Putting what matters "in the center"

I’ve been fortunate to have an interesting career. It’s taken me to some unexpected places, and I’ve learned a lot about ways we can show up along the way. Early on, I learned a lesson that has stayed with me: what we center in our work is critical. It’s critical in how we experience our work. Perhaps more important, it’s critical in how we encounter each other.

The specifics of the job I had when this lesson presented itself aren’t important. That said, it was a mission-driven organization that required demanding hours — it wasn’t unusual for us to work an 80-hour week. In fact, I worked over 100 hours in a week on multiple occasions. It also wasn’t unusual to encounter people who only thought about the work, and who pretty much worked 24/7. I watched person after person burn out, sometimes within weeks of being hired. It was pretty brutal.

In the first months of being in this job (which, by the way, I was definitely passionate about, which will help explain where I ended up), I encountered superiors who pushed me to always do more. I remember telling one of them that I’d go talk to the person they wanted me to track down as soon as I grabbed a sandwich. It was 7pm, and I hadn’t eaten all day. “Are you saying you’re willing to risk not being able to reach them for a sandwich?” Yeah, that was his response. In each of the places I had to travel to for this job, I encountered more of these high-pressure managers. We had so much to do, we can’t wait to get it done. Go. This was a culture of get it done at all costs.

You can probably see where this is going. Within a year, I hit a wall. I was falling apart. All the working, the traveling, the late nights, the early mornings took a toll. Too much coffee. Too much Red Bull. Unhealthy eating. It was doing me in. I fell into a deep depression and struggled to do the simplest things. A coworker who had become a friend encouraged me to talk to my boss. “She’ll understand,” this friend told me. “Trust me.” Thing is, this boss, who was well loved in our organization, wasn’t one of these more more more types. She worked her butt off, and people worked their butt off for her. But something about her was different. I went to talk to her.

She took me to lunch, and I spilled my guts. She listened. Really listened. She was fully with me. When I finished speaking, she looked at me with kind eyes and told me her story. Of burnout and being overworked. Of collapse. Of not being able to go any further. She looked at me and said, “I get it. Let’s figure out what to do together.” We talked about plans, about what was possible, about what I wanted. It was amazing. She stood up for me with some people, made arrangements, put me on a new work plan. Got me a reasonable schedule. Helped me get the help I needed. She may very well have saved my life.

I’m not so sure this is all that unusual. Yes, the conditions were extreme. But I think the underlying issue is far more common than we realize. The thing that gets into our cultures and drives us to do more. And more. And more. The thing that leads us to burnout, and unhealthy stress, not to mention what we tend to call “lack of engagement.”

And what is this thing that drove the intensity? It’s simple. It’s what we centered: getting the job done at all costs. We had goals. We had to achieve them. There were quotas. We had to meet them. We were in a very competitive environment, and if we didn’t “win,” someone else would. There was no time for us to consider an alternative. The irony is that I believed in this. In some ways, so did my boss. She believed in what we were doing with a passion I saw few meet.

But she held the work very differently than most of us did. She centered the health and well-being of the people she worked with. Dare I say, she centered care.

We could say this another way: she put humans first.

I was centering what pretty much everyone around me was centering. The winning. I was centering what others told me to get done. I was centering a transaction. And why wouldn’t I? It’s just the way things are, right?

And this, I think, is a big part of what we are up against. It’s just the way things are. But it’s not working. Perhaps it never did.

There are shifts happening in the world of work. The decisions we make during this time are likely to impact the “way things are” for years to come. I believe we’re being called to clarify what we center. By choosing just the work, we will get a certain outcome. And there is no doubt that some will choose that.

But if we center people – if we put humans first – we can expect an entirely different outcome. We can expect an outcome that contains greater meaning. An outcome we can be proud of. An outcome we can actually live with.

The thing is, putting people in the center doesn’t mean we are giving up on getting things done. We aren’t giving up on outcomes. My boss wasn’t saying, “It doesn’t matter if we lose. I don’t care.” No, she was saying the opposite. That it’s possible to achieve our goals, to get our work done, but only if we are around to do it. How can I help if I’ve burned out?

Productivity. Efficiency. Profit. Return on Investment. Yes, these things are important. But must we center them? What might the impact on these if we put what’s meaningful in the center? If we put humans first?

There’s one more thing I feel called to speak to here. My boss wasn’t holding this perspective as some sort of workplace initiative. It was who she was. One of the most significant takeaways in this for me is that in order put humans first, it has to come from within — from who we are and from caring about who others are. This requires being honest with ourselves about our goals, our desires, about who we want to be in the world. And it requires doing the hard work of extracting beliefs and conditioning that no longer serve us.

I’m grateful for what my boss did for me all those years ago. She showed me that there was a way we can approach our work that values care for one another as a way to support what we are doing in the world. She showed me that it’s okay to be a messy, challenged human being. She showed me what can happen by putting humans first.

The Great Transaction

A while back, I worked at a place where an employee engagement survey made it clear that there were things that management could do to make the environment more appealing for those doing the work of the organization. I supported the management team in putting together a process to figure out the possible moves they could make, ensuring to get the direct input from the staff. Over the course of a couple of weeks, ideas were surfaced and voted on. A prioritized list was revealed.

At the top of it - with a far distant second - was...put a coffee machine on the floor. That was it. Coffee. Also on the list, with far fewer votes, were things related to increased responsibility for decision making, training to increase staff's expertise in their roles, and approaches to processes that would increase the participation of staff in the way work was done in the day-to-day. But number one (by a lot) was coffee.

