Humans are created to interact with each other, work in collaboration, and search for a place to belong. In this world of constant interconnectedness, made even more connected with the internet, inclusivity must never be set aside. Darrin Tulley explores what it takes to create improved humanity with author, podcaster, and TEDx speaker Michael Welp. Together, they discuss how to handle polarization and divisiveness in society that mess up communities and workplaces. Michael also explains the importance of showing up in your authentic self, building human-centric organizations, and creating long-lasting and genuine relationships in a fast-paced world.
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Inclusive Interconnectedness In The World With Michael Welp
Our guest is Michael Welp. He founded White Men as Full Diversity Partners and Full Partner Leadership. It’s a gift and honor to bring Michael onto this show. This show may never have happened without experiencing his Full Partner Lab in 2016. Going through these immersion labs gave me back my authentic self, but I never knew I had lost it.
I call these experiences my awakening. It inspired me to be vulnerable and expand my belief in all humans with a purpose to help everyone tap into their potential and possibilities. Read this episode as Michael shares how to lead with authenticity, compassion, and love for others, while learning ways to humanize connections to possibilities. He is guiding organizations to create partnerships and cultures where everyone can thrive. Enjoy the show and live your possible.
Michael, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Good. Thanks, Darrin. It’s good to see you again.
Introducing Michael Welp
It’s great to see you. Last time we chatted, it felt like we were talking through some of the experiences I had with you and your group and what a time we’ve had over these last several years. I’ve got to tell you some of the work you’ve done for me, you’ve opened my eyes like it was an awakening and we could get into that at some point. I’ll say this. The world has changed quite a bit and I’m curious about what’s on your mind these days and what are you bringing into our conversation?
I appreciate your ongoing work in this work and the journey you take so seriously in your own courageous life and standing up for what you believe. It’s a time a lot of polarization in this country and a time of more divisiveness than I have ever seen. It reminds me back to when I went over to South Africa for a year and that was like in 1990. I had been an Outward Bound instructor for ten years or so in Minnesota, dogsledding, canoeing and growing people and compassion.
After living in DC for two years, I got a chance to go over and do interracial team building with mining groups and banks right after Nelson Mandela’s release. It was formidable for me. It was one of those a-ha pieces for me. Back then, it was like partly connecting around the work with White men and how I recognized myself in those White men there and that I wanted to work with people like me. I did that whole research dissertation about White men and learning about diversity and coming to what Nelson Mandela did, which was turn to his captors with love and engage his colleagues and say, “How do we make our country great together?”
I feel like that got instilled in me in that some lineage of that is, as you experienced, turning to White guys with love and saying, “How do we partner better across difference?” In South Africa, at that time, we didn’t need to focus on difference. They had people separated. Apartheid kept everybody separate, not even working the same shifts together or eating at the same tables or any of that.
We were focused on sameness and people discovering their common humanity across race. I feel like I’ve done a lot of work to help White men in that arena of understanding our role and our uniqueness. Now with all the divisiveness, we’re coming back to a period where it’s helpful to just really focus on our common humanity. What is it going to take to disrupt the dehumanization that’s happening in workplaces and to optimize workplaces for humans? That means, yeah, seeing difference, but recognizing our commonality and recognizing what we all live on in this country in terms of values of dignity and respect.
It’s beautiful and I love where you’re starting here, what it’s based on and our ability to see that no matter what’s happened. Being incarcerated as you mentioned in that example and still having the love and the ability to see through that for the greater good, for the common cause of humanity.
It’s pretty remarkable.
It’s inspiring and I love that you’re bringing that thread here. We need it.
I’d say the work I did for many years and as is envisioned, my TED Talk talks about the engagement of White men, but it’s been misrepresented in media as beating up White guys, telling them they’re bad people and all that. Nothing is further from the truth of what I did because I just followed Nelson Mandela’s and turned to us with love and say we get to win in this. Others gain and we gain.
