130: Leaders With Heart, with Fran Benjamin

What happens when we acknowledge our full humanity in the workplace? 

Fran Benjamin, Managing Partner at GoodWorks Consulting, delivers a masterclass in organizational transformation that challenges longstanding assumptions about leadership.

Fran offers a definition of compassion: "that moment in which one can no longer distinguish themselves from the other," and explores how this concept applies to modern organizational structures. Rather than viewing companies as collections of individual cogs, they advocate for seeing people as interconnected ecosystems where mutual benefit and reinforcement drive success.

The conversation takes a fascinating turn as Fran traces the evolution of leadership competencies through major historical events. 

• During the Cold War, decisiveness reigned supreme. 
• After 9/11, empathy emerged as crucial. 
• The 2008 financial crisis elevated transparency.
• 2020's dual crises highlighted psychological safety. 

Now, as we face what Fran calls the 2025 polycrisis, new leadership qualities are emerging: principled dissent (values-based courage), regenerative leadership, and coalition building.

For leaders hesitant to embrace compassion, there are tangible costs: increased employee attrition, legal liability, reduced market access, and diminished community impact. The antidote? Building systems that institutionalize compassionate leadership beyond individual personalities or initiatives.

Whether you're leading a Fortune 500 company or a community organization, this episode offers practical wisdom for creating more resilient, innovative, and human-centered workplaces. Join us to discover how acknowledging our full humanity (emotions, bodies, relationships and all) unlocks our collective potential.

Fran Benjamin (they/he/she) is the Managing Partner and Principal Consultant at Good Works Consulting, an organizational development, human capital consulting, and executive coaching firm. With 20 years of experience guiding organizational transformation and inclusive cultures, Fran has led global teams through 50+ successful engagements with clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. An MBA graduate from UCLA Anderson, Fran is also a certified Integral Coach, yoga instructor, and a somatics practitioner, blending professional rigor with creative and holistic approaches to leadership.

You can learn more about Fran on LinkedIn or email them at: fran@goodworks.consulting. Learn more about Good Works Consulting on the website: https://www.goodworks.consulting/

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Transcript

Leadership Competencies in Times of Change

Fran Benjamin 0:01

Are there tried and true leadership competencies or behaviors that will help us navigate great upheaval and socio-political change? And so I started to look into both the organizational practice and some of the research about this, and if you look back in time, you see that actually it changes. It changes so during the Cold War and when leadership studies as a field was first coming into being, it really pointed to decisiveness as a key unlock for leaders, and that made sense in the context. After 9-11, empathy started entering into the field.

Manya Chylinski 0:40

Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, manya Chylinski. My guest today is Fran Benjamin, managing Partner at GoodWorks Consulting. We talked about organizational transformation, empathy, passion and how we don't check our humanness at the door to the office. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did at the door to the office. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did, fran. I'm so excited that we are sitting down and having this conversation. Thank you for being here.

Fran Benjamin 1:11

Of course it's my pleasure. I've been really looking forward to it.

Fran Benjamin 1:25

To get us started.

Fran Benjamin 1:25

I would love to hear what is one thing that you've done in any area of your life that you never thought you would do.

Performing on Broadway and Defining Compassion

Fran Benjamin 1:30

Oh my gosh, it's such a good question and, as I think about it, for anyone that knows the Enneagram model, I sometimes consider myself a type seven, which is called the enthusiast, and part of that in my life shows up as having many, many irons and many, many fires, and so I struggle with this question somewhat, because it also comes with some adventurousness and like living in the land of ideas, and I was like I don't know that I'm so surprised One thing that I am anything sort of that type of person. One thing that I think surprised me that it happened was many years ago now. It's one of my fun facts for like Two Truths and a Lie is that I once performed on a Broadway stage, which was really fun. I was not in a Broadway show, I should disclaim, but I got the opportunity to do a bit of a showcase in a Broadway theater, which I didn't. It was sort of a hope for myself one day, but I'm proud that it happened. I didn't necessarily see it coming as it was coming.

