Lean Out: The Truth About Women, Power, and the Workplace

by Marissa Orr

In private, between good friends, we freely admit feeling apathetic or conflicted about our careers. At work, or in public, we wouldn’t dare. Admitting ambivalence or being tentative about your ambition is seen as foolish surrender to the culture trying to keep us down.

Posters. The leader of modern-day feminism, running one of the largest and most famous public companies in the world, helps solve the leadership ambition gap with posters.

Doesn’t it make more sense to look at what might be wrong with the job instead of what’s wrong with all the people who don’t want it?

A corporate CEO’s power is formal authority over others. The first implies choice, and the second control. The people who followed MLK didn’t work for him. He didn’t hold any formal power over them. He led with influence. He made people feel heard and understood. He painted a vision of a better future and motivated his followers to act. People chose to follow MLK because he commanded respect, engendered trust, and deserved their admiration. Dr. King embodies the cocktail of traits from which true leaders are born.

MLK and a corporate CEO represent two distinct and diametrically opposed forms of leadership. When we say that men want to be CEOs more than women do, that statement doesn’t represent women’s lack of ambition toward being leaders. It reflects a lack of desire to be a CEO, or to be an executive with lots of authority and control over other people.

When women are disinterested in something like science, it’s a societal disease. When men are disinterested in anything, nobody freaking cares.

Organizing around the values of truth and trust doesn’t mean increasing the trustworthiness of each individual employee. It’s about building reliable systems that people can trust to be fair and objective, not arbitrary and punitive.

When power is too concentrated, among an individual or a group, truth is almost always the first casualty.