Adam Torres and Virginia Lacayo discuss intersectional leadership.
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Show Notes:
What are the traits of intersectional leaders? In this episode, Adam Torres and Virginia Lacayo, Co-founder and CEO at Massive Systemic Change, explore Massive Systemic Change and intersectional leadership.
About Virginia Lacayo
Driven by the belief that women leaders from historically marginalized groups will change the world by changing the dynamics of power within it, Virginia Lacayo, Ph.D. is co-founder and CEO of Massive, a coaching and advising practice that guides and equips business leaders called to use their status and power to take on systemic change.
Her executive coaching program called The Intersectional Leader is designed to coach visionary leaders, serving as CEOs, Executive Directors, and/or Founders, who deeply believe in social justice, are driven to challenge traditional leadership approaches, and are committed to leveraging their power and influence to create systemic change in their organization, industry, and/or community. Her clients know first-hand the systemic issues that perpetuate oppression and now, they have a deep calling to use their authority and resources to transform the systems they are part of.
About Massive Systemic Change
Coaching business leaders who are called to create systemic change on mindset, personal branding & leadership activism.
They partner with leaders who are at the intersection of business, consciousness, and social change to cultivate the mindset, personal brand, and activist leadership skills necessary to change the system.
Their clients develop the confidence to play big, an “indomable” mindset to handle the pressure, and receive an execution plan and ongoing coaching to make their calling a reality.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I have Virginia Lacayo on the line and she’s co founder and CEO over at Massive Systemic Change.
Virginia, welcome to the show. Thank you. It’s really a pleasure to be here. First off, Virginia, I love the name of that company, Massive Systemic Change. Like, who came up with that one? It’s pretty ambitious, I know, but that, is kind of my, it’s the culmination of a path of 30 years working on social change issues and systemic change.
So, I’m convinced that we got to the point in society that doing good things within the system is not longer enough. We need to change the system. And that that’s why we talk about massive systemic change. Wow. can tell you’re passionate for your topic.
And I love bringing on passionate entrepreneurs onto the show. So great to have you here. And overall topic, we’re going to be talking about intersectional leaders and really how, that type of leadership has the ability and the and the potential to, to change the world. So I guess let’s start with the basics here.
So what are some of the traits that you feel an inter sectional leader must have and is it important? for me, it’s important to start to define where our leadership, current leadership paradigms come from, and that is the leadership paradigm that we are all immersed and that we learn in our schools and from modeling, you know, from learning from others actually is very influenced and informed by four major forces or, you know, Belief system that is patriarchy, white supremacy consumerist capitalism, what I call greed somehow, fundamentalist religion.
And the thing about the problem with that paradigm is that it reinforces structures and dynamics of power that are not only Promote and sustain inequalities, but also actually hinder development, innovation, collaboration and expansion in business. So I think that we need to challenge that paradigm and the way we’ve been doing it.
And a lot of people are there many leaders that really see some of the flaws of this systemic, this leadership paradigm, and they’re trying to challenge it. They put on things like. Di programs, you know, like, okay, we’re going to embrace diversity. We’re going to try to build equality and things like that.
So there is some, a little bit of the feminist. If you want feminist influence there to bring equality for everybody. That’s important, but it’s not enough because 1. I mean, to really change a system and to really change a paradigm like that, we need to, yes, to understand the dynamic of power that play in the system that reinforces equality and oppression and discrimination.
But we will not be able to change them if we don’t understand at the same time, how complex system work and change. And that comes from understanding little bit of a complex or complexity science theory, you know, understanding the system. we still think of organizations as. In a linear way, you know, like, we have the paradigm of Newton that explain the word as a big machine, like a clock.
And so everything is the sum of the parts. And if you understand the part, you’re the whole and everything is linear and with more information and more instructions and more planning and more. prediction and control, then you’re going to be able to guarantee the outcomes. And we know that reality doesn’t work that way, but we keep working for that.
intersectional leadership approach is. A leadership approach that combines 3 main. Paradigms or ideologies or perspective. Mm-Hmm. one is feminist perspective that understand, really understand all kind of power dynamics and how they play in, in the, you know, day to day work or the business life.
That’s one paradigm. The other one is complexity science and. Equip leaders to not only understand their organizations as a living organism, Not as a machine, and to understand that as a living organism is constantly changing and evolving and adapting and you have to adapt with them. And that means that you change your role from a centralized power and direction and commanding and controlling to more of a facilitator and, and nurture of a different kind of system and a different kind of behavior.