Manya Chylinski 2:43

That's amazing. Well, congratulations on getting on a Broadway stage, in whatever way that means. That's so exciting.

Fran Benjamin 2:50

Yeah, it was fun.

Manya Chylinski 2:51

Thank you for sharing and you and I are talking about generally the topic of compassion and organizations, and what do you think? I guess let's get started with. How do you define compassion?

Fran Benjamin 3:08

Compassion is kind of that moment in which one can no longer distinguish themselves from the other. It's that moment where my heart extends to the person before me.

Manya Chylinski 3:28

Okay, I love that definition. How do you think that fits in an organization? I mean, you work in organizational transformation and I work in a similar area and we're talking about compassion and organization similar area and we're talking about compassion and organization and if we're talking about connecting those two hearts, how does that fit when we're thinking of an organizational setting?

Organizations as Ecosystems, Not Cogs

Fran Benjamin 3:52

I think that when we think of organizations as ecosystems, as opposed to individual cogs that show up, that happen to show up to the same space, that's where this becomes possible. So my whatever I'm up to, whatever my goals are, are somehow intrinsically intertwined with those around me, whether they're my team, my boss, my, the community that my organization has an impact on or interaction with that. Note that understanding, sort of mutually beneficial, mutually reinforcing ecosystem. I think how that can translate to an organization.

Manya Chylinski 4:32

I really like that thought of the organization as an ecosystem, not individual cogs. I think we do get caught up a little bit in that thinking of us each as individual cogs in this big machine, versus looking at it as one entity or one community. What do you think leaders get wrong about understanding how we relate to each other in this kind of ecosystem?

Fran Benjamin 5:01

I think that one thing.

Fran Benjamin 5:04

There's a few things that are coming to mind, one of which is the idea that has been pervasive for decades that we have the option to leave any component piece of ourselves at the door when we arrive to work. And so I think that leaders, to operate in that version of leadership which asks of their teams to check their emotions at the door, check their bodies at the door, check their relationships at the door, I think that just gets in the way of their ability to inspire their teams, get great work done, because we, of course, know that that's not possible. We carry our bodies around with us when we go to give our next presentation, when we engage in a conflict with a colleague, we bring our emotions with us. Those things don't get left at the door. And so I think that when a leader has a hard time recognizing the fullness of the person before them, the complexity of the person before them, the reality that the person before them may themselves hold contradictory feelings about what's going on, that's when leaders can fall down on the job.

Manya Chylinski 6:20

Okay, in your work with organizations, do you encounter resistance to this concept, and how do you deal with that when you do?

Measuring Compassion in Organizations

Fran Benjamin 6:30

Yeah, I mean I coach a number of leaders and it's not so atypical that I'll be working with a leader and ask them how do they feel about what's happening for them? So let's say they just went through a reduction in force or a layoff, or they've just received community feedback that the organization that they work for has somehow harmed the community. I'll ask this question how are you feeling about that? And it's not atypical for the response to be no-transcript. So maybe you're scared or maybe you're ashamed or maybe you're excited, and I sort of provide some of this language and I think that the best way that I can help at an interpersonal level with individuals is to just model the language and model in myself, demonstrating my own connection to the fullness of who I am. Just one way. There's probably about 10 other ways to answer that question, but that's one way.

Manya Chylinski 7:54

It's so interesting what you say that the response is well, I think, and it can be very difficult for some people or in certain circumstances to access or understand the emotional side of it, and I think there can be a lot of fear with that, especially if we're thinking about in an organizational setting. If we're still in thinking that we're supposed to separate our work lives from our personal lives. I think it would be very frightening to want to try to access your emotions in a work setting.

Fran Benjamin 8:30

Yeah, it can be.

Fran Benjamin 8:31

And the other thing that you didn't say, that I'm also sensitive to, though, is that it may not be safe for some people to go inside, and they may have because of the bodies that they navigate the world in.

