Every once in a while an obscure study by little-known academics carries a mind-set-altering message. This one, reported in the Harvard Magazine (October 2007), may suggest a cure for machismo.
Robin J. Ely is a professor at the Harvard Business school and knows a thing or two about King of the Jungle behavior in the workplace, but she wanted to study “masculine norms” in an even less refined environment; so she set off to visit two oil drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico to examine macho in what she assumed would be its purest form. Instead, she was stunned to encounter men who were willing to say they didn’t know something, or that they were afraid, or that they needed help – qualities many of us have worn ourselves out trying to nurture in the men we love.
Not that they were domesticated in all ways. “Some were big and burly,” she recounts; “many drove Harleys and were into hunting and fishing; and their humor – while never mean-spirited – could be gross in that ‘peculiarly male’ way such as farting and then laughing about it.”
Ely and her co-author Debra E. Meyerson, an associate professor education and organizational behavior at Stanford University’s School of Education, determined to investigate why the workers were so unexpectedly in touch with their emotions and shortcomings.
They discovered the transformative influence was not sensitivity training – how to become more in tune with the feelings of others – but its opposite: self interest.
It turns out that the oil rig Ely visited was an anomaly (subsequent visits to other rigs encountered the expected level of testosterone). Safety measures had recently been instituted on that particular rig and workers were trained to put safety above image and to speak up when they were unsure about something. For safety’s sake. If a worker felt scared because of the way a piece of equipment was handling, he said so; or if another had problems at home a felt he might be distracted at work, he alerted his co-workers. And they were, Ely reports, “very supportive.” The behavior had nothing to do with age. The crew ranged from 21 to 58, but the older ones admitted that things had changed a lot. In the old days, one of them told Ely, “the guy that was in charge was the one who could basically outperform and out-shout and out-intimidate all the others.”
The safety program shifted the men’s focus from proving their masculinity to, as the Harvard Magazine reporter Samantha Henig sums up, “engaging in larger goals – ensuring safety, building community, and advancing the company’s mission.” The message couldn’t be more profound: “their employer was able to reshape their previous notions of what a manly man should look and sound like.”
The impact might not be so dramatic in other environments, Ely warns. “Not dying, not blowing up, not losing legs – that meant a lot to them. In the corporate environment, you don’t have that compelling incentive to change.”
It is fascinating to contemplate what other “compelling incentives” might be out there. Ely’s findings open up new realms of male-female interaction and emphasize the influence of male-to-male behavior. In the safety category, medical findings show that unmanaged anger – or suppressed feelings of any kind, including doubt and sadness – can be deadly. Or, to draw on the most clichéd example, imagine if men started advising one another to ask for directions. Thirty years ago Gloria Steinem famously speculated “if men could menstruate” they would compete over heavy flows and tampon use (and “abortion would be a sacrament”). Ely’s study suggests that if men can be induced to compete over sensitivity to danger, they may be encouraged to move on to other sensitivities. Perhaps then, they can begin to feel good about feeling feelings.