From the Charlotte Observer: "What Tony Robbins should have told men"
The following is from the Charlotte Observer.
What Tony Robbins should have told men
BY ISSAC J. BAILEY Observer editorial board (ibailey@charlotteobserver.com)
Tony Robbins needs a life coach.
The motivational speaker, reportedly worth half a billion dollars, spent time during a self-help seminar last month trying to school a woman about #MeToo. While claiming to be m of the movement, Robbins warned women against finding “significance” through anger and “victimhood.” He couched it as tough, necessary talk from a man unafraid of going against the grain, because he is a truth-teller who knows truth is more important than political correctness. But he failed to muster courage to tell powerful men to be, well, men.
This is what he told Nanine McCool, a woman who challenged his assertions about #MeToo, in front of thousands of self-help seminar participants:
“I was with someone the other day — very famous man, very powerful man — he’s saying how stressed he is because he interviewed three people that day. One was a woman, two were men. The woman was better qualified, but she was very attractive, and he knew, ‘I can’t have her around because it’s too big of a risk.’ And he hired somebody else. I’ve had a dozen men tell me this.”
Robbins has had men with enormous influence tell him they were passing over qualified women because of an undefined fear, and he responds to that admission not by telling those men they needed to more responsibly wield that power, but by scolding women for making men uncomfortable. Robbins is known for telling people to take personal responsibility, to do the right thing – but he was incapable of saying that to the men who needed that message most. So I will.
If you are a man in position of power and are balking at hiring women because women are voicing concerns they had been forced to remain silent about, you have no right to give into baseless fear. You have no right to punish them by prioritizing your own comfort while misinterpreting a movement that could lead to a greater sense of gender equality if weak-kneed men don’t stand in its way.
There is not an epidemic of innocent men being dragged through the mud by women. Men are not the real victims. It is your responsibility to lead your organization more purposefully to uproot practices that cemented gender imbalances you have unwittingly allowed to go unchallenged. It is your responsibility to do better, be better. That means spending less time comforting the already-comfortable and more listening to those who have felt voiceless.
Men like you have had it easier than women. You don’t hold almost all the top positions in Wall Street and politics because you are better than women. You may have worked hard, but your hard work has been valued more than women’s hard work. Your preferred leadership style is considered the right way to lead because that’s how male privilege works. That’s what must change, not women denying their justified anger.
Men like you need to grow up, not be pacified by men like Tony Robbins.
What you need is to emulate men who know when to admit a mistake and commit to true self-examination, men like … Robbins, who has since apologized.
“It is clear that I still have much to learn,” he said in a statement. “I will never stop examining my own words and actions to make sure I am staying true to” the ideals of the #MeToo movement. “That begins with this brief statement but will not end until our goals are reached.”