Systemic behavior, so we have the systemic feminist approach. We have the complexity science and systemic leadership approach and then and then we have the neuroscience or mindset approach because also as a intersectional leader is 1 that. Share or has the trait of what I call an in the model a mindset in the model a Spanish word that loosely translate into impossible to domesticate.
And what I mean by that is that it’s a person is a leader that has work has done the inner work to 1st. Decolonize their mind from all this socializing and limiting belief that society has imposed on us and therefore is capable of, overpower, let’s say all the influence that the context, the past, other people, but also their own mind might have over them.
And so put leaders in a position of a strategic thinking kind of a stoic mindset somehow means that they have work on their thoughts and their emotions to be able to be their own govern somehow. Right? So they’re not that. They’re not reactive all the time to what’s happening to them or around them.
So when you combine these 3 elements, the right mindset, systemic leadership skills and perspective of the organization. And a clear understanding of the different power dynamics that play within the system and they have the tools to manage that and to influence the direction, which the system is going, then we can talk about.
Really transformational systemic change. is there any examples? And this can be, you know, it could be with individuals you work with projects or otherwise, or just things that, you know, common examples. Is there any examples of this type of leadership that you see working? Well, like, or some some areas that you see it working?
Well, yeah.
to be honest, I haven’t seen one that a leader that has all these characteristics perfectly equally balanced, let’s say, but many organizations that are very innovative, I mean, big organizations like Apple, for instance, a lot of the, you know, the innovative leaders different fields, especially in the tech field, but even the army, for instance, the US army, they.
I start implementing a complexity science approach to leadership and they saw an increase in decentralized. Leadership and autonomy and decentralized power and way more efficiency and effectiveness in the results that they’re getting just by changing the way they understanding the structures and the way the system works.
So that’s an example of how Google is another example of this to how to. Increase their level of autonomy initiative and innovation within an organization by decentralizing the authority and allowing the teams to really, to really tap into the collective intelligence and creativity of the system to solve happen in the tech sector, but also in the health sector in some ways in the army, as in the military sector, as I was telling you, social movements, for instance, have been, even if they have, if they don’t have the theory, that’s clear. They have been tapping into the power of the system to self organize itself.
So these are characteristic of. System thinking leadership that allows for growing and expansion and efficiency that we need to collect and to understand and to start implementing intentionally and the same thing for many organizations that are more. Conscious of their environment or conscious of, you know, diversity, and they promote the liberation of people from all kinds of discrimination and oppression, and they, they have been using somehow also certain approach of let’s say systemic leadership skills in their process of getting people involved and collaborating and connecting and embracing diversity for innovation.
So you see some examples of this kind of approaches in different kind of organizations that have worked perfectly well, and actually are. Giving amazing results when I’m doing, and this is based on 30 years of you know, my, doctorate program communication for social change. Plus all my expertise becoming an expert on complexity science and being a feminist for many years and working with social movements and in all different sectors in 4 continents for 30 years.
I’ve been studying all this and I, I really, I came to the conclusion that actually what we need now is to bring all these approaches that are doing are having amazing results together in one leadership instructor or leadership framework that combine all these qualities to get the best results we can get.
So, know you said you’ve been doing this work for quite some time and building, obviously, your base of knowledge and your methodology. throughout the years. That being said, like, where did all that start? Like, was it from you were a kid or like, when did you get, I would argue, I don’t know if obsessed is the right word or how, but like what influence or how, or like what got you on this path, like in the beginning?
Cause it’s, it’s interesting. Cause you’ve been building on this body of work for quite some time. And, and most people kind of don’t, you know what I mean? I see it as I, obviously I know there’s ups and downs and different zigs and zags, But nothing’s linear. Right. But like, what got you obsessed with this long enough to stick with it and build over the last 30 years?
It’s amazing. It’s a great story. No, thank you. Well, we might need another podcast for that, but I’m going to take, I grew up in the middle of the war in Nicaragua , so I grew up facing all kinds of adversities. I imagine the war. Bargo and all those things, but at this time was a period of hope and to understand the possibility to really visualize the possibility of a different kind of society where everybody was equal and the revolution at that time, the Sandinista revolution at that time was promoting that.
Vision of everybody’s equal. Everybody should have equal access and opportunities to be, you know, to develop their potential and be happiness and be happy and all that. thing is that towards the end of the war, I, I noticed that even in a system that was utopian, in theory, some people were more equal than others, you know?