Fran Benjamin 8:44

I can speak for myself as a queer, non-binary person. Because of the body that I navigate the world in, there are moments where it doesn't necessarily feel safe to go inside and explore, and so we have to be both respectful of that and then create the conditions in which a real sense of belongingness and safety can occur within our organizations. But then there is also the more kind of let's call it commonplace and maybe less trauma-informed fear of just tapping in to that part of myself when the culture has asked of us for so long to not tap into the emotional components of who we are in a work setting, and in those instances I think it's really again about it's about slowing down, taking it step by step and also drawing the connection for folks between that experience and the potential outcomes. So whether it's a more resilient experience, a more resilient workforce, the connection to creativity, the connection between creativity and emotional intelligence, the ways that organizations might be more innovative if they're able to have that emotional self-awareness, things like that.

Manya Chylinski 10:03

Right, I appreciate you naming the assumption that I made there. It was an environment of trust and psychological safety, and when you're not in those spaces, whether you want to access your emotions or not is not the relevant question.

Fran Benjamin 10:20

Sure, yeah, yeah, well put.

Manya Chylinski 10:23

What do you think that leaders are getting right when they're thinking about building those environments where there's trust and psychological safety?

Leadership for the 2025 Polycrisis

Fran Benjamin 11:06

I've seen over the past 20 years leaders much more willing to share of themselves and much more willing to role model failure, creating the conditions for failing safely. I would love to see a lot more of it, but I do. I will just say, kind of as I look back on my career, that I have some folks that I can visualize in my mind right now, and it's even hard to imagine them standing up in front of a room and saying I missed the mark. I can't quite bring the mental image picture to do that, and today I see it much, much more. And so I think that, continuing on that trajectory of leaders asking for feedback, role modeling what it's like to fail and fail safely and acknowledge that and then share it themselves and that was hard for me, whatever the narrative might be I'm seeing more of that these days. Great, are you seeing that?

Manya Chylinski 12:10

I am seeing that, I worry that. I'm seeing it because I talk to executives in the kind of organizations that already, on some level, understand the need for compassion and psychological safety, and I fear that there are still many out there that aren't embracing this.

Fran Benjamin 12:33

Yeah, yeah, I think it is kind of environment and sector and industry and all of that specific to some extent.

Manya Chylinski 12:42

How are we missing the mark in leadership development?

Fran Benjamin 12:46

Great question. I think perfunctory leadership development activities are. We're missing the mark, sort of like the tried and true show up and learn about public speaking, learn about influencing skills, things like that. In one of the schools in which I'm trained we talk about that as thoughtful development, so like skill acquisition, and I think that leadership development programs that focus exclusively on that horizontal development, new skill acquisition we're just getting better at what we're already doing and I think that leadership development that happens on a vertical level, which is about stepping into the next stage of your development as an adult, deepening into excellence and grace when navigating complexity.

Fran Benjamin 13:36

This type of development that is more focused on whole human how do I become the best version of myself?

Fran Benjamin 13:42

That's hard to programatize, of course, but I think that some of the features that come with that is that it's never one and done. It is necessarily an ongoing practice and reflection. So having both, I need to practice something different with my body and then reflect on the experience of having practiced it, which means it's usually a combination of outside in perspective, either with a coach or leaders receiving 360 degree feedback from their teams. It is usually peer coaching, so that we're providing feedback to one another, always an element of social accountability. So here's what I've committed to, here's what the ecosystem can hold me accountable to, and that you're using multiple modalities to reach different leaders in terms of their own development, and that that becomes about the work, not about a program that's being run. It becomes about how do we go accomplish the next big strategic feat as an organization, as a collective of leaders. But we're also employing these practices to try new leadership behaviors and getting feedback on them, Right, right.

Manya Chylinski 14:47

And, as you were saying that, I was thinking about something that I hear is important, I know is important and I hear from people that I talk to is important is metrics and measurement. How can we effectively measure compassion, inclusivity, psychological safety in a way that satisfies the number crunchers?

Fran Benjamin 15:12

Yes. The short answer is yes, we can, and there's two ways to answer that question. The first is that it's been empirically studied. All three of those factors that you just mentioned have been studied in organizational context and the sort of research behind it. The business case for it is ample and happy to point people to it, but a Google search will do it.

