What's in a Workplace (EP.09)

Last Updated

February 28, 2020

On this episode, we dive into the physical and virtual components that form the structures impacting how we work. And increasingly, changing what that looks and feels like. We discuss tools to help us in our daily work and then explore the philosophical when we think about what does it mean for social creatures like humans to work entirely distributed from each other.

Guests: Rachel Casanova, E. Andrew Taylor, and Ramphis Castro.

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin.

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Guests

RACHEL CASANOVA is currently the Senior Managing Director of Workplace Innovation at Cushman & Wakefield. She has more than 25 years of diverse industry experience advising companies on how to transform their real estate assets to reinforce long-term business strategies, corporate culture, as well as integrated space, technology and performance goals. Prior to Cushman & Wakefield, Rachel founded Balansett, a workplace consulting practice, with clients spanning legal firms, professional services, technology, non-profits and architectural firms. During the course of her career, Rachel has addressed workplace-related advances from multiple vantage points—working within an end-user environment at Nortel Networks, serving as a design consultant at Herman Miller, and leading Workplace Strategy at Mancini Duffy, Perkins + Will and most recently, R/GA. As the Global Co-Leader of Planning + Strategy at Perkins + Will, Rachel supported clients with various workplace initiatives including activity based working, change management, occupancy strategy, and workplace/business alignment. As the Managing Director of the Connected Spaces practice at R/GA, she spearheaded the digital marketing and communications company’s efforts to use digital design to drive the physical experiences in workplaces. Rachel’s other major achievements include developing the Workplace of the Future initiative for KPMG in the US from 2004-2015. This effort included the development of the overarching strategy as well as the transition management approach and implementation for over 20 KPMG offices. Forward-thinking and creative, Rachel is passionate about the convergence of organizational behavior, the human experience, and real estate. She is frequently called upon as a subject matter expert and has contributed regularly to audiences in conferences and education seminars. Rachel has recently spoken at Worktech. RealComm, CoreNet, CRE Tech, Cornell University, NYU, IIDA, and Neocon.

E. ANDREW TAYLOR is an Associate Professor in the Arts Management Program, and Chair of the Department of Performing Arts at American University, exploring the intersection of arts, culture, and business. An author, lecturer, and researcher on a broad range of arts management issues, Andrew has also served as a consultant to arts organizations and cultural initiatives throughout the U.S. and Canada, including the William Penn Foundation, Overture Center for the Arts, American Ballet Theatre, Create Austin, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. Prior to joining the AU faculty, Andrew served as Director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration in the Wisconsin School of Business for over a decade. Andrew is past president of the Association of Arts Administration Educators, current board member of the innovative arts support organization Fractured Atlas, and consulting editor both for The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society and for Artivate, a journal for arts entrepreneurship. Since July 2003, he has written a popular weblog on the business of arts and culture, ''The Artful Manager,'' hosted by ArtsJournal.com (www.artfulmanager.com).

RAMPHIS CASTRO is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He is the co-founder of ScienceVest, a venture capital fund for hard-tech and life science companies. He is an experienced technologist and product strategist that has led and supported venture-backed teams from idea to exit. He is a Kauffman Fellow and co-Chairs the NYC chapter of the Society. As a Fellow, his research focused on the funding gaps for radical science companies in the U.S., collecting interviews of over 200 stakeholders across the research & commercialization ecosystem in the U.S. He's worked extensively on grassroots startup ecosystem acceleration & support for the purpose of helping countries evolve into innovation-driven economies. In 2016, upon the invitation of the White House, he was part of the US delegation with President Obama on his historic visit to Cuba. He has a diversified personal investment portfolio of companies ranging from Artificial Intelligence, Drones, Wearables, EdTech, Productivity Software, eCommerce, MarketPlaces, FinTech to Consumer Apps, all of them evaluated through an impact or gender lens. He also designed and is on the investment committee for Parallel 18, a global accelerator based in Puerto Rico, where they now have a portfolio of 100+ seed/series A companies from over 40 countries across multiple verticals that have collectively raised over $95M in venture capital funding from investors from Silicon Valley, New York, and beyond. He is a Computer Engineer and Lawyer by training, serial entrepreneur by experience, and grass-roots ecosystem builder by conviction.

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Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. A podcast about well, that. On this episode, "What's in a workplace?" we dive into the physical and the virtual components that form the structures around how we work, and increasingly changing what that looks and feels like. We discuss tools that help us in our daily work and then explore the philosophical when we think about what does it mean for social creatures like humans to work entirely distributed from each other. Our guests include Rachel Casanova, Andrew Taylor and Ramphis Castro. And as always, later in the episode, we'll be joined by podcasting favorite co-host, Lauren Ruffin to get her thoughts on the topic.

If you're interested in learning more, we have a number of articles and resources available on our website at workshouldntsuck.co. We have a lot of fun stuff to cover in this episode, so let's get started. Our first guest is Rachel Casanova. Rachel is currently the Senior Managing Director of Workplace Innovation at Cushman & Wakefield. She has a wealth of experience advising companies on how to transform their workplaces to reinforce long term business strategies, corporate culture, as well as integrated space technology and performance goals. You'll quickly learn that she's incredibly passionate about the convergence of organizational behavior, the human experience and real estate. Rachel, welcome to the podcast.

Rachel Casanova:

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Tim Cynova:

So you're currently the Senior Managing Director of Workplace Innovation at Cushman & Wakefield. That sounds incredibly awesome. What does that mean? What kind of work do you get to do?

Rachel Casanova:

I think it helps to just think about the foundation of workplace. It's been called the workplace, workplace strategy, workplace innovation, but largely speaking, we're looking to help organizations figure out who they want to be and how the built environment enables them to get there. So workplace is the place that we're doing our work. Most people come to work at some point. That's really our focus when they're coming to work. And innovation is how do we think about that differently? There's so much information that you're going to hear from other people, even on this podcast about how things are different and where people work and how they work and what they're doing. What can we think innovatively about that when they come to work, we can provide a different experience.

Tim Cynova:

So what does that look like when you're actually doing that?

Rachel Casanova:

So Cushman & Wakefield is a large real estate company. So the drive for most clients who come to us is that they have some changes going to happen to a place, to their real estate, to a lease and so on. So the work looks like, a client says, "Great, I have a lease expiration. We need to figure out if we're going to stay here and go somewhere else." That opens the door for me to say, "Well, how's it working today? What is it that you're trying to do that you can't do? What works really well?" Not so much how does the chair work though those things come up. But it's more about who you trying to attract here, who has to be here and be effective, what does high performance look like? And knowing having 25 years of experience in the industry, having some pointers as to the things you might do to the built environment that will enable these behaviors that you want to see.

Tim Cynova:

What are usually the questions that sparked the most interesting responses?

Rachel Casanova:

Questions from the client to me or questions that I asked?

Tim Cynova:

Either way. I mean, I was thinking about the questions that you ask, because for our listeners, I actually have had the opportunity working with Rachel. And it was an incredible experience. And there are a lot of questions that she asked and it caused me and our team to take a step back to say, what should work feel like here? How can we encourage that? But I can imagine you get questions from clients that you're like, "Oh, that's going in the wrong direction."

Rachel Casanova:

I mean, generally speaking and this could be any industry. We get asked by clients, what's everyone doing? And it's the most painful thing to answer because first of all, it's looking backwards. So what people did doesn't necessarily mean it's an indicator of what you should go do. And if no one went and assess how well it worked, all we know is that it happened but we don't actually know that it was for a good reason or that the outcome was what you wanted. So it's kind of a painful question we get asked by clients. One of the questions I think I did ask here, but that often yield some interesting responses is, how do people take risks here? That's the easy one. Then the question is when someone failed, do you have a story of what it looks like to fail here? Do you have a story of what it looks like when someone succeeds here? And this is not scientific.

But I would say that people remember the failure that went poorly and can tell that story generation upon generation of worker better than they could tell, "Oh well, Tim took a risk. It was a big one, he failed, but it ended up being our greatest success in some other way." So when organizations say we want to innovate, the other side of innovation is risk. And if you have more stories, where taking a risk that maybe didn't go well, did not end with a success story of some kind, we know that no matter how innovative you say you want to be or build us something that enables us and encourages us, those behaviors that leadership style, it speaks more truly to what's going to happen than if we create the right environment.

Tim Cynova:

So you're like, "You might actually like gray cubicles."

Rachel Casanova:

There have been times I say, I've become a no-police. And it's not a place that I really enjoy being. But when you hear on one hand, the leader saying, "We want everyone in the open plan, we want people collaborating. We want people working together." Great. Well, when you evaluate them at the end of the year, do you evaluate them in their group success or individual success? It's like a perfect example of when those two things don't align great cubicles might be the answer, or we're talking about some of the most difficult decisions that they're going to have to make and choosing the environment is not that. That's really the first step and then it's the hard work that we are going to encourage those leaders to do to bring that to life.

Tim Cynova:

The response sounds very aspirational. "Oh, that's what our space should be like. Is that how it functions?" No, not at all. But if we build it, they will come.

Rachel Casanova:

Build the dreams?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Rachel Casanova:

For a long time, that was the common thing we used to hear, "Can you build us what Google has?" And we'd say, "But you're not Google. It's no different from you want that fancy car that can go 150 miles an hour. If you don't know how to drive it, you're not going to get use out of it. And it would be irresponsible to tell you to go buy that car." So that's where we end up branching into all these other areas of an organization. How do you communicate? How do people know what success looks like? How do people learn? How does knowledge get shared? How do leaders convey what their expectations are? How do peers work together? How hierarchical is it? Do you want people to make decisions and come to leadership with those decisions? Or is it much more of a vertical go up to leadership and then across to another part of the organization?

It almost seems like we want to know too much about an organization, but we also know that the built environment becomes that body language of an organization. And when the two are misaligned that incongruence can create pain for employees. So they don't know what the expectation is. You said you wanted us to all collaborate, you said that we're all responsible for the decisions that we make, yet you've just put director levels and above and offices because they have something that other people don't. When an employee can question that, we say we're about sustainability. But now we have paper cups, we say we're this, but we do that. Those are depleting pieces of what human energy, the opportunity for people to be a high performing individual. Those things just deplete from there.

Tim Cynova:

That was one of the most enjoyable and enlightening experiences of getting to work with you, because of the intentionality that went into how do you build a space that aligns with your values and how you work and how you want to work. And before that moment, personally and professionally and as an organization, we had been giving a lot of thought to the Workplace, but much like many nonprofit arts organizations, we just walked into a space that had cubicles and the things that it had, and you just started working there. And it could have been any company in the 1980s. And it was this really exciting and liberating moment to take a step back and have that moment to think about how do we want to intentionally design a space. At the same time realizing in doing that, we weren't going to please everyone. And you helped us walk through a couple of different things.

We learned what the acronym SCARF meant, we learned the three ways to get people to do something, you can inspire, motivate or coerce them. But that even though you're doing this with input, you're going to get to the end and some people are going to hate it and some people are going to love it. And some days you feel like if I could just get 51% that's a helpful thing. And I think that was one of the most challenging things for me to be like there's a lot of thought, a lot of work going into this and some people are still going to hate this new thing.

Rachel Casanova:

I don't think I have a good analogy to something else but because of the cost on day one that you spend, it's really challenging because people will grow into things. And you will find out that even though it worked for everybody else, something may or may not work for you. And unfortunately, the industry is such in balance sheets or such that it can be hard to change the built environment, let alone the people that we say will grow into these things. I've always said, hold a piece of your budget, hold 10% leave a room empty, or leave 10% so that when something doesn't work, you're willing to change. Because I don't think that the industry is welcoming to behaviors that adapt. And maybe you'll find that you didn't think when we went through the renovations here that you would become a virtual organization. But if you had if you knew that you might have made other decisions.

But if we're unwilling to make change, then it's really hard to say we're going to take people down a journey because really what we're doing is we're just saying you're going to have to like this, because this is what we committed to. And that really happens to be something that the industry is trying to figure out, how do you make construction much more like a set, much more flexible? So as an organization moves into something, they are one thing, the space is one thing, but that we assume change is meant to happen. And when we ask people how it's working, not only do we want them to understand the intention, but they may know something we didn't know. They may have learned something about themselves they didn't know or how a group wants to work together. And if we can't make that a sort of continuous improvement process, we're really making everybody struggle.

Tim Cynova:

The whole set idea is a really interesting thought. I was thinking about how arts organizations are some of the most creative places or producing the most creative work. And then when you go to the actual office that's running it, it could be in the 1960s, how organizations just work and you sort of check the creativity, but not applying that to the physical space or even the virtual space or how we want to work. We've been working on moving to be an entirely virtual organization for some time now with People now in 12 states and six countries. And we could not have gotten to this place had we not gone through that renovation, because that unplugged people from a space, it introduced multiple different ways of working groups, solo, light-spaces, dark-spaces, comfortable-spaces, hard-chairs, whatever it might be.

When we published the piece about us going entirely virtual, I was sort of shocked at the negative reaction that I was getting from some people. And it took a while to meditate on why am I getting this reaction? Why are people reacting in sort of that way to this? It was always in, something must be wrong. Why would any company do this? There must be money problems, you're getting rid of your office to save money on the lease or what's happening? And I started to realize people were taking this idea of an entirely virtual organization and grafting it onto their current environment. There was such a big disconnect. It was difficult for them to imagine even what that was like, which meant something has to be wrong, like, what would you do? And I imagine when you're working with organizations, you're helping them through different steps. What are some of the milestones that you see organizations go through where you're like, okay, this organization can make that step from cubicles to this, but there's no way they're going to get here.

Rachel Casanova:

Let's see. So it really depends on the size of an organization. If we think about an organization that has 50 offices around the globe, for example, they probably have delegated the responsibility of real estate, it's a line item to someone in the real estate world. So their measures, what they're looking to do is manage those costs either to maintain at a certain level or to reduce. There's rarely a corporate real estate executive who was told go spend 10% more next year. Those are the ones that we understand it's a real estate play first. And what's really important is that we go bring along some other stakeholders, historically you'd go to HR, you'd make sure that what they have their eye on is incorporated, but it's still a real estate strategy. Technology plays a huge part because technology really links us into process. How does communication happen? How does content move? So understanding how that's going in any strategic plan.

The thing that we really need, and we can't always have at that scale, are the business people, are the stakeholders who want their authentic driver to say, "I want to go through the hard work that it's going to take to do this because I see it and I believe this is going to enable us to do something that we couldn't otherwise." We know an organization will have a harder time when it's a real estate person saying we're going to do this because it's going to be better for performance. That doesn't feel authentic. From the time I started my career at Nortel Networks, which was when Voice over IP was becoming a possibility and we were saying we need to design based on need not entitlement and we were creating these great places this is now 25 years ago. I was young, I was probably a little arrogant in my Northeast New York way and working in North Carolina. But I heard people say, "I've made more money for this company in a day than you make in a year. And you're not going to tell me what I need." Because it wasn't believable.

So the errors that we see at that scale are often that it's not a holistic look. And so we are pushing an agenda for one part of the business that is not believed by other parts of business. In a smaller scale, when we meet with leaders who are saying, "I need something for my organization," it can be really empowering, because they're looking for any tool that might be out there. So maybe it's an HR Benefits Program, maybe it's something else. They've decided that the built environment can help them and it's a much different conversation. So when we have that opportunity to really link what an organization is about, who they want to be, in your case, you're supporting artists all over the world. And you're saying there should be no difference if you are in this mothership, physical mothership, or if you are a diverse group of people who are trying to help. We don't need that physical co-location to do it.

I think there are some things that I think we've talked about this that we do believe that place and face-to-face matters. So there are things that you may find you have to recreate. And that's that synchronous conversation that isn't necessarily planned, but it happens because two people are in the same place. It could become a very disciplined work environment, because now when I go to work, I go to work. I think that plays out as to where on the continuum is it all healthy and where does it take something away from the culture of the organization?

Tim Cynova:

When you start to talk to people about virtual or space, it becomes, "Well, where do you have this thing? Where do you do your conference meetings? Or how do you brainstorm? Or what happens to the kitchen?" And increasingly, as we as an organization at Fractured Atlas, look at it, especially through our anti-racism and anti-oppression lens. It's very rooted in white spaces. And what's really exciting is to say, "Okay, so that thing, how might you do that, without that space or without that thing?" And it could be, "How do you have that holiday party gathering not around a holiday that's not celebrated by everyone? And what are we trying to achieve?"

And I think that's some of the work that you really brought to our organization, when we have those conversations, what is the thing that you're doing? And not because you just did it that way for years, because then you open up so many different opportunities and options that you don't even realize. And I think in a scarcity mentality where, especially... I've never met a company who's like, "I've got way more resources than I possibly need." So I think the cultural sector feels like the most scarce resource sector but I think universally, people have the resources they have.

Rachel Casanova:

Well, I think what it brings up for me is, this is not your last move, necessarily. This is the right move for this organization right now. And that's how it should be thought of. So there are solutions for all the things you just brought up and you may find we went too far, but to deplete of the habits and assumptions that we're saying are grounded in something that are just that, maybe we bring back the things we want, and we don't bring back the things we don't. So most organizations don't really have all those things aligned in a time. I mean, you are preparing for this, and you have a situation where you're able to leave this home. So it's worth a try. There's no barrier to entry to come back to the other way. There's no barrier to entry to say we're getting together for a party four times a year. But now you can choose the things that you want to do.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I'd like to go specifically now to how you work as a person because you study this. You work on this with other companies. And I'm fascinated about what your routine looks like, how you actually work, what tools you can't live without or what structure you use for various types of things?

Rachel Casanova:

Turning this on me. The one thing I hate, I hate to enjoy the giant. But once I move to the Google suite for collaboration, it was something you can't undo. So I've actually moved to an organization that is not that far along on collaboration, the kind that is truly embedded. And what you're able to do in that, in any online co-editable document, but Google does it really well, there are no versions, there is no pulling you back into email. There is no searching for what's the latest and not knowing who owns the most up to date content. It means not depending on people, I mean, it's taking me the red lining and the assistant so far into another world where you're all coexisting in one creation.

At one time, I had my own consulting practice, I was doing some work for a law firm, actually with an organizational culture specialist who gave me the Inspire course and that framework, as well as an experienced design firm. And then a graphic designer who I've met in person once. I've been on video with his team, but I've only met him once. What we were able to create in a short timeframe was exceptional. And it was based on, we're all looking at the same thing, we did not have to be in the same place. And we did not have to own license to, "I own this, you own that," we were sort of in that integrated content the whole time. So that's one. I happen to be someone who loves to hand write things. I understand it better. It's just something that I guess you can call it a generational thing, although I see college students thinking that way too.

But the iPad that I recently got has also been a game changer. So the ability to quickly rather than printing out a document, redlining and things like that, which again, I'm working in a little bit of more of an asynchronous system now. So it's required to edit things like that. But the iPad becomes a tool on the move, on the go with my hand, I don't have to type it, it doesn't have to fit on a line that goes horizontal. It's really a great enabler. I could tell you about the habits I push my kids for because I think that they represent what I think is best. One is the phone out of arm's reach. It's so, we all know, but it's just so easy to get caught up in that urgent but not important idea. So trying to take that device and use it the way it should be used, but not where it becomes really part of our arm. No charging of phones in bedrooms.

Another place like sleep is super important. And that moment of not waiting for a reaction, not waiting for a buzz, not waiting for something I think is priceless and I think most people have given up on it. So you often hear people up at 3:00 in the morning just to check their email. And when I travel, I often use a phone as an alarm clock, which means it is near me and it changes my sleep pattern. So I can only imagine people who are doing it all the time, who becomes habitual to have that right next to them. I think video, video calls, video connectivity to people, it should become the default, especially for a virtual organization, to have to turn it on to make that creates some defensiveness, it creates, "Oh, what am I wearing this and that." If the protocol is, "We don't care what you're wearing," but looking at someone's eyes is part of the game, then that's a fault-on as opposed to default-off, really changes how people interact with each other.

Tim Cynova:

I'm including a couple of classes during my new school course this year that are all virtual, everyone's on zoom. Because I've seen the value of learning what that's like and learning how to be a part of an entirely virtual meeting where there's 25 people. And the things that are just developed by accident I think, at Fractured Atlas, everyone mutes themselves, and you can tell someone has something to say because they unmute themselves. So you start scanning the screen to look at that pulse. And the other part of it equalizes it in a way like you could see the top quarter of someone, which is always fun when you meet someone in person for the first time because you're like, "You're that tall." "You have pants."

Yeah, everyone looks the same. One of my colleagues, she started working last May and hadn't met one of our other colleagues who always wears over the ear headphones. It was like, "I've never seen Gillian's ears before because she's always wearing headphones." So some of those things that are different. And I felt like this is an increasingly important skill that people need to have, and so let's practice it to the point of, don't sit in front of a window, because then you have that certain witness protection look.

Rachel Casanova:

I have actually often take screenshots of people on video with the most awful backgrounds because they're just a silhouette because of the light in the back or things like that. I don't think we've figured out that video is really ubiquitous. Maybe we can be more conscious of where we take that call, but I don't think we create environments with the assumption that framing a person and what's behind them is important. But you also brought up an interesting point, when everyone is virtual, I think it actually does create a better experience than when the majority of people are physically in a room and there's one person on the phone, and that I know I've come up with a really loud... just because I want off the floor that there's no way to get the floor otherwise. And that's just as awkward and almost passive-aggressive in order to do so. But I think the cues that you picked up on are really interesting and it does, it brings an equality to everyone in the room.

Tim Cynova:

Going back to just audio only calls is the weirdest thing. Because half the meeting is you're stepping on something someone says and then everyone waits for someone to say something, but then all of you say something and then you're like, "Oh, excuse me. This is Tim." And it's the oddest-

Rachel Casanova:

And can you imagine if you were in a room, and everyone said, "Hi, it's Rachel, I'm here." "Hi, it's Tim. I'm here." I mean, it's the time it takes, we can all tell. And everyone should learn how to look at that button of who the participants are, and then we can probably move on. But you also don't know whose attention you have. And we all know, I know it for myself that when I'm on a conference call, I will do something else. One of the physical things and I spoke to someone yesterday who agrees with me, but it's not readily accepted, I don't think, you had the walking workstation, right? The treadmill desk?

Tim Cynova:

Yep.

Rachel Casanova:

So when I would use that on conference calls, it was incredible. I had so much more focus because I could do two things at once. Adding that third was beyond. So it was not taking my attention. I mean, I know how to walk and I wasn't thinking about it. But walking felt good. Just felt better than sitting at a desk. And I had more, I think engagement and energy to be part of that call by doing it than I did just sitting at my desk, because now I was unfortunately looking for the second thing to do.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, it's like sitting down to watch TV and then you pick up your phone to look at a video online or flip through it. It's like multi-screen. Yeah, that's a great way to hotwire your brain into that second thing.

Rachel Casanova:

That's right.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. One of the things we've been looking for to try and figure out is when you do have bigger meetings, oftentimes, unless someone proactively does something, everyone joins silently and leaves silently. And it's a really awkward thing if we're just sitting here, so someone has to start chatting and then what is that thing that you'd be doing if you walked into a room together? And at Fractured Atlas we developed this thing years ago where we always clap at the end of the meeting. The meeting is so strange if you go someplace and people don't clap and you're like, "Oh, wait, what? We don't clap when this thing's done?" So what is the equivalent of that punctuation so we can say, "Yeah, we spent time together we're not just disappearing into the ether even though we are."