I love it because executive’s wives used to send thank you cards to some of the clients saying, “My husband’s better with me and my kids because of that workshop you went to about White men and diversity.” It’s like, yeah, we get to grow too. It’s not just helping others with their issues. Now we shift the focus to overall what are the skills we all need? What does it mean to optimize an organization for humans? There’s a lot of good angles there for that.
What gets in the way, do you think?
Ed Schein was a mentor of mine. He was the called the Godfather of Organizational Culture. One of his assessments was we build the minimal relationships in the US to get tasks done. We only grow connections to just really stay task-focused. Other cultures around the world they spend a lot more time building their connections and relationships before they would work together or they spend more time maintaining that.
Now that we have an environment of polarization and massive conflict, it doesn’t work anymore to just basically ignore connecting for the most part and try to just work together on tasks. I think a lot of people don’t know how actually you build trust, how you build psychological safety in workplace environments. You need workplace safety. You need a sense of safety and connection in order to have trust, in order to discuss messy topics in hard issues, including business confusions and conflicts. That gets in the way, this assumption that we can ignore the need to build relational partnership skills at work or how you do it, knowing how to do it.
Embracing Navigational Empathy And Social Capital
Something that stands out for me, especially going through the program, the partner labs with you and the team, one thing I remember, especially as a White male leader, I never knew I was part of a group. I never knew that there needed to be a focus on something that wasn’t truly being focused on, which is me as a White male leader. I think the example you’ve used is like we’re a fish in the fishbowl and we don’t rec we don’t really recognize what we’re swimming in. We’re just there. I’m just curious about how does that limit us or how does that prevent us from doing the work we need to do?
One of the concepts I talk about is what I call navigational empathy, to understand that others are navigating things that I don’t. We could use the concept of those folks living in a wheelchair are navigating things that you and I today don’t have to. We might have to tomorrow, but we don’t have that. They have some burdens and we have some freedoms around that.
I think to understand that I don’t navigate things, some people do and that takes their time and energy and you and I navigate things that other people don’t even know. We navigate issues, whether it’s some people with dyslexia, learning disabilities. Just not being a driver personality for me in some business context was seen as I’m not a real leader even though I bring a heart or another layer that others don’t bring. I think it’s important to understand the complexity that others deal with things we don’t and not everybody knows what we deal with.
Just to have that compassion as humans, that our lives are complex. Who knows what people are dealing with at home and when our work colleagues and stuff? To give people grace and compassion and maybe even an open ear so they feel if they want to, to share a little bit more of that, it might build more connection and trust with some colleagues. That’s a good thing as a leader for us to share sometimes what we deal with and show behind the armor some of the kinks and the challenges that we’ve all faced, make it more permission to be human by being more human yourselves.
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, the vulnerability there is incredible because as a leader we’re told, “You have to have all the answers.” You’re not allowed to really show people you don’t know or that you’ve failed or you’ve struggled or any of the things that you’ve mentioned.
Yeah, it’s a burden to feel like your only value comes from fixing everything. Somehow, you’re not supposed to have to ask for help. You’re supposed to know the answers. It’s like, how much do you give yourself permission to be, say, “I’m confused. I need help. I got some ideas, but I need others people’s ideas too.”
Brené Brown says vulnerabilities a appears form of courage. I like that. I relate to that. It’s like once we have permission, I think a lot of us have been taught in this culture that we’re the rugged individualists, whether it’s the Lone Ranger, Marlboro Man ethos to go out and do our own thing and make a place and, and basically forget that how interdependent we are with everybody else. Are we really going to survive in this country or in this world without everybody surviving and thriving?
How interdependent are we in success? I think a lot more than people realize. How do we optimize organizations for everybody to thrive, for all of us to be able to tend to our wellbeing and each other’s wellbeing. I love this book Activating the Common Good by Peter Block and he talks about freedom is the ability to tend to your own wellbeing.
I think that works collectively too. It’s like, do we, as a team unit in an organization, have the freedom to tend to our wellbeing? How do you measure wellbeing? Besides productivity or profit, it’s about how much do I feel a sense of safety? How much do I feel a sense of trust in my colleagues? I know one person operationalized trust, would I buy a used car from my friends?
