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Three Surprises at the Launch of ‘We-mind vs. Me-mind’
Perhaps because I accompanied my wife and author Jessica Lutz as she found, tested and ordered her ideas over the past seven years, I need little to convince me that her latest book contributes a powerful new way both to understand and also to run our human world.
Still, I was in for more than one surprise at the 6 July publication launch of We-mind vs Me-mind: A New Vision for Success in Leadership and Life here in Brussels. Most of all, I was bowled over by how the strong women guest speakers had already made Jessica’s breakthrough language their own.
First up was Helene Banner, from Germany and the youngest person ever appointed a EU spokesperson. After a successful decade in European institutions, she has now, like Jessica, dedicated herself to solving the dilemmas faced by many women leaders as they fulfil their ambitions for promotion but lose faith in the often blinkered, hierarchical organisations they serve. Because of the mismatch she felt in the workplace – always being pressured to speak, act and even laugh differently from what came naturally to her as a woman – she gave her new platform a tongue-in-cheek name: Let’s Just Be Imperfect, Ladies!
Beyond the gender lens
“I felt, when reading your book, as if you were speaking from my heart,” said Helene. “You are finding words here for what many us women feel. So many of us feel represented and recognised by this term that you have coined, the We-mind rather than the Me-mind. This is what I call the more feminine approach to leadership: leading by building alliances rather than thinking in hierarchical terms; building teams; working for win-win situations with women’s empathy and their sensitivity to others, acknowledgment and anticipation of what others may think. When you coined it as the We-mind vs the Me-mind, I was like: Thank you so much! You found a term to go beyond the gender lens. That is such a breakthrough!”
Next to speak was Georgia Brooks, whom the newspaper Politico had just two days before named one of the most influential 40 people in Brussels. Of British and Egyptian heritage, Brooks founded and leads The Nine, a club for women members only, and she had invited Jessica to launch We-mind vs Me-Mind in the garden of The Nine’s beautifully re-appointed belle époque townhouse barely one hundred metres from the European Commission. Georgia fully agreed with what Helene and Jessica were trying to get across.
“The tide is changing. People are waking up to realise that we have to do something,” Georgia told the capacity audience. “The great resignation is happening. Middle to high managers, female, are leaving …. If companies really want to attract and keep their strong female talent it is a question of training and work culture. You come in as a young woman, you are ambitious, you are keen to progress. Then there’s a little bit of, like: No, no, stay down stay in your box. We are taught to stay in our lanes, be good girls, colour within the lines. Then [others] are rewarded for being a little bit cheeky, a little bit naughty, breaking the rules. [Former British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson is a great example of someone [who is] so Me-minded.”
Reframing leadership
My second surprise was how much Helene and Georgia agreed with something that I had tried and failed to argue against while Jessica was writing the book. For me, the idea of We-mindedness seemed most useful as a new way of looking at human interactions, which might then nudge us all to a more collective approach. Jessica disagreed. She firmly believes that We-minded leadership can become a credo of an active, whole new style of management for both women and men. So did her two co-speakers, I discovered.
“What Jessica does very well is to reframe ‘What is leadership?’, ‘What is success?’ and to move beyond the more gendered stereotypes and roles,” Georgia said. “It is very important for women to own the room and to step into their power and presence. Which is not to say we have to be like men …. It’s more about the team spirit, it’s about all of us who can … move the conversation together as opposed to individuals on plinths, the very siloed approaches and individualistic goals.”
Including men was another argument that resonated strongly. As Jessica points out in the book’s preface, her inspiration to write the book after returning to Europe from a reporting career in Turkey followed her surprise “that the battle for equality was still not settled in the West. At the same time, it bothered me that usually the only explanation given was to blame the men, the ‘patriarchy’, for blocking us with a glass ceiling. I had worked among men all my life, and always enjoyed it. I love men. So that argument didn’t sit well with me, even though I’m the first to acknowledge that sexism can seriously hamper a woman’s career.”
Jessica wanted her years reading up on the science of it all to find language that would go further than the usual debates. “Many men switch off the moment we start talking about gender. I do too,” she said. “This is more about two different value systems, that we all have. We all have a We-mind and a Me-mind. We lean to one of the two sides. Men tend to lean more to the ‘me’ side. But that’s not a dogma. There are 40 percent of men who are more We-minded, and 15 percent of women who are more Me-minded … Our definition of leadership is very Me-minded. I believe, and I think I have also found scientific grounds to say that the We-mind can be just as good as a leader as the Me-mind.”
Helene also spoke of her frustration at the way men usually felt as if the question of differences between men and women’s approach to life and work were nothing to do with them, either because it was unfamiliar territory that made them nervous or because they believed that quotas for women managers were blocking their careers. Jessica’s approach, she believed, offers a new way forward.
“Thank you for introducing us to language we can use to share how we feel as leaders in our workplaces … Thank you for finding the words and for speaking on behalf of so many women who often go to work stumbling [against] the glass ceiling, thinking: I’m not tough enough yet, I have to become more assertive, I have to hide my emotions, I need to cry in the bathroom not the boardroom,” she said. “In your book, you are giving us permission to be in our We-mind, to feel confident as We-minders to change the world and workplaces.”
