EMOTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE
The New Frontier for Leadership Development Strategy
The chorus that describes masculinity as in crisis has failed to diagnose the issue. Power, a notion of it that is domination, the emotions that conjures, the loss of that, and white men’s relationship to this notion of power. That is the correct diagnosis.
When Misdiagnosed Masculinity Becomes Political Violence
With a correct diagnosis, a change can truly come.Without it, we continue to tunnel through cycles of data that spell doom, and offer solutions that are cruel interventions centering interfering with women’s bodies, a nation’s freedom, and thriving Black and Brown families. All this drowning and devastation to reclaim this notion of power that centers dominationcannot shape a future for any collective humanity.
From Domination to Development
We need a notion of power that centers development, not domination. What then,would the change that serves a masculinity of development be? Emotional Infrastructure.
Emotional Infrastructure: A Leadership Strategy
Emotional Infrastructure is the next frontier in leadership development strategy. It comprises 3 elements: - Emotional literacy, Emotional accountability and Emotional worldview – ‘the E stream’. Emotional infrastructure is how masculinity institutionalizes wellness within organizations.
Power, Titles, and Organizational Culture
The holders of titles, the shapers of organizations,the heads of teams all require emotional infrastructure in order to transform organizational cultures. Emotional infrastructure transforms a relationship to power.
How Power Is Taught: From Classroom to Boardroom
As global educator leader Francesca Adedeji argues, boys learn about power from the classroom. These are lessons about violence, control, domination, and supremacy. Those lessons are embodied in masculinity. They metastasize in their bodies, and are professionalized into male leadership. The teams they lead, the organizations they run, the boardrooms they sit at all tell the story of this lesson about power as domination, not development.
What the Data Really Tells Us
There are copious amounts of data that have led to the declaration of masculinity in crisis. What story does the data tell? A single story about loss of power, domination and how that leaves men feeling, and how those feelings are harnessed and weaponized. The loss of power makes men scared and threatened. They take their fear and feelings of threat, do not name them as theirs, but instead weaponize them into narratives of external threat and fear. They point, they accuse, they label, and then they act. That action threatens safety for so many. This is unexamined fear, scaled through power, that produces policy that leads to sustained systemic damage.
Weaponized Fear and Leadership Harm
That is what happens to a leadership connected to a relationship to power that centers domination, and rejects development. What I mean when I say development is emotional literacy. Without emotional literacy, this leadership risks being an emotional terrorist. That’s when we harness emotions of fear and threat, weaponize them and then lead teams, organizations with those tools. Patriarchy calls them strength. Emotional literacy understands them as insecurity. Strength doesn’t weaponize, it engages and explores, it co-exists, it collaborates, it honors and uplifts.
Before Emotional Intelligence
The historical language has been ‘emotional intelligence’. Can you be emotionally intelligent, if you’re not emotionally literate’? You can’t. Historical language must be replaced with best practice from accurate diagnosis of contemporary leadership harm. From the classroom to the c-suite, the boardroom, the courtroom, this notion of power that centers domination threatens the health of institutions and diminishes thriving across teams.
White Masculinity as an Emotional Regime
The emotional worlds of western white masculinity are not regulated, they are dominated by external narratives – fear as weakness, insecurity as unmanly. In the contemporary classrooms of the digital world they are imposed on by external forces – often white, male and psychological. That imposition doesn’t recognize the world of emotions as part of humanity. No. They are a tool to be harnessed and weaponized in service of white supremacy.
Credentialed but Emotionally Illiterate
When it comes to male leaders with position and titles in corporate spaces, across sectors, in our movements, our spaces of labor, leisure and learning, those named as leaders are often Intellectually eloquent but emotionally illiterate;professionally credentialed but emotionally illiterate;ideologically sophisticated but emotionally illiterate.
Emotional Governance and World-Building
This white masculinity is an emotional regime tied to supremacy.The contemporary leadership harm is a failure of emotional governance. How do you govern what you have not named? Emotional Infrastructure is world-building as a collective project that serves a full humanity. That is Emotional Justice within a masculinity focus.
MM16: Applied Emotional Infrastructure
MM16 is innovative capacity training for male leaders by the MOVING MASCULINITY: global lab housed within The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice. Its focus is Emotional Infrastructure as leadership development strategy. This is a global lab; our MM16 training siteshonor the context and specificity of masculinity within geographical, historical, societal locations. The MM16 sites are in the UK, the USA, and in two African nations; Ghana and South Africa. Francesca Adedeji is MM16’s UK Site Director and a Global Educator Leader.
