Good afternoon from a sad and embarrassed Vancouver, where, as you probably know, the Vancouver Canucks lost in the final game of the Stanley Cup playoffs to the Boston Bruins. And then, a small group of young men, fuelled by alchohol, began to riot; burning cars, breaking windows and fighting with each other. The hundreds of thousands people packed into the downtown core to watch the game were trapped between police in riot gear and the young men. It was an awful night, with flames and smoke, mace and batons, and the constant sound of helicopters overhead. We live in a neighbourhood about a halfhour walk from the site of the riot, so were witness only to the smoke and helicopters. A number of our friends who live in the downtown core posted on Facebook last night, “Home safe.” We all breathed sighs of relief.
So, as sad and awful as last night was, what is the link to leading people and making a difference in organizations? Well, as easy as it may be to say; that’s just sports fans, or they’re just hooligans or criminals, the fact of the matter is that it was pretty regular people downtown last night. There were no masked anarchists, no evidence of gang members, no dangerous escaped criminals. These are not people society needs to be protected from. These are our sons. (There is little or no evidence of young women doing much more than flashing their breasts at cameras during the riot.) Many of these young men probably have jobs, or go to school, or ride on the subway with you and me. What happened here last night was despicable, and terrifying, all the more because it was not someone else, it was us.
I wonder if part of the issue is that we don’t really have a sense of eldership in our communities or organizations. There is a story about a group of elephants who terrorized a group of villages in western Africa. The experts noticed that the group were all adolescent males. Instead of shooting them, a small group of adult males were brought in and within a month, the adolescents had calmed down, and were behaving. When the elders for the young men of Vancouver fight, slash and break each other’s backs to get to the Stanley Cup, what would we expect their young male fans to do when they lost the game. And in our organizations, if the older adult males in your culture swear, slam doors, hit desks, threaten overtly or covertly, or generally push their way through decision making, what do we expect the younger men to do in response? And to be clear I’m not calling for a feminization of organizations, we need all genders and all the perspectives therein in our organizations to work at our best. But we need to take the creative and action oriented energies of masculinity and harness them to move our organizations and communities forward. The only way to do that is through modelling, mentorship and eldership between generations of men and women.
May we all make a difference in a younger person’s life this week.