My third surprise
My own many discussions with Jessica over We-minded values have left me in no doubt that giving them more weight would improve the state of the world. Indeed, her research and writing has buttressed my own enthusiasm for the ultimate tapping into our common We-mind: democratic reforms that would give everyone a chance to contribute to policy making through random selection, or sortition.
But none of this prepared me for my third big surprise of the launch event. It is traditional in the Netherlands, from where Jessica comes, to give a first copy of the book to somebody whose contribution the author truly values. In the months before the event, Jessica had discussed a few names – for instance, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo, whom Jessica met at the launch of his book The Age of Women: Why Feminism also Liberates Men – but I didn’t know what she had done about it.
So, after she told the audience how the Prime Minister had declined her invitation, it was a shock to hear Jessica calling me up to be that honoured person. Suddenly there I was: a somewhat Me-minded man standing in front of an audience largely of women to receive a book mainly about women from a woman. My eyes were not dry as I stammered through my admission that indeed Jessica had long converted me to her way of thinking. But neither, our daughter Scarlett informed me later, were the eyes of several others in the audience.
Long live that moment that Jessica formally delivered her We-minded idea to the world in such a We-minded way.
Click here:
- To buy the book on Amazon.com (available as Kindle/ePub or print-on-demand at your country’s Amazon platform, )
- To read the preface of We-mind vs Me-mind
- To read more about the book on Jessica’s website
- To see a multimedia Instagram story on the launch
The headscarf struggle
I didn’t write much about the women’s headscarf debate as a journalist — it always seemed too complicated — but I had a go in a chapter on Middle Eastern women in Dining with al-Qaeda. Barçin Yinanç of Hurriyet Daily News in Turkey picked up the story (original here).
An outsider’s look at Turkey’s headscarf issue
BARÇIN YİNANÇ
Friday, October 8, 2010
The issue of the headscarf is back on Turkey’s agenda. The heated debate coincided with my reading of Hugh Pope’s recent book, “Dining with al-Qaeda.” As the subtitle, “Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East,” suggests, the former journalist explains to his readers the many and rather complex faces of the Middle East, emphasizing that the region is much more than a monolithic “Islamic World.”
One of the 18 chapters is dedicated to women in the Middle East. Some of the passages of “Subversion in the Harem: Women on the rise from Cairo to Istanbul” pertain to issues that are directly related to the current debates in Turkey.
One may recall the war of words between the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, on the different way the headscarf is worn in Turkey, Iran and Pakistan.
Pope also compares Turkey with Iran in his book. Changes to the traditional moral and household duties of women are recent in the Middle East, following the lead of the West, says Pope. Family honor and submissiveness are still usually considered to be essential and symbolized by the appearance of women, yet women also use their appearance to make political points, according to Pope. “The Turks consciously unveiled in their 1920s secular revolution to show how they were turning toward the West. Iranian women covered up during the 1979 Islamic Revolution to turn their back on the West and its support for the shah’s dictatorship. In the 2000s these two countries swapped places, with Iranian women pushing back their head scarves to register opposition to the regime and Turkish women wrapping themselves up,” he says. “Each nation had its own struggle with modernity rushing in, and paradoxes abounded.”
He says Turkey is almost schizophrenic in its attitude toward women. The country’s republican secularists and its religious conservatives use women as their favorite political playground. But, argues Pope, this conflict is not only about the place of Islam in society, it is also a “new front in a long-running conflict about communities and social class. The religious-minded two-thirds of the population that is rooted in the villages of Anatolia tend to be pragmatic and open-minded about headscarves, whereas the more secular third is urban and often descended from refugees who built the Turkish Republic up from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire after the 1920s and views headscarves as the nemesis of their ideological goal to create a modern state.
For those who know Turkey and the headscarf issue, Pope’s analysis might not be so new. But in the following passages he touches on one dimension that rarely comes up:
“The problem for me lies more in the Islamists’ other main justification for headscarves; that they are part of women’s duty to stop men lusting after them. Innocently enough, many young women therefore wear a chic headscarf that signals not that they are fundamentalists, but that they are morally upright and marriageable or are dutiful wives. But for exactly the same reason, the secularists are quite right, as in France, to insist that no headscarves be allowed in schools. A schoolgirl wearing a headscarf implies that I, as a man, might be lusting after her. I find the insinuation repugnant – if people really think there is such a general problem, they should first start educating the men.”
Let me put it in different words. The headscarf also symbolizes in conservative Turkey that the woman wearing it is not an easy woman; implying in reverse that those who are not wearing it have the potential of being easy.
One of the drivers of the daily I was working at 10 years ago once told me how his daughter, living in Southeast Turkey, decided to cover her head, as her husband, a soldier in the Turkish army, used to go away for long periods of time. That way, she thought, she would not be harassed by men.
That’s the point when I, as a woman not wearing a headscarf, perceive this attitude as insulting. Just because I am not wearing a headscarf does not make me “less Muslim” or less “dignified.”
Hugh Pope 