On a Monday night in early June with a Toronto Raptors’ championship on the line, the Oscars among the in-house legal crowd was also happening, and Jeff Davis, rubbing his head and snapping his fingers, knew he had to keep it “going.” He had just won Counsel of the Year, a tremendous honour, no doubt, but in that moment, one that demanded some brevity in his remarks.
It was a profoundly intimate moment, played to a full house, and it showed the top lawyer at a $190-billion pension fund to be human, vulnerable and all-too-real before an audience of high-achievers drawn from a community where leaders have traditionally been typecast as invincible, where betraying weakness is tantamount to a character flaw.
Fredeen is 60, and of a generation, as he describes it, that was taught to push through problems, not speak of them, and where the boss retired at 65, stereotypically dropping dead from a heart attack the next day. “We can often connect concepts of authenticity and sincerity to notions of vulnerability,” said Geoffrey Leonardelli, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “Meaning when our leaders have expressed their own challenges in life, we see them as being more real people, and coming from a place of experience that can give them an appreciation for the struggles others go through.
Within six months, the relationship was toxic. He hung on for a few years, but he knew the marriage wasn’t right and was going to end, and that thereafter he would be that guy: the lawyer in his early 40s and already twice-divorced — and, as he points out, who wants to be that guy?He felt as though he couldn’t tell anybody, but what he felt most of all was a consuming sense of shame. Naturally, he did what anyone back in 2012 would do: he Googled “shame.
“Over the years it has bled into my working style and how I relate to my team,” Davis said. “Where it has become almost programmatic — that this is what we do here, this is our strategy — was probably in late 2017-2018.” What makes Davis a true man of his people, among a team of 80, is that he doesn’t just prattle on about vulnerability, or have it written into — and it is — Teachers’ corporate affairs strategy, he walks the walk, a quality Rossana di Lieto, chief compliance officer at Teachers’, admires.
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