Rachel Casanova:

Well, what I hear in what you've said is that you all choose when the meeting is over. And on conference calls that can happen because body language would also signify people are starting to get up. But on a call, it also often becomes one person whose job it is to say, "Okay, I think we're going to wrap that up." Again, changing the group thing into one person is now leaving with... One person has the command to decide when the meeting is over. So I think you should keep the clap.

Tim Cynova:

I like the clap.

Rachel Casanova:

There's got to be an emoji somewhere in there.

Tim Cynova:

Zoom, I believe just released an updated version that now allows you to put copying emoji next to your image that not all of us had, but one of our co-workers did. So this reminds me I need to download the updated Zoom. Because Yeah, clapping is just you're getting feedback there. So you have to change what that is like. But again, I guess intentionality around how we're coming together and experimenting with different things that work and don't work to figure out what works the best for you now, and I love that point, like we're building this for now or for the future, but recognizing it's going to change, we're going to change. So we need to iterate and adjust rather than this is what we have for the next 25 years.

Rachel Casanova:

Right. And if you're not willing to acknowledge that I think it's just harder. That's when you asked me this question before, like, what's the hardest thing? The hardest thing is when people actually don't have a choice, we act as if they do we want their input, but now you're going to have this. I think, if we apply consumer mindset to the workplace, and we recognize that if a consumer didn't have a good experience and was told to change how they walk or change what they wear when they come into a store, they won't come into the store anymore. So if we treat employees, more like consumers, and we are willing to hear that person and say so what isn't working? Of course we have the bounds and what we're able to do willing to do, there could be lots of reasons why, but most people have an idea of what it is that they'd like. And if we're actually willing to listen, and I think this is again, where corporate real estate, large organizations have struggled, because their job is to scale, their job is to have it one way. But if we really acknowledge that mass customization means willing to listen and willing to adjust, we probably get a lot further.

The industry uses the words changed management, no one wants to be changed. No retailer says let's go change our clients. We're going to now tell them to go. No, they appeal to the heart. They appeal to the mind. They appeal to me choosing to do it differently. They can coerce, I'm thinking of a gym, a gym wants people to come. They're not going to change behavior, but they are trying to use motivation. There is recognition even on the gym front to say, "We want people to use it, we don't just want their money for them not to come here. We want to motivate them to actually be here." So they're trying to change behavior, but you'd never say that someone who works for Equinox is in the change business. And you'd never try to change at someone, you would entice them to see that there's a different way that they might really like. So you do market research you're willing to listen. The outlier may actually be someone who's just more able to verbalize what's not working than the people who aren't saying anything.

Tim Cynova:

I love that idea as it applies to the art going experienced, too. I grew up with classical music. I was a trombonist. I played. I have a conservatory degree, I wouldn't be where I am in life, if not for it. It's sometimes really tough to love it. You go to performance, you're like, "Why does this feel so horrible? I actually love this thing. But the experience of going here it's chairs are horrible, the people are rude. If I wasn't so connected this I wouldn't come here." And I think that's what arts organizations many are struggling with now, and it's by extension, then to the workplace. So you're figuring this out for one part of your circle, but then the other people who are actually making that thing happen to apply it holistically to the organization.

Rachel Casanova:

Yeah, it's really interesting to take Broadway, those seats are awful yet people are coming. So something is enticing them enough that they say I would put up with that. So what are we enticing people at work with that work shouldn't suck? There should be something so great, that they put that into context. And I think maybe we think about the fact that when people don't see all that great, that's exactly when those little things become the problem. So we have a survey at Cushman & Wakefield. It's called experience per square foot, and it measures 40 attributes of the Workplace that links them into five experience outcomes and five engagement outcomes. So if you look at how people feel about certain things that links into the bond component of the outcome, do people bond at work? Do people have the ability to learn at work? Do they have the ability to do their best work?

And what's interesting is that we have 30,000 respondents in that survey, let's say represents 100 companies, the data scientist who's working with it says that there's typically five things that present themselves as really good or really bad. So my question was, "Well, what are they? If we just know that, then we're done. We don't have to survey anyone." He said, "Well, they change by organization." What that tells me directionally is that people can only complain about a certain number of things, they can only love a certain number of things and they can only hate a certain number of things. There's no evidence that once you fix those three, they won't find the next three. So if we work on the ones that are really, really good, I think we just don't fill those bad's with three new ones. That was my conclusion from the data's.

Tim Cynova:

Terrific. Yeah. Well, as we're coming to a close here, I'd like to get your thoughts on your advice for organizations that aren't looking to renovate or can't renovate, or big physical change or virtual change, what can they do right now to sort of move towards what you've been talking about? And then just any other closing thoughts on the topic that you might have.

Rachel Casanova:

I love organizations that can't make the physical change because it challenges them to really think and it challenges them to say, "What experiences are we trying to create?" Like you said, in the past, you had just managed with the space that you had. There's so many other things that impact people's experience. We are 650 people in our New York office. And we're in that situation, our lease is closer to ending than beginning. We know that it was designed for the organization that was 12 to 15 years ago, which, by the way, I was the consultant who worked on it. So it's kind of interesting to see how they've grown beyond. But I was given the challenge to look at the workplace. So people thought I was going to come up with chairs, rooms, things like that. And I said, "I don't think that's what people need."

So we did an exercise, put post-it notes on the wall from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Then it extended from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM. And ask people with post-it notes to put on the wall, what do they do in the morning before they come to work? What's a ritual they do when they first get to work? What do they do in the middle of the day, last thing before they leave and afterward? And don't mention anything about work. And the wall probably ended up with 500 post-its and so I crowd sourced it. I mean, we have all kinds of people who work there still within a confines of probably people who work in nine to five professional world, then what we try to do is we try to cut that data and say, what is it that we're trying to solve for? And it may or may not be the physical space, but it may be the pressure of what I've got to get home and get to, or making the train or calling a sick relative or doing all these things.

And so we came up with a few ideas on how to enable people to be in a work mode when they want to be in work mode, but also how to support them as individuals. And that is for them as people. We're all people when we're not at work. The breath of seeing those post-it notes makes you realize how many other things are on people's minds when they go to work. It's a small thing, we just contracted with a company who does same-day delivery of convenience items. So an order that gets placed by 11:00 AM, comes in a white shopping bag with your name on it by 3:00 PM. That workplace, I don't know, to me it's something that happened when I was at work that enabled me to say, "I don't have to go get that shampoo that my kids said, please don't come home without the shampoo." It's taken care of my focus is now here. So it's a little thing.

We have a café, served decent food, but we just went to the vendor and said, "How do you treat us more like consumers? How do we advertise this more? How do we put signage around it? How do we increase the offering?" So we increase the soup, we increase the breakfast sandwiches, it was no cost. In fact, the more we sell, the more the organization doesn't have to subsidize. So it's sort of good for everyone. It was just a thought process to say, what are those things that can create the workplace experience? And that more than ever before is acknowledged to be an entire experience, not just what I see, not just the physical furniture design of the space.

Tim Cynova:

Amazing. Rachel, it's always a pleasure spending time with you. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Rachel Casanova:

Thanks for having me.

Tim Cynova:

Our next guest is Andrew Taylor. Andrew is currently an Associate Professor and Department Chair at American University, where he explores the intersection of arts, culture and business. He's an author, lecturer and researcher on a broad range of management issues. You might even know him from his long running blog, The Artful Manager. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Andrew Taylor:

Hi, Tim. Thank you.

Tim Cynova:

One of the final ways we currently have an opportunity to work together is through your service as a Fractured Atlas Board Member and as the esteemed Chair of our Audit Committee. As part of our work at Fractured Atlas, you recently published a piece titled, "Working Together, Apart", the comment is silent, where you reflected on the transition that Fractured Atlas has been on to become an entirely virtual or distributed organization. You wrote about how the physical workplace is filled with, "a million subconscious cues that help us work together effectively when we're with each other". And then you wondered in a hopeful way, what takes the place of those? And how might we need to approach work differently in an entirely virtual workplace? You also said, "It's not clear to me what we're abandoning when we abandon the shared physical workplace. Humans are evolutionarily social animals." Can you talk through your exploration that took place when you were thinking about and writing this piece?

Andrew Taylor:

Yeah, and it's a bunch of different journeys that sort of came together that for a very long time, I've been wondering about human cognition as just a component of how we engage the world, which obviously is important when you're trying to work effectively by yourself but also with others. So I had done a bunch of reading on sort of the way the brain works, the way language works, the ways we subliminally process a lot of what we do. And more recently, I've been reading and learning about the social components. So I just finished the book Blueprint by Nicholas Christakis, which is sort of about how his social engagement in humans particularly, but other animals too, evolutionary, how is it deep within our DNA in ways we cannot ever see.

Andrew Taylor:

And the general idea is the social capacity of humans and other species that are social, or selected by evolution as being more fit for their environment more and more. And humans are particularly so since we have language and cognition. And that means that probably the vast majority of how we engage the world is invisible to us. What we imagined to be cognitive choice is kind of like a little sidecar on the way the world actually works. And that's not bad or good. It's just how it works. So it just happened to be as I was reading this stuff, and as a board and the executive leadership team, we're talking about going virtual, it just struck me that's curious, like what exactly changes that we are designed over thousands of generations to work in physical proximity.

Andrew Taylor:

And in the last few seconds on the evolutionary clock, we've had telephones, and we've had internet, that may or may not mean radical change, it just means this is pretty recent. And most of how this works is invisible to us. So what does it mean to sort of move physically distant and yet still work in ways that are supposed to be collective?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Well, you spent a lot of your day working with students in your program and other programs outside of American University. I'm curious as you think about that, as you think about the future of work, building a shared culture, where Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are core, how do you counsel students to think about this when the work today will quite likely be radically different or how we do work today will quite likely be radically different from when they retire from their careers and their work, what pieces of advice? Maybe the fax machine will come back. So learn how to put the paper in the right way or how do you approach that with them?

Andrew Taylor:

Well, I mean, there's a great question in there, is it going to be different? If the assumption is true that humans have evolved to have certain social capacities that are invisible to us just because we're good. I mean, I'll tell you a few of them from Nicholas, what he recommends. Certainly, the means by which we engage with each other change radically, and sort of the tactics and technologies and the sort of process that we might go through through out the day might be quite different. But the underlying way of being aware of other people, understanding their trajectory, their attention, being aware of your own cognition, and its flaws and benefits, and just sort of acknowledging that you're a human creature on the earth that is evolved in ways and a very large part of how you think you move in the world that is invisible to you.

Andrew Taylor:

So I mean, some of the things that Christakis mentions as what he calls The Social Sweet, which is sort of this bundle of evolutionary social tendencies that humans have evolved over thousands of generations. One is cooperation and friendship, what is generally called in-group bias. So you tend to favor people who you believe to be part of your group. Turns out that's pretty malleable. Your group can be people who look and talk and act like you, people who are your family, or when you get to sort of larger visions of how the world works that can be a country, or a group of passion. So there's, in social learning and teaching, capacity to have and recognize individually identity is another one, the idea that we can actually recognize each other as individuals.

Andrew Taylor:

So I think with students, one is just to unbundle the fact that we use all these terms, assuming we know what they mean, like organization is a great one. And like any power tool, it's kind of useful to know the tendencies of the structure, the things to avoid and the things that make the machine work in a healthy and safe way. And a large part of that machine is invisible to us. It's evolutionary, it's subconscious, it's sensory. So just sort of sitting and living with that idea and then say, "Well, okay, given the limited control I have, how do I behave in a world that's changing in small ways? And maybe big ways to?"

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Wow. I love how you started that answer with the classic Andrew Taylor putting a giant hole on the thing that I asked you.

Andrew Taylor:

[inaudible 00:41:23] what I do.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I love that about every time we get together, or you tweet about something I wrote, and we're like, right, yeah, my whole argument unravels on that one piece that Andrew Taylor just pointed out.

Andrew Taylor:

And I hope you know I made it with love and generosity. But I find a large part of what I do as a teacher is to notice assumptions, and then just to poke at them. And sometimes the assumptions are absolutely valid and valuable. And sometimes they're like, why do we think that? Is that true? So a large part of our survey course, which is the opening is just saying, well, what's an organization? Do you work in one, do you work for one, do you work through one? How do you know you're in it? How do you know you're out? To just tease a part this idea that everybody assumes they know what they mean, I work at this place, well, do you? And that's to me again, what leads to such an intriguing adventure that you're on with Fractured Atlas saying, well, let's imagine an organization that has no common physical place. What does that mean? And that's why it led me to say, "Well, I don't know what that means. And isn't that exciting?"

Tim Cynova:

Well, in that poking that you do is really core to thinking about how work can be different. Because in the same way that you're asking, "Well, what is an organization?" You start to go into, "Well, what does a conference room allow us to do? And what is a water cooler when there isn't a water cooler? And how can we capture the thing that we're trying to do that in sort of the "traditional workplace", you just take for granted? You don't even think about it. There's the physical proximity and you can always just turn around and ask someone or whatever it might be. And so I think that poking is what leads to some really fun and creative solutions to being intentional about creating the workplace and creating work in a way that fits the way we in whatever collection want to work rather than what maybe a book 50 or 60 years ago said, "You should craft an organization to look like..."

Andrew Taylor:

Yeah. And that's what I really love about Fractured Atlas, just as a corporate culture. And I could say that because I'm not in it. And I just admire it from a distance. But you can see how easy it is to slip into sort of the analysis paralysis. Like I wonder how we could set up the best possible conference call. Let's spend a lot of time thinking about it. And let's make a plan. And let's review multiple vendors. And let's test those vendors. And you actually never do any work if you did that. So I think what I admire about you guys, your whole team is you dive into it. It's like, well, we don't know. Let's get as smart as we can. And let's do it. And then as we do it, we're going to learn where things make sense and where they don't. And that to me sets the organization up to be more likely to succeed in a radically different structure.

We're all aware of other organizations that always think, usually in a very narrow group of people decide how things work and how they work best, and then they're wrong. So I think the real benefit I know your team brings is just this sort of voracious curiosity. But you're moving. It's like, let's do stuff. And let's figure it out as we do stuff. And let's get better, in the same way you iterated around what the offices does in benefits and payroll. So that to me it's a great way to approach this challenge.

Tim Cynova:

I'm curious to get your take on, on what and how this might translate. You work and have worked for a number of years in university environments. You also work in the cultural sector and with culture sector organizations that serve where I spend the bulk of my time. Universities aren't often thought of for their innovative organizational designs, although much like the cultural sector where amazing art is being created. There's a lot of really great thought I think that goes on in university environments. And so there's like this weird juxtaposition of these institutions were amazing thought is going on, amazing art is being created, you pull back the curtain and you're like, it could be 1945 in the way that the organization is structured and run and how people work. And I'm always curious why, why that doesn't filter into? Why are you running it that way? Why do you just accept that that's the way it's done? And with your lens into multiple different sectors and workplaces like this, I'm curious to get your thoughts on this one.

Andrew Taylor:

Well, we could talk for a long time about University structures. But I mean, any human structure is complicated and nuanced. And it is what it is for all sorts of reasons. Some of them are useful still, some are just legacy. And it's just how I usually first sort of say, "Well, let's be generous and kind of just say, okay, well, we got to this place through some means, everybody trying to do something the best they could." But I think where I keep coming back to this idea, Howard Becker in his art worlds book talks about convention as sort of the established ways of doing something is a convention. So a way of running a theater, for example, its convention that a theater has a raised stage and an audience chamber and sometimes a proscenium, and it's got fly space.

These are just ways that if you wander into a theater, you can recognize what it is, how it works, and what's expected of you. And you can hire a stage manager from multiple different theaters, and they will have a general idea of how to work in that space. And that's hugely efficient and powerful and productive. You couldn't actually do complex work without convention. But then there's invention, which is I don't want to do theater in a proscenium stage, I want to do it in a parking garage on a Sunday afternoon, without telling anyone. And that's no longer a conventional theater space. So you get a stage manager in there from a traditional theater, they're like, "What? I can't even... Where's the power outlet? I need a board. Where's my board?" And so they're out of their element there. So I find convention, the way Becker describes it is really useful because it's hugely powerful. It's not bad to have a standard way of understanding how something works in the world, and what the various roles might be to advance that and the skills required of those roles, those are all really helpful until the moment they're not.

And then they become barriers to innovation or invention. So it's like almost everything we talked about as either a positive or negative is both at the same time. So in-group bias is another great example. It's horrible. In-group bias is what leads to racism and to nationalism and to violence against others that's in-group bias. In-group bias is also what creates a sense of connection and core in an organization, "We're in this together, we're going to stand up for our friends and neighbors and co-workers, we're going to be there for them." So in-group bias is both horrible and fantastic. Conventions are both horrible and fantastic. And the underlying theme is these are all elements of complex human systems. So it's more about just saying, "Okay, these conventions are great, maybe what we need to do is poke at them every now and then and say, Well, why are we doing it this way? Oh, it still works. Okay, let's keep doing it this way."

So I think in response to your question, it really comes to me about convention invention that that's a tension. And I'm going to use that poetic words now, convention, intention, pretension might come next. That's the way I tend to explore it. And certainly at the university and in arts organizations, the first thing I tend to do is, "Well, what's the convention in play here? What does this organization supposed to be and look like? And what do people think it is and it looks like? And is that right anymore? Does it fit?" And sometimes the answer is yes and no, simultaneously.

Tim Cynova:

I think that might actually as you were saying, convention invention. Is this Andrew Taylor schoolhouse rocks about workplace culture?

Andrew Taylor:

I'm in on that lets do it.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, I just want an animator, see if we can get this one done by the time this episode is published.

Andrew Taylor:

Excellent.

Tim Cynova:

Nice. Let's go tactically. I'm curious. We've known each other for a number of years now. You're incredibly thoughtful in how you structure your work and working with people. I've seen you teach. I'm curious, tactically, how you put your day together? What tools do you use to do your own work? How do you really thrive? What kind of environment do you hang out? At coffee shops, zoos? Do you have an anodic chamber where you do all of your best thinking? What does Andrew Taylor's setup look like?

Andrew Taylor:

Boy, it's a mess, and I'm always changing it. So just get me into an office supply store and I will have all sorts of false hopes. And I'm very fond of new systems and structures. And at the end of the day, I find I spend almost all my energy on those systems and not on the reason I got the system. So I have a bunch of blind spots that I try to avoid as best I can. I know my best thinking and working energies between nine and 12:30 ish afternoons is different kind of energy and just being aware of that. I know I don't work well in my house, for all sorts of reasons that I could try to fix or just say, "No, I don't really work well there." It's sort of noticing and trying to reinforce the positive aspects of how I work in the world and also noticing my blind spots and weaknesses and saying, "Well, how can I mediate that?"

And I love Dan Kahneman's report to this. He studied this stuff his whole life and he hasn't done the most, anything to change it because he can't. So I guess my day is I do my best work if I'm really focused in the morning on generative work. And the afternoon on sort of structural tactical, cleanup administrative work. In the evenings I'm best if I can read or engage something that makes me curious. If I'm driving, I have a book playing often. How can I get sort of new stuff into my head and ponder on it? And then how can I watch a stupid movie that has no variation from conventions that I find very satisfying? Movies that absolutely do exactly what you know they're going to do next just makes me really comforted.

And in terms of organizing how all the various pieces and what I need to do I'm not getting any better yet. I just started using things. So that's my new things the program, yes, the to do manager. Even there, I have an awkward relationship with to do managers, I noticed when I write down a task for myself, I get mad at the list for telling me what to do. You can imagine that's just a sinkhole. It's like, "Don't tell me what to do." It's like, "Well, I just wrote that."

Tim Cynova:

It's like getting mad at Waze or Google for telling you which way to turn.

Andrew Taylor:

"I don't want to go that way."

Tim Cynova:

"Why do you keep yelling at me to go left?"

Andrew Taylor:

That's right. So I don't know if I gave you a useful answer. But I guess the summary is around just noticing when your energy is appropriate to the circumstance and what might you do to change that when it's not.

Tim Cynova:

One of the other things I heard and what you're saying is, nothing lasts forever. And you have to iterate on it. Like that thing might work for a little while and then you find another to do manager to be mad at and then you find something else. And I think, both personally, I've noticed that, but also sort of organizationally, that way we work, that thing we do worked for a little while. And then the organization changes what we need. And you're constantly iterating on things, trying to maybe make them fit better for what you need. But it's not like, once we get this done, we're set. And that's part of the creative journey, and also the frustration that exists, because it's a thing that's constantly evolving, much like people.

Andrew Taylor:

Yeah, and it's not just over time, it's given the situation, the environment, mental models that you try to use to make sense of the world are useful until the moment they're not. And sort of being able to say, "Hey, that was really useful in this context to think of the world like this. And now I'm noticing it's not as useful. So maybe I should put that model off to the side for a minute, find a different, more robust model for this moment, but keep the other one because it might come back to that moment." So one of the examples I found in the arts where we talk about production and consumption. So there's a producing side and there's a consuming side, the producers, the artists, the consumers, the audience. That's useful and productive. And it's also wrong. It's not true that who's making meaning in that moment, when an artist and audience member really connect, everybody's making meaning everybody's brought something to the room.

So really, they're co-producers. That's another way of thinking of it, which would be useful in a different context. I think it's George Box. There's a great phrase I use all the time, "All models are wrong. Some are useful." No matter how you would describe the world, it's wrong. It just has to be wrong, because you cannot encompass the world in a single perspective. But it's useful. So me against an enemy. Sure that's useful. It's not true. But sure, in this moment, that's a useful way of thinking. And I find the most successful leaders I meet are really adaptive, in which model they have and use. And when they set it aside, and when they start to say, "Hey, this is feeling like we're at the edge of this model. Maybe we need to interrogate it," or sometimes like, "Hey, this is working. It's wrong, and it's limited and it's flawed, but it's good enough for now, and let's keep going."

Tim Cynova:

You included a number of questions in your piece that you wrote, but I'm wondering, what are the burning questions that you have about workplace, how we work, the future of work, what that might look like?

Andrew Taylor:

Well, I guess I'm still interrogating the conventions of a workplace. So workplace is, like if you walk into a room and you can say, "Hey, this is a workplace." What is it? You see, that tells you that? Oh, there's a desk, there's a phone, it looks kind of professional. There's nothing particularly personal on the walls, there might be a photo. How do we recognize a workspace from a living space or a coffee space and just noticing sort of the indicators and then starting to poke a little bit. It's like, "Well, desk, okay, let's talk desk for a minute." So I think one is just really to say, well, what is the workplace and I don't believe a workplace is anywhere, I believe there is a particular quality, maybe it's different person to person, but there's particular elements of the environment that help people be productive in a work like way.

And again, for some people that's their bedroom, and a messy laundry pile behind them and it's totally fine. For other people like me, you got to be in a different place physically that just tells you where you are and how to be. And then the other thing I think that's coming on real fast is so many conventions of the workplace are racist and oppressive. They are the product of systems of wealth and power, and therefore they are just dripping and infused with all sorts of problematic things. And it's not obvious when you first look particularly like me, you're a white male who grew up in the water, you don't see them. So what in this environment, first, well, what do we consider a workplace? What is it the sort of qualities or attributes or indicators that suggests a place is a place of work? Two, is among those and even among the ones we can't see right now, which are products of oppressive racist power, imbalance systems in which are more malleable.

