Mary C. Gentile: An interview by Bob Morris

 

Mary C. Gentile

Mary C. Gentile is Senior Research Scholar at Babson College; Senior Advisor, Aspen Institute Business & Society Program; and consultant. Previously Gentile was faculty member and case development manager at Harvard Business School. She is author of Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right (Yale University Press 2010, www.MaryGentile.com. Gentile is Director of Giving Voice to Values (GVV), a business curriculum launched by Aspen Institute and Yale SOM, now based at Babson College. This pioneering approach to values-driven leadership has been featured in Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, strategy+business, Stanford Social Innovation Review, McKinsey Quarterly, BizEd, etc. and has been piloted in over 100 business schools and organizations globally. Gentile consults with corporations, non-profits and schools on leadership development, ethics and education. At Harvard Business School (1985-95), Gentile helped integrate ethics into the MBA. Gentile co-authored Can Ethics Be Taught? Perspectives, Challenges, and Approaches at Harvard Business School (with Thomas Piper, Sharon Parks, HBS Press, 1993). Other publications appear in Harvard Business Review, Risk Management, CFO, Academy of Management Learning and Education, BizEd, Strategy+Business, etc. Gentile holds a B.A. from College of William and Mary and Ph.D. from State University of New York-Buffalo.

Morris: Before discussing your brilliant book, Giving Voice to Values, a few general questions. First, as the titles of your various books and articles suggest, you have an especially strong interest in diversity. Why?

Gentile: First, thank you for the opportunity to talk about these topics that I believe are so important. As for my interest in diversity, I believe it is closely aligned with my work on the project, Giving Voice To Values. That is, there are often times when we may witness (or personally experience) situations where some individuals are not treated with the same respect or care as others, precisely due to some difference in their identities, their styles, their experiences, or their perspectives. Often it is difficult to speak up in such a situation, for ourselves or for others. What’s more, when we do speak up, sometimes it is with the kind of emotion or judgment that can lead our audiences to become defensive and to freeze in their positions.

While at Harvard Business School, I developed a set of pedagogical materials and designed and taught the first course there on Managing Diversity, precisely because I wanted to better understand this phenomenon and to find ways to enable future managers and leaders to talk about and address these kinds of inequities constructively. I believed that we would all come to better decisions and we would create more humane and ultimately more livable and more sustainably productive workplaces if we knew how to speak to each other about difficult issues and if we were more able to listen to and learn from diverse points of view.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like Giving Voice To Values?

Morris: It certainly does. Here’s my favorite passage in Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Please share your own opinion of it, especially in terms of its relevance to effective leadership.

“Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.”

Gentile: Well, this is a wonderfully succinct expression of participative and empowering leadership. It reflects an approach that is both respectful and pragmatic. In this way, it is quite akin to the Giving Voice To Values (GVV) approach to values-driven leadership.

That is, GVV does not dictate that there is one way to voice and enact our values. Rather we do well to examine our own strengths, style and preferences, and then to frame our values conflicts in ways that draw on our best. So if I am most comfortable in a “learner” role, I may raise my values-related concerns by asking the well-crafted and well-timed question, rather than by strenuously arguing a particular point of view. Or if I am a risk-taking, aggressive manager, I may frame the values conflict as just one more challenge that I want to take on, as opposed to a “constraint” on my action choices.

Much like the leaders in the Lao-Tzu quotation above, GVV ‘begins with what we have and builds on what we know,’ but GVV is as much about leading and enabling ourselves – to be more of who we want to be and to do so more effectively – as is about leading others.

Morris:Whenever I hear the phrase “shoot the messenger,” I think of corporate whistle-blowers. In your opinion, why are so many of them reviled and punished rather than praised and rewarded?

Gentile: Well, of course, there are many answers to that question. Whistle-blowers may be punished because they are seen as disloyal, as stepping outside of the organizational circle and exposing their own colleagues to negative consequences. They may be seen as somehow uncommitted, lacking in the strength or commitment that is needed to “get the job done.” And at the most basic level, they may be seen as “spoilers” who ruin the boss’s or their organization’s or their colleagues’ plan. At a deeper level, they may be reviled because they make visible to the rest of us the very things we don’t want to look at, about our own choices and our own failures to take a values-driven stand.

However, the Giving Voice To Values approach was designed precisely because the costs of whistle-blowing are often so high – not only to the whistle-blower and his or her family, but also to the organization itself, the whistle-blower’s colleagues, and so on. The thinking was that, in many of these whistle-blowing scenarios, there are likely other individuals, earlier on in the process, who also saw the problems but who did not feel that they had an option to speak or act. We wondered whether there was a way to better prepare and equip organizational participants to speak and act constructively, possibly collectively and early on, so as to avoid having to get to the point of costly and often devastating whistle-blowing scenarios.

Morris:After I read several of your articles, including those published by Harvard Business Review, here’s a question that occurred to me: What specifically can be done to establish and then sustain a culture within which everyone feels “safe” (if that’s the word) to express their thoughts and feelings without fear of rejection, ridicule, perhaps even abuse and punishment?

Gentile: I am so glad you asked that question. Often when people are introduced to the GVV approach to values-driven leadership development, they make the assumption that it is focused only on the individual. However, by more fully understanding how and why we can, as individuals, be more empowered and more skillful at voicing our values, we also are identifying a set of conditions that make it more likely that we will do so. These conditions become a sort of checklist for our own career choices – that is, they become a list of cultural characteristics we will look for in any potential employer. But these “enabling” conditions also become a sort of “recipe” for the kind of organizational culture and context that we will want to develop in the organizations that we lead.

Interestingly, many of the organizational characteristics that have been identified as conducive to effectively managing diversity and as conducive to fostering innovation and creativity in the workplace are also important for enabling employees to voice their values. Some examples include:

•  Invite alternate viewpoints. By creating explicit occasions to invite dissenting viewpoints on a new project, strategy or policy, leaders enable employees to feel that their questions are welcomed and appreciated.

•  Create “islands of time.” Although time pressures are a reality of business life that cannot be eliminated entirely and that even can create a beneficial focus at times, it can be powerful to set aside discrete occasions where individuals are invited to step back, to look at their projects from different vantages, to consider input not usually examined, and so on. This again encourages folks to express alternative points of view.

•  Share your own thought process – and of times you changed your mind because of your values. When leaders are willing to talk through their own decision-making process, making visible that values are an important consideration, this sends a powerful signal to employees.

•  Share stories of values-based choices. Communicating and celebrating the times when individuals have made values-based decisions is, of course, empowering and can provide role models. But perhaps more importantly, it removes the sense of futility that often prevents employees from speaking up.

•  Provide opportunities to pre-script typical responses to values conflicts. GVV is premised on the idea that both anticipating the kinds of values conflicts we are likely to encounter in a particular industry or firm or profession, and literally practicing responses to them, out loud, is hugely important.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

You are cordially invited to check out the resources at

www.MaryGentile.com

www.GivingVoiceToValues.org