Fran Benjamin 15:34

And then, yes, within any individual organization, I think about levels measuring the success of any intervention that might try to enable compassion or enable inclusion, and those levels might be self-reflection. So I'm self-assessing over time, my experience of these dimensions and my sort of adeptness with them, these dimensions and my sort of adeptness with them. The next level might be again I'll come back to feedback might be my environment's observation of my behavior relative to these dimensions, and then the kind of pinnacle level would be at an outcomes level, like can I measure changes in the organization's success by way of enterprise goals and somehow correlate them to these behaviors and the interventions that promoted them? Also correlates with an uptick in productivity or an uptick in profitability or what have you. And I mean that's some more advanced analytics, and larger organizations have sought to accomplish this, but it's possible.

Manya Chylinski 16:50

Okay, good to know. We're living in interesting times. There's a unique social and political climate that we are all navigating right now as we navigate our work lives, and how do you see that influencing leadership styles and organizations right now? You know it's interesting.

Fran Benjamin 17:12

I have kind of a hypothesis about this. I have been a student of leadership studies, let's say for my career student of leadership studies, let's say for my career and I was asking myself this question recently do these behaviors need to change over time, or are there tried and true leadership competencies or behaviors that will help us navigate great upheaval and socio-political change? I started to look into both the organizational practice and some of the research about this and if you look back in time, you see that actually it changes. So during the Cold War and when leadership studies as a field was first coming into being, it really pointed to decisiveness as a key unlock for leaders, and that made sense to the context. After 9-11, empathy started entering into the field. After the market collapse of 2008, it became transparency, which makes a lot of sense with problematic lending practices.

Fran Benjamin 18:14

With 2020, with George Floyd's murder and COVID, psychological safety became much more in organizational practices, in the literature, and so I've had this question about what is the unlock for leadership that is unique to what I've been calling the 2025 polycrisis, and I have a little bit of a hypothesis, which we're beginning to test, is that it might include things like principled dissent or you might call that something like values-based courage. It might be the practice of regenerative leadership, meaning, how am I regenerating within myself the capacity to face tomorrow, and am I doing that for my teams? It might be coalition building. So I'm seeing some of this somewhat in my work with diversity, equity, inclusion. I'm seeing some coalitions being built across organizations to stand up and stand strong with regards to practices of equity. I'd like to see a lot more of it, but I think these are just starting to come to the surface and I'd like to see a lot more.

Manya Chylinski 19:20

Just starting to come to the surface and I'd like to see a lot more. That is, I would also like to see a lot more. But I appreciate that analysis and your work and looking historically and seeing what has come from what's going on in the moment. So I'm encouraged by your analysis of where we are at this moment. So thank you for sharing that. Yeah, of course, your analysis of where we are at this moment. So thank you for sharing that, yeah, of course. What do you think is the biggest risk? If organizations don't get it, if they aren't inclusive, if they don't understand compassion and empathy, they don't build that psychological safety.

Fran Benjamin 19:54

So for organizations in the private sector it's dollars and cents and it can be caused and measured along many different dimensions, some of the effects of which are the cost of employee attrition, some of the opportunity costs from lack of market access, sort of knowing their consumer. It also comes from the cost of legal risk. So we just saw that Google is selling a new multi-million dollar discrimination lawsuit. Even in spite of the current socio-political climate, that says most DEI practices are illegal, turns out, employees that have been poorly treated are still going to hold organizations accountable based on their protected class status.

Fran Benjamin 20:43

But I also think that in other sectors as well, in the nonprofit or the public sectors in which I do a great deal of work we're talking about people's, and we were talking about it period. But we're talking about people's lives, the well-being of communities, the extent to which people have access to healthcare, the extent to which healthcare outcomes for entire, to which the healthcare outcomes for entire communities sustain the community itself. You'll hear I'm speaking a little bit from the experience of some of my clients. We do a lot of work in the healthcare space, but the risks are quite large and I think that also the risk to existence is real right now. You know small businesses are really struggling. Funding is in question across the board if you're a federal contractor, if you're a public agency, and so tending to these pieces that you're raising compassion and the connection of our people is necessary to sustain in these times. Otherwise, I think that our organizations will start holding it on themselves.

