Masculinity Isn’t Working: Justin Baldoni’s Advice For Male Leaders In 2021 And Beyond
Justin Baldoni is a husband, father, actor, director, producer, and as of recently a writer. He wrote and is releasing, Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity, on April 27th, reflecting on his own struggles with masculinity.
With an aim to foster diversity and inclusion, abolish sexism, and create psychological safety for LGBTQ groups, he exudes a style of leadership that men can aspire to. However, this approach requires men to do something they may have never done before: embrace their emotions, communicate what they don’t know and get connected to who they are.
I sat down with Baldoni to understand more about his experience with boldly redefining masculinity and how his approach can inspire a new form of leadership for all of us.
Laura Garnett: You are all about understanding the truth of other’s experiences that is often different from the perception. As a leader, how do you use vulnerability on your sets and with your teams?
Justin Baldoni: I think we’ve been taught, especially as men, that leadership requires an impervious, never-be-shaken, never-mess-up mentality. I think that’s one of the biggest myths of not only leadership, but masculinity, and as a result we miss out on what makes us human. I want to be led by a human—someone who admits mistakes, is aware of their shortcomings and allows for other’s strengths to shine.
True leadership requires vulnerability; to know that your idea may not always be the best, that you might not always know the answer, and to consult with others and genuinely want to know their views and input before making a decision that will affect the team or the project. These are all things that we have been socialized to view as “weak” in leaders.
I model this by readily admitting that I don’t know the answer, then follow up by asking someone on the team, “but what do you think?” Because that’s the other thing about vulnerability, it requires trust. I hired that person because I trust their ideas, thoughts, opinions and experience. So, if I’m not looking to the people I trust to contribute to the project or company, then I am selling us all short.
Art is creative and creativity thrives in collaboration. And collaboration thrives with vulnerability.
Garnett: You are sharing stories about the male experience that are often unspoken. What has changed in your professional life as a result of this vulnerability?
Baldoni: I’ve experienced freedom.
For most of my career, I thought I had to act a certain way and lead a certain way to be successful or considered good enough. But that was actually hindering my success, as well as my growth as a person, and in turn, as a creative and a businessman. Once I was willing to acknowledge my weaknesses, strengths and vulnerability, I experienced a level of freedom that I hadn’t before.
The freedom to lean on people when you need help, to say you’ve had a tough day, to show up messy, imperfect and human, and the freedom to embrace my humanity as a leader instead of trying to separate my humanity from my career.
Garnett: As a leader and a director, how powerful of a tool is an emotional connection with your colleagues for creating your best work?
Baldoni: Emotional connection with your colleagues is the most important tool. As a director, I want to create entertainment that reaches through the screen and touches the hearts and lives of the viewer. I believe the only way that can be cultivated and created is with sincere connection and relationships on set.
When I was shooting the first episode of a documentary series called Stories From The Street ten years ago, a person experiencing homelessness told me, “What comes from the heart, hits the heart.” Our entire mission at Wayfarer Studios is to create content that hits the heart, and just like that wise man told me a decade ago, you cannot do that if you do not have a true heart connection with the people you are creating it with.
That doesn’t mean that heart connection is going to be perfect, but the intention and practice of cultivating meaningful, emotional relationships and connections with the team that’s making the content that you hope will connect with the audience in a meaningful way—that’s the most important ingredient in all of it.
Garnett: For some men, being as vulnerable and honest as you’ve been will be too uncomfortable. What is a first step male leaders could take toward deepening their connection with their teams and dipping their toes into being vulnerable?
Baldoni: You can’t authentically do something in public unless you are practicing it in private. With that said, the most significant step you can take to deepen your connection with others is to deepen your connection with yourself. By tapping into your heart and humanity, you’re connecting with a part of yourself that creates space for you to connect with other people in the same way.
As you start to be aware of your feelings and limitations, and begin accepting yourself as being enough, it will lead to you practicing that same vulnerability with others. This vulnerability creates an environment where empathy, empowerment, acceptance and connection can thrive.
Garnett: As a director, you have the power to shift society by the stories you tell. How do you plan to take action on the diversity and inclusion commitments you made in your book—such as having a more diverse cast?
Baldoni: There is a difference between amplifying diversity and inclusion versus tokenizing it. I think anytime we are making choices to be more diverse and more inclusive, we have to first understand why it’s important, why it hasn’t been happening, and what the ramifications are. Otherwise, we are just tokenizing diversity so that we can be perceived a certain way. And in that case, we end up perpetuating the racism, sexism, and ableism that we say we want to help dismantle.
Once I personally learned how white-washed Hollywood is, and the role I play in perpetuating it, I had to do the work to unlearn everything that made me ignorant to it in the first place. It’s my job as a person of privilege, in the body that I am in, to use that privilege and power for the benefit of others, by doing the work behind the scenes and on the screen.
It means including people not to tokenize the color of their skin, gender, sexual orientation or disability, but to amplify their story, experience, perspective and humanity. It means asking myself questions like “Is this role for me, or would I be taking it from someone else?” or “Is this story, or this movie for me to tell, or to direct, or would someone with a different perspective, and a different life experience, do a better job with it?”
It goes back to that collaborative effort and understanding that if we want to make content that impacts the human experience, then we have to bring the full, authentic human experience to creating it. As a white, able-bodied, cisgender man I can only bring part of the picture.
I think of it like an x-ray vs. an MRI. With an x-ray, we can see the bones and part of the organs, but with an MRI we get to see the blood flow, the ligaments, and brain activity. Together, they give us a much fuller picture of the human body. In the same way, when we have different perspectives, different stories, different people at the table, then we get a much better representation—a more authentic representation of the human experience.
Garnett: What’s your vision for the future and what might our society look like if men embrace this new, more vulnerable approach to emotions and leadership?
Baldoni: I think about this Abdu’l-Bahá quote where he says, “The world in the past has been ruled by force, and man has dominated over woman by reason of his more forceful and aggressive qualities both of body and mind. But the balance is already shifting; force is losing its dominance, and mental alertness, intuition, and the spiritual qualities of love and service, in which woman is strong, are gaining ascendancy. Hence the new age will be an age less masculine and more permeated with the feminine ideals, or, to speak more exactly, will be an age in which the masculine and feminine elements of civilization will be more evenly balanced.”
That’s how I see it—a future where men are not bullied and demonized for exhibiting feminine qualities, and women are not bullied and demonized for exhibiting masculine qualities. I believe the future will be a world where masculinity and femininity is embodied and celebrated in every single person on the planet.
My hope is that this book can be a small step toward helping men begin to embrace the qualities in themselves that they have been trained and socialized to ignore and suppress, so that they can be more content, joyous, open, empathetic human beings. And so that the world would be a place with less violence, destruction, suicide and pain; a place that we can be proud of.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.