And to me that second question is a big one because the people designing these spaces they're all predominantly of and from and for the systems of power that created them in the first place. So I'm really curious how that evolves. And it can't be me that figures it out, I can just try and sort of flag it and then amplify the people who are making productive discovery.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons workplaces should be intentional, be questioning all of the things that make up their workplaces, because that's when you start to uncover things that are problematic, things that prohibit or hinder people's ability to thrive in the workplace and in the work that they're doing. And it's work that we've done together, not coattail we've adjacent taught together. And I think that's increasingly important for workplaces to question conventional wisdom when it comes to how we show up and how we support and what those systems and structures are.

Andrew Taylor:

Yeah, and just to acknowledge how challenging that is. So convention is efficient and effective, and it's comforting. And I know what to do when I get to work. And I know what's expected of me and I know how to behave with my peers. It's a lot of convention stuff that is sort of the oil that makes an organization work. And you can hire people, and you don't have to train them for 17 years, you've trained them a little bit, but they get the general idea. So there is a lot of benefit in convention, as is a lot of damage and danger and destruction.

You can imagine a workplace where they're questioning every single thing about everything they do, like the stapler, are we doing vertical or horizontal staples? And why? Is that a racist thing? What's up with that? As opposed to... And maybe it is, so I don't want to discount that. As opposed to that sort of how do we find a balance between pushing the things that really caught our attention and sort of other things? Okay, we need some stability and understanding and conventions here. But let's think together about where really to push and not be either A not pushing it all or B pushing all the time. Otherwise, we're crazy.

Tim Cynova:

Do you have any final thoughts on the topic?

Andrew Taylor:

No, I'm just excited. I think going virtual as you guys are is an experiment. So my thought is how do we pay attention in ways that is productive and not distracting? And how do you actually do the work while you're building the work? I'm really curious how we do that. And I don't know. So I get to learn by watching you guys.

Tim Cynova:

Andrew, it's always wonderful and thought provoking to hang out with you. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Andrew Taylor:

Thanks, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

Our next guest is Ramphis Castro, among a myriad of other things, Ramphis is a serial entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. He's the co-founder of ScienceVest, a venture capital fund for hard-tech and life science companies. He's an experienced technologist and product strategist that has led and supported venture-backed teams from idea to exit. Ramphis, welcome to the podcast.

Ramphis Castro:

Thanks, Tim. Great to be here.

Tim Cynova:

When you think broadly about the concept of a workplace, for you, what comes to mind?

Ramphis Castro:

So I'll circumscribe my comments within the creative field broadly, right in that box, because if you're in manufacturing, you have to put things from point A to point B. You have to do point A to point B, it's a little bit more difficult for everybody in the creative fields. Thinking about workplace broadly, to me everything is work. And I am lucky to be able to say that in that way, so nothing feels like work. And that is broadly how I think about it is what are the things that I am good at that I can go the geeky guy type efforts, this overlapping circles about like, what are you good at? What does the world need? What do you get paid for? And all this overlapping intersections. And I've gotten the chance to operate within that space and find that and evolve that. But over time, it feels and gravitates in the same type of center.

So to me, workplace, the spaces that you create to get that type of creative work done, whether that's in the specific case of creative where you have focused time for producing something new on your own, but then the other efforts around sharing that in a way that reaches the audience that needs to experience your work in that way. I'm trying to keep it super abstract because I feel that I've seen the experience of the creative as a field being very horizontal across a wide array of fields, I mean science, engineering, art, music, movies, and within those fields, different roles, the producers, the directors, the software engineers, smart engineers, the designers.

So it's distilling the practices themselves, workplace is just the space and creating the relationships, the interactions with people around me, that allow me to put my best work forward, which I've decided on in terms of supporting more entrepreneurs and expanding the definition of those entrepreneurs more broadly, which include new fund managers, entrepreneurs, new business and founders entrepreneurs, artists, the space creating new space entrepreneurs, and creating those spaces like round-tables and conversations around this work which I can then take to other spaces. But broadly, workplace to me is, and these days its New York City. So it is abstract and it is more broad, because the creative work is not siloed in just the organization, the corporation or ScienceVest or some other organization, that is not the work that I'm putting forward, does not depend exclusively within that organization.

So, understanding how other organizations, other individuals that I work with, how they work among themselves and with each other, and with myself is a part of the framing of workplace. And we can kind of unpack that more, but broadly, keep it at that sort high level, and we can kind of dig into more of that.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Let's go straight down to the ground. And then we'll come back to the middle. Life Hacker had a series, maybe they still do that was called How I Work or something like this, and you talked to various people and you saw snapshots of their desk and what they needed and apps that they couldn't live without. I'm curious, what's the Ramphis Castro, how I work portfolio look like?

Ramphis Castro:

Yeah. Glad you asked the question because I obsess about this forever. And there's all these thoughts around like productivity, it's not more around productivity, it's more around, "How do I get the most out of Ramphis and how to frame that?" And at a tactical level, it starts with calendar. So if it's not as my practice, I guess I learned and maintain for Microsoft. If it's not on the calendar, it's not happening. So carving out time for pieces is these first sets of tools thinking about time and 168 hours and the week and that breakdown of all the different things that you think you want to do in terms of tactically. So there's a spreadsheet with the hours and how those are broken down, but that is flow through from calendar in terms of you are what you carve time for.

That's one, the other is organizing thoughts and referencing them in different ways and seeing what comes back. So you have notion for organizing and for example, meetings with different individuals and notes around what stuck about different conversations at different points so that when you're meeting with that person over, you're seeing is there an evolution into how those works. And then a lot of different tabs for different topics around the ideas, parking lots, around new sets of ideas. So notion as a tool. Obviously, email, I couldn't live without an email, I've tried my best to get away from it. And so Slack is the tool for collaborating with organizations that I control or I'm a part of, and for others, that have their organizations that include me to best engage with me in real time. Yet, outside of those organizations, the way they access me are all these different tools, but primarily email in terms of either close, if it's a direct, personal, external relationship.

Superhuman is the email tool that I use for that. [inaudible 01:03:59]. Condor for what's going on, Notion for the note taking and coordination and thoughts and journaling and morning pages of where I'm at and what's going on, Email Slack. And then across the board in terms of messaging, but most of my phone as you've seen doesn't have notifications on. The only way would ring is if my wife or my parents or my brothers call me, and it's structured in a way where everything is, I reclaim all of my time for myself. It's all about carved myself and then it carves out based on what I want to achieve. And then I carve out time. So tactically, those are some of the tools.

Tim Cynova:

Our colleague, Lauren Ruffin just recently changed over to a Nokia phone. And she was talking about how that's changed just her interaction with the world. Because when the bank says, "Yeah, we're going to text you this code to put into the app. She's like, "I've got to go to a computer now with that code because I can't do it on my phone." And it's caused her to change her interaction with how she goes through her day and what's possible and protects her time. But then how do you be available when you need to be available for your team, if you might be out because she travels a lot, but it sounds like you've similarly carved out when I'm focused on this thing, I'm doing that thing. And I'm not being pulled in 16 different directions at the same time.

Ramphis Castro:

Yes. And I think that is crucial in terms of carving out time to think about how to organize the work so that emergencies, what are the emergencies? In my world like engineer, those are exceptions and exceptions, there's the phrase around exception handling, there's entire coding structure around thinking about how to handle exceptions. Because if everything in your work is an exception, and by exception I mean, an interruption, an email that you need to answer, a message that you need to look or something like that. If your entire work is an exception, then you've literally not designed your worst structure and I know most of everyone operates under interruption work, especially workplaces. You're there like, "Hey, I have this thing." How can you achieve focus work if you're constantly interrupted in all this other work?

So exception handling and thinking about what is the work to be done? How does that work achieved, and then creating the framework processes, checking whatever makes the most sense for that particular type of work, so that you have all of your time to do what you're supposed to be doing, whatever that is. And then the challenges are if the exceptionists reach you, then they reach you in a way that you already have a process in place to know that it's going to come in. And you know how you're going to manage it and you know the time shifts for responds and those expectations have been managed, which going back to service engineering, service level agreements, by when do you should expect a response from Ramphis? When should you expect a response and I do not respond.

There is no emergencies, unless it's like a baby something, but still, those are the way we're thinking about it is around that work of being available for that very particular exception where you literally have no control over. Yet, most or the other types of emergencies are work related, someone something like that has happened before. So being able to think about what are the nature of exceptions and organizing and unpacking that, and structuring that so that when it happens, it's taken care of, or there's all this work to be able to achieve it because it's already carved out for you to say, "Oh, what are the exceptions and happened and this is something I need to take care of." Well, the time is there, and then there's ways to manage that.

And that's obviously difficult to reconcile, limited resources and time and budgets and others, but at the end of the day, if it's a sustainable organization, you're thinking about all these things, so that the work that actually moves the work forward, is it will happen otherwise, everyone is in fire reaction mode, and no work gets done. And then the organization dies. And that's it, which I've seen over and over and over and over in all kinds of ways.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, that's the battle the urgent versus the important. But what I really loved about how you broke that process down and the structures down is that it helps address unplanned versus unexpected. I was doing some research into scarcity mindset. And one of the examples they were highlighting was around operating rooms that were overbooked in a hospital, I think Massachusetts and they're trying to figure out how to solve this problem that was pushing surgeries later in the day and into the night and into the weekend and more mistakes were being made. And they eventually solved it around realizing that things that came in to interrupt emergencies. They were expected, but they were unplanned.

So after a little while, you're talking about like, I see how my work week goes, it's going to be interrupted by all these things. It's not unexpected that it's going to be interrupted, but they're unplanned in how they come in and I love how the structure that you've built helps to address how do you handle those unplanned things as they come in, so they don't become just the normal way that you work. And interrupting all those important deep thinking times, where you're trying to move forward the important or the urgent and the important.

Ramphis Castro:

Absolutely. I mean, again, keeping it in the box of creative work, because in the context of a lot of other types of work workplaces and the way things are versus the way they should be, a lot of it is not designed. Everything, which is sort of having happenstance, I mean healthcare system itself, it has all sorts of challenges around how it's designed broadly, like all these issues that affect different industries, where the type of planning for the work to be done, they may not have those options. That's it. This is how things happen. This is how much control they have over how people react to emergencies. This is how things are reversed. There's just so many things in there that are outside. They control of one particular workplace to be able to manage where those constraints, obviously, it just makes total sense. Versus if we're in the creative with some creative endeavor, then ideally, you're putting something out into the world. So you're thinking about to who and in what way and everything around that interaction and all the other pieces that affect that.

So you're able to design the business, going back to the business model, thinking about what is your business model and breaking that down. And then really taking that down to like the super granular level of there's an email that's going to come in, because there's a customer support need, well, what are the customer support needs, and how do those work? Those are things that require real dedicated time to think about and process. But the opportunity for a lot of organizations is that there is a lot of lessons learned around these things. We do not have to reinvent the wheel on a lot of pieces, some things work really well.

And then you can just adapt to what makes the most sense, or not dedicate all the time that's needed for that particular thing, because that is not the thing that moves the needle on your business. That doesn't affect, let's say in startup, your core metric. What is the core metric? This could be multiple, but it's typically one and one them tends to be revenues. If it's startups, what drives revenue is one metric. So anything that does not help move that needle then are things that I might not get time allocated to it.

Tim Cynova:

Speaking about being intentional and designing work and workplaces, I had the pleasure of co-authoring a briefing paper with you for the Fractured Atlas Board a couple months ago on creating resilient and entirely virtual organization. Some questions we posited included in five years, what does it look like to work with and at Fractured Atlas? What is the future of work in service of creative expression? What do we gain by a transition to being entirely virtual? What outcomes are we looking for? What are the potential pitfalls? What's not being talked about? Sort of the, what do we not know that we don't know that we're going to find out on some random Tuesday. And the context of the board? What's the board's role in the journey? How does it intersect with their own service engagement? How might we use our resources today to achieve this future state.

I want to get your thoughts on the process? We had a number of long conversations that would make its own podcast series if we would have captured them about what is work, what do we track? What are we looking for? What's our responsibility to people and to the organization? I want to get your thoughts on this topic and if there's any questions that are still outstanding for you on just the future of work, as it relates to entirely virtual organizations, and perhaps any aha moments that you had, during that process, or after about, "What does work look like?"

Ramphis Castro:

So that exercise, by the way, it's just a fun because it really dig into what are the environments that allow an organization to capture an individual's best work, best-self? And that the organization is invested in that success within and without the organization, so as that individual thinks about the rest of their career, how does Fractured Atlas play into that? I think it's an exceptionally important effort to be constantly thinking about that. And one of the things that I kind of stuck in my mind, that's, it's tricky. I'm still learning about it. I think that's why we're all here kind of learning together about how to reconcile all the various levers that can be pulled in the context of a fully virtual organization with anti-racist and anti-oppression work that's at the core of Fractured Atlas. In the context of what is not talked about in terms of workplace design, when we're thinking about "future of work", is something that at the intersection of these two pieces, the AR it'll work, is right at the top and everything should flow from that.

Yet, the practices of how it operates and practice some of the mechanics of thinking and achieving that feels emergent, from my perspective, that certain aspects of like a field of study itself, this is an opportunity that's been exciting to unpack. So as I think about future work and fully virtual organizations and the learning and also things that have shifted since this work started is that it is the absolute trend in creative fields, talent is everywhere, full stop. It is everywhere. And given the continued access of the internet and mobile phones, globally, [inaudible 01:14:20] it's just going to continue to be that explosion of perspectives and backgrounds and cultures and others that will feed into the creative fields, which ideally Fractured Atlas should be able to tap into, continue to tap into over time and allow for those perspectives to kind of go in and out.

So that is the absolute trend it feels around that more of that in the individual where everyone is sort of an individual organization within a larger organizations and we pull in from how that's being seen in practice in the blockchain space around distributed architectures just thinking about where, it's how do you organize networks and relationships. So as we rethink how individuals go in and out of organizations that will continue to be the trend. So making it virtual allows for that evolution of how that type of work gets achieved. That might not be exclusive to just Fractured Atlas, yet absolutely led by Fractured Atlas because the leadership is within the conversation of how is this achieved? And how are we learning to do that? And how is that shared amongst individuals inside and outside the organization so that more can participate in the work beyond just the no longer available four walls of Fractured Atlas.

I mean, even the symbolic nature of that is very exciting from the creative fields, this idea that something is bound within, first of all, creativity and human creativity within Fractured Atlas and all the talent that's potentially a part of it now, and it's potentially a part of it in the future is distributed. Then how is that captured in terms of what is the evolution of that culture look like is an exciting come to see is about.

Tim Cynova:

It's exciting and incredibly exhausting.

Ramphis Castro:

Well, I mean, that's why it's well work, everything is work. It's just fun, I mean, in terms of having the opportunity, think about how everyone moves forward on who they are and who they want to be, and how that relates to pushing this other mission forward of enabling more artists to create art and other areas of opportunity there. It's incredible. There's so much of everyone that hasn't been shared yet, and having more opportunities for our platform Fractured Atlas to expand that opportunity and share that with others and then leverage additional structure virtually, with individuals on the ground where the artists created everywhere. It just makes so much sense where they are constantly exposed to as best as we know about what's happening within what's most helpful to artists in the field. And that is constantly learn internally, but then immediately a part of the communities where everyone operates in that makes so much sense and that trend towards virtually connecting where we're all indirectly living already where our families and friends are distributed.

And that'll continue to happen more and more, as we're sort of more and more connected, but then how does that work captured virtually. And then it permeates the communities where we operate in and everyone around us. And then we're influenced by them in their way how they are connected in some other organization that's virtual and global as well. And then that affects them. So it's more of, hopefully the future of work trends towards getting to sort of anti-racist anti-oppression culture broadly faster, because we're sharing faster and we're learning faster because we have all these other pieces in place. So that is the trend, globally and the trend as I see it for Fractured Atlas is leading that charge in the context of how artists access the tools that they need to succeed wherever they are. It is exciting and exhausting, I imagine exhausted and endless work.

Tim Cynova:

It's a largely positive exhaustion. But it's it's intentionality around a different type of work, different type of working and connecting, that you can't go on autopilot, especially when you consider the importance of our commitment to anti-racism, anti-oppression. We could go on autopilot, but what would happen is it would default into typical ways of working that are largely rooted in things that are not helping confront racism and oppression. And that's where you're inventing or finding or crafting ways that allow you to work in a new way that also has this really deep commitment to anti-racism, anti-oppression so people can thrive in the way that they want to.

Ramphis Castro:

[inaudible 01:19:04] talked about enough it's sort of the negative aspects of all the weight of all that work in all these different contexts and how to embed the practices to process experience, discuss and talk about that growth. Because a lot of this work is extremely uncomfortable for a lot of people, whether it's operating in uncertainty in terms of creative fields in terms of talking about the different challenges of what is racism, how is that experience and acknowledging it and how it operates on a daily basis and practices, cultures and policies that we just take for granted, like we default, because we live in the real world. So it's just super normal and challenging that because that sometimes means challenging yourself, and who you are and how you're wired. And that is super hard, because then you're questioning, well, your own core beliefs were not yours to begin with. You sort of inherited it from operating in some community or real world, whatever it is.

So unpacking all these pieces about yourself is also part of the work. And then it's difficult to stay in that space of questioning everything about yourself all the time. And everything about how you react to something to how you do work, to how you feel about how you feel. I mean, this just that in itself is a lot of work. That should be a big part of the work work of the day to day work. And not just the supporting of creatives, but really that supporting creative is, again, supporting yourself like you're going back to personal development, and how is that integrated into the way we work and burnout and depression and how is that process internalized? And that's a part of the organization is something that is absolutely, specially in startups, not talked about enough. I mean, there is a trend, but in terms of the actual mechanics and practices of including how does that bereavement process actually work and talking about what's experienced.

How is it I mean, same thing with being a parent or new parents or they're just so much about, I guess living. That's not a part of workplace and how that translates into affecting the mission around creatives or artists. So it is like this sort of exhausting word, but then the negative aspects of operating that space, negative in the sense of the difficulty of managing it, I don't think it's negative in the negative sense. It's more of, there are consequences. So operating to your creative maximum, and managing how that energy, your energy levels and your work and your mindset and your thoughts and feelings, all of that and the practice required to manage that as well is also not talked about enough.

Tim Cynova:

It's often a hurdle that when I'm talking with organizations, about either our anti-racism, anti-oppression work and how it actually is a part of our organization in the hiring process and other aspects. Or I have someone who I'm going to lose if I can't let them work remote, but we don't have the possibility for them to work remote, we don't have a structure like that. And so you sort of talk through it. And then you realize that's a scary unknown thing. They're already working at what they perceived to be maximum, there might be some benefits there.

But there it's unknown, and maybe it's longer term. So you're not going to even address that and then you start getting this negative spiral, where it's like if you can move forward in ambiguity and leap towards that and continue to iterate on processes. Like it's not a fully formed remote policy, just experiment. Try that thing out, try this thing out. But it's the unknown and the potential negative and more work that I need to do on top of, I'm already working with too few dollars, too few people and too few hours in the day, that maybe that's what I should be doing, but I can't even.

Ramphis Castro:

I think there's a tricky balance between how to support organizations as they are to move to where they need to be. And what has happened is happening will continue to happen more around this is the direction that individuals need when we have the opportunity to acknowledge that and create new spaces. And they create it for themselves. Artists create it for themselves literally is like, "I am going to do my thing in my way, how I think, and others that share in that and collaborate with me are also a part of constructing this new kind of world." Same thing for startups and others. So how much is dedicated towards shifting those that are, where they are, where they are, if they brought in their lens, they are facing an existential threat, they are losing people left and right, because of how that's wired. But more importantly, from a broader like economic lens. I mean, companies are dying faster, companies and others.

So part of it is because they're in it, they feel this is their entire world. So it's normal. So what is the process of zooming out zooming in so that that opportunity is created to help themselves? And something that feels like, "Oh, well, I'm doing this thing, the site thing," because they're clearly obviously not operating at maximum capacity, because a lot of those companies are getting challenged by new types of companies all over the world in all the fields in almost all the things all the time. And the reason they stay operating, is because of how sticky a lot of this practices and culture is. But that's been challenged now, versus do we also allow more of these new kinds of spaces to create in and those practices to be a part of that?

There's always sort of this balance between how do we help those that are trapped? Because at the end of the day, that individual that's like, "Oh, I'm going to lose this employee," it's a good chance they feel that because it comes from some other way of a culture that is outside, it's in control, and immediately go all the way up to CEO or even the board or whatever the structure is, it fills in the broader business culture of others. So we kind of keep zooming out and always feels versus the artists, and I'll put [inaudible 01:25:14] in there, we feel like we're going to do it, you're compelled to do it and get it done. And then if you're lucky enough, you find others where it is a practice. And that is the conversation on how do we create, like anti-racism, anti-oppression, [inaudible 01:25:30] organizations and you have the space to explore.

And you're giving the support to explore and learn and share so that others can experiment and share and then that can be fed back into and we're all in this thing together. Feels like the right approach? They feel in the sense of the data and the research and all the other pieces that support all these aspects. A lot of that still feels anecdotal from my experience, because the world is happening real time. In terms of the breath and scale, and this speaking as an engineer operating within kind of the species, it feels emergent in that way where the opportunity to be able to operate virtually in that way, at scale, with all types of timing and all types of environments feels is still happening real time. So like, what is the effect of operating virtually? And how to best enable that to achieve all these goals? And what's the data that supports doing all these pieces? If you're going to need data to operate in that way, then you probably have to wait, which is what's happens with a lot of these practices for traditional companies or corporations.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, as someone who's worked almost in my entire career in the creative sector in the cultural sector, this is the biggest irony. One of the biggest ironies I find about it. Our whole sector is dedicated to creation, art, do things, experimentation, and creating mind blowing things. Pieces of art in whatever mode you're working. And then behind the screen, behind the curtain, it's like your organization isn't the same thing. You're built off of like how someone said an organization should be structured. Most of these organizations is built and run by artists, or people who used to be artist, why do we not have that same creativity and risk and experimentation in that in all of the areas of the organization? Why do you check that when you come into the organization versus what would be in the art form?

Ramphis Castro:

I love your answer to that. I'm unpacking that, which is a quick comment is, everything you just said, if I replace artists in the industry that you're in to venture capital, to companies, it's almost exactly the same as specifically venture capital, where we will say, "Oh, you have X, Y, Z. we find all these crazy innovative X, Y, Z super disruptive et cetera, yet there's 2020 models, they're sort of the way things which [inaudible 01:28:02] are paid and compensation, it's the same thing. Somebody sometimes said, "We're going to do it in this way." And we're like, "Why?" And there's a lot of other pieces around that pressure. And yet, people in it, even myself and others, into entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs in the context of building a new kind of model and things of that nature. So was it just one that Larry said, "You experience that and it's experienced in a lot of spaces."

Ramphis Castro:

I feel the same way in philanthropy, government, it has to have experiences where I would just shift the words just include whatever manifestation of some, I guess, sector, and it feels that way. Science. I was in conversations around how scientists, some scientists and the way they kind of practice kind of risk averse in terms of kind of new developments in the field and how that's integrated across the field. And it's been just interesting to see progress in that, but I'd be more interested in where you at in terms of answers to why that is. Why is that the case in the creative field.

