FOUR WAYS TO LIVE OUT YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES

A nonprofit I worked with lately was grappling with a core question: how do we live our principles of collaboration and inclusivity? The group started by considering how to increase diversity among the staff. But they also recognized that they needed to look at their overall organizational culture to make sure they showed up in ways that supported their values every day.

From feminist organizing principles to holacracy, there are a number of emerging approaches to cultures that are more open, horizontal, and experiential. Here are four that I’ve found useful.

ALTERNATIVE MODELS TO DISTRIBUTE POWER

This article by the Building Movement Project provides a set of foundations for distributed leadership, with a greater level of shared decision-making. They include:

• Build trust, via transparency, sharing information and demonstrating trust in staff decisions.

• Invest in learning for all staff to make informed decisions. Clarify roles and engage all staff.

• Support organizational values, building in structures such as regular conversations with diverse viewpoints.

• Commit to shared decision-making. Embrace autonomy and push decision-making down, and ensure that leaders control only what they need to control, not everything they could control.

One of the impacts noted in an organization that took this approach was that staff members really began to find their own voices.

SELF-MANAGEMENT

The concept of self-managed teams, including the structure of holacracy, was popularized by Frederic Laloux in his book Reinventing Organizations. This article provides a thoughtful overview of self-management in action. Self-management is a complex concept, but a few intriguing concepts include:

• Get out of siloes. Think in terms of roles to be filled. Each person is likely to have skills and interests in a variety of roles, so this helps use people to their best abilities.

• Use teams that design and govern themselves to identify challenges and find ways to address them.

• Organize work in terms of short sprints, finding workable (not necessarily the best) solutions and iterating rapidly to maintain accountability, flexibility, and learning.

• Take “total responsibility” for improvements, even if they’re outside your role.

FEMINIST ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES

This article offers insight into how feminist organizing principles can be used in practice to shape an organization. And this blog post makes an intriguing case for ways in which feminism and agile principles coincide. The team I worked with added their own aspects of these principles, some of which are included below.

• Collaboration over hierarchy. The commitment to inclusivity requires actively stepping away from authoritarian approaches to decision-making and power.

• Making power visible supports the shift from hierarchy to collaboration. This may require investigating privilege and power structures that the organization has, perhaps unwittingly, perpetuated, and a willingness to address structures that don't align with an inclusive, collaborative approach.

• Alternative agendas from status quo. Groups incorporating feminist organizing principles are often acting within a world with very different beliefs and approaches. As these principles infuse the organization, they also become visible in its work in the world, both in terms of what challenges they take on and in how they model their values.

• Playful, experimental, and iterative. Shifting away from existing power structures is no small thing. A healthy organization will offer members the grace and freedom to make mistakes, laugh together, and keep trying new ways to make shifts.

• Culture of care. This broad term reflects the importance of seeing the whole person, being anchored in relationship, and paying attention to what truly supports each person. Each organization will have its own unique culture of care.

HABITS OF THE HEART

Finally, this article from the Center for Courage and Renewal offers a deeper dive into the concept of integrating heart, mind, and body. Their principles include:

• We’re all in this together. Groups hold an intention of truly supporting one another and creating community.

• Appreciation of otherness. Sometimes groups want to skim over differences of all types, but it’s important to actively acknowledge the value of differences.

• Hold tension creatively. Tensions are inevitable and they make people uncomfortable. It can be helpful to acknowledge the existence of tensions, the fact that they may not be fully reconcilable, and the value of exploring workable solutions that honor the differences.

• Sense of voice and agency. Each person is committed to supporting others in growing in their ability to speak for their beliefs and take responsibility for decisions that they make.

• Capacity to create community. It takes a village to support social change.
  

The Center also has a blog post describing their exploration of holacracy.


The team I worked with took an afternoon to talk through these approaches. They noted areas of overlap and unique aspects of each approach. They discussed how they aligned with organizational values and aspirations. From there, they prioritized the elements that seemed like the best fit for them and developed some short-term “sprints” to practice using these approaches.

One of the important learnings for them was that simply opening up this discussion helped everyone on the team be more attentive to collaboration and inclusivity. Creating this ongoing conversation allowed them to acknowledge what aspects were more difficult to put in practice, and work together to rethink how best to live their values.