Lilith Leadership Lessons
In the 1990s, radio executives commonly reported that playing two female artists back-to-back was bad for ratings, so it rarely happened. Seriously. No one could stand listening to women’s voices for six whole minutes straight?
It’s hard to imagine now, when Lizzo’s announcing it’s “About Damn Time” more often than not once I turn on the radio, often followed by Taylor Swift confessing that she’s the problem, it’s her, and then onto Billie Eilish breathily whispering about birds of a feather. The music industry isn’t perfect by any stretch, but this is notable progress in less than a generation.
I recently watched “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery.” For those not singing along in the summers of 1997, 1998, and 1999, Lilith Fair was a pioneering, all-female music festival created, led and headlined by Sarah McLachlan. Aside from being a delightful, nostalgia-inducing trip down memory lane for this Gen X’er (with my own extensive collection of Indigo Girls CD’s), the documentary felt like a masterclass in leadership:
Identifying a system that isn’t serving everyone fairly
Designing a different path
Executing it so well that the results speak for themselves: Ticket sales, culture, and charitable impact included.
Returning to the “no two women back-to-back” belief (one of McLaughlan’s stated motivators to create Lilith Fair): The “people won’t listen” rationale WAS NOT ROOTED IN ACTUAL DATA. It was assumed truth disguised as inevitability. And frustratingly, I still see modern versions of this thinking in our workplaces.
Have you ever heard: “We have enough women on the executive team,” or “Not everyone will see her as leadership material,” or “No one will vote for two women at the top of the ticket?”
Rarely are these evidence-based conclusions. They’re the effects of systems that were never neutral to begin with. When a system subtly (or overtly!) communicates that there’s only room for one of you at a time, it shapes behavior, opportunity, and outcomes.
In the documentary, McLachlan says, “If we want to change things, we have to keep building new systems, for us.” And she did.
From a leadership lens, what I find instructive about this story is that McLachlan didn’t burn the industry down, but instead, she built something new and innovative alongside it. In doing so, McLachlan proved the assumptions behind the existing systems wrong.
Sometimes, building new systems doesn’t require a revolution; it can start with 1) Simply noticing that a rule or a practice isn’t backed by data, or isn’t serving those it should, and 2) Having the courage to design something better.
(Is it true that the hardest to learn is the least complicated? IYKYK.)