Tim Cynova:

You're not rewarded for risk when it comes to running an organization in nonprofit, I think it creates risk aversion. As an executive director, if you take a risk, you're only going to get fired, or you get to keep your job and your same salary. So there's no real reward or it's not structured for that. I mean, think about art. There's some art, that's great. And there's some art that's horrible. And however you judge great and horrible, but a piece of horrible art, I mean the great artists have created bad pieces of art, but you just keep moving forward. But somehow when we create the organization, it's got to be created in a way that there's no horrible, there's no bad, so it's mediocre. It's just like, we can go middle of the line just to keep this thing moving forward.

Ramphis Castro:

This is great, because becoming what you're saying it's internal, it's an internal concern where the executive director or someone within the organization will have potentially a negative consequence to them, which goes back to the professional development conversation we were having. I was trying to share in terms of like the constant change and whatnot. Because sounds like what you're proposing, your experience is, is that it's widening the lens piece. Like, for example, in startups, this was super difficult for me to see like, "Oh, is that true?" As an engineer or in startups, they fail all the time for all kinds of reasons, yet, it feels okay to fail, because part of that is rewarded by being able to switch career. So you go somewhere else. And recently, there was all the we work back or whatnot. And almost immediately, you would see the list of like 2000 plus employees of who they are, where they want, what are their skill set, and many of them were placed really quickly.

Ramphis Castro:

I'd be curious to see the kind of outcomes of where we displace, but it's normal in startups where when the company dies, you're like, "Oh, there is a lot of talent now," and they can move on to the next opportunity. So the way I typically think about it when organizations is, is to take all those risks, and especially sharing the experiences so that others that can see the next thing for them when they potentially fail or they're not rewarded for those risks in a way that they lose their job or something, they have the next thing. But then other creatives can appreciate the risk and effort that they took versus what I'm hearing it sounds like it's not appreciated internally by the organizations that want things to run in a particular way.

Ramphis Castro:

And actually, I would challenge the finance piece as well. I mean, there're all these rules and also, this is more as a lawyer, there's all this mistrust. A lot of the rules are based on bad behavior by someone else and bad intentions in that behavior. Yet, we take it as gospel that there are these finance rules and you can't do things differently. Well, why? "Oh, there's criminal X, Y, Z," and yes, you want to ensure but it's also a conversation, what is the right kinds of conversations around finance and exploring what is the right kind of approach. And there are spaces where that's rewarded, and others where, why do that? But it's the intentions, it's more the point, the intentions of kind of the creativity is around finding a new approach to solve real problems for people or enable something that is better for others. Then that should be generally rewarded versus if the intentions for being creative and like finance or something is for benefiting yourself at the expense of others, then that is why we have all these compliance requirements is because that is what has been seen. And there's this mistrust.

So I kind of balance that where yes, don't be creative. And I'm glad that those rules exist in that way. Don't be creative in finance, if your intentions are to benefit yourself. Yet, if it's in the service of others with the right intentions of supporting a mission, then it's not around doing it's more like you need to explore. That's what lawyers are for and then bringing in regulators and others. And we just went through this in the context of blockchain again, blockchain regulation, the intention is in the direction of moving the field forward of technology and support and others. Let's explore what this looks like with regulators, with lawyers, with policymakers, with entrepreneurs, with investors, everybody figuring out what's the right approach, so we can move forward versus saying, "Nope, the rules say you can't do X."

Well, just doing things because they're there doesn't help anyone. And actually, this is something that's been very, I guess frustrating as worries, because everyone that's in the field, always defends the field as it is, a lot of people. So there isn't this conversations around, well, why is that? Should it be that way? Should we have contracts that operating this way? Should the format of the contract and the clauses are included in this way? Same thing for production of a new film and how its finance and how it’s structured I mean, is that the only way? Can we use other mechanisms to think about how we get to the outcome?" So I'm super interested in that is the feeling that is taken internally is that it's not rewarded. And so I guess broadening the scope of that reward and outcome is important.

If you take the risks, then there needs to be... And maybe that's something to explore where, if the risk is taken, there is a more explicit commitment to the development of the individual. Because I think that's what we're getting at where there is a commitment to the institution versus the individual where the individual is sacrifice and then the institution itself is being hurt, because it can't leverage the creativity needed to evolve as it requires a constant change. So a more explicit commitment of the individuals in the service of each other, versus in the service of the institution, is something that's probably worth exploring and not hiding behind, oh, fiduciary duty, about X, Y, Z versus again going back intent. What is the intent of the effort? And how thoughtful is everyone around the table to try to figure out what's the right approach and try things? Because if we do things the way things are, then we have what we have. And we know for sure that most workplaces do suck. So, anyways..

Tim Cynova:

Do you have any final thoughts on the workplace topic?

Ramphis Castro:

I think at the core, people should gravitate towards workplaces that resonates with them and who they are. I don't think they should give workplaces that much of a chance. They think that they're either built to help them be who they want to be and who they could be, or they're not. They're just interested in how can they extract from them a particular skill set for a particular goal, and then who they are isn't of consequence to their organization. And they should presume bad intent from the company unless the company is extremely proactively thinking about them and how they can be their full-selves. Like there shouldn't be a cliche or something, it should be at its core of how everyone in an organization, think of it as like workplace activism. Everybody should get together and say this is how things should be. And if not, then there are organizations that are thinking about it in this way.

And there are a lot of startups creative organizations and others that are pushing the [inaudible 01:36:25]. That's why we're having this discussion. We can have this discussion now. It's because there's enough of us now globally, pushing for these changes, and having experiences around creating these spaces successfully, that there are opportunities for everyone, yet, closing that gap on how people know about them and access them is still part of the conversation.

Tim Cynova:

Great. Ramphis, it's always a pleasure to spend time with you. Thank you for setting aside a couple of your 168 hours this week to chat. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Ramphis Castro:

Thank you, Tim for this work. I'm excited for hopefully work, not sucking for everyone in the future.

Tim Cynova:

Great. Thanks Ramphis. To close out our episode I'm again joined by podcasting favorite co-host Lauren Ruffin. Lauren, how's it going?

Lauren Ruffin:

Hey, Tim, it's good. Sun's up. Finally. I'm ready for these short days, dark mornings to end.

Tim Cynova:

It's good. We usually are recording our episode snippets at the very beginning of our days. And that's a two hour time change between Eastern and Mountain Time. So yeah, you're literally starting the day. So I appreciate you doing the early morning shift there.

Lauren Ruffin:

It's good. It kind of makes me feel cool like the radio folks.

Tim Cynova:

It's the morning show.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, we're doing a morning show. It's totally cool.

Tim Cynova:

I can't imagine doing an actual Morning Show.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Or television. Television is worse, you've got to be actually be awake. You can't just keep your eyes closed.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I will say that Albuquerque, watching Albuquerque Morning News is always just a hoot. This morning, apparently today is National Handwriting Day.

Tim Cynova:

Oh, nice.

Lauren Ruffin:

And I've heard it even before we got on here, he brought it up like at every segment how he needed to find a handwriting analyst because he used to know one it's a whole thing.

Tim Cynova:

Okay.

Lauren Ruffin:

This would not fly in a major city, can't talk about National Handwriting Day.

Tim Cynova:

Well, now I need to do a little research on this as I get my day going.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. One of my favorite things about you is that you love obscure topics as much as I do. It really really is.

Tim Cynova:

The list though. The things I want to dive into just keeps getting longer and longer and longer. And it's not sustainable.

Lauren Ruffin:

I know. It's not, we should just retire now.

Tim Cynova:

Just start reading all the books that I have. Yeah. So in this episode, we spoke with Rachel Casanova, Ramphis Castro and Andrew Taylor about the things that make up a physical and virtual workplace. We explored practical tools to get your work done, questions to explore, for those wanting to incorporate alternative work arrangements, and how to approach creating connections in an entirely virtual workplace. There was a time for about two years, maybe two years plus when you never seem to join a Zoom meeting from the same location twice. You once joined a full staff meeting from a flight. You participated in many meetings from the backseat of taxis.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, God.

Tim Cynova:

We're talking video meetings too. We're just not talking, you called in. You're doing video meetings. So you clearly proved that you could join meetings from anywhere. I'm curious, what do you need to do your best work and thrive?

Lauren Ruffin:

An internet connection. I don't even need a laptop anymore at this point. Well, actually, since I switched to my dumb phone, I do need a laptop. But before that all I needed was an iPhone and I was good to go.

Tim Cynova:

What does your setup look like in the sort of how I work? What does the Lauren Ruffin workplace setup look like?

Lauren Ruffin:

So for the first time ever, I have a physical, not ever, but in the last three years, I have a physical desk with a monitor and a camera. I have an actual setup now, but it always feels luxurious to me, I really just need a laptop and headphones. And in some ways I do my best work when I'm on the move. There's something about being in a different place that generates creativity. It helps me think outside the box. Yeah. And I think it's really hard. And I also think one of the things I loved and I haven't been on a plane and I think eight weeks, which is the longest ever for me. I think I haven't been on a plane or train or anything in eight weeks. So I'm really feeling like I haven't been as generative as I could be. But yeah, I mean, just a laptop and it's good to move. It's good to watch scenery pass by.

Tim Cynova:

Well, certainly, I know you're traveling this weekend. So I imagine this is going to start 2020 with a bang, and then come summer, you're going to have spent every other week traveling somewhere, I'm sure.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, what is it like 12 degrees in New York?

Tim Cynova:

It's slightly warmer today. I think we're mid 20s.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I shouldn't put a little asterisks next to that whole generative thing. Traveling to frigid temperatures just slows you down. There's nothing generative about being in permafrost.

Tim Cynova:

I don't know. I sort of feel the opposite, is the cold you're shocked into being awake and alive and you're like, "Oh, God," certainly when you get down to I don't know, negative 20 that it sort of goes the other way again, but there's something about waking up and it's cold that my brain just engages in a different way.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, my brain engages in a different way but it's not...

Tim Cynova:

Survival in [crosstalk 01:41:21] that are warmer.

Lauren Ruffin:

It's different. Yeah, I do. I go right into prepper mode, how we going to survive? We have fat wood? Who's got the door flame logs? Are my feet really going to touch the ground? Where are my slippers?

Tim Cynova:

What apps do you use? How do you structure your work?

Lauren Ruffin:

My Google calendar is amazing. I don't know if we've talked about it on this show. But the one thing that's been hard about the transition to a dumb phone has been not having a calendar. That's a function that I didn't really think I had grown to really rely on. But I do and having to go to a physical day planners been really, really hard. But the brilliant, amazing magical wizard technology of your devices knowing what time zone you're in and giving you reminders is such a lifesaver. I mean, I definitely have missed meetings, but I would have missed every meeting over the last three years if I had not had a smart device to keep track of what time zone I'm in. That for me is the one. And then there is I think an app that you turned me on to maybe, Dark Sky?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

For weather. That thing is amazing.

Tim Cynova:

First thing in the morning.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. So it's the first app I look at in the morning.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, I once saw that as a way to differentiate between some Myers-Briggs personality types. Maybe it's not the personality type, it's one of the letters in the Myers-Briggs. It's like, you're either the person who checks the weather or you go outside and just risk it.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, Katie goes, "We have French doors that open up to the outside in the bedroom." And so she opens the door and steps out.

Tim Cynova:

And then an hour later when it's completely changed...

Lauren Ruffin:

This is New Mexico. I'm like, it starts off... It was like 28 degrees this morning when I woke up, it's going to get up into like 50 or 60 today, and then it's going to drop back down at night, kind of the flavor of it every day. But yeah, the stepping outside in the morning isn't as helpful as it would be someplace else.

Tim Cynova:

Well, I guess if you have a car, you can have an umbrella in there. And it's not the same thing as you're in Midtown and all of a sudden it rains.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

So part of this conversation was around the transition between physical and virtual workplaces, or straddling those two things. And you've been a part of our conversation and at times fervently leading our conversation around transition to entirely virtual I'm thinking after the 2016 presidential election. So now that we're an entirely virtual organization, and we've gone through through the 12 to 18 months of getting there. I'm curious to get your thoughts on what that was like, what concerns you had that actually were real concerns, what things didn't we think about that maybe we should have thought about? And what are sort of the outstanding things that we will just have to wait for time to pass to see if it actually becomes something?

Lauren Ruffin:

So, one, my first concern about virtual started when I was hired, because I think I was the first non-engineer hired as someone who was not in the office full-time. Maybe me and Polly, no, probably wasn't full-time then. But I remember transitioning from organizations that allowed work from home. But it was really a paranoid thing. What are you working on? What are you doing? You're really going to work from home? And remembering how seamless it felt to work from home and even to be in the office couple days a week when I first started. But I don't think organizations know how much it means to have colleagues who really trust that you're doing your work when they can't physically see you or you're not present. And conversely, you understand this just because you're in the office, you might not be working.

I quickly realized that the three days week that I was in the office were my least productive days because I was in meetings all the time. So there's that. The second interesting thing about our transition is how there was a split on the leadership team around... Sean and I being completely comfortable with it, like just flipped the switch. And you and Polly probably being like, "I don't know, there's gonna be a lot of change and a lot of blah, blah." And then Polly walking in and being like, "Let's just do this, I'm ready now." And that happened in like three months. I don't know if we ever really talked about how quick Polly flipped the switch?

Tim Cynova:

No, I don't think we did.

Lauren Ruffin:

And Tim, I'm a little worried about you, because you're still in the office.

Tim Cynova:

I'm still in the office, but I work on the ops team that is the last team that has to be.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I mean, I can't tell if you're done with like the five stages of grief?

Tim Cynova:

I'm going through the five stages of I've got a lot of crap here that it's time to get home. And it takes like, every day I'm taking another bag of I've worked in this office for 11 years now and I've just stored a lot of stuff at the office. And it's stuff that we've used like light kits and green screens and stuff. So it wasn't just me at the office using it, but yeah, part of it is just practical. I'm taking a load of stuff home every day. But also because the team needs to clear out the space and make sure that there's not a water leak that floods the office. That's the last thing we're doing.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I'm curious about... So my workplace setup is way less interesting than yours. You've been working in the same office for so long. You've been there five days a week.

Tim Cynova:

Unless I'm traveling.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I mean, but what are you going to? Do you have a workspace at home?

Tim Cynova:

I do.

Lauren Ruffin:

Well, you're in like a New York apartment, what's the square footage on that?

Tim Cynova:

I don't know. I'm really bad at square footage, actually, because I thought that the Fractured Atlas office in New York was 3,000 square feet. And then I saw the building owner listed and it says 8,000 square feet. I don't have a concept for square footage. And I read that and thought, this can't be 8,000 square feet. That seems massive. But I don't have a concept for it. So I imagine that the building owner is correct on the square footage.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I didn't think it was that big either. We looked at a building in downtown Albuquerque that was 7,500 square feet on two levels. And it was most definitely significantly larger than our office space.

Tim Cynova:

It could be something with common areas that they have to factor in for tax purposes and stuff, but my apartment is certainly not 3,000 square feet. And I mean, I am fortunate that I have a room that the computer is not at the end of the bed anymore.

Lauren Ruffin:

Got it.

Tim Cynova:

I do different, as to you, we do different types of work. And the home office is great for some types of work for me, but not for other things like thinking and I find too when I travel that I'm processing things in a different way. And while it can be exhausting to travel, there's actually some really great benefits to how it influences my work it allows me to make connections between ideas that if I'm in the same space, I don't have that benefit. So one big monitor at home and a really old desk that was my great grandfather's. The only two things I have from my family, great grandfather's desk and my grandfather's chair, both of which were not made for people working in the 21st century. Let me just say that.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, now I get it.

Tim Cynova:

Beautiful pieces. Really not functional.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I looked at, as I'm furnishing, I looked at a desk that I feel like the desk was probably 50 square feet. One of those, like desktop was expansive, and I was like, "I have a really big house now, should I get this big old style governor's desk?" It's probably the size of a double bed. It is huge. And I was really tempted. You look at those things and you realize they're huge. It's not like they were made to have a monitor on top. They were just big for just big sake. It was no reason for anyone to have a desk that huge except for ego.

Tim Cynova:

Well, interesting point. In one of my previous organizations, one of our board members was the CFO of a publicly traded company, and I went to his office and I imagine the desk you're looking at is what his desk was like. And it was back in the day where he just had spreadsheets all over his desk. And I thought, "That's why you need a big desk." But yeah, besides that, yeah, if you take a 15 inch monitor or a laptop, a lot of space to collect dust.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I remember when working in politics, people have very large desks. And then there's like, I have a really big desk, but nothing on it. Because when you go to very rich guy who will remain unnamed, you'd go into his office. There's nothing but a phone on his desk and zero inbox in his life. He agrees to do something in a meeting, picks up the phone calls the Secretary to do it and puts the phone back down. But there's nothing on his desk and I'm like, "This is such a badass power play."

Tim Cynova:

He should have like a TV tray.

Lauren Ruffin:

Exactly, like nothing on your desk at all? And then now that I'm taking a film class and watching old movies, I realized that becomes like a hiding place. You can't hide under a very desk, like little...

Tim Cynova:

[crosstalk 01:49:58] going, "I see you. I see you."

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, like you're totally transparent. So now I watch movies and I'm like, what kind of does this person have because the desk becomes its own sort of hiding place its own landscape in a way that's really interesting.

Tim Cynova:

I saw recently that one of the standing desk manufacturers created a hammock attachment. So you can put a hammock underneath your standing desk.

Lauren Ruffin:

Viewer you can't see my face right now, but Tim knows that I'm going right to Amazon or to someplace that's a little bit more worker friendly than Amazon to find said hammock as soon as we get off of this conversation.

Tim Cynova:

It looks really dangerous. You should be very careful.

Lauren Ruffin:

I live on the edge if that's how I go, I'll be proud.

Tim Cynova:

That would also be how the hammock desk trend ends.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, exactly. Well, my family tradition is the laugh at funerals so that gives them lots of material. They will talk so much shit about me at my funeral if I died in a hammock desk.

Tim Cynova:

It's a hammock underneath the desk. So it's like a standing desk. And then there's a hammock underneath.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm sorry. This just got more ridiculous.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm sorry.

Tim Cynova:

But to your earlier point, it's not like you're protected from anything so everyone could just see you like, hanging out in the hammock underneath your desk.

Lauren Ruffin:

Just swinging under your desk.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh gosh. I mean that feels like a great like baby attachment. Super mom worker. Dad friendly.

Tim Cynova:

I'll split snacks down there. I don't know.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I mean, even Cassidy and Enzo, nine and 12, but if they see a hammock under a desk they get right to swinging. But like a grown ass adult underneath desk?

Tim Cynova:

I know.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, that is a blessing for this morning. Thank you for this Tim. Thank you.

Tim Cynova:

Well send me photo when it arrives.

Lauren Ruffin:

Thank you. Yeah, I don't know if I could hang it under here. But now I definitely have to buy a desk to swing under. It's on. It is on.

Tim Cynova:

Yes.

Lauren Ruffin:

How did we get here?

Tim Cynova:

The future of work.

Lauren Ruffin:

Future of work. That's right.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I can't imagine my grandfather, corporate job. What you do at four o'clock in the afternoons? Get underneath your desk and slip into a hammock.

Lauren Ruffin:

It's so wild.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

I do wonder with the sort of gimmicky office stuff, you walk into some office spaces, and there's so much extra stuff, there's candy machine, a vending machine and video games and foosball. And I'm like, you could just take this and pay your workers more to work from home, you could take all this money on this physical space and give everybody on your staff a five to 10% increase, and let them buy their own crap for their house. And that, to me is the biggest waste of I mean, I think physical offices are a waste at this point for most organizations. But the ones that sort of decorate them like they're supposed to be a fun home place, I'm like you could give your workers, you could give that money to them so they can actually have a fun house to work from, to improve their quality of lives.

Tim Cynova:

Probably nine times out of 10, if not more, it's not a fun workplace just because it has that.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, there's got to be like a curve there.

Tim Cynova:

It also masks intentionality to, this came up in prior conversations, in alternative work arrangements and going entirely virtual and designing an office, like you're asking yourself questions and a lot of times like the foosball table and the snacks, that masks sort of what should a workplace actually be and have so that when people show up, they have what they need to be successful.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I was in one in the [inaudible 01:53:31] in May, I was in one where they had a bunch of beanbags and a quiet dark space for people, it was like nap room or some shit. And I'm like, "Is this is a kindergarten?" Do you know unsanitary having people just lie down in their dirty ass street clothes in an office environment is? That is disgusting. Yeah, I don't know. It's a weird thing. But if you want to have a nap, take a nap at home. Well, I would have thought until 10 minutes ago, take a nap at home. But now I'm like take a nap in your own personal hammock desk. But these workplaces?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, the nap pod was something that over the years at Fractured Atlas, people routinely put on the list of things that we really needed for the office. But when we started talking about like, "Okay, so, right, people are all just napping, who cleans it? How sanitary is it? Do we really need a nap pod in the office?" Sort of went the same way as the frozen margarita machine. It might be fun the first time but then someone has to clean it and no one's going to make margaritas again.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, there's some things like that, that I will say really when I was working in D.C., I always loved having a couch in my office, but it was my couch. I could take a nap on my couch when I had to work late or be in early.

Tim Cynova:

I had a conversation with the Director of Development, who came to our office right after we had renovated, Director of Development at another Arts organization. And was saying that he was trying to get a work from home day because he writes his best when he sits on a couch. He said, "Actually, I just would be fine if the company could buy a couch to put in the office so that I could sit on it and do my writing." And after he left, I'm like, "Wow, that's a really, that's like a $500 IKEA max proposition for the person who's actually writing the grants to keep this organization in business." And that felt like an easy thing to just say, "Okay, let's just put a couch in the office." But it seemed like a massive bureaucratic issue about whether they would just put a couch in the office so that this person who raises all their money could work more effectively.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, but I do feel like organizations missed the point. So often on that, just so often, if somebody wants work, just give him a work from home day. It is the cheapest yes, you can possibly say yes to. But you say no, because of control.

Tim Cynova:

Control. What does it mean? Setting precedent? Yeah, a lot of other things that aren't really about the work for home day.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, but again... Not again. But like, Lencioni, trust, if you have a healthy organizational culture, you can talk about why that person gets a work from home day and you don't and the difference is in your work, and why you need to work from home, and why someone else needs to work in the office. I also think the problem is people start thinking that once you flip that switch in your head into who needs to be in an office all the time and who doesn't need to be in office all the time, then you realize for most organizations, you don't need an office space.

Tim Cynova:

And on that note, yes, lots of stuff to think about. Lauren, it's always a pleasure spending time with you. Thank you so much for these chats. Thank you so much for making time and have a great week.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, thank you so much for letting me know about the desk hammock. Thank you, truly blessed. Have a great day, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

Thanks, Lauren.

Lauren Ruffin:

Bye.

Tim Cynova:

If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today. Please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or phone friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don't like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.

Shared Leadership, Part 2 (EP.08)

Last Updated

February 20, 2020

In this Part 2 of our exploration into shared leadership models, we sit down with a team that lead the transition from a single founder/CEO model to a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical co-CEO leadership team.