Is there a basic level of trust? The relational or social capital is as important as financial capital. What does it take to grow that so that we can leverage the trust, get innovation, creative ideas flowing, work through conflicts, sit in the messiness, deal with each of us having different feedings of disinformation in the world and having different philosophies of it. What is it telling us? We need social capital now and learn the skills. I think leaders today need skills of resilience, how to deal with constant change and how to have messy conversations.
When you’re talking about all this as well, it feels like we need to be emotionally connected in a whole different way. It feel like, I don’t know, many years ago, we were told, “Don’t be emotionally connected with your people.”
Some people are like, “I don’t want to be connected to people. I don’t want to share who I am. I want to go do my job, go home. That’s a strategy for them of survival in life. It’s not on us to disrupt that potentially to respect it to some degree, unless they’re in a role of a leader, then they need to connect with people relationally in order to build trust and stuff too. Yeah, you’re right.
The research I’m familiar with in senior executive positions, EQ or Emotional Intelligence, is the highest thing correlated to success. We often promote on IQ and technical skills because the culture says those are the most valuable. It denied the emotional component or assumed that it was gender-based, that that was more of a women’s skill. For us to model emotional vulnerability as men, you got questioned or thrown out of the club. Sometimes even wearing a pink shirt like you are, you’d be joked at or ribbed at or teased and stuff like that. It’s like subtle ways of keeping us in a box.
Emotional intelligence is the highest correlated thing to success. But we often promote IQ and technical skills because culture says those are the most valuable. Share on XMichael, as you probably know, the branding for me is a lot of pink. My pink pen, the show’s all pink. That grew out of the partner lab with all of you by leaning into that comfort. I felt like coming out of that, there was a point in time where I didn’t feel like I fit in because I was actually seeing the bigger picture. I could see when we were definitely not intentionally, but we were talking about men and their successes and people getting stuff done. It was the actions and the action-oriented components.
People were getting promoted or maybe they were viewed as the top 10. When I started to voice the questions of are we intending for that? I’m not saying it was right or wrong, but just the mere question of is was that our intention for these first ten people to call them all out and they’re all males, was that intentional?
I felt like I was on an island. I got texts from all the women leaders in that group saying, “Thank you for speaking into what you believe and what you’ve been saying after going through this work with you.” I didn’t get one text from one male from that leadership discussion when we were talking about our top talent. When you do those, like those nine-box exercise and you start to say where everybody goes. To your point, we have to put ourselves out there. We have to see what’s right and what’s good and see if there are patterns that we’re noticing.
I would’ve noticed that before had I not slowed down to create this space to see what’s there. I feel like even as you were talking a little bit, Michael, it’s like we’re having to go with one side or the other. We’re not able to balance things in the middle or to have that emotional element as part of our thinking.
I want to point out something that you did Darrin, which is inspiring, which is that you perhaps put yourself at risk amongst your male colleagues by saying your truth and speaking up. The fact that you didn’t get any response from them, just silence, you got a lot of response from the women, shows that you’re willing to put, in some ways, your relationships with them on the line. You’re willing to potentially give up attachment needs or support from them, or at least put them at risk, whether it’s perceived or real.
Some of us have done that, stepped out and lost friends of support too, as you probably have. I think that for us to create change in the world and to call us to be our best, sometimes we do have to challenge norms. It inevitably puts us in our relationships at risk because and some guys are like, “I know a guy who did something challenging, some colleagues, males who were saying some inappropriate jokes and he never got invited to the golf crew again and that system stuff.
I think sometimes men, we raise the bar and we realize actually you do find new guys that are drawn to you, and ultimately, how do we gain social status amongst men by challenging each other to be at our best and to disrupt things that are dehumanizing or negative for employees? How do we learn that that’s actually having each other’s backs?
It’s honorable. One of the things talk about, it’s honorable for folks, it’s, we’re leveraging in some cases our privilege in a better way, different way. I’ve had some women say to me, especially that golf example, “When you guys are off golfing, just honor what you guys were speaking about. Don’t speak about any of us.” I thought that was so insightful.
