unflappable leader, the closed face in the meeting. But glass cracks under the load we’re now asking our organizations to carry. Clay flexes. Clay, it turns out, also holds more.

The CHRO has been doing this work quietly for decades, often without title, without pay parity, and without a seat at the strategic table that matches the weight of what they carry. The cleanse we’re proposing isn’t theirs alone to run; it’s the rest of the C-suite’s catch-up. If community really is what makes work work—as the research insists—then the leadership capable of building it is the leadership worth building. Clay, not glass. A softening that, as Fellows might say, isn’t weakness. It’s strength with a different shape.

Check out our full conversation with Felicity Fellows on the latest episode of From the Culture here or wherever you get your podcasts.

View the full article