Finding Hope in Coalition Building

Manya Chylinski 21:46

Sometimes I feel we get stuck in short-term thinking and what's going to give me results for this quarter, what's going to give me results for this year? And sometimes, if we're looking at the kind of work you and I are talking about longer time horizons, it takes longer to build that psychological safety and the trust and see the end results. And that's very human, us wanting to having it be more difficult to see something down the line where much more often want to satisfy our needs in the moment as organizations. How do we navigate that?

Fran Benjamin 22:23

Building systems around the people that enable this.

Fran Benjamin 22:28

So it's one thing to ask people to have more empathy, and even for the you know, I started kind of from this place how do I help individuals get in touch with their emotional, their internal experience, and that's critically important what also matters is the systems that are built around that individual that continue to promote that over time, such that if any leader leaves the organization, there is still the understanding and emphasis on these practices.

Fran Benjamin 22:57

So, whether it is, we value leadership development in this way, and this is what leadership development looks like for us. Here's how it gets programatized, built into our incentive structures for compensation. Here's how we have stood up a continuous learning expectation for all of our people. Here are organizational values and we refer back to them in every employee meeting and every time we come together. All of that kind of stuff, these more systems level things, I think, help leaders that are new to an organization, or help anyone that's new to an organization, understand the value and continue to pursue it over time. But I think you're right. What you and I are advocating for is they're not quick wins and they often require folks to do work that maybe they have neglected for 40 years or however long, so it doesn't change overnight.

Manya Chylinski 23:55

So, fran, we are getting to the end of our time and I'm curious is there a question that you wish I had asked you, and how would you answer it?

Fran Benjamin 24:04

I will say I'm going two different directions and I'll answer them both.

Fran Benjamin 24:08

I wish that you asked my favorite ice cream flavor, which is pistachio, just to keep things light, and it's finally summer in the Twin Cities, so I have reintroduced ice cream into my diet.

Fran Benjamin 24:20

But, on a more serious note, the question that comes to mind for me is what gives me hope these days, and I think I alluded to this leadership practice of coalition building, and I think that while I'm starting to see that arise in organizational settings, I'm definitely seeing it arise in social settings, and I'm just so inspired by people and communities that are starting so small in creating positive change in their immediate local places of being and maybe just picking like. I see folks picking up one issue, one topic that their small community is passionate about, and trying to create change on that one topic. It doesn't take much and maybe you even get. Maybe someone offers to make soup for when y'all get together, so you have the added benefit of a delicious meal. But I really I think this coalition building piece in this day and age is so valuable, and so I'm very inspired by the examples of that that I've seen.

Manya Chylinski 25:22

Oh wonderful, it is inspiring and I'm glad you brought that up. Often, when we think of change, we think of very big change and there's many steps between here and there and many people who have to do something, but it really starts with one person talking to one other person or making one small change. So I appreciate that reminder. Fran, before we go, can you please share with our listeners a little bit more about your work and what you do and how we can get in touch with you?

Fran Benjamin 25:50

Oh sure, thank you so much, and I love what you just said. It just takes one person talking to another person, so true. So I am the managing partner of a small organizational development consulting firm called GoodWorks Consulting. We center diversity, equity, inclusion in everything that we do, but we answer questions like my team is poorly organized or my organization structure isn't well suited to achieve our goals, can you help us? Or our managers don't quite have the skills to accomplish this next big challenge. Can you help us with that? Or this team is getting a lot of feedback that they're really not inclusive and it sort of plays out in the data. Can you help us with that? So those are the types of feedback that they're really not inclusive and it sort of plays out in the data. Can you help us with that? So those are the types of challenges that we help answer, and you can find us at goodworksconsulting.

Manya Chylinski 26:40

Excellent. Well, I will put that link in the show notes to make it easier for folks to get in touch with you and Fran. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure talking with you today. You too, no-transcript.