I'm leaving an organization that is in severe crisis: financial stability has replaced mission driven work and interpersonal relations are at an all time low. Some fellow managers have asked me for some resources and I'm going to share them in this gist.
I'm not an expert at organizational development or wellness: I'm only sharing things that I hope are helpful for mission driven organizations in crisis. We need to figure out how to reduce the harm that is very present in mission driven work/orgs...and often keep being perpetrated by people in management roles.
- While it's from the NYT, this article does invite small changes. To me, small changes matter because in organizational formations, change has to happen at a glacial pace so that folks are left behind or trown under proverbial buses. The article is here.
- Generally, the mission driven sector doesn't invest in Human Resources...and when it does, it sometimes sees HR as part of a risk management scheme and not a vehicle of how our mission, vision, and values become manifest in how we treat employees. Anil Dash has an interesting idea here that parses out HR from People Experience. Maybe it's time we focus on employee experience as part of understanding and evaluating if we are living our mission, vision, and values.
- With organizational flux in staffing and management, how can we reduce some of the friction that exists with transition? There is an interesting idea here of a readme file. I use something similar in my consulting work where I tell folks how to reach me, how to schedule, what tools we use for the work, and what expectations are between reaching out to me and getting a response.
- Often, power in the workplace manifests in who is allowed to be violent in their communication with others. One tool to raise awareness about these practices is nonviolent communications training. If you are not familiar with NVC, there's a quick overview here.
- Even when folks learn and use nonviolent communications, there are sometimes where power from the top disrupts these better practices. In those cases, it's important to factor how sometimes narcissistic leaders weaken collaboration and integrity.
- Dean Spade has two good tools on organizational culture chart and leadership qualities that support mutuality and cooperation
I've learned that management takes dedication and a systems approach. I'd suggest the trainings and material from The Mangement Center for folks who want to get moving fast but intentionally.
At the end, if we aren't infusing our politics into how we manage folks, we will end up lifting up and strengthening settler-colonial practices. We need more leaders and less managers...but when we're trapped in the NPIC, we should at least be conscientious managers.
While the content is designed for movement work versus organizational work, there's so much wisdom and thoughtfulness that could be useful in an organizational setting from Ejeris Dixson and Mariam Kaba's work. I'd caveat both books by saying that if they're being used as an attempt to shortcut true healing and accountability, you should just stop. Being authentic saves you so much work...and is actually helpful.
I would also invite folks to look at Grace Lee Bogg's Next American Revolution through a lens of leading folks. I find it a valuable management text.
While the above is not exhaustive by any measure, I hope it's useful to folks who are trying to do deep thinking, or just survive, the tension that in many mission driven organizations have more management rather than leaders.