So, yeah. It’s equal, I mean, everybody’s equal, but some, some of them were more equal than the rest. Sure. And there was the ones that were less equals where women, people with disabilities, people, indigenous people from, you know, African descendants, people with young people, people from the queer community.
So I realized that just that idea of everybody should be equal and can be equal. Cannot be bring about brought about without really understanding the power of dynamics of the system and how it’s constructed and what are the belief systems that sustain even that utopian. Thought, you know, or vision. So that’s where I started developing all my, like, say, my feminist consciousness.
To understand those, that, that level of power dynamics. But since then do you remember how, like, roughly, like, how old you were when you kind of had that realization? Or if it was a progression? I’m just curious. Oh, I easily between 12 and 13 years old. Wow. That’s such an awareness. That’s what I mean.
Like that’s a, that’s a quite a bit of awareness at that age. I figured it was pretty young. And I was, I was young, but I was very active. I was you know, Since I was a kid and, you know, at school and in the student movement and, you know, in the social movement at that time. And I got involved within women’s movement since I was very young too.
So I started a lot from my mother was a great infant, but also other great women’s around me. And so. I started working on, because of that, that experience, the revolutionary experience, I started working and I’ve been working my whole life on social change issues and how to bring about social change and social justice.
And I became really obsessed about trying to understand why humans behave the way we behave and how can we change it? So I went to law school, that was my undergrad degree, was law school. Because I thought maybe law can explain the structure, you know, like the skeleton and I will that will help me to understand the framework within humans interact.
And that was good. But far from it. So, I, I did my master degree on communication for development. Now, based on an experience that was incredibly successful during the time that I was working for a nonprofit organization, we develop a communication strategy for social change that end up in textbooks and universities and the United Nations.
I mean, people from all over the world came to us saying, like, how you did that? How was that?
now at that time. And we, we look at each other, my colleagues and I, we were like, theory, what, what’s the theory?
We didn’t have access to, we didn’t have bookstore or libraries or internet. We were disconnected from the world, but we weren’t doing any impactful work. Wow. Being always kind of a nerd, so I said, like, I volunteer to go back to college and understand what a theory is and , you know, come up with a theory that it will explain the impact that we’ve had.
during my master, I came across complexity science, and that was another a moment for me was like, oh, social science, not enough to explain why human would behave the way we behave at the collective level. But complexity science has a lot of theories that could explain in many ways, I mean, form social change strategies and make it way more effective.
So I became a scholar of complexity science and really passionate about it. I became after I graduated from my. My doctorate program on that, I, I became a consultant and a teacher, you know, a professor and all that, but I realized that no matter how well you explain this and people were like blowing their mind with this idea and this approach was not enough.
If the leaders. of the organizations that wanted to bring about this kind of change didn’t change their mindset about everything, about themselves, about leadership, about social change, about their organization, about collectives, about everything. So that’s how I get my certifications on coaching so I could collect enough knowledge to come up with my own coaching methodology for that purpose.
And now I’m putting all. The ingredients together to make this cake, I mean, it’s all my experience as an activist for many years in different kind of social movement and my expertise as a complexity scientist and my, all my experience as a mindset coach and leadership coach together in this, this framework that I call intersectional leadership.
Well, what an amazing cake and recipe. It sounds like you’ve been brewing up and working for the last you know, X amount of years. So first off, I just want to say, Virginia, it has been great having you on the show today I know we only touched on the, the depth of the, of your knowledge here and in many different sectors.
That being said, I know there’ll be some entrepreneurs and business owners or some other individuals that they’re going to want to follow up. They’re going to want to connect with you and your team. How do people follow your work? How do they connect? Well you can find me on every social media, but especially LinkedIn under Virginia Latayo, which is my name, or look for MassiveChange.
co is our website and it, we’re all there. On social media as well, so you can find everything that we’re doing and actually, I’m launching the 1st intersectional leadership immersive for women’s leader in May. So this is the time to apply. If you want to learn about this framework. Fantastic. And we’ll put all that information, by the way, in the show notes for all the listeners.
And speaking of the listeners, if this is your first time with Mission Matters, and you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet, hey, hit that subscribe button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you amazing stories and interviews and guests, and we don’t want you to miss any of that programming.
Each and every day we’re, we’re putting out new content for you. So hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss it. And if you’ve been listening to us for a long time, then you haven’t hit that write a review button on Apple Podcasts yet. Hey, we sure do appreciate reviews, so make sure to get that review in us for as well.
’cause again, we, we really do appreciate it. And Virginia, thank you so much time for making some time for us today and coming on the show. Thank you, Adam. It was a pleasure to be here.