Guests: Shawn Anderson & Pallavi Sharma

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

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Guests

SHAWN ANDERSON currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer at Fractured Atlas where he oversees the organization's software development operations. In that role, he serves as one of the four members of the organization's non-hierarchical leadership team. Prior to joining Fractured Atlas Shawn was a founding partner at Gemini SBS, where he managed the development of web applications for a number of U.S. Department of Education funded projects including the Federal Resource Center, the Regional Resource Center Program, the Family Center on Technology and Disability, and the Technical Assistance Coordination Center. He Holds a B.A. in user interface design from Hampshire College.

PALLAVI SHARMA currently serves as the Chief Program Officer of Fractured Atlas where she oversees the team responsible for program strategy and growth, product development, customer service, and R&D. Prior to joining Fractured Atlas, Pallavi was a full-time consultant helping nonprofit organizations and women entrepreneurs develop strategies, streamline operations, improve team effectiveness, and market themselves successfully. Her previous roles were varied and global, including working at large organizations like 1800Flowers.com and Everyday Health Inc., to startups funded by Goldman Sachs, as well as an early stint in the luxury retail industry in India. After her 16+ years in the corporate sector, Pallavi is excited to transition her skills and experience to follow her passion for the nonprofit space. Pallavi is a voracious reader, an aspiring writer and a lover of all things in nature – plants, animals, even bugs. Pallavi completed her MBA from IIM, Bangalore India and holds a Bachelor’s degree with triple majors in Psychology, English Literature and Journalism.

LAUREN OLIVIA RUFFIN currently serves as Fractured Atlas’s Chief External Relations Officer where she is responsible for the organization’s marketing, communications, community engagement, and fundraising. Prior to joining the team at Fractured Atlas, Lauren served as Director of Development for DC-based organizations Martha’s Table and the National Center for Children and Families. She was also fortunate to serve in various roles at and various positions at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Children’s Defense Fund, New Leaders, and AAUW. Before entering the nonprofit sector, Lauren held the position of Assistant Director of Government Affairs for Gray Global Advisors, a bipartisan government relations firm. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science and obtained a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law. Previously, she served on the Board of Directors of Black Girls Code. And in her spare time, she can be found mountain biking or gesturing wildly at the teevee in support of Duke University’s men’s basketball team.

TIM CYNOVA spends his time assisting teams and organizations with the things they need to create workplaces where people thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR), a trained mediator, on faculty at Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and New York's The New School teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Leadership & Team Building. He is a certified trainer of the Crucial Conversations and What Motivates Me frameworks, and is a firm believer that Work. Shouldn't. Suck. He currently serves as the Chief Operating Officer of Fractured Atlas where he oversees the FinPOps team (Finance, People, and Operations, as well as is a member of the organization’s four-person, non-hierarchical shared leadership team). Prior to that, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville Courier-Press. Also, during a particularly slow summer, he bicycled across the United States.

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Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi. I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. A podcast about well, that. On this episode we're joined by Fractured Atlas' four person shared non-hierarchical leadership team for part two of "CEO Not (Necessarily) Required." In part one, we spoke with Mike Courville, Kelly Kienzle, Holly Sidford and Russell Willis Taylor. We dove into what shared or distributed leadership is, explored some models, discussed the criteria that's useful for successful implementation and chatted about our thoughts for future exploration. Now we'll spend some time with a group that helped craft and lead the transition from a single founder led company to this current experiment. But first, let's welcome podcasting favorite co-host, Lauren Ruffin. Lauren, how's it going?

Lauren Ruffin:

Hey Tim, I'm good. Living the dream. It's New York Midtown. It's clean and sunny here in January. What a blessing. It's good.

Tim Cynova:

Today's a special day because we're joined by two of our colleagues who help us form a Voltron of sorts of the leadership team.

Lauren Ruffin:

I always think of us as Captain Planet.

Tim Cynova:

Captain Planet of sorts. Shawn Anderson and Pallavi Sharma who help us form the Fracture Atlas four person shared non-hierarchical leadership team. Pallavi and Shawn, welcome to the podcast.

Shawn Anderson:

Thanks Tim.

Pallavi Sharma:

Thank you for having us Tim.

Tim Cynova:

As if there was a choice.

Lauren Ruffin:

Captive audience.

Shawn Anderson:

That's right.

Tim Cynova:

So the four of us have been working together for about three and a half years at this point for that entire time we've served as members of the Fractured Atlas leadership team. However, our foray into shared leadership really began about two and a half years ago when Adam Huttler, Fractured Atlas founder and CEO at the time, began his sabbatical to explore to launching another company that ultimately became what he left the organization to run. Shawn, you mind giving us a once over of how our leadership team is structured? How do we coordinate? When do we meet? Things like that?

Shawn Anderson:

We do have a basic meeting cadence. Yeah, so every week we're meeting for our weekly tacticals. We have quarterly ad hoc scheduled, so meetings that are beyond the tactics. We used to do quarterly off-sites. Those have turned more into once or twice a year now though.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's new.

Shawn Anderson:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. We were supposed to have one this fall but moving and then it was just holiday scheduling. But I could see us doing twice a year moving forward it seems like.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Because Shawn you live in Denver, Pallavi lives in India, Lauren you live in New Mexico and I'm in New York and we've actually been entirely distributed for quite some time and the organization now is entirely distributed. But it means we see each other mainly online and only two, maybe three times a year in 3D in person.

Pallavi Sharma:

I just want to jump in. I mean I think the one thing that's important is... Tim you mentioned this, that we had been working together for three and a half years and it was well over a year later that we actually formed the shared leadership team. So we'd already established kind of relationships and understanding of each other. And as far as how the team got structured, I mean it was just an organic thing. We were the four kind of leaders or whatever you want to call it off the functional/operational areas in the organization.

Pallavi Sharma:

And it made logical sense for us to kind of come together to form the shared leadership team. Even though we may not have formal or we may not stick to the formal schedule all the time, I mean I think we have such a great relationship with each other that we're able to communicate anytime we need to and all the time we need to address things. So the formal meetings I think are more time that we require when there's really something significant that we need to discuss and otherwise we have a strong enough relationship that we can discuss things on the fly.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, we have our Slack channel and then impromptu zoom meetings in other exchanges.

Tim Cynova:

We've all been in other organizations, we've all been in leadership positions in other organizations. How does the shared leadership model that we're experimenting with differ from a leadership team model in a maybe traditionally hierarchical organization where there is one CEO?

Pallavi Sharma:

I mean, I'd say the first thing that always... I mean as cliche as it sounds, they always say it's lonely at the top. And that I think has always been my biggest concern in any leadership position I've been in. There never really is someone that you can be completely open, honest, candid with. Someone that you can trust to help you through some of the challenging times that the organization or your team might be going through. So I think the biggest advantage I feel in this shared leadership model is we have that. We have that support system, we have people that we can talk to and share even if we're not looking for specific input. Just being able to open up to someone who gets it and understands it and can contribute to solving it. That's a pretty amazing feeling.

Shawn Anderson:

Yeah, I would agree. I mean, in the tough moments, it's so much easier when you're not alone. Just having someone to say, "Hey, you're sharing in this pain, right?" They're like, "Yes." That's a big difference. I felt what it's like to be alone in the tough situations and there was really no place to turn. It's nice to have a team of people you can count on.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. And I think that people will tell you you can find that support network outside of here. They'll say like, "Find a mentor or go have a drink with someone at another organization."

Shawn Anderson:

Not the same thing.

Lauren Ruffin:

No. I mean you need somebody to complain to in your organization about the unique situations that are happening in your organization.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah. I think the other thing is when you are in a traditional hierarchical model there's always someone who holds the ball. The buck stops with one person. Again, boy I am loving the cliches today. And the challenging part, I always feel like is you need to know enough about everything to be able to make the tough decisions and the opportunity for smart, talented, differently skilled and just different experiences that every one of us has had makes it a lot easier to come together to find the ideal solution as opposed to trying to figure it out ourselves or independently. And yeah, I think that also is a huge advantage.

Shawn Anderson:

We talked about non-hierarchical commiseration.

Tim Cynova:

Where in a traditional organization, right, it's just you. And so you have to go someplace else and people just won't understand it as much and sometimes there's times I just need to talk to someone right now about this who deeply understands all the complexities at play here.

Lauren Ruffin:

Tim, you were at Fractured Atlas when it had a CEO. And you were both you and Shawn, but what feels different now? I'm just thinking you're the only person who's been in your role still with the three of us now. That's a lot of change and also not very much change. So in so many ways you're like a baseline for what the experience is.

Tim Cynova:

There's been so much change that's just been going on sort of naturally through Fractured Atlas that it's tough to separate what might be because of the shared leadership team. Holly, Russell and I talked about this a bit where just after getting into this, then we started switching to an entirely virtual distributed organization. But there are also different changes in programs and people are always coming and going and it just feels like different challenges, new challenges. I think one of the interesting things though when I came into Fractured Atlas was I believe I was the first person on the Fracture Atlas team who had ever run another organization.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I mean that shows up at Fractured Atlas. The way we're structured sometimes and who we hire and how we hire. But, yes.

Tim Cynova:

And I think Adam appreciated that. Finally someone else, it wasn't the same level of the knowledge of the complexity and stuff. Adam literally built the company type of thing, but I understood what cashflow issues were and what it meant to fire someone and how to go through hiring and all of those things that just as CEOs and executive directors, it's tough to explain to someone what firing someone is like until you've done it. Or when you're going every two weeks to figure out how to make payroll. You can read about it, but when you actually do that thing, you understand the toll that that takes on you. I think that was appreciated.

Shawn Anderson:

So when I first came to Fractured Atlas officially, we experimented with the 10 person leadership model. I never really had the experience of just the pure CEO. We were there for the move towards where we are now because I see that as an intermediate step. First trying how do we distribute leadership in some way? How do we give more ownership and agency to people throughout the organization and not rely on a single person for every single decision? It's almost as if we're in a more refined version of where we started.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, because 10 people is most certainly unrefined and maybe a little bit vulgar. That is horrible.

Shawn Anderson:

It was very challenging.

Pallavi Sharma:

Really.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Shawn Anderson:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's got to be.

Tim Cynova:

Pallavi what were your leadership teams like at the organizations that you were with? You worked for Everyday Health, 1-800-Flowers. What were those structure like?

Pallavi Sharma:

It depended on the organization, but typically I'd say for most of the places I worked at, there was a CEO and then they were heads of business units which had independent P&Ls. And I was a head of P&L at many of my jobs. Again, depending on the organization, sometimes you had functional leaders who were responsible for say key support functions like IT or finance. We had legal teams sometimes. That group of business unit owners and the CEO tended to work together to make decisions.

Pallavi Sharma:

But again, as a business unit owner you again, within the context of your own work, you are the head of the organization and that makes a challenging. Or if it's not at that level, if it's one level down or a couple of levels down. There is some more opportunity I guess to share and seek help from your colleagues and your peers. But it isn't the same because the experiences are different for each of them based on what their roles and responsibilities are, their team sizes, things like that. So I'd say this is a very unique kind of structure we have, which is what makes it so exciting and fun to learn and grow from. Most places follow variations on hierarchy that pretty traditional.

Shawn Anderson:

So we started to talk about things we've enjoyed about the shared leadership team or the shared leadership team structure. For the record. I enjoy immensely getting to work with each one of the three of you individually and together. And always look forward to our weekly tactical meeting Wednesday at whatever time we have that meeting. Because it varies and depends on where you are in the world.

Lauren Ruffin:

I look forward to the 6:00 AM ones a little bit less than when we meet at other times.

Pallavi Sharma:

Oh, the 2:00 AM ones.

Lauren Ruffin:

Those are...

Tim Cynova:

Frankly the best.

Lauren Ruffin:

I think the earliest I've had is four. But when you were in Hawaii, you had-

Tim Cynova:

2:00 AM.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

I was in Hawaii though. So it's-

Lauren Ruffin:

You're right.

Tim Cynova:

And I was getting to meet with you all.

Shawn Anderson:

Give some, get some.

Tim Cynova:

But it's the opportunity to... Already talked about people who understand exactly what's happening and to be able to bounce things off of each other and to be in a place where you can't just slide through. I mean Lauren, you and I've talked about this before, where there's an idea that's dumb. So someone in this group is going to say that and be like, "In the kindest of ways or with the kindness of intentions [inaudible 00:11:00]."

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah. Let's clarify that.

Lauren Ruffin:

Tim looked right over in our direction.

Tim Cynova:

With the intention and hope that it's making that idea better. It slows down decision making a lot of times if you're just a CEO you do it and you'd move forward.

Pallavi Sharma:

Fall on your ass and figure it out later.

Shawn Anderson:

Disagree and commit.

Pallavi Sharma:

Disagree and commit.

Tim Cynova:

Several of our listeners on Twitter posted question for us and there are a couple that relate to decision making. So Carl Swanson from Springboard for the Arts asks what are your systems or guidelines for strategic decision making? Do you use a consensus or compromise model?

Tim Cynova:

Neither.

Pallavi Sharma:

Neither.

Lauren Ruffin:

Neither. I've been thinking about how to try to describe how we... It's almost a committee report out with recommendations model. If you were to think about how a board works and I won't go that far. But often because we are responsible for our own operational areas, what we do is how do we operationalize this idea or this goal we have, go back to our teams, work independently and then we present. And it's fuzzy sometimes it's conversation but we usually have a recommendation to make. I think we should do this thing.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah. I think the other thing is, again, I think because of the fact that each of us has an area that we're focused on or are responsible for, we trust that we have the expertise on decision making in that area. So when we come in with a recommendation and we have to bring the information on the detail, the kind of logic to share about why we're choosing to make that decision. We trust each other enough to support a decision unless it's way off track or it has a significant impact on the rest of the organization or some information is unclear or needs clarification or something like that. Where it's a joint decision where it affects the whole organization, I don't think it's a consensus model, but nor is it a compromise model. I think as Lauren said, it's more of a disagree and commit. We spend a lot of time arguing and our conversations I'd say on not like calm, peaceful. There are no systems and guidelines.

Lauren Ruffin:

They're pretty wild.

Pallavi Sharma:

They're pretty wild and there are no systems and guidelines. I want to be sure and clear about that. I don't think we have anything specific documented, but we very vigorously and energetically discuss anything that we have to make a decision about. And then either we're won over and we're all on the same side, or some of us disagree but agree to commit to the decision anyway.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. And also just because someone's quiet is not necessarily they agree. So given the different personality profiles on the team, we have to be conscious. I think we have actually gotten the point where we're all really conscious of everybody's energy levels.

Pallavi Sharma:

Right.

Lauren Ruffin:

And trying to bring folks into the conversation.

Pallavi Sharma:

To model that, Shawn, what do you think?

Shawn Anderson:

I think there are downsides to having four people trying to make large decisions. There are things that we've decided to do that were discussed again months or years in the past. And I feel as if, if we were just a single CEO, if that was our model, these are things that would have been in place earlier. But instead because there's so many perspectives, even something you're confident in, you could back away from because there's voices that you respect.

Lauren Ruffin:

Is that a byproduct of how decisions are made or byproducts because the way that our unique organization is set up. We have really imperfect data.

Shawn Anderson:

I think that's a good question.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I think the second guessing ourselves is something that this particular leadership team has fallen prey to in the past and talking about that, how we got out of that. But I think we struggle not uniquely. The four of us are pretty data-driven. We're handed to a certain extent, a product, an organization that just-

Shawn Anderson:

Didn't have data.

Lauren Ruffin:

Didn't have clear data. We have lots-

Shawn Anderson:

We have lots of data.

Lauren Ruffin:

We have lots of data but it's mumbly jumbly so it's really hard to see. It's hard to use data to back up your decisions and I don't know if even one person would have followed their gut to the point that they would have been able to make the decisions that we've had to make.

Pallavi Sharma:

Right.

Lauren Ruffin:

It would have taken a special kind of leader to be able to in the midst of so much change, be able to make some of the decisions we've made without given the status of what we knew to be true 100%.

Shawn Anderson:

I think we're all cognizant of the fact that we were part of the change.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Right.

Shawn Anderson:

So that brings in some amount of caution I'd imagine and wanting to, can you overdo it?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Pallavi Sharma:

The other thing I would say is just because of, as you mentioned Lauren, the number of changes and the pace of changes, sometimes it becomes tricky to kind of sift apart and say, "Wait, this thing is still a priority because so much has shifted since we last talked about it." And I think that's another thing that maybe trips us up a little bit. It's like, "Oh crap, here's a new list of priorities that we have to look at." And the list we were looking at a few weeks ago may not be relevant anymore. And I think that's something that we constantly face where we're rethinking earlier decisions or maybe going back on earlier decisions just because something new has come up that seems more important.

Shawn Anderson:

Yeah, and having four leaders operating on parallel tracks, there's so much more room for things to change.

Pallavi Sharma:

Right.

Lauren Ruffin:

Our decisions are better.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Thinking back to the single CEO thing, we do make better decisions and often way more quickly. I do think that.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah. I also want to say, I mean going back to the original question, we've had this question so many times. I think if someone else said, "Hey, what about the gray fuzzy area where it's not clear which way to go?" I honestly cannot think of a single example where we haven't gotten to a decision. I mean, this question has come up repeatedly, but I don't think we've ever left without a decision. I mean, again, it might not be a 100% consensus or it might be kind of some folks saying this is not critical enough for me and my team to have a clearer perspective. But literally, I can't think of anything that we've spent an inordinate amount of time discussing and trying to... You're right Lauren. I think we get to decisions well and we get to them quickly.

Lauren Ruffin:

We make the right decision for that moment. There have been decisions we've had to revisit because the environment's changed, climate's changed. But in hindsight I feel like they are better decisions because we fuss with each other over-

Shawn Anderson:

Well, they're going to be vetted.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Shawn Anderson:

Which in general is going to be the better decision and that's the weakness of the CEO model. They can just snap all of a sudden switch direction and not have put enough thought into it.

Tim Cynova:

Similar to hiring, you can put the time at upfront or you can put it in when the hire isn't working. And so the decisions might be slower for a four person team to make. But if you look at the full arc of whatever you're making and what's happening, and if it's a single person who makes a decision, then you have to iterate and change and stuff. Over time, those might be shorter in the aggregate than they are in the moment. It might take us a month to make that decision because someone in one tactical says, "I think we need this piece of data to get more clarity on that thing. So we need to go look at that and come back or just let it sit for a bit." But then when we do make that decision, it's been vetted, it's solid. We have that thinking behind it that we're much more certain that that will be the right decision for that thing.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah, there's not a lot we've had to roll back either I think on decision making. I mean we've revisited and tweaked but yeah, there hasn't again been I think something that we could say, "Well that was a bad decision."

Tim Cynova:

Well, an early on, six months, maybe a year into our operating as a four person team, we realized that we needed help. We realized that we were spinning in our meetings and weren't moving forward. And we were coming back and revisiting things that some or all of us thought had been resolved. I guess probably not all of us, some were. The majority of us thought were resolved and we fortunately were able to turn to our board member, Lisa Yancey, who could come in as just she is a consultant. And she was able to come in and parked her board member hat and just be a consultant with us to listen to what we're being challenged with and could say, "Here [inaudible 00:18:54] pull apart the pieces and here's what you should do." Am I describing that correctly?

Lauren Ruffin:

No, you are. I'm remembering that feeling. Yeah.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah. We got really stuck. I don't know what happened, but we kind of went into the spiral that we were unable to-

Lauren Ruffin:

That was the first time we realized how bad our data was and we couldn't make a choice. Yeah, you're right.

Pallavi Sharma:

Actually you're absolutely right.

Lauren Ruffin:

That we realized how our data was so poor that it was paralyzing us.

Pallavi Sharma:

You're absolutely right. That was all around decisions, around products and services and the lack of data made it really hard for us to prioritize.

Shawn Anderson:

I also feel like I failed to communicate how absolutely sure I was about the correct direction at the time.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah.

Shawn Anderson:

I knew what we needed to do. I thought I had conveyed it, but in retrospect it makes me feel like I probably soft pedaled it. I probably did not clarify the urgency of what we were trying to make decisions on.

Tim Cynova:

There are some things that we talk about that we've realized, "Oh, we're not talking about the same thing." Or we don't understand this the same way, but we think we do and some of that came out early on because we were trying to figure out how to work together. Some of that I think comes from most of the time that we see each other is in a zoom box or we're talking online and gotten really good at saying, I can look at Lauren and know she has something to say.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm a fairly transparent person. I mean if you can't look at me...

Tim Cynova:

All right, well, bad example. Pallavi, we can look at Pallavi.

Lauren Ruffin:

Who also makes [crosstalk 00:20:22].

Pallavi Sharma:

I mean we all do it. All four of us. There's no poker face.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

We can look at Shawn and see that. But I think that that becomes part of our shorthand for communicating.

Pallavi Sharma:

It's our version of body language.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I read a couple of books on body language by body language experts and they often talk about if someone moves their leg like that, it doesn't mean they're lying. It might mean they are, but it's more data that you're putting into the mix that you might want to explore. And so I think those are those data points for our team. They were like, it might mean that they have something to say or they're just hungry.

Shawn Anderson:

So we had Kelly Kienzle work with the board and our team about a year ago because we were trying to figure out, we had been in this model for a year, year and a half. And one of the board's roles is to evaluate the CEO. And we as a team with a board, we're trying to figure out how would you assess a four person shared non-hierarchical leadership team without it being simply assessing the four people and adding it together. And one of the things that came out of that, Kelly talked with us, talked with the board, talked with staff. Trust that we all know is a trait that high performing teams often demonstrate came up as something that people saw in this group.

Shawn Anderson:

And the question that they had though was, "Do the four of us just have a propensity to trust people or did we go through something together that built the trust or where did the trust come from?" In a way of if not these four people, how might you build that trust? Or does this model just work here right now because of the four of us and what happens when one or more of us start to leave and then someone else comes in? How do you reconstitute that team? How do you build that trust? And I would add as a close related trait the psychological safety that I think we all feel that we have in this group.

Pallavi Sharma:

The first thing I would say, I mean I can only speak for myself is, I've always feel like if you can't trust the people that you're coming into work with when you first come in, whoever they might be, then you're setting yourself up for a lot of work and a lot of headache and a lot of overhead. So if you come in with a distrust upfront, then you've already set yourself up for a lot of emotional heartache and pain and challenge. So I would hope that we're coming in trusting each other.

Pallavi Sharma:

But I think working together, we all are extremely candid or honest in different ways. And going back to what Lauren said earlier, I think some of us take a little longer to kind of process and communicate what they really feel like, but we tend to be very direct and honest with each other. And I think that can only build trust. If we were soft pedaling the issues or we were not sharing all the facts or holding something back, I think that would eventually come out. And that would cause us to lose trust in each other. But we haven't had that situation. So I think coming in with a little bit, for me at least, I came in with, "Okay, this is the group of people and I have to trust you otherwise I'm never going to get my work done." And then that trust just kept building. I think if it had broken along the way, then we'd be in a very different place along the way than we are now.

Lauren Ruffin:

There's an ego thing.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah

Lauren Ruffin:

So many people that I know who run organizations, their personal identity and ego is so tied to that organization and the fact that they have a CEO or executive title in front of behind their name. And the way our team formed and I had just started at Fractured Atlas. I think Adam and I worked together for maybe two months, one month of which was spent at the Hermitage. But when it became clear that Adam was transitioning out, my assumption was that Tim was going to step up and do the thing because, I mean why not?