The director bought, out of their own pocket, an industrial grade Keurig machine, and enough coffee pods to last a month. An employee volunteered to buy pods on a regular basis, and put out a cup to collect money for that. The office had coffee. And that was that. The thing is, I didn't notice any discernible difference in the office. There was some work done on figuring out how to implement some of the other suggestions that were made, but nothing was really done that would impact the overall culture of the office. After a couple of months, report outs on progress being made on the survey suggestions fell away. Things in the office moved along. I left before there was another engagement survey. I'd be curious to see what it had to say when it was done again.

So, what was going on here? Why would people put coffee down as their #1 priority over, say, increased autonomy or mastery? My take is this: it's what is at the center of the relationship between the director and their employees. A better way to say this might be that it's what is at the center of a relationship between an an organization and its employees[1]. Here's another frame: there is a story that we are living in about what it means to be in relationship with our superiors, or the organization we work for. One way to look at that story: we are in a transactional relationship.

When we are in a transaction mindset, we are always in a negotiation. If I give you a coffee maker, will you do your jobs just a little better? Will you give a higher score on the survey next time? That's the deal that the director was making. A little bit of coffee means increased productivity (I mean, that's ultimately what we mean when we say engagement, right? Productivity?).

When it isn't coffee, it's generally the "basic things": raises and benefits. Without going too far into the organization we were working in, let's just say it's an environment where those sorts of things are pretty controlled, so it's unlikely any wiggle room could be found there. My colleague Shannon and I recently met with a small company that was looking to improve the dynamics in their organization, and they were telling us about how the staff was saying that they are upset about being underpaid. There is likely some truth to this. Yet, from what we heard, the owners were doing their best to pay as much as they could (including to themselves...they made far less than you'd expect an owner of a company of this sort to make). I was left with the question "what is it that they, the staff, really want?"

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. What is at the center of these things that we talk about in organizations? Gallup has been doing surveys on employee engagement for 20 years. It's not changing. Yet, people hire consultants to come and help on a regular basis. Over those 20 years, I'd be surprised if the dollars spent were less than in the billions. Not to mention time spent. Not to mention how initiatives often don't work. What happens then? Well, the next time, things are taken a bit less seriously.

So, what's at the center?

What I suspect is that what's at the center are things that are quantifiable, and only things that are quantifiable. Money. ROI. Widgets produced per hour (where widgets represents whatever it is that your organization "does"). Cut costs. FTEs. An on and on. It makes sense that we are working with what is quantifiable. I mean, what can't be measured cant be done, right? Well...maybe.

One of my favorite authors and thinkers, Charles Eisenstein, has a fantastic new book[2] out (like literally...it came out on Tuesday). It's called Climate: A New Story. It's about climate change, which might seem a bit off topic. I'd leave it to you to go check out the book to see how it's related to what I'm discussing here (it really is). That said, check out this bit, from p. 30:

The totalizing quest to capture the world in number never succeeds. Something always escapes the metrics and the models: the unmeasureable the qualatative, and what seems irrelevant. Usually, the judgment as to what is relevant encodes the intellectual biases of those doing the measuring, and often the economic and political biases too. You might say that what is left out is our shadow. Like many things we ignore or suppress, it roars back in the form of perverse, unforeseeable consequences. Thus, although it is the epitome of rationality to make decisions by the numbers, the results often appear to be insane.

The thing is, those things that are unmeasurable, the qualitative, are often the things we have come to refer to in our world as "soft" and/or "touchy-feely". They are things that we have decided aren't necessary in the workplace. I mean, what's the first thing that gets cut when there's a downturn? Just as people need to do the work of navigating the rocky waters, we get rid of coaches, Organizational Development, etc. The problem is, it's these "touchy-feely" things that are the very things that make us human. We can't leave them at the door. We can't decide to turn them on and off. We are just as human at work as we are at home or out with friends.

There's certainly a movement afoot that is bringing this idea into the mainstream. It's true. But there is still and issue I take with this movement: it still keeps the quantifiable in the center. It elevates it to primary. We want to bring in mindfulness and emotional intelligence. Great! I love it! But, why? Well, the intention (what's at the center) is so often productivity, revenue, etc. Tapping into our humanity for the sole reason of increasing productivity is not going to work. Why? Because we still haven't looked at that shadow. We are acting from a story that places our humanity below the productivity we can get from a person. We are still seeing a machine (which is, ultimately, how the industrial revolution taught us to see each other).

I'm not here to propose any grand solutions. I don't really know how we take the next step. What I do know is that it's time to step out of the story that puts the quantitative in the center, and replaces it with the unmeasurable, the qualitative, and what seems irrelevant[3]. Perhaps we can start to upend the questions we typically ask about employee engagement, and start asking questions that get to these more tricky ideas. What if we were more interested in better questions, and less in answers? What if we became more interested in a story that was about relationship, rather than transaction? What might we experience?

[1]: The idea that there can actually be a difference between an organization and its employees is one that deserves its own write up. Heck, it probably deserves a book. I'll say this about my perspective on it: organizations can only exist if there are people working together to do work. In other words, there is no difference.
[2]: No, I haven't finished reading it just yet. But it's fantastic so far!
[3]: I'm not (fully) naive...I know that there are definitely things that are irrelevant. Sheesh.