Interrupt each other if you see that coming. Awesome.
Embracing Navigational Empathy And Social Capital
As we think about some of that work, the paradox is something that I believe you’ve used regularly. I’m certain that you’re probably talking about that now as well. Are there certain paradoxes that you feel are resonating out there with people and they’re starting to say, “I can’t think about this in a couple different facets?”
I love Barry Johnson’s classic Polarity Management and he’s got a lot of resources on the Polarity Management website. It’s like a lot of us think of things as problems to solve and not polarities to manage. How are we going through things that are opposing tensions to manage? A lot of times, we’ll see one side is a problem, the other side is a solution. We maybe move from being organized by product to organized by function, and then three years later, you get the downside of that silos and then you reorganize. It’s like how do you matrix, how do you create the best of both?
I’ve always talked about the sameness difference paradox. How do we see our commonality and tone into the differences that make a difference in terms of who’s heard, who feels like they belong and have a voice and influence and appreciation for their skills. Sometimes it’s are you in a support function or core dominant function in the organization or your tenure?
It’s not always race or gender. You in headquarters or outside of headquarters, what language or accent? Subtle things, too. Sometimes people have different badge colors in companies for their tenure and that impact set up a caste system almost. I think the core is who gets heard and tuning into that and noticing that sameness difference around that.
Another one I think you resonate with is critical and appreciative. A lot of the problem-solving fix it engineering mentality in our culture has us overlooking on what’s wrong and what’s critical. A lot of leaders, I think, consciously have to learn how to be more appreciative. Catch people doing things right, reward them, appreciate them, tell them how they’re impacting others when they’re impacting them positively. Same thing in parenting. There’s a lot of different paradoxes I think that are core, but those are a couple.
We can’t have sameness and difference together. We can work through those together. I think it’s so critical because I think people fear differences is as that’s the only way and we’re giving up something that we bring or someone else brings into the table or we’re giving up something. I feel like that’s where people’s heads are. We talk about friends. I’ve had friends that I feel like I have lost because there’s not that understanding that differences doesn’t mean you give up what you bring or your unique self or your differences.
In my first book chapter I ever wrote, I said, “If you were stranded on a desert island, would you rather be with people exactly the same as you or people totally different?” A lot of people say different because there’s more survival skills perhaps across things. Yeah, it’s like it takes longer to work across those difference, but there’s more assets to tap. Similarly, I think a leader unconsciously hires people like them to start with and at some point in their career, they’re like, “I have strengths and weaknesses. I need to hire people that aren’t like me to balance out me.”
A leader unconsciously hires people like them to start with. But at some point in their career, they need to hire people who are not like them to balance themselves. Share on XThat’s a great way to outline that, too. I think about the fix-it element. I think as listeners, we have these archetypes in our minds that depends on who’s doing the listening for us. I think often, a lot of people are trained to be, “I’m going to fix everything.” You give this example even in your TED Talk, which I could totally relate to and in your book about listening and if we’re listening to someone just to fix them, how that feels for that other person. They don’t want you to fix them.
Listening to debate or fix versus listening to understand or connect. If I’m listening to you with an intent of what’s the problem and what we are trying to solve, I’m going to show up differently than my listening to affirm your wisdom. First of all, I’m looking at you as a source of wisdom, a teacher, what can I learn from you? I want to reflect it back to you and appreciate it. That totally shifts my behavior, just changing my intent to listen and affirm others’ wisdom.
Yeah. It starts with that, the intention. As we start to see that, that’s a critical space for us to make these connections with people that are listening. If we’re not looking for with intention and exploring what’s there that whatever it might be, unique perspectives, different skills, ideas, how someone wants to show up or belong, the absence of listening, how can people speak into that? How can people achieve things they once thought were never possible? The absence of that, the absence of making these connections to these paradoxes we’re talking about or emotionally connecting versus just being rational and trying to count the numbers like I used to do earlier in my career.