Shawn Anderson:

He's Tim.

Lauren Ruffin:

He's Tim. Why not?

Pallavi Sharma:

Logical.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Joke's on you.

Lauren Ruffin:

I was like, yes. I came in to work for Adam. I was at the point where I was like, "I'm probably never going to work for anyone ever again. But let's do this thing with Adam. The guy seems interesting." And then I was like, "We have to work with Tim. Is Tim interesting?" And I was like, "Yeah, Tim is interesting. A little uptight but interesting."

Tim Cynova:

But not uptight enough that I wouldn't start a podcast.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, exactly. A little uptight. You've loosened up. That's my influence. I take credit.

Shawn Anderson:

Why not?

Lauren Ruffin:

Speaking of ego, I take credit for lots of things but I think there was a moment with the four of us. We've talked about this I think where it could have gone sideways because someone actually wanted to be CEO. And I had spent three years in. It's so interesting that truly none of us want to run this organization by ourselves and at this point, I don't want to run any organization ever by myself. But I think that's the undercurrent with regard to trust and candor and everything else. It's because, I mean you have to have the lack of ego to be able to step aside and listen to the people and build that relationship without an ulterior motive. If Tim or Pallavi or if any of us secretly wanted to be CEO, this would not work.

Shawn Anderson:

Yeah. That would set up competition amongst team members which-

Lauren Ruffin:

Which exists?

Shawn Anderson:

But there's no room for that here. If you're going to have a trust [crosstalk 00:25:27].

Lauren Ruffin:

But that exists in so many organizations that when you have different people managing P&Ls and different business lines and competing at the end of the year for a budget.

Pallavi Sharma:

Right.

Lauren Ruffin:

So many organizations are set up for that adversarial relationship between colleagues and just by virtue of Tim not wanting this job, we were all cool. So we can work together and actually work together.

Shawn Anderson:

I mean candidly the 10-person leadership team, there was a lot more of that lack of trust, more competing for air time for influence over the direction of the organization. And that's not something that we've seen with this particular group.

Tim Cynova:

There's also more overlap in that group. And one of the things we found in the research while we're looking at this model was what are the criteria for success? What are ways to set this up to be successful? And the research found that the less overlap each one of us has over the area, the more likely is to be successful. So in a traditional arts organization with an artistic and an executive director, there's very little overlap. You sort of have those two things. Here, we each have our four departments and there's overlap in different ways, but that Venn Diagram is not a solid circle on circle. And in that 10 person team, there is far more overlap and I think that's why you saw that it was because you had multiple programs in that room, multiple different activities and programs and services and departments that you almost could stack circles on top of circles. The Venn diagram was-

Shawn Anderson:

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean I was in every one of the Venn Diagrams, not by choice.

Lauren Ruffin:

You just get trusted a lot though.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah. The other thing I think that I'm thinking about as we talk through this is maybe because we didn't found all of these products and services and the team, yet we were close enough to see the details of it. We agreed on a lot of the business decisions and choices. We agreed in a lot of the direction. I think if we had diverged a lot or even some on kind of which way we need to go, that may also have led to some pretty challenging conversations. But I think we were pretty much in agreement from the beginning about what was most important and what needed to happen. And we saw things the same way because we saw it from a similar high enough but not so high that you missed the details to feel that way. Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

So our colleague Courtney Harge submitted a question. How do you use each other's strengths to support the team as a whole? How do you mitigate each other's weaknesses? Who wants to start with that one?

Pallavi Sharma:

I feel like we talked about that earlier. That's the whole benefit of having a four person leadership team that's making decisions together. Is we can leverage each other's strengths, fill in for each other's weaknesses and past experiences. I mean pretty much everything that we're going through, one of us has seen in a previous role or lifetime and therefore can bring that experience and bring that journey with them in the decision making process. So again, it's not one person trying to figure it out in their heads. It's four people who can verbalize and talk and hear things happening when decisions are being made.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. It strikes me that this team with four people or have three people, the ability to maximize assets like your personal assets while absolutely minimizing your weaknesses. I try to be self-aware, but my impetuousness around let's just f'ing do it. Just like, "Why are we still talking about this? I hate this meeting, can it be done? Can we make a decision? Let's go." The ability to pull me back from the cliff, the three of you do it all the time. And I hopefully I pull you all a little closer to the cliff. And the four of us are a spectrum in terms of risk tolerance, processing speed, everything else I think. I mean that's the piece that folks miss and that's when we stop working. That's what I'm going to miss the most. I'm actually terrified to be by myself, with myself and all of my flaws. We might have to keep our weekly tactical [crosstalk 00:29:25].

Shawn Anderson:

It's a support group thing.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah it is.

Lauren Ruffin:

Right.

Pallavi Sharma:

One with geriatrics and fooling about.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Earlier this week, since we're all in New York city meeting, we went to speak at the new school. Wasn't that a question that someone asked about how you make decisions when one of us isn't there or something like that. If Pallavi is not there. [crosstalk 00:29:49]

Lauren Ruffin:

Right.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah. The time zone thing if someone's not available.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Someone was asking, I think specifically with the time zone difference between they asked it of you, Pallavi. In India, what happens if there's an emergency in the middle of the night?

Pallavi Sharma:

I think what you said Tim, that really resonated which is one, we've learned each other's styles and approaches to things well enough that we can get to a certain point. But then we've also made enough decisions together.

Tim Cynova:

Over the years, we've learned each other's shorthands and tendencies between at least the three of us. When you pull one of us out, the three of us could sort of play that role, play through that. To work through the issue far enough so that when that person comes back online, they can weigh in at a way that's not like, "Well we need to wait 24 hours before everyone's here for us to do this thing." We can move forward and then it's much faster to then implement whatever it might be the issue.

Pallavi Sharma:

I also feel like we do a good job saying like, "There probably isn't an emergency in what we do."

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Pallavi Sharma:

Like a real emergency. Shawn, you have some stuff that's on fire but even in the grand scheme of like life or death-

Shawn Anderson:

It's not life or death.

Pallavi Sharma:

Emergency.

Shawn Anderson:

It feels like life or death for the organization, for our customers. And I think that's where when I'm experiencing an emergency, that's where my sense of urgency comes from.

Lauren Ruffin:

But I mean for the most part I thought that wasn't such a sweet question from your students because I was like, "There're really aren't any emergencies in the arts." This is not super high pressure.

Pallavi Sharma:

Not just arts. I mean most organizations unless-

Lauren Ruffin:

I mean most organizations, right?

Pallavi Sharma:

Unless they are working on life and death.

Lauren Ruffin:

Unless you're working with kids or the elderly and infirm in a hospital.

Pallavi Sharma:

Right.

Lauren Ruffin:

Fire, rescue. I worked with someone for a while who was always having emergencies. I worked for a boss who would be like, "Tell so and so it's emergency." And I'm like, "What you're doing is actually not an emergency. That's not an emergency. That's just you have a competing priority."

Shawn Anderson:

You're just going to burn out your employees that way.

Lauren Ruffin:

It's not an emergency. You have something else that's due and that's all it is.

Shawn Anderson:

There's times I think something's an emergency, I just don't tell them.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Another question that came in from Twitter is from Daron Hall. How is responsibility and salary quantified?

Pallavi Sharma:

Can you quantify responsibility?

Lauren Ruffin:

I guess that's what we do with salary.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah. Well Fractured Atlas we have a-

Shawn Anderson:

Fixed tier compensation system.

Pallavi Sharma:

Thank you. Fixed year compensation system. So the same fixed year compensation system that applies across the organization applies to the shared leadership team. And while our individual roles and responsibilities within our teams might be different, we carry an equal weight when it comes to the running of the organization. I mean all of these places that we talked about earlier about jumping in when someone's out, handling emergencies. And I'm saying this with air quotes that nobody can say are all reasons why fixed year compensation makes the most sense? Again, like Shawn was saying earlier, it takes away the competition, right? We're not fighting to get to that next level because we're already at that same level.

Shawn Anderson:

I think not having strict fixed year comp would make a shared leadership model so much more challenging.

Pallavi Sharma:

Totally.

Shawn Anderson:

I'm not sure exactly how you'd approach it too because all of these issues that we're talking about would be exacerbated when we all know we're not making it the same and when a 990 lists what everyone's making, and that was one of the biggest challenges that we had in setting up this model. Was that we wanted to set it up where there was no first among equals. There wasn't someone who, "Oh yeah, they can sign for the CEO." Type of thing because then it wouldn't be truly non-hierarchical.

Shawn Anderson:

And that created issues with Chase Bank and a lot of different state bureaus where they're like, "What do you mean you don't have a CEO?" So we had to create board resolutions that said, "This group and the people in this group can function as the CEO of their department or of the organization so they can sign for the CEO." Some of the models that I studied in advance, particularly in corporate, where you need someone to be able to sign contracts and filings and whatnot. They did have a first among equals even if it was as part of a shared team. I think that would make it exponentially more challenging to come together in the same way where there's... You could simply be in the room as equals.

Lauren Ruffin:

I think it can happen. It's just a lot more fragile. I was just thinking if the person who managed the largest business unit, our team sizes vary. I have the smallest team managing the smallest budget and if Pallavi or Shawn went out of their way to say, "Well, I mean I'll manage. This is clearly my team is more important." And that could happen again to a certain extent it does come down to who's on the team and what's their worldview and what's their ego like? But I mean even in a situation where salary isn't the thing, it could just be same salaries and that person wants to throw my program area or my department is more important because we do X amount of business or we oversee X functions. I mean if that's what you bring into work everyday, that you believe that your work is more important, that's going to come out in how you interact with your colleagues.

Pallavi Sharma:

I think again going back to the fact that all of us have worked different places doing other things. I think we've also held different kinds of responsibilities so we understand the importance. We've been on the side where we were told we were not the most important or we've been on the side where we believe we were the most important and realizing that everyone's important. And every department and every area is equally important and has a role to play. So that makes it less likely that we're going to have that challenge.

Tim Cynova:

There's also something I think related to the shared identity versus shared purpose focus because sometimes we might get into this is not necessarily anyone says, this is mine. One of us can redirect to say, "How does this help serve our members? How does this help further the mission of the organization?" And that's usually enough to say, "Right. This is what we're trying to pull together to do. This is what we need to do." And that's enough to sort of break from a shared identity, internal focus to an external focus. So when Kelly helped us with our assessment, she gave us a 30 page document or so that had about 17 themes in them. The model represents and encourages diversity, one.

Tim Cynova:

Two, the model reflects our values and mission. Three, the model is effective and efficient. Four, the model enables us to be bold. Five, the model generates collaboration. Six, responsibility is shared and that's good. Whatever number is next, responsibility to share it and that's difficult. That was actually, there's nothing in that to have a board section and a staff section. Seeking an answer from four people is frustrating and slow, but maybe the quality of the answers is better. This model creates more transparency in decision making, makes it easier to approach the leaders. This model is exhausting for the leaders. Every time that it's come up I've reiterated what was said at the time, no (beep).

Tim Cynova:

Every time I say it, I know I have to edit that word out. This model is better than a single CEO model. This model is potentially better if we address vulnerabilities. This model means we might mean we need to reimagine how leadership and board work together. Establish how the board will evaluate the leadership. So I think that's putting a pin in the board likely needs to do more work around what the evaluation process looks like in the future and need to understand why/how these individuals are so successful together. Anything on that list that I just read resonate more than others?

Lauren Ruffin:

I mean the bit about how your model needs to reflect your values. It's pretty early up, so I might be getting it wrong. But I spend a lot of time thinking about business models. And it strikes me that some of the conversations we've had this week even we're realizing we're being very candid about the fact that the model that we currently have, which is a nonprofit model that relies heavily on philanthropic subsidies to survive, is probably not the most innovative cutting edge model for the organization to be sustainable long-term and to really make change and meet our mission long-term. So I mean, and when I'm talking to people in classes I teach or folks come up like, "How do you do this thing?" I think we tend to follow the default assumption around what type of organizations like what organizations look like. So everything from the having one CEO to you go ahead and get your (c)(3) status.

Lauren Ruffin:

We just kind of follow this sleepwalk through this path of starting something and it feels like as a team we've been liberated because of the four of us and over time some of the freedom the board has given us to really dream a little bit about what could this container be? What could the organization do? What kind of model could we set up to make sure that we last for as long as we're supposed to last, which is likely not in perpetuity. And I wish that we'd done that sooner. I wish we'd been able to pull ourselves off the page enough. I mean, there's been so much change and so much work that we had to do to get this point, but I'm appreciative of this particular opportunity to do it now.

Shawn Anderson:

Along those lines, I feel like it's enabled us to be bold. I'm seeing that now and like you're saying Lauren, it feels like that has evolved. A lot of the list feels like it was reaching into the future. A bit of the what could be the aspirations for this model and I think some of that is starting to crystallize more now.

Pallavi Sharma:

Yeah. For all the positives I think, I mean the one thing, maybe it's because you emphasized them. But I'm thinking about a difficult aspect of it and for all the positives of sharing, the decision making and having someone to talk to, there's also an added burden now. In a traditional model, you would only be deeply burdened by the decisions around your own team and then you would take it up to a CEO who would either help make the decision or guide you to the decision.

Pallavi Sharma:

But now I think we take up a little bit of the burden of every one of our teams when we have... So not just our own, but a little bit, a little bit, a little bit of everyone else's burden. And that on the one hand that means that everyone's burden is a little lighter. But it also means everyone's burden is a little heavier. And speaking to the exhaustion factor, it definitely doesn't multiply by four but feels like it in terms of just we are now involved in everything. Whether actively or inactively or just mentally. We're aware of everything that's going on, we're involved in everything that's going on at a conversational level, at a decision level. I mean different levels of involvement, but that's a lot for four people to be carrying as opposed to one person to be carrying.

Shawn Anderson:

That's true.

Pallavi Sharma:

And even that one person, I'm not sure in a traditional CEO model they would be carrying all of those things because they I think that sense of helping share the burden doesn't come into play. I think that's a valid statement or word or whatever that they used is that it's difficult and it's tiring and it's exhausting and all of that fun stuff.

Shawn Anderson:

I wonder to what extent the exhaustion is about the model or is it about the organization and the things that we need to do. So if we were to let's say pick up this exact team and put us in charge of something that had a very clear straightforward business model, would there be the same amount of exhaustion?

Pallavi Sharma:

Actually, it's interesting. I think it would simply because of what you said. You said the things we have to do, it's we.

Shawn Anderson:

Yeah.

Pallavi Sharma:

Even if there's something on your team, Shawn, I'm a part of it.

Shawn Anderson:

Yes. Yeah.

Pallavi Sharma:

Even if it's just a little bit, it's in the list of things that I'm waking up at 2:30 thinking about. I mean we're all waking up and thinking about not just our stuff but everything because it's all in there in some way or the other. And I think that's the little bit of difference I see. So there is the support, there is the comfort of having someone, but there's also the added weight of knowing and being responsible for all of these things.

Tim Cynova:

As we close our conversation on shared leadership and reflect on the model, our team, what are your closing thoughts?

Pallavi Sharma:

I really am curious about how it would work if it were a different group of people in a different place. I mean one of the things we know from all of the research, Tim, you were trying to do is that there's not a lot of examples out there. And I really wish more people would try it. I mean you've mentioned this enough times, it's an experiment. Sure, We'll try it and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. That's what anything is about in an organization.

Pallavi Sharma:

You try products, you try services. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. So I'd be really curious to see if this is a model that can work in other places because there's just so many advantages to it and I think it really shakes things up, brings the organization to a different place and you can always go back to the traditional model. It's tried, tested, it exists anywhere. It's an easy thing to slip back into. But to go out there and try something that's different I think would be an incredible experience for any organization. I'm just curious. I'm going to be watching to see now if there are others doing it and what their experience is like. All those questions about, "Is it because it's the four of us or it's the individuals?" And, "Is it because we came together a certain way." Or, "Did it happen because we're in a shared leadership model?" I don't know the answers to the question because there's no other benchmark to go by.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Along the same lines, I mean we've talked to organizations who are thinking about it and then decide not to. The shared leadership question, I feel like once you ask yourself that, how can you not say yes? It's the sort of question that would keep me up at night forever. As a board, as a CEO, whatever role. Once you start asking yourself, "Can this be a little bit more egalitarian? Can I distribute responsibility in leadership and power?" We didn't talk about power at all.

Pallavi Sharma:

We didn't talk about power, yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

But can I share power from a Can I? Like that I, me, am I strong enough to share power with someone else and trust someone else and build this thing with someone else? I don't know how you start asking yourself that question and say no. That to me is the... Tim, you and I have talked to organizations who are curious or to listeners who are curious about it. That's a little shade at you all, you should do it.

Shawn Anderson:

That's a pretty challenging, no.

Lauren Ruffin:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tim Cynova:

There's a lot behind that that you're saying no to and exploring it and thinking you're going to just turn that down on, keep the status quo. Especially in this day and age when so much of what we're certainly focused on as organization with the field is focused on inclusion, equity, racism and oppression and to say, "No, we're going to still stick with that one person at the top and the hierarchical organization and it's not important enough for us to start looking at how we structure organizations differently." We don't have it in us to do that.

Shawn Anderson:

I agree with that wholeheartedly. I mean, this notion right now of executive power seems to be blaring in your face. I don't know of a better way to start transforming organizations and corporations then trying to embrace some form of shared leadership.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Gosh, that executive power and then abuse of power. It's a really hard to get to the point where you're abusing your power if it's shared.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I think on that note, getting to work with each one of you together and individually is a huge privilege and incredibly meaningful. We won't work together forever unless we do.

Lauren Ruffin:

It's the podcast, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

It's the podcast.

Lauren Ruffin:

This is how we're going to work together forever.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, at least [inaudible 00:44:46]. It's an incredibly meaningful part of my professional career, getting to work with each one of you in this. And Pallavi and Shawn, thank you for joining us on the podcast. Lauren as always, always a pleasure to spend time with you and each one of you. Thanks.

Pallavi Sharma:

Same. Thank you.

Shawn Anderson:

Thanks Tim.

Tim Cynova:

If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review in iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don't like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Shared Leadership, Part 1 (EP.07)

Last Updated

February 14, 2020

On this episode, part 1 of “CEO Not *Necessarily* Required.” We look at shared or distributed leadership models, what are they, what aren’t they, how they work, how you might evaluate different models, and might they be right for you and your organization.

Guests: Michael Courville, Kelly Kienzle, Holly Sidford & Russell Willis Taylor

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

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Guests

MICHAEL COURVILLE is Founder and Principal of Open Mind, an independent consulting firm that combines research insights with direct social sector experience, to tackle problems that impact people and spiral out to organizations and into complex systems. Michael has deep experience with organizational capacity building, change management, applied social research, community development, and social sector strategy formation. His current research and client projects focus on workplace democratization and decision-making systems in nonprofits, understanding the role of arts and culture in community change, social policy under neoliberalism, and the political cost of inequality for civil society. Michael holds graduate degrees from the University of California-Berkeley in social welfare and comparative development policy. He is an associate member of the National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers and an affiliate of the RoadMap consulting network. He currently serves as adjunct faculty in the Department of Sociology at Sonoma State University. (The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation's case studies in Distributed Leadership can be found here.)

KELLY KIENZLE, founder of Open Circle Coaching, provides leadership coaching and professional development programs to individuals and teams to improve organizational performance in the private, public and nonprofit sectors. Kelly is a people development specialist with over 25 years of experience and is a certified coach of the International Coach Federation logging over 1,500 hours of coaching leaders. A description of her philosophy and approach to coaching can be found at www.opencirclecoaching.com.

HOLLY SIDFORD is an expert systems thinker–seeing connections and making more than the sum of the parts. Her endless curiosity, penetrating intelligence and commitment to excellence underpins all of Helicon’s work. Holly draws on her training as an historian and her experiences as a program developer and funder to inform Helicon’s efforts to elevate the role of artists, recognize the full diversity of creative expression and make the arts and culture a more central part of community life. Holly has a knack for identifying the most important issue facing the field at the time, and her work is often a thought-provoking catalyst for change. Reports such as Bright Spot Leadership in the Pacific Northwest (Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, 2012) and Fusing Art, Culture and Social Change (National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2011) have stimulated field-wide discussion. Earlier in her career, her work at the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund helped shift national discourse and practice in the ways cultural organizations engage audiences and communities. In 2000, Holly’s work prompted unprecedented research on artists, Investing in Creativity (Urban Institute, 2003), and the creation of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), a unique ten-year initiative to expand support and recognition for artists nationwide. Holly serves on the board of Sadie Nash Leadership Project, an award-winning leadership program for young female leaders in metropolitan New York, and Fractured Atlas, a national organization pioneering technology-based ways to empower artists, cultural organizations and other creative enterprises.

RUSSELL WILLIS TAYLOR served as interim Vice President for arts and leadership at The Banff Centre in Canada from 2016 to 2018. Prior to that, she was President and CEO of National Arts Strategies from January 2001 to December 2014, and she has extensive senior experience in all areas of strategic, financial and operational management. Educated in England and America, she served as director of development for the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art before returning to England in 1984 at the invitation of the English National Opera (ENO) to establish the Company's first fund-raising department. During this time, she also lectured extensively at graduate programs of arts and business management throughout Britain. From 1997 to 2001, she rejoined the ENO as executive director. Russell has held a wide range of managerial and Board posts in the commercial and nonprofit sectors including the advertising agency DMBB; head of corporate relations at Stoll Moss; director of The Arts Foundation; special advisor to the Heritage Board, Singapore; chief executive of Year of Opera and Music Theatre (1997); judge for Creative Britons and lecturer on business issues and arts administration. She received the Garrett Award for an outstanding contribution to the arts in Britain, the only American to be recognized in this way, and in 2013 was honored with the International Citation of Merit by the International Society for the Performing Arts, presented in recognition of her lifetime achievement and her distinguished service to the performing arts. She currently serves on the advisory boards of the British Council's Arts & Creative Economy Advisory Group, the Alyth Development Trust, the Salzburg Global Seminar, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

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Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. A podcast about, well, that. On this episode, CEO, not necessarily required. We look at shared or distributed leadership models. What they are, what they aren't, how they work, and might they be right for you in your organization? We're joined by Mike Courville, Kelly Kienzle, Holly Sidford, Russell Willis Taylor. And if after this episode you're still hungry for more about shared leadership, next week's episode we'll dive into part two of this adventure by chatting with the members of the Fractured Atlas Four Person Non-Hierarchical Leadership Team. We have a lot of ground to cover, so let's get started.

Tim Cynova:

Our first guest is Mike Courville, Founder and Principal of Open Mind. Mike and I connected after he published a series of case studies based on his research around how different organizations are distributing leadership. And since our first few conversations flew by, I'm excited to have him on the podcast to kick off this episode. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Mike Courville:

Hi, Tim. Great to be here. I appreciate being invited and looking forward to talking with you today.

Tim Cynova:

We had a conversation a couple of months ago, it ran long, it was rich with a lot of information, around shared leadership, around just workplace in general. I'm really excited that we can capture some of this for posterity on recording, because you've done a lot of work around shared or distributed leadership models through your work at Open Mind Consulting. You've been engaged in research around this with various different organizations. What do you call it, shared leadership, distributed leadership, and whatever you call it, what is that thing?

