Mmm… Temptation.

A few days ago in my daily Tarot pull, I got The Devil.

This did not freak me out one bit. 

Because after 25 years in progressive politics and more than 30 years working with the cards, I know this archetype. It’s the fear that keeps you trapped. And looking at it in the light of this crossroads moment, I saw something I hadn’t seen before: a lesson about collective liberation.

The images of The Devil usually show some kind of escapable cage. On my card, there are two people with big, heavy chains around their necks. They can’t see that their own chains are clearly loose enough to take off.

But they could see each other’s.

(Btw I don’t believe in “The Devil.” It is a villain invented by the early racist patriarchy and used to divide the people from their own self-interest, much the way the word “Socialist”is being used today. But I digress.)

Think of healthy culture as being made of rules and relationships. Those are the warp and weft of the fabric of your workplace or team or community. When the rules are transparent and equitable and aligned with your values, they lead to healthy relationships. 

When relationships are healthy, you need fewer rules.

This creates a virtuous cycle that leads to belonging, low turnover and creative collaboration. 

The problem arises when there is one set of rules for people with positional power or white privilege or gender privilege, or all of the above… and another set of rules for people with less power and privilege.

When that happens, it tears the fabric of relationships. It causes real, ongoing harm and doesn’t allow us to catch each other’s blindspots: 

The blind spots of the privileged become the culture.

If this is going on in your community or team, some of the ways it shows up is asking for feedback and getting crickets or repeatedly getting the same feedback or having the same frustrating meeting over and over. Plus high turnover of BIPOC, queer or trans folks or other other people with marginalized identities.

If you recognize your organization or your team, 

please don’t ask people with less privilege to tell you if it’s true.

I have worked with people on both sides of this dynamic – leaders who are getting negative feedback from their teams and teams who need their leaders to create more belonging. 

Nearly every time I have started work with a leader who wants to improve their culture, that leader says to their team some version of this in our kick-off meeting: “Please tell me if there’s anything I can do to improve.” 

They say this because the leaders I work with truly want to be great at creating cultures of healthy belonging! And what I offer in that moment is this: That’s not a fair ask at the beginning of the journey. Giving challenging feedback to someone with more privilege is incredibly difficult for our human nervous systems. It can happen and I have helped many teams get there. But the leader’s work to make that feedback safe comes first. 

That work means leaving the familiar and going into the unknown, because that’s where change happens. It’s not easy – uncertainty sucks – but it is life changing. The journey is different for every leader but over the years, I’ve developed a map that seems to help. For the sake of sticking with today’s theme I’ll sum it up this way: Name the chain, feel the fear, learn to take that fucker off. 

And (forgive me, but) the Devil is in the details. 

For one leader I worked with, he wasn’t able to unlock why he was so impatient and, frankly, scary to his team until we figured out that he felt a life or death responsibility for everything being perfect. When he set the goal of “Letting go of things that aren’t my responsibility,” things began to change. He learned how to notice when that fear was a chain around his neck, affecting not just him but his team, even his family. He learned how to take that chain off and show up with heart and excellence. Six months later his team rated his ability to hear feedback as off the charts. (Literally. I gave them a numeric range and they wanted to go higher. Spinal Tap 11, anyone?)

And the boss who asked him to do this work offered him a promotion he had wanted for years. 

Another leader was trapped by the fear of looking unqualified for a position she had fought tooth and nail for, and truly earned. But this is how privilege and oppression collude! Why? To silence her voice and dim her brilliance. By doing the work, she started shining again – as herself. Ironically earning the praise of her board and staff. Ain’t that the way? 

If the traps that privilege sets sound familiar to you and you are interested in this kind of journey, reach out to me or another coach. I am currently offering a special, New Year’s coaching package. A 20 minute conversation will help you know if we’re a good fit.

If you are on a team with a boss who needs this, see if you can get this post into their inbox.

Because it doesn’t have to be that way. 

You can have a workplace culture with a balance of rules and relationships. You can have healthy belonging. So that when we fuck up or get blinded by something – like we will because we’re human! – someone close to us can say “Hey, what’s that around your neck? That looks heavy and uncomfortable. Want to take that off?”