The Cowboy and the Englishman: Unexpected Advocacy
“Sometimes in our careers, we look for professional ‘love’ — by that I mean support, advocacy, mentoring — in all the wrong places. We overlook people in our ‘court’ because they are unassuming, nontraditional sorts of leaders that do not correspond to an internalized image of leader we often have. The highly visible people in organizations often get all of the attention, because they are the established decision makers, promote their influence, have organizational history, and often exude confidence and authority. We can call them Cowboy Leaders.
I grew up around Cowboy Leadership throughout my career spanning across the petroleum and engineering industries, academia, fieldwork overseas, and gender studies. I’m currently at Grenoble Ecole de Management, where I am an Associate Professor of Intercultural and Diversity Studies and Academic Director of a doctoral program.
Below I reflect on one leader who is not a traditional Cowboy — in fact, he hails from a decidedly non-cowboy culture — someone who has been a champion for many women. I met this mentor when I was at a critical career transition point living and working here in France; yet my story begins in the heartland of Texas.
Growing up with Cowboy Leaders
Children of the 1980s may remember the film Urban Cowboy and its theme song “Lookin’ for Love (in all the wrong places)” by Johnny Lee.
Growing up in Texas, horseback riding across my adolescence, I realize now that I internalized an image of leader as an alpha-male cowboy, like the character John Travolta played in that film I so loved. At age 13, my horse’s farrier was the most-idolized person in my life: a handsome, tough, and kind cowboy named Randy. This image stuck, got tucked back somewhere in my mind’s creases, and persisted: During study abroad, university years, and my first job at age 22 in a petroleum engineering and construction company.
Working in the industry in the 1990s meant working in a Cowboy-filled world of engineers, pipe designers, process controllers, and procurement specialists. Watching the #metoo movement unfold over the past few months, several memories of those Cowboys returned to haunt me. The women working in the industry at the time can, I am sure, vividly recollect events that at best still make them cringe. Others may have taken to Twitter to finally lay the anger to rest and call out those cowboys on their macho audacity back in the day.
Despite this, the Cowboy somehow remained programmed in my own subconscious operating system. Even after studying feminist theory the Cowboy Leader bias had been imprinted, and it ebbed and flowed across the different locales where I worked, lived, studied.
As my career continued I cycled through two Master’s degrees, more jobs, fieldwork in remote places, working my way to a PhD at Harvard…. and whether in the US, Europe, Central America, or West Africa, the Cowboy Leader trope was always there.
The reality I’ve observed in organizations showed me this: Cowboy Leaders are on the move and preoccupied with externalities. They often have neither the time, energy, nor inclination to turn inward to fulfill employee development needs — needs for support, advocacy, empowerment, and mentoring. They may support others, but they may not always be the ones doing the heavy lifting.
As I found out, the heavy lifters are likely less obvious, in the background, yet steady in their mentoring, advocacy and impact.
Mark’s Mentorship
Mark Smith is one of those people. Now the Dean of Faculty at the school in Grenoble, France, where I am a professor in the People, Organizations, and Society Department. But things have not always been this way.
When I first met Mark, he was professor of Human Resorce Management, and we were both foreigners working and living there — he is the Englishman, I the American. Mark had a long commute, was managing work and family, and doing important research on women’s careers and gender policy. He was friendly and fun, had an impish, mischievous grin, and did not promote himself as brazenly as several other cowboys did.
By then I was a mother of four young boys, with a very busy but supportive entrepreneur of a husband, and caught up in my very own nightmare of a job. Feeling trapped in a high-pressure role, in a dysfunctional part of the organization, I was unsure of how to get on the exit ramp gracefully before burnout set in. I stayed the course for three years, to prove to the cowboys that I could do it, nonetheless.
In the process, I came to know a number of truly inspiring colleagues. Some took note of my work ethic and drive to do good work despite the serious constraints I faced. After three years of grinding it out, I decided to walk away from the drama, and all its cowboys. My manager (a cowgirl) would not, however, let me move elsewhere in the organization without a major battle.
So, I decided to cut my losses and move elsewhere. Rumors of this fell on a few key sets of ears.
Enter Mark Smith into the picture. Freshly promoted to the role of Director of the Doctoral School and aware of my predicament, Mark used a nice analogy from soccer (or football), as any self-respecting Englishman such as himself would do:
‘Michelle, when the manager of Chelsea FC or Manchester United moves to another club, what does he do? He takes the best players along with him. You are coming with me to the Doctoral School!’
A Different Kind of Leader
Mark was decidedly a different kind of leader. His British communication style disarmed me; even as an intercultural expert myself, I was blind to the cultural issue I was experiencing, misled by our common language. His decidedly un-cowboy behaviors were even harder for me to decode.
Mark did not gesticulate for attention or recognition. I had wanted someone who ‘shot from the hip’, but Brits are not straight-talking Texans. I often misinterpreted Mark’s intentions, or ignored what was actually happening, because of his indirect, more implicit way of speaking.
Yet in retrospect, it’s clear that he did no less than transform my entire experience of an organization and my professional ‘rebirth’ within its walls. He saw the redeeming qualities it had for me, and recognized the qualities I brought to the table that it needed. Mark implicitly ‘flipped the script’ I had developed from dealing with the trauma of the cowboy (and cowgirl) leaders.
Thanks to him, work became a learning experience, full of personal and professional lessons. I got to reframe a failure as a success for the next phase. I admittedly was, at the time, relatively oblivious to these insights. Only later did things unfold more clearly in my mind (sort of like the subtle, understated humor of a Monty Python film that you actually understand the second time you see it…).
Mark never stopped expecting the best from me, and kept the gentle pressure up, sometimes to the point of irritation. Working with him was never about ‘arriving’ and resting on my laurels. It was more about maintaining the learning curve and making new things happen. He knew I had to juggle private life with the professional, and had studied women’s experiences like mine for years. He wanted me to ‘win’ but never told me to get comfortable, as he knew that I probably never would be. He did not choose the easy path for himself, so why would he choose it for those he chose to mentor?
That is my story of the unexpected advocate in my corner — I had been looking for him in all the wrong places.
– Michelle Mielly, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Intercultural and Diversity Studies, Grenoble Ecole de Management, France
Michelle Mielly is the Academic Director at Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Doctoral School and an Associate Professor to for People, Organizations, and Society. She belongs to the research team Organizations, Work, Identity, and Culture and works on career trajectories, women’s leadership, intercultural identity in organizations, and questions of diaspora/integration of migrants. She holds Master’s degrees from Université de Grenoble (1991) & Pennsylvania State University (1994), and a PhD from Harvard University (2004).