Mike Courville:

It's really interesting. When I really started to get involved and thinking about this more deeply, I recognized quite quickly after talking to a lot of organizational leaders in the nonprofit sector, that people describe shared leadership and distributed leadership often in similar ways. They'll use both words and they use other forms of leadership to describe what they do, collaborative leadership or they might sometimes describe it as relational leadership. And I think what I was recognizing is that taking together, what we're talking about here is when there's more than one person who's essentially making decisions and ultimately driving something forward. It's really about a more participatory approach.

Mike Courville:

So I think shared leadership is lik a concerted action between many people or groups of people within organizations to get something done. And distributed leadership is a really deliberate, intentional effort to include people in decision making from many different levels within organizations. That's kind of how I think about it. One is going down vertically and across horizontally. The other is more just saying, how do we bring as many people into this process as possible?

Tim Cynova:

We first met when you were presenting at the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference in October. You were a part of a panel about the work that you had been doing with the Hewlett Foundation and some of the organizations that have various different models around distributed or shared leadership. Can you talk about that work? Was this your first foray into it or do you have a prior background as a shared leadership aficionado?

Mike Courville:

My interest in this stems from both having worked within large nonprofit organizations that were truly trying to figure out, how do you bring in new perspectives, new ideas, new voices into complex decisions? And I myself had worked as a co-director, co-executive director for a while for a nonprofit or research institution. And myself and my co-leader really sort of went back and forth about what does that look like? How do you do that in a way that's truly shared? And then I've worked in larger organizations where I saw leadership teams trying to figure out, how do we include people from the right level of the organization to inform decisions.

Mike Courville:

But I also started to observe and notice that a lot of folks were talking about being more inclusive and participatory, but sometimes their practices weren't quite participatory and inclusive. And so I got more driven to think about this as a research question and I started looking at the literature and talking to colleagues who are both scholars and researchers around leadership, nonprofit management, and other fields. And what came to recognize is that we haven't done a good enough job of really understanding and parsing out the practices or what I call the cultural attributes that actually sort of manifest when you actually distribute and share leadership.

Mike Courville:

And so the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave me an opportunity to think more deeply about what's happening in the arts sector, arts and culture sector. And so we took a close look at arts and cultural organizations in other nonprofits to see how do people actually do this. When I started to sort of point finger on with my colleagues from Informing Change with my research partners, was that we're really thinking about the way decisions get made. Like, it's a really practical location within organizations that see how power, participation and inclusion play out when big decisions are made that are high stakes decisions.

Mike Courville:

So decisions about how resources should be distributed, who gets paid what, what are we going to produce as an organization, or if it's a performing arts organization, what are we going to put on to our performance calendar for the year? Big decisions. And we really look closely at that. The research kind of helps bring into sharper focus some of the attributes, I think, practices and organizational forms that manifest as a result of being more distributed in your leadership practice.

Tim Cynova:

What were some of the forms like? A lot of your research is available? I've watched video series that you put together, I've read some of the research. What were the different types of organizations that you studied that are part of this cohort?

Mike Courville:

Yeah. So we did a combination of things. We collected data that was more of a narrative, kind of told a story about different organizations who have adopted distributed practices. And we often say that they're adopted to different degrees. So in some instances, we have organizations who have boards of directors and you've kind of ... Maybe this is something going on for Fractured Atlas as well. Boards of directors who actually reflect or include individuals who may have actually been participating on staff or were as staff at one time. In an organization we saw called Orpheus, which is a conductorless chamber orchestra in New York City, we saw this example where they actually had members of the orchestra just sitting on the board as voting members. And then they would rotate and other members get to sit on the board.

Mike Courville:

So they're participating and thinking about big governance questions. And they're bringing perspective from the performers side, the practitioners side, and also the side of leadership and making decisions about the organization. So in that form, we're seeing how even at boards of director levels, you can have this sort of participatory opportunity for staff to be part of the leadership process in an organization to high level. We also saw organizations who distribute to different degrees, where what they built are really intentional teams to deal with day-to-day decisions that have to do with operations, have to do with strategic plans, that have to do with resources and expenditures.

Mike Courville:

So we would see smaller teams coming together, like at the Denver Center for Performing Arts, they run a sort of experimental program called Off-Center. And in this particular effort, you have a lot of new leaders who are coming together to think about new ways to engage audiences who didn't traditionally show up for performances that were taking place in the Denver Center. They were looking for younger audiences, and they were trying to figure, how do you engage them? So they started to make more decisions together and they kind of brought people in from marketing, people who were actually involved in the design and the decisions about the performances and about the artistic director. Everyone coming together and thinking through, what can we do to bring more people in to see our performances from a new demographic?

Mike Courville:

In that size of distributed leadership, you have small teams that membership often changes and adjust and adapt over time, depending on what they're trying to accomplish. But you have more people getting engaged in a decision. And those people actually take full responsibility for whether that's a success. Or if it didn't go as well, what did we learn from that? How do we change and do it differently next time? So you can have people involved with very formal leadership practices like at the board level or senior leadership teams, but you can also see groups coming together to make decisions about programs or about performances, or about the production of something really specific for an organization.

Tim Cynova:

When Fractured Atlas started our exploration or journey into shared non-hierarchical leadership, I was struck by the number of cultural organizations I spoke with who thought this is really novel thing. And then I pointed out well, you have an artistic director and an executive director, that's shared leadership at the highest level at the organization. And there's a lot of aha moments, were like, all right.

Mike Courville:

Yeah. I'll say something about that. I think that there's definitely moments where people kind of lead alongside each other and we looked at that in organizations. We may have like, what's called the co-leadership model. And while I do think that's opening up for shared leadership, for me, and for what I'm thinking about when we look at organizations, it's too much agree are more people participating in decisions? So if those two individuals are co-leading, how are they practicing their leadership in ways that makes room for others to participate? So this can include, what we noticed was a lot of directors who are more distributed, they see themselves as sort of a central communicator within the organization.

Mike Courville:

They're really helping to push out information, connect people across departments or across service providing areas of an organization. Like, how do you connect people? They don't see themselves as having all the authority vested them can make each and every decision. So I think co-directorship is a great example of sharing. And then what I'm interested in is, how does that then sort of manifest further in the organization in practices across departments and teams elsewhere where others get involved in decision making? And that was something we looked kind of closely at because, well, I think shared leadership can be expressed as just two leaders working alongside each other as a co-leadership, that may not be sufficient for truly building the kind of inclusive participatory workplaces we see.

Mike Courville:

I think they're more democratic and more collaborative when there are more voices and more people making the decisions together. And not everyone's going to be a decision maker. But we did see a lot of organizations like On The Move, which is based in Napa, which is not necessarily an organization that traditionally operates with just sort of programs and services. They really are a leadership pipeline organization that tries to match leaders to new projects and community that can make kind of progressive social change. And in doing that, they built out this cadre of powerful leaders who then can participate in senior leadership decision making. They can participate in leadership decisions for programs. They become more engaged in leadership decision making.

Mike Courville:

And that was really interesting to see. Because it's not just the executive director and a team of senior directors, you see people from within other programs stepping in to make big decisions with them and collaborate with them on big decisions. So I think that the multiplicity of voices and the opportunities for people to participate, really strikes me as a more significant degree of distributed or shared leadership. And I do think it's good to acknowledge that co-leadership can be right size for some organizations, but there are further degrees you could take that to be more distributed.

Tim Cynova:

Your concept of co-leadership, your categorization as co-leadership might actually hit at some of the problems that actually exist in organizations that have two different leaders who are operating effectively in silos, they're co leading, but they're certainly not shared leadership model. And that just because you have that, there are other things that actually need to be present in order for distributed or shared leadership models to be successful.

Mike Courville:

Yeah, it's a great point. I think that a lot of times people make an effort to bring new leaders or more leaders into positions of authority. And so they might have a co-leadership model where someone's a senior director of operations. Someone's a senior director of finance, someone's a senior director of program or in modern arts organizations, an artistic director, an executive director and they're like side by side or alongside each other. But they may still be operating within silos and be thinking these are my respective areas of responsibility. And so it sounds like you've built a team in title.

Mike Courville:

But in practice, what we often would observe in organizations that did that was that there wasn't really any sort of collaborative, deliberative kind of collective sense making around big decisions. People weren't necessarily participating or feel like they had a stake in driving or determining the outcome. There's a lot of opinion seeking that goes on in organizations like that too. Where they'll say, well, let's listen to each and every director and see what they think. And then the executive director still makes the final decision or in the case of an arts organization. We might solicit input from different people on staff but the artistic director makes the final decision.

Mike Courville:

That kind of sounds like it's making an effort to be more participatory. But when you step back and you think about who still holds power and who actually operates and practices leadership, as in the intentional sort of setting of direction of the work, I think that's what starts to become interesting to think about. In organizations that we looked at where they were making big decisions, where they took a lot of people's input, they oftentimes had to organize that in some manner, and then realize they come with like ... Almost a matrix where they would say, let's have like 25 people get together, have a conversation about, what might be produced this year? What might go on to our performance calendar?

Mike Courville:

We want to be more inclusive and we want to have more stories and shows about communities of color and people have been excluded historically in our community, LGBTQ folks. And the organization that did this kind of brought all that information together in sort of a master matrix and then working together with the artistic director, with managing director of marketing, with all the staff sorted through that and said, what decisions would be the ones that most people are invested in? It's kind of a more democratic process. So it's not just opinion seeking. It's actually kind of like ... I mean, it's really the old school crowdsourcing. It's like how do we get as many people to make a contribution and then together, figure out which of these is the best choice for us?

Mike Courville:

One thing I'll say about this is that also distributed and shared leadership, it takes more time to do this well, and that's because the more democratic you're, the more time it takes to include more people. But there's a sense of authenticity and genuineness that a lot of the organizations describe. That by being able to participate more intentionally in decisions, staff from many different levels in the organization would convey a sense of feeling connected and feeling like what they were providing to the organization was meaningful. So when we're thinking about building organizations that are both equitable and feel more democratic, there's something about distributed leadership when it's practiced right that seems to convey to staff and to organizational participants that they matter and that their voice matters and what they have to say is important.

Mike Courville:

Even if their particular opinion or issue doesn't get selected in the end, they felt like they got a chance to contribute. And a lot of executive directors in our study would tell me things some [inaudible 00:14:07] of, I spent a lot of time cleaning up messes because I didn't include enough people. I didn't actually collaborate and distribute the leadership process. It made me have to go back and clean up a lot of messes that I could have avoided making if I had been more intentional about it. And I think that's an interesting insight from sort of an executive director who sees the value of being more distributed as a way of making smarter, better decisions, and then having people feel enlisted to support them and engaged in the process of implementing them.

Tim Cynova:

It also creates transparency that helps people make better decisions in their own right. They have context, more context for how they're making decisions, and seldom are people making just bad decisions to make bad decisions. Despite someone, it's usually they're making the best decisions that they can based on what they know of the context in which they're operating.

Mike Courville:

Yeah. And I think we're trying to build out cultures in organizations that have a more equitable set of practices at their center. So thinking about equity and inclusion which becomes something of a real concern for many organizations today, and also in our society thinking about how to bring in more voices. And particularly, when we're talking about the work around racial equity, what we also have come to think about and sort of wondering about and wanting to do more research around this is that, are there conditions that distributed leadership creates that actually help accelerate organization's efforts to become more racially equitable, to become more inclusive, and to become more participatory?

Mike Courville:

Because what we found in the organizations we study is that they're creating spaces for staff to feel like they can contribute in a genuine way. And they're helping executive leaders and traditional senior leaders with positional authority, we would say reconfigure their relationship to others, they start to lead more from the middle. This was something we found was a pretty powerful practice. Meaning, it's not like one individual has all the answers and makes all the decisions and this sort of command and control from the top.

Mike Courville:

They really find themselves centered in the middle and they're having people get together and gather around them and gather with them to make smart decisions around oftentimes complex questions or tough calls, not always simple of yes or no kind of things. I think by pursuing distributed leadership, an organization may be helping itself create the conditions that will help build a more equitable organization with regards to inclusivity, but also in regards to race and other forms of identity and other forms of inclusion.

Tim Cynova:

What are some criteria that organizations need to have in place or immediately start to address in order for a shared or distributed leadership model to be successful?

Mike Courville:

From all the organizations we've looked at, they all sort of picked up and adopted distributed leadership at different points in their history. So some built it in at the beginning. It's kind of in their DNA. And others have tried to figure this out after having been long standing command and control kind of organizations. Shifting gears. I think some of the steps that organizations can take to get started is first number one, is think about the values that drive your decision making in the organization. Have you taken a look at where you share values as leaders in organizational stuff and where you might diverge? Do you have a value around equity? Do you look at who's missing from decision making opportunities? Do you look at who's present and who's missing?

Mike Courville:

Because if you start to build a sensitivity towards what equity looks like in practice, it starts to open up the possibility that you can change the way you actually practice decision making so it's more equitable. But first, you have to understand the value of equity, and building that in to organizational practice seems to help organizations get closer to adopting more distributed styles of leadership. The other is sort of your thinking through your board and your senior staff have to really take some time to build trust. And we found this to be really important as well. And trust building means listening to other people, hearing what they have to say, and not necessarily passing judgment but really listening. And then being able to respond in a way that's sort of thoughtful and reflective. And this is another set of practices we find often coexist in or distributed organizations.

Mike Courville:

Reflective practice on the part of leaders themselves, building a sense of trust with the other people you're going to make decisions with, and a recognition of the value of equity. And I think if you start working towards those three values, attributes and practices, you're starting to open up the pathway forward. And then you have to come up with some really explicit rules of engagement. I think this is important to lift up and elevate. Because other people have talked about forms of kind of distributed leadership that involves practices that don't actually allow others to step in and participate, because they don't know what the rules are. How do we do this?

Mike Courville:

So you kind of have to be clear with each other about when you're inviting people in to make decisions, what are the expectations about that? What is the amount of preparation required? And what's the time that's going to be necessary to do that? Another thing I'm noticing organizations have done, some of the realizations in our study did this, was thinking about the equity that comes with the pay to do the leadership work. So how do you actually allocate pay or salary so that people who are spending more time leading and making complex high stakes decisions feel like they're being compensated adequately. So that there's not going to be this sort of off-kilter or tilt of people still getting elevated salaries, because they're supposed to be positionally making all the decisions when you're now asking for decisions to be made across the organization. So you're going to have to take a look at that.

Mike Courville:

It's not to say you have to bring everyone's salary in line with each other. It's thinking about how you do that in a way that's equitable. And so I think all of those things may be helpful for organizations who are starting to think about this. But I will say one more thing, Tim. Something I've observed, and this isn't something we've studied deeply, but it's been sort of emerging from the findings. Organizations who've done this well have already accepted and embraced the importance of managing and being good managers. And there seems to be a relationship there. Meaning, thinking about time, thinking about how you give supervision and feedback, being reflective, being thoughtful, being intentional.

Mike Courville:

All of those things seem to carry well and carry forward. Because when you distribute leadership, you're going to have to pull on all those practices and really rely upon them in a more diffuse way. And so I think it's good to think about it. Is your organization already doing some things now that make you stronger organizationally as far as management, because then you can start to open that up and bring more people in and do it in a way that seems fair and inclusive.

Tim Cynova:

That's a good point. Yeah. If your organization doesn't already have those things, then it's going to be very obvious when you start to mess around with it that those will be problem points. It reminds me the point I read when I was doing some research in our own exploration around shared leadership. If you looked at sort of a tier, the leadership team tier, researched showed that the tier right below the leadership team often suffered maybe the most because it didn't have the same relationship that the leadership team had. It didn't often have the same trust and psychological safety. And so you saw this breakdown immediately below as they're trying to struggle with it, but hadn't yet done their homework.

Mike Courville:

Yeah. I think that's really important. I agree. And I think with almost all the organizations, there was some reference to the importance of trust building, even if it's a group of people who see each other regularly is maintaining that trust and understanding and listening. I can think of a couple examples to make this really accessible to the listeners. There's a group Terrain and Spokane, Washington. It was founded as a very community-based, community connected organization that would incubate arts and economic development in the community.

Mike Courville:

As they started to formalize and grow the organization, they got a little anxious that they might lose the collaborative ethos of the organization and the participatory ethos. But they also recognized there have to be some ways of helping those who come in who are new to the organization, know the rules and know how to participate, and know how much time it's going to take to do that well. This included their board having to understand that as well as the staff.

Mike Courville:

So the reason I'm lifting up Terrain as an example of kind of what you're alluding to, is that this was an organization that really had to figure out how to take the time to build relationships and ensure that the trust continues to flow as new staff come in, as they grow in size and they bring in new individuals to participate in decision making. Because they're kind of growing as they're simultaneously trying to continue to foster distributed leadership. So it's trust building is happening constantly as people come in. And you can't minimize the importance of that, whether it's someone coming in to do operations for your organization or finance or whether they're going to actually be a program director. How do you fold them in?

Mike Courville:

And then another organization that's been doing this for such a long time, which was Orpheus, they've been doing what they would describe as a form of shared distributed leadership since 1972. They recognized that they had to as they grew and developed and matured, everyone has to come to performances and rehearsals with some level of self-leadership and individual maturity to know how to manage time. So that you respectfully listen to each other, give contributions and ideas and make decisions in a way that's also timely. And I think that includes trusting that just because you didn't get to speak and say something about this particular issue or decision, you trust that others who weighed in have said something important and of value that you can kind of trust to follow that lead of others for the time being.

Mike Courville:

So it's not that everyone has to speak. But if you're building trust even within a large group, like in this case, an orchestra working together, they trust each other enough to say that, I don't always have to be the one to make a comment. Every time you bring new members in, they talk about how do we bring new members in and fold them into those practices that they feel like they're part of that. And they can share in that. So it is beyond just the leadership team. And if you are bringing people together, and you want to see them do more work, to distribute leadership within their teams or departments, or more broadly, they do need the time to build trust.

Mike Courville:

That can be simply a matter of making time on the front end of meetings to have conversations about what's been happening for you outside of just work, what else is happening, and how do you share and disclose a little bit about who you are and the way that people become to appreciate you. But it's also about realizing that you may have to take a little more time to connect with people around the table before you can actually take on a big project together. Because it might stall out if you don't build the trust.

Mike Courville:

There's a group called Thousand Currents that we studied. They're actually a grant making institution that works mostly in the global south. They talked a lot about moving at the speed of culture and the speed of trust. It's not about getting it done within a 30-day timeline. It's about building that arc of relationship that will sustain the work long-term. And then that makes them go faster and I think makes them smarter about the work they do in the future. And this would include executive assistants, admin assistants, all the way up to policy people within that organization, all of them throwing out how to work together with a way of trusting each other.

Tim Cynova:

A new different way of working that might seem ... It's an intentional new way of working, rather than just the way it's been done. You think it's good and you think it's fast, but then it's not.

Mike Courville:

You said intentional, I tend to call these things intentional actions. What you find within organizations that distribute to some degree is that more often than not, there's a cadre of leaders because we are building more leader-full organizations through this work, who are really making intentional steps to both listen, to be reflective, to solicit input, to inform individuals who historically maybe weren't informed about big decisions and bring them in.

Mike Courville:

So it's a really intentional effort. And it happens periodically and then it keeps happening over time. And that's something that we also noticed, particularly executive directors who've recognized that they got to change their way of operating from being just like the final decision maker at the top. It's sort of like, how do you intentionally keep engaging actions that let other people lead, that give people enough information to make smart choices and be part of the process?

Tim Cynova:

I want to come back to founders as it relates to this question, because the last time we spoke, I know you get some questions about this and I'm curious where you got with this. I guess there's that. And also, some of the questions I frequently I'm asked relate to those who are not at senior levels in the organization who ask, can we still do this? Or how would we approach it? It's usually, what if leadership or what if our board doesn't go for this? What do you say to organizations? What's your advice?

Mike Courville:

Let me take the first question from founders. I didn't want to come at this work with an assumption that if someone was a founder, they couldn't necessarily be distributed in their style and practice are shared in their orientation. We were open to that and I've been open to that. What has been hard is that a lot of founders came into the role they're in now during an era of a certain kind of organizational psychology of sort of the command control. And today, some people talk about this as sort of everything ... There's scarcity and resources are limited. And just like, we got to always keep our hands on the wheel, we can't share it with anybody else for fear that will lose out. That's a reality, sort of political economy of this that we have to keep in mind.

Mike Courville:

But I have seen some founders who have intellectually an orientation to wanting to share and wanting to build new leadership. And what I've seen, though, is that if those leaders don't feel like they necessarily have the time to be able to change the kind of practices that they would need to deploy in the organization to shift, if they will be willing to step either aside or let someone else step in. It's kind of thinking about stepping up and stepping back. Like, how do you move around the space. And I've seen organizations where founders have stepped back and said, it is time for someone else to lead in this organization.

Mike Courville:

And because I understand the importance of distributed, shared leadership, but maybe I haven't quite been able to practice it like I hoped, how could I bring in a new leader or a new set of leaders who are already oriented to that? Or are already practicing that to some degree. Who bring that reflective posture, who have demonstrated an ability to be very collaborative, and to kind of make sense of other people we call it collective sense making. Bringing in leaders who could succeed them, who can bring that forward more rapidly, would be one way founders, I think, can help this flourish.

Mike Courville:

So that's to say, there are some founders who have led organizations in a distributed manner. But I do think sometimes it's harder because historically, many organizations were being pushed to move away from that and to kind of centralize authority and so sometimes that's hard to see. And I think to your other question, which is when people work with an organization at different levels. We took lot of time thinking about positional authority because we thought it was important to make a distinction between that and leadership. So positional authority is sort of that tendency to confer upon an individual a set of responsibilities, a certain kind of recognition, whether it's to pay or titles, almost status.

Mike Courville:

Within organization, there's always going to be different levels of positional authority that are formal. But leadership can happen at any level. And with distributed and shared leadership, we're trying to ask people to lead in many ways and in many different circumstances. And so your position of authority doesn't always equate with your chance to lead, to help make a decision or to move some things forward. And I think that I would say to folks who are coming in, maybe they feel like they're at a mid-level organization or they're entry level, but they'd like to see more distributed leadership or more shared, would be to start a conversation with their immediate supervisor or with those who work with them on a regular basis. And just maybe explore how they actually make time within their group or with their supervisor to think about how they might be able to include more people in an opportunity. Just like one small opportunity to get started.

Mike Courville:

Like, how could you practice bringing in more people to a process of decision or making opportunity for more people to have their voice heard in a decision that's coming up? And the other would be to kind of use like, there's a quiz that I created working with William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Performing Arts Program, we created a quiz to help organizations start that conversation about whether or not they're even oriented towards distributed leadership, and how that happens across generations. And that's available on their website. And that might be something you could use, a simple quiz. And then you could have a conversation and discussion about it very informally, to kind of get the ball rolling and open up a conversation about the language of distributed leadership.

Mike Courville:

Which is something else we've learned from doing this study, that a lot of organizations don't always know how to describe what it is they want to do, and they're not always crystal clear what it means. So that may be a first step. I will say that it's hard for organizations to practice distributed leadership to a deep degree. So I'm using degrees here to distinguish between there can be a modicum level of sharing leadership. That's like you had talked about co-leadership model. Vary a certain amount. But then to get to a deeper degree like what we saw with Orpheus, where like literally everyone, there's no conductor. They're all making the music and deciding things together. And then people from the orchestra are actually sitting on the board. That deeper degree of distributed leadership does require board orientation and awareness of why it matters to have the process of inclusion, and why it matters to have that kind of collaborative effort within staff and among staff.