It’s like am I using advocacy and arguing for my perspective or am I an inquiry, which is where the learning’s going to happen more and do I balance those? The Harvard Negotiation Project studied conflicts and said when they’re stuck, 98% of the time people are in advocacy at each other. To shift it into balance or more inquiry gets a learning conversation happening and that’s where breakthroughs happen.
Applying The Knowledge Into The Workplace
Michael, how are you bringing this into the workplace? I know you’re out there at conferences, you have your book, your TED Talk.
As I continue to reinvent the work, obviously I talked about engaging White men that my book Four Days to Change, there’s a webpage that has a lot of free resources. There’s the book chapter with Ed Schein on culture, there’s other videos, free videos and other tools and TED Talk link and stuff. That’s there particularly around that topic of White men. We have a new entity company called Full Partner Leadership. Full Partner Leadership has a website.
I am really looking at how do we, as I said, create human-centric organizations? How do we grow leadership skills? My best asset from my Outward Bound background is experiential learning. It’s like how do you have experiential labs like you went through the 4 days, the 2 days that are deeply experientially powerful and growing skills and mindset shifts in people and leaders.
Those are about how do you teach people what the building blocks are for psychological safety and trust in teams and organizations. How do you grow skills at having messy conflict conversations, connecting people’s head and hearts sitting in the ambiguity of topics and messiness? These are leadership skills that aren’t always emphasized in the mainstream culture.
It’s the integration of head, as we said, listening to understand, having the ability to balance paradoxes, be an agent of change, which means being a disrupt, look at what dehumanization is in the system. When does somebody show up with a win-lose mindset? Do I recognize that or an us-them mindset, can I disrupt that and can I bring my own humanity and invite others to and help each other in some ways really show up as humans enough that we fall in love with each other.
I think a lot of times in this world, people trust anger and fear more than they trust love. I think that the media is pumping out so much fear and anger across difference these days. Political differences and other differences. It ends up dehumanizing each other and we forget that we are dealing with each of us as humans.
A lot of times in this world, people trust anger and fear more than they trust love. Share on XThe research shows the perceptions across political differences are that 30%, 50% of the other party is extreme when in reality, the research shows it’s like 20%. That’s sometimes who’s getting amplified in the media. The majority of us actually want a lot of the same things. We want safe schools and safe environments and healthcare that works.
We want a chance for all of us, including the 60% of Americans that live paycheck to paycheck to be able to make it and to have a tendency to tune in and collectively and individually tend to their wellbeing and have dignity. The freedom that we talk about in our country. Dignity and respect and all that. Full Partner Leadership is the venue now for me to do that. We go into companies, find out what their pain points are, what their values are as a corporation, whether is respect, authenticity and other things. We say, “How can we grow these skills even more and deeper and teach people how to be more collaborative, how to partner across this messy train that we’re living in now?”
Yeah, the messiness, getting comfortable with being in that messiness and not knowing what the answers are. That’s a tough place.
It’s a tough place and it’s a real place. I finished a session with a mortgage lender client and this woman at the end said, “Thank God for all the effing humanity that’s been in this room the last three days.” People are hungry to just have levels of authenticity and humanness that they don’t get to experience because people are fearful and they don’t have that safety to show up as themselves.
I think we are distancing from each other with all that you’re talking about, all the rhetoric that’s out there, the technology’s not helping. We could hide behind certain things. The fact that we are more divisive, we’re not really understanding what’s really in front of us. It’s getting worse and worse if we don’t do something about it and change ourselves.
There’s an organization called More in Common that has some interesting studies about how much more we actually have in common than is perceived across some of these polarized differences. I love a documentary called Divided We Fall TV. They have brought together Republicans and Democrats in two different retreats, revisited the participants five years later and really broke down some barriers and humanized them with each other. I think there’s good tools out there.
I think one of the company Essential Partners that has a great guide crossing the Red-Blue divide, WhatIsEssential.org, but it’s basically saying what’s at the heart of your political beliefs? What life experiences have you had to generate those beliefs and is there anything that you don’t resonate with that’s on your side that you actually resonate more with the other sides?
It’s just complexifying the narratives and giving us a sense of the intricate life that we each have as humans. It deconstructs those basically oversimplified narratives that the other side is crazy or they don’t care or they have bad character or bad intent. It’s like, let’s actually engage each other as humans and discover what we all care about and how we might want to grow that together.
Do you think we’re going to have success in the corporate world or our communities with our political system not able to do that? Unless we can get you in there, Michael, and help fix the us versus them.
I watched the media polarizing and if we just are guided by that, then we’re going to have stoked fear and anger more than the possibilities of care humanness and love. I don’t think it works to go back and forth between these extreme political parties in power and have so much commonality across the middle just get dissolved. I think we have to find ways.
I think today’s leadership’s, to be a leader nowadays means you need to learn how to manage these tensions. Another colleague of mine, Mark Williams, who’s writing a new book an updated to his The 10 Lenses book is like, we may need a VP of social cohesion or social navigation to help organizations navigate these massively different worldviews that are pushing and pressuring them politically and media wise and on things.
I think people need to get tired of the polarization and they need to sit down and say there’s got to be a better way to learn how to work together and to start practicing that in ourselves. Yeah, there may be still some fights going on, but there’s got to be parallel to that. We got to model the world we want to create together. We’ve got to learn how to partner and see each other as humans and understand the common things that we can agree on that we do want to create or maintain in our country together.
I love the components of the sense that you can go try to make a place for yourself in this country. Hard work status meritocracy. There’s some of that that exists and there’s parts of it that are blocking it, but I want people to be able to thrive. How do we thrive and place that all of us can thrive together? We’ve got to learn to see each other as humans and respect the ability to build bridges. That means as a leader, how do I have the skills to depolarize conversations, disrupt dehumanization, and use inquiry and grow the connections across humans to humanness where we discover that there is more in common than there is difference.
What does it look like when we’re thriving? I think those components you just mentioned help us get there. What does it look like?
It goes back to that concept of what is it what you want to measure wellbeing by? It’s not necessarily only profit, but it’s like how are we creating a better world in our organizational work? Peter Block says, “A school is successful if when they graduate they all are well aware of their strengths and they have some optimism about the world.” We don’t always focus on that appreciative and helping people discover what their gifts are and then have them feel excited about bringing their gifts to the world.
Bringing Your Full Self To Work
Yeah, there’s something to that, too. I think also bringing our sense of, to your point, full selves. I think I’ve heard some people joke around and say, “I don’t think you really want that.” It’s funny as people lean into maybe the more negative side that maybe it’s easier to put out there rather than get into this messy stuff that we’re talking about, which is really trying to connect us as humans with these tough issues, to be able to actually to jump all in.
I want everybody to have that opportunity to actually have a chance to thrive in the workplace. I believe that it’s, I believe that people, everybody has the skills or capability to actually thrive in different capacities. I’m not sure people see that nowadays with leadership. I think what you’re doing there is to help people understand that that’s possible and the opportunity for people to dive into that work and that that thinking is going to be necessary. I think it’s critical. What would be a first step for leaders to start to go down this path?
I don’t want to just say therapy but I know for me, I had to look at where do I dehumanize myself? Where do I minimize my own self? A lot of people have learned to get attachment needs themselves, either sometimes through something dehumanizing themselves or in other people. To learn to go back and to build my capacity to not always have my attachment needs met, so that I can have space to say no or to stand up to mistreatment and by myself or to own any mistreatment towards others.
I’ve got to look at my own behavior and what it is I reinforce that’s healthy that helps me and others thrive or it blocks that and then I’ve got to do the work that is about healing that or disrupting that in myself. How do I uncover what’s natural for me? What’s my authentic gifts and what authentic self, or as my therapist would say, your authentic personality instead of your performative self, which was designed to get others to like you or approve of you or whatever I grew into to get my needs met? As we just find our own authentic selves and free that up, naturally, it’s going to give us the ability to collaborate in those ways.
It’s good to have that vision to know what that looks like and it’s a little bit easier to be our authentic selves than someone we’re told to be or to be that Marlboro man as you mentioned earlier. It’s harder to be somebody else that way. That’s not authentic.
It’s like what are the clues about who I am and what I was meant to bring into this world? A gift that’s so natural for me, I don’t even care if I get paid for it. In some ways, for me, it’s creating trust and awakening people’s spirit and bridging differences in opening the world for love to flow across difference and, but everybody has a unique gift.
I believe in that too and I think it starts there I think if we could all believe in that and accept that and embrace that and even seek it out. Imagine that as a sense of purpose. That’d be pretty powerful. I love that.
Seems like yours is around awakening people’s possibilities.
Yes. I would agree with that.
Unleashing that freedom in in the organization.
Michael’s Tip On Living Your Possible
Really allowing and accepting and knowing that it’s there and really bringing it out, to your point. To that point too, the name of this show is Live Your Possible. I’d love to get your definition. What’s your unique perspective on what that means to you?
Live your possible to me is similar to what I was just talking about. It’s like freeing up my full authentic self and the gifts I want to bring to the world or the wounds I want to tend to in the world to leave the campsite a little better and to learn to collectively support others to live their possible or their best selves or the impact they want to have on the world so they die peacefully knowing they took risks, they grew, they were themselves and they made a difference in impact in the world aligned with what maybe was meant to be or what they chose it to be.
Learn to collectively support others to live their possible or their best selves that they want to have in the world. Share on XThat sounds so expansive. I love it.
It’s great to touch base with you again, Darrin, and catch up a little bit.
Yeah, it’s great to see you. Michael, any closing comments that you want to share with our audience, just to take a step forward in today’s day and age?
I just think we all need to take care of ourselves and do what’s going to help us breathe, help us ground in this chaotic world and do find the source of a few colleagues and friends that feed that in you and build that. I think the Surgeon General released a report this epic of loneliness in the world and a huge amount of people don’t really have a best friend or don’t have a couple core people that they would consider to go when they have issues.
I’ve been part of a men’s group for 20 years and I get 4 hours every Wednesday night to deeply connect and, and to not only a resource, but to ask for help or to just share. I just forget sometimes that other people don’t have that. To build some connections and support that you can be yourself with, it doesn’t take but 1 or 2, but it makes a big difference. I wish that for everybody.
Michael, thank you for being you. Thank you for putting yourself out there every day. You’re making a difference. You’re making a huge impact and I adore what you’re doing and you know man to man I love you and appreciate everything you’re putting out in the world.
Thank you. Love you too, Darrin. Thanks for being you.
Thank you. We’ll be in touch soon. I know we got to run, so we’ll catch up soon and I look forward to what’s ahead.
Thank you. Awesome.
Important Links
- White Men as Full Diversity Partners
- Full Partner Leadership
- Activating the Common Good
- Polarity Management
- Four Days to Change
- More in Common
- Divided We Fall TV
- Essential Partners
- The 10 Lenses
- Four Days to Change: 12 Radical Habits to Overcome Bias and Thrive in a Diverse World
About Michael Welp
Michael Welp, Ph.D. earned his M.S degree in organization development from American University / NTL Institute and his doctorate degree in Human and Organizational Development from Fielding Graduate University. He has been leading global organizational change and leadership development work for the past 35 years.
Michael most recently founded Full Partner Leadership, which develops new emergent skills in leader to address organizational challenges. He also co-founded WMFDP and FDP Global over 25 years ago. These brands all serve a common mission: helping leaders create partnerships and cultures where everyone thrives.
Earlier in his career Michael facilitated interracial team building with over a dozen South African corporations, in his work with Outward Bound. His decade of experience instructing for Outward Bound led him to a specialty of using experiential learning as a process to disrupt old mindsets and create breakthrough learning and skill development experiences for leaders.
Michael is the author of Four Days To Change. He is a TEDx speaker and is also the host of The Insider Outsider Podcast.
