How Leaders Can Respond to Increasing Employee Activism

MIT Sloan Management Review’s recent Work/22 virtual symposium invited a range of experts to share their insights into the challenges leaders will face in the year ahead. Among them was Megan Reitz, a professor of leadership and dialogue at Hult International Business School, who discussed how organizations can develop a plan for encouraging employee voice and acting on issues raised by workers.

Reitz and her research partner, John Higgins, have spent seven years exploring the experience of speaking truth to power in organizations — what gets said and what doesn’t, and who gets heard and who doesn’t. She has observed activists who are seeking to influence their organizations’ policies on wider social and environmental issues and found that the process is upsetting the power dynamics: When it comes to activism, leaders are not in control, and they often don’t know the answers.

Her first point: The word activism brings specific images and judgments to mind. In some countries and on some issues, it’s cool to be labeled an activist; in other regions and on other topics, it’s life-threatening. Activism is in the eye of the beholder; as author Ruchika Tulshyan has said, “What looks like rebellion to you might be another’s human fundamental right.” All of this matters because leaders will take actions driven in part by their assumptions about this loaded term.

Reitz’s second point: As leaders become more senior level, they become more optimistic. Younger employees might say that those leaders are more deluded: They overestimate how well they listen to employees, and they’re often taken by surprise because of the bubble of optimism they live in.

In the past, leaders would say, “We’re neutral. We’re apolitical.” That doesn’t cut it anymore, Reitz said: “What we’re discovering is that that excuse is getting pretty difficult to say now. You can’t sit on the activism fence. Inaction is as political as action.” Leaders don’t have to be engaged on every issue, but they do have to show curiosity about understanding more. They need to invest some humanity and some relationship capital in that process. How leaders make their choices matters.

Reitz uses a taxonomy to describe how leaders react to activist overtures, ranging from nonengagement to full engagement. Leaders fall into one of three stages around activist demands, she said: defensive engagement, dialogic engagement (where they concede that they don’t know the answers but start listening and sharing decision-making), and activist engagement. Leaders in the last stage, such as those at Ben & Jerry’s and Patagonia, vigorously encourage activism by their employees.

Reitz noted that if a leader isn’t hearing any activist voices, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. It could mean that there’s a perception that the organization doesn’t have the ability to tolerate difference — something that will hurt the company in the long run.

Watch Reitz’s Work/22 presentation below:

Takeaways

• Leaders often live in an optimism bubble, overestimating their listening skills and underestimating others’ silence.
• Leaders’ responses to activism have consequences.
• The first step in engaging with employee activists is examining what assumptions the term activist conjures up.