Mike Courville:

The other organization we talked about, which was Terrain, which is a small organization, their board took a little while to figure out why would it be important to maintain the distributed practices that we can have a board with as we grow. Eventually, the board recognized the value of that and how it also made them better at responding to staff, and how it allows them to be more inclusive with what the community continually wants to see happen within the organization. So it was a benefit to the board, I think, recognizing that if we support this, then we also become more responsive to our community. And so I think it can be more valuable when every level is understanding it to some degree. But not every organization has a board that fully embraces and understands distributed leadership in practice. But the staff may have figured it out to a certain degree and it's working. But at times, you recognize where it could be more robust if everybody was kind of on the same page around that.

Tim Cynova:

Well, there seems to be things that any organization can take from this. Think about the different types of decisions that you make, command, consult, consensus and vote. And just being direct, as a leader or being open as a leader say, this is the type of decision I'm coming to you with. So everyone understands that this is what they're being asked. And this is how much their feedback or input or ... Actually, feedback and input. Those are two different things. So you could have more of a hierarchical traditional organization that still benefits from this in being intentional and being clear about what are we asking what are we doing. Even if you're not sharing leadership, being a leader-full organization, there are still waiting For you to tweak and hone even the most traditional hierarchical organizational structure.

Mike Courville:

Yeah. I think that there are always opportunities within any organization to begin to try on some of these practices to a degree or to the right size for where you are. I've had executive directors work with me from a consulting vantage point will say, I want to shift this organization to be a distributed leadership organization. What do we need to do? It's as if overnight, we're going to flip a switch and we're going to shift what is essentially a set of cultural practices and a set of intentional actions that are not yet in the repertoire of how to do things. And so I think the smaller incremental steps you can take can be really important and impactful for helping people understand what it might feel like if they tried to do it differently.

Mike Courville:

I think what was really compelling for me and for my colleagues when we looked at this was that, when a decision was collaborative, and it was truly collaborative, meaning multiple voices came together, there was some compromise, you synthesize the input into one decision. We kind of called it collective sense making. It's not the same thing as saying that it's a consensus. I think that was something we also walked away with. I want to throw this out to the listener, because I think it will be interesting what your other guests will talk about this at all. But there's this notion that consensus means we're all 100% in agreement on every point in every way. And getting there is not an always a clear path for folks. And they spent a lot of time trying to build towards that unless ... If they can't get there, they think that they haven't been collaborative. I'm not sure about that.

Mike Courville:

I'm more of the opinion that collective sense making is learning, and this is the democratic moment in this. This is what helps us as a society be better as a democracy. How do we refine what we already think is the right answer or the best path forward and reconcile that with each other's perspectives and input? Because I think when organizations have done this well, what we see as they come to rest on an agreement that's shared, meaning, it's not exactly the one thing that one person said, or it's not just the one thing we all exactly agreed on every point. But we come to embrace it that it's inclusive of all of our good thinking. And we've actually now test it out. And if it goes really well, we take shared responsibility for that. And if it doesn't work out, we take responsibility for that.

Mike Courville:

So there's a learning to it. Its to say, it may not be that we were all 100% lined up on every point here, but we came to agree and rest in this space so we could take action. And now we're going to learn from it, and we may have an incredible success from it, but we're in it together. So this is why I think you're building trust as well. Every time you do this, you build deeper trust. I think we saw several organizations demonstrate this process. I think it's an important part and can't be overlooked. I wanted to lift it up because we get a lot of questions like, does this mean we have to have consensus? When I always say, I don't think so, some people get really anxious. Like, wait, what? Isn't that one of the most important parts of building something that's shared?

Mike Courville:

Well, it also means having to learn how to build some compromise into your conversation, but not in a way that excludes or historically negates individuals who haven't been heard. That's the other thing. By bringing more voices in, really finding collective sense making solutions, you are actually reconciling with groups or individuals who may feel like they haven't been heard or haven't had their perspective understood. And that was something else we saw as people actually felt heard. That's important.

Tim Cynova:

We borrowed from Patrick Lencioni, the Disagree and Commit, where we have healthy debate. And because we built trust, because we have psychological safety, we're willing to really bring it to have those hard conversations. But at the end of the day, recognizing that the decision that we ended up with is probably much better than had one of us done it individually. And sometimes we just have to disagree and commit on whatever it might be. But you're right, that we put our voice into the pool and move forward with whatever's best for the organization.

Mike Courville:

And in a way, that's sort of also demonstrating, I think, in distributed leadership, it seems like organizations become more ... This was a concept that became more popular for the last decade of being adaptable. Some of that has to do with responding to external factors, but it also to do with internal factors. You can adapt and adjust how you do things so that others can participate, who historically may not have been able to participate. This includes people within different positions of authority, but I'm also talking around lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, other forms of identity.

Mike Courville:

That if you're going to practice including more voices, including more people, and for thinking through the best decision, with all that informed opportunity you have among yourselves, you are building trust, and you're going to possibly shift and adapt a little bit to do things a little differently. It's when you start carrying it out. And that seems to be good for organizations. Organizations have to have a way of changing and adjusting. I think in distributed leadership, what you are seeing and observing is organizations are trying to figure out, we need to have some space to adapt and make some change. How can that look differently if we bring more people into that process? So the changes and the adaptations are more beneficial to more people and make more sense to more people, not just to a few. I think that's pretty powerful.

Tim Cynova:

I'm curious. In your exploration of distributed leadership, leader-full organizations, what are the big questions that you're still wrestling with that you still want answers around? What's next in your research lineup to dig into?

Mike Courville:

I think that we have a lot of questions that I still do about the timing at which people adopt distributed leadership practices. So the timing within the sequence of their own sort of organizational trajectory, like when did this organization decide that this makes good sense? And individual leaders like, when do they arrive at the awareness or the recognition like, I want to try to do this differently. I think that timing question both for organizations and for individuals is really important to understand, because it could ultimately help advise and guide others in the future on when and how to pick this up and really put it into practice more deeply. And that may shed some light on the degrees of practice, like why some organizations go really deep and do a very deep dive on distributed leadership. Why others only find they're able to do a small amount of this on a certain level. So we're interested in that.

Mike Courville:

The other was, and I think I lifted this up earlier, but I'll come back to it is, as we've seen organizations who distribute leadership become more aware of equity and questions of who's included, who's been excluded, and how do we bring more voices in, we think there's something there between that recognition and understanding of equity. It's fertile ground to kind of have deeper discussions and further conversation about racial equity, gender equity, other types of equity that we want to be able to address and think about within organizations and in practice. And so I think we're really interested in what are the relationships and connections. And right now it's kind of, we're hypothesizing a little about this, kind of, theoretically, it makes sense, but we'd like to see what it really means concretely with some data. So we're really wanting to dive in on that more deeply.

Mike Courville:

What is the promise that this might hold for creating more inclusive organizations where people truly belong. And that's something that I think is really important to a lot of us right now in the field, and it's something that's important to me and to others I work with. We see within the practice of distributed leadership, some potential conditions that maybe if they're kind of cultivated in foster in the right way, they will really deepen our practices around racial equity and other forms of equity and inclusion.

Tim Cynova:

What are your closing thoughts on the topic on distributed leadership? Maybe it's something we haven't covered yet.

Mike Courville:

I think we're at a really important juncture in the nonprofit sector and in the world of work more generally. We are seeing a need for smart, thoughtful, complex problem solving in nonprofit sector and workplaces more generally today. We live in a very complex world, things move quite rapidly. And we have a lot of blind spots as human beings. It is near impossible for a small number of people to really see something that complex with the potential for that many blind spots well. I think distributed leadership is up a practice that has been identified in the past as useful and meaningful because it's participatory and collaborative.

Mike Courville:

But now I think in a way, it's actually probably necessary for the sector to adapt and to stay responsive, whether it's to communities who you're providing services to, or whether it's to a complex world where you're trying to deliver and produce something that's very eclectic or requires a lot of moving parts to get it done. I think we're seeing that need now. And so I think distributed leadership can be promising in that regard. But I also really think that we're at a point where more people are coming to work with an expectation that they have something to say that, they have significant value and they have a higher level of education. This is true nationally right now. More people are finishing their bachelor's degree than in the past.

Mike Courville:

We also have a lot more diversity within our workplaces by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability and other forms of human difference. And we are at a point where we need to figure out how to bringing all of those experiences and those perspectives into that sort of decision making process, because we don't want to continue to miss those blind spots. So I think organizations are at a perfect location within history to now really leverage all of this leadership possibility, all this leadership potential, and we don't want to lose that. And if we lost that opportunity to bring more people in, we may be missing the opportunity to solve some complex issues and complex problems, both as organizations and as individuals.

Tim Cynova:

Terrific. Mike, thank you so much for making time today to be on the podcast.

Mike Courville:

Thank you so much for having me join you. It was really great. I appreciate it very much.

Tim Cynova:

Our next guest is Kelly Kienzle, Founder of Open Circle Consulting. I first had the pleasure of collaborating with Kelly about a year ago when we worked to create an assessment process for the Four Person Leadership model at Fractured Atlas. We've since gone on to work together on several other things, and I'm always excited to chat with her. Kelly, welcome to the podcast.

Kelly Kienzle:

Thank you. Thrilled to be here.

Tim Cynova:

So the first time the two of us met and had an opportunity to work together was when we created the structure and process to evaluate our own Fractured Atlas, four person shared leadership team. Before we dive into that, because there's a lot of stuff that came out of that, there's a lot of stuff you helped us learn about that. Let's just take a step back and ask, how do you define shared or distributed leadership.

Kelly Kienzle:

I would define it as when more than one person shoulders the responsibilities and authority of an organization. So by this definition, frankly, most organizations have some form of shared leadership. But the scope of their responsibilities and authority gets gradually larger as you go up the ladder of senior leadership until you get to the top where the CEO typically sits, and that is where the greatest port of responsibility and authority rests. What's unique about Fractured Atlas is that your shared leadership does not have that variance in scope of responsibilities and authority. But at the top, the four of you each sit there and have the exact same amount of authority and responsibility. That's how I would define it traditionally and how I see it for you guys.

Tim Cynova:

When you came into the project with us to figure out a system and a structure for assessing our shared leadership team, what were your initial thoughts? What were you maybe hoping to get from it, hoping to learn, maybe some things to real life examples of backups and research and maybe hunches about shared leadership?

Kelly Kienzle:

So what I was hoping to learn was whether this ideal that I talk about a lot with my clients and hundreds of articles have been written about was possible. And that ideal being a true shared leadership model where people in an organization have equal voice to help shape the future of that organization. So that's what I was ultimately hoping to learn from it. I was also curious just to get under the hood of Fractured Atlas and see how operations had been working since you'd been in it for a year or a little more at that point. And answer questions like, can non-experts in a particular area contribute meaningfully to a decision making process outside their area? For instance, you sit in the seat of operations, yet you have equal voice in IT decisions. Can you contribute meaningfully? Because part of that answer leads us to answering, is the single CEO model, in fact, a strong one? And the answer we found was resoundingly, yes. That was exciting to see.

Tim Cynova:

Before we get to what you found during the process through your interviews and research, what was the process like for you?

Kelly Kienzle:

It was fascinating to go through the process. It was a mental exercise for me in that the key question I was trying to answer was, how effective is this model? Not, how effective are these four individuals as leaders? And it's that latter question that I'd always been answering in all my previous work. Any performance review in the organization goes through that process, and they're trying to evaluate the performance of a person. Here, I was trying to evaluate the effectiveness of a model. So for me going through that process was trying to, sorry to say Tim, but kind of dehumanized you and the other three of you and instead ... Every time I would start to picture you as individuals, I would instead try to picture you as a four-headed piece of art and evaluate that. So that was what it like for me.

Tim Cynova:

Nice. I imagined the leadership team will now commission a four-headed piece of art or a piece of art that has four heads for our next assessment.

Kelly Kienzle:

That'd be excellent.

Tim Cynova:

Actually, we should have asked the board for that as a momento from this last assessment, having known that.

Kelly Kienzle:

Yes.

Tim Cynova:

Well, that's a challenge to separate those things. Because it is such a natural thing, we're evaluating a person, how well they did and then maybe we roll it all up together to see how well that group is doing. But not from sort of maybe reverse engineering to the model into the people. And then what are those traits and skills and the knowledge that's necessary to make that a success?

Kelly Kienzle:

Yeah. And then the challenge got even trickier when I started talking to people in the organization, board members and staff. And they started telling me how the success of the model was largely because of the personalities of the people. No.

Tim Cynova:

It’s not at all helpful here.

Kelly Kienzle:

Right. Yet, going into this as objectively as I can, I had to take in and absorb that data, that input from them, and understand how personalities affect the success of the model. That was an interesting intellectual exercise too.

Tim Cynova:

Well, you have a master's in positive organizational development from Case Western, where you focused on how to build resident leadership and achieve positive organizational change. You also are a graduate of Georgetown University's Leadership Coaching program where you studied adult development, communications, somatics, and behavioral science. So based on a lot of research and work, what do you feel like are the qualities and traits that need to be present in this type of model to be successful?

Kelly Kienzle:

It did come down to several factors and one of them is the nature and characteristics of the people in those positions. Interestingly, none of the feedback from this process said that there were any particular environmental factors or organizational characteristics that had to be present. Which reflects what you read in the research. The research says, shared leadership is the ideal. It's effective, it's efficient, it allows to have an expert in every decision. Yet, it's just so hard to sustain. So when organizations think about what needs to be present for this model to be effective, they do need to look at their people and which people have the characteristics that would work in this model.

Kelly Kienzle:

At the top of that list of characteristics that people should have for the model to be effective is trust. Trust of one another, trust in the organization, trust in their staff. But what was interesting was for that first type of trust, trusted one another. So in this case, trust across the four of you. What was interesting was that people, both the staff, the board, and I think the four of you weren't sure whether the trust that you felt for each other was the product of having worked together so closely for over a year, or it was the prerequisite that you had going into it. It was interesting, you guys couldn't even quite remember what your levels of trust were to for each other before you became a four person leadership team. You felt that it was strong and that it was good and the staff felt that also. But it was uncertain whether, again, it was something that existed beforehand, or something that resulted afterwards.

Tim Cynova:

It seems like the chicken and the egg of shared leadership models, where trust fits and how its developed, because it keeps coming up again and again. And really for any team, trust, psychological safety, these are traits that all high performing teams exhibit or all teams need in order to perhaps be "high performing". But yeah, it was this weird thing where we're like, I can't remember that time and maybe even what we did to create that trust, because we were all individuals when we started. It wasn't like we came in together. It wasn't like we founded this company. We all joined the company at different points and did different things, and just happened to all end up on this team together.

Tim Cynova:

I mean, still to this day, I'm not sure. And it's frustrating because you want to grow more in different shared leadership teams and this is a prerequisite, I think, for that. And so how do you recapture that thing or build that thing? And maybe even faster. Not everyone has the luxury of three half years together to get to this point. That's still an outstanding question for me about shared leadership.

Kelly Kienzle:

My theory on it is that it's both chicken and egg, right? You guys have now moved from being a piece of art to being a chicken and an egg, where the trust did exist, beforehand, and it grew deeper as you guys worked together. So what I would say to other organizations is, do the people that you are looking at for this leadership role, do they have the propensity for trust? Are they inclined to trust the others of this group? And if you have that propensity, then that starts the relationship off on a positive, hopeful note. And then the trust can deepen as the group works together, debates with each other, kicks ideas around, fails together, succeeds together, and then that deeper trust can grow.

Tim Cynova:

You mentioned a little while back that this kind of model is so hard to sustain. Why is that? Why do you feel that way?

Kelly Kienzle:

Yeah. Because it's exhausting. Right? I should turn this question back to you, Tim. Right? You're the one who lived this. But again in the interviews that I did with the staff and the board, no matter how close or far they were from the leadership team, they could see how exhausting it was. It's exhausting for some interesting reasons. One is that this model is exceedingly efficient. You guys can work at four times the pace, four times the scope, because you are a four person team, than a single CEO. And so your factory is a 24/7 factory that is just inherently exhausting. It's also tiring because every decision does go through debate and vetting across the four of you, which in the end, it's also a great thing like efficiency and broader scope. It's wonderful that ideas get vetted so well because they are rock solid when they come out at the end. But the process, again, as you know, is extremely tiring. It's kind of a bittersweet revelation that something so good does have a high price to it.

Tim Cynova:

When you first gave us the research that you had pulled from the assessment, it's like a 31 page document. And you sat down with us and our board chair, Russell Willis Taylor, and just walk through it. One of the slides was, the model is exhausting for leaders. And I'm going to totally have to bleep this, but a sound was like, no (beep), Kelly.

Kelly Kienzle:

I think it was important to bring that out because it is something that is so enticing. I think that other organizations see it. They're like, we can do four times as much work and we can be so much more effective and we can have an expert in every decision. Let's do it. I think it's good to put up a great big caution sign. Say yes, and watch out for this. And that frankly, that's the second horizon of this work with this model is answering the question, how do we make this sustainable? Because even with a marathoners pace, this is still not sustainable long-term. Right, Tim?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. There's a flip side to this where ... I've been a CEO, before I've been an executive director, a sole executive director before. And to me, that's a really lonely place. No one else in the organizations where I worked had been in that role before, and understood what that was, and the weight that you hold. Especially, when money gets tight and you're trying to make payroll, and you don't have anyone else really inside the organization to go to. And while it is an exhausting model, there are three other people with you in that journey, who understand exactly what's going on, and that you can turn to. And for us, we have a weekly tactical meeting every Wednesday. And that hour is the most important hour of my week. That I look forward to because we wrestle with a really challenging things.

Tim Cynova:

We have really tough conversations. But it's the one time I'm in a room with people who totally get what is going on, and will challenge and make better the things that we're trying to do by going through that leadership team process. So it is an exhausting thing. But on the flip side, a lot of other executive positions are exhausting as well and you oftentimes don't have that backup. You have to look to mentors and executive coaches and other people to help bring some of those things. While, those are still really important things to have for any leader, it's not always that you have something like that inside of your organization.

Kelly Kienzle:

Yeah. It's true. One element that does exist, though, within every organization is the rest of the staff. And this is another discovery that came out through the research, which was by having this shared leadership model, you guys inspired the rest of the team to think more collaboratively. To consider how they can enact shared leadership at their level of the organization and with their teams and in their departments. And because it created that kind of culture shift, I think that's where the opportunity lies for the leadership team to offload some of its work. To again, live the mission of bringing equity to all by thinking and constantly pushing yourselves to identify what responsibilities and tasks you can share with the rest of the staff.

Tim Cynova:

One of the things that came up related to that is, we saw this in the research before we adopted the model. Is that rather than just one line of succession, it's X times how many leaders you have, because you need ... I mean, we need four lines of succession. Because the person or people who might replace me, are likely not the same people who will replace our chief technology officer. It's even more exhausting because you're looking for all those different things in the combination, while you're trying to take what exists on this leadership team as it spreads to the organization so that more people understand how it works and that they would be ready to slide into these roles. But it's even more exhausting because it's just not, that person will take over if the leader leaves. That's a really convoluted way of saying something. So I hope to God that I can edit that one slightly more concise.

Kelly Kienzle:

No. I think it touches on the point about how having the shared leadership model, yes, you do now have to have four succession lines instead of one. Yet, there are also a couple benefits of that. One that the staff pointed out, and I think the board did as well, is that it will be less traumatic when one of you eventually leaves as compared to a single CEO model. When that CEO leaves, that creates significant anxiety and stress within an organization. Here at Fractured Atlas, it wouldn't create about a quarter of that. I think another piece of it is that the responsibility of filling in the gap when one person leaves can be shared, again, by the other three, because all of you are so intimately involved in every decision. You do have, I believe, far more knowledge in IT now than you did 18 or 24 months ago.

Tim Cynova:

That could be a very dangerous thing, Kelly.

Kelly Kienzle:

It could be.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. When working well, the shared leadership model is much more resilient for that team, for the organization. Because Yeah, you're not reliant upon one person who holds a lot of information that may or may not be shared in various ways with the organization more broadly. Let's look more specifically at some of the themes. I shared these in a blog post about the assessment process that we put together. So for those who really want to dive into this a bit more, there's a blog post that has sort of four different stages or four different components of our assessment process, and then the 17 themes that came out of Kelly's interviews with staff. Why don't you take a moment to explain sort of how this actually worked? What did you do? How many people did you talk to? Where were they in the organization? And then how did you pull your themes together for us?

Kelly Kienzle:

Sure. So the way the process worked was, we interviewed every manager in the organization. I interviewed them. And that was six managers and then I interviewed all, I believe, eight board members, and ask them all the same series of questions with a few additional questions just for the board. I ensured that all of those interviews would be kept completely confidential so that people could speak freely. So the output of this process included no direct quotes, no attributed comments. So people felt safe to speak frankly and plainly.

Kelly Kienzle:

After I conducted all of the interviews, I went back through my notes and pulled out the common themes. I defined a common theme as the same idea or sentiment shared by at least three people. And I put just those common themes into the summary report, which I then shared directly with the four of you plus the board. The reason I do those common themes is so that you would know when you got the summary report, everything in there was real and substantive. There were no one off comments. There was nobody's bad afternoon when they were feeling grumpy. It was something that had been reiterated by others. So that was the process for it.

Tim Cynova:

Was there anything that came up that didn't fit the three time theme that you're like, that seems pretty significant, but only one person said that.

Kelly Kienzle:

No. I mean, in my mind, then it's not significant. [crosstalk 01:01:17].

Tim Cynova:

This is the way it works. Three people say, actually ...

Kelly Kienzle:

I feel like I'm dissing on that one person. So just to clarify, so it's very real for that one person, then that's something that needs focused individual attention. It's not something that is relevant to the organization as a whole. And again, we were evaluating the efficacy of the model in the organization. So yeah, a one off comment, just by nature is not relevant in the context of a whole organization.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I think that's a useful clarification too. It is a real thing for that person. But it might not be maybe real within the organization or-

Kelly Kienzle:

I heard someone refer to it once, slightly harsher terms than I would use, but as tyranny of the minority when you let one person shape the overall course of a much larger entity. No tyranny of the minority here.

Tim Cynova:

The other thing we had talked about going into it, because it was looking back, primarily looking back at a year in sort of change was how do we adapt for the recency bias? Because we all have it. It's like you get asked something and you remember immediately what happened or within the past month or so, and you forget that there are 12 other months that we're talking about. And because things at Fractured Atlas, specifically, in this instance, move so quickly and change, we often forget that, yeah, that happened in the same 12-month period. And so part of the process that you engaged in was that you were having the conversations and you would sort of help people adapt for that recency bias as they were talking, so that it wasn't just the immediacy of what they remember.

Kelly Kienzle:

Exactly, yes. So if they would give me an example from last week, all right, I would ask them, so how prevalent is that trend? How often do you see that? Would you consider that a minor or major theme? And get them to give me a little more context for the size of that issue. Because you're right, we do have that recency bias, and it's a natural way for our minds to go. But I would try to draw them out and get up on the balcony and see the broader picture of how the model had been working over the last 12 months.

Tim Cynova:

Well, there's also the negativity bias that