Eisler emphasizes the critical (but often unacknowledged) role played by women in providing a chalice or container for a group. In providing the chalice, a participating entrepreneur makes an organization a safe and supportive place in which its members can tolerate the uncertainty and stress associated with conflict and chaos. Heifetz similarly describes the role of executives in providing and managing a holding environment. Physicians often serve this containing function in their relationship with patients. Parents also serve as containers in working with and supporting their children—and participating entrepreneurs create a holding environment when they effectively facilitate the adaptive work of their closely-held enterprise. The participating executive “contains and regulates the stresses that [this adaptive] work generates.”
Appropriate Use of Strengths
Participating executive functioning is invaluable to closely-held enterprises for two primary reasons: flexibility and connectivity. The participating entrepreneur can be flexible, moving into a variety of different roles and balancing off both the strengths and weaknesses of assertive, thoughtful or inspiring entrepreneurs, particularly if any one of these three approaches becomes too powerful. Typically, the participating entrepreneur moves easily back and forth between a formal executive functioning role and a supportive role as an active member of the work group.
There are rarely major struggles within the group because both the participating executive and her followers view the participating entrepreneur as someone who is special in some circumstances but just like other members of the group in other circumstances. Gibb describes just such a flexible model of executive functioning:
Followers subordinate themselves not to an individual who is utterly different but to a member of their group who has superiority at this time and who is fundamentally just as they are. . . . The entrepreneur inevitably embodies many of the qualities of the followers.
The participating entrepreneur is truly a context-oriented entrepreneur who accommodates many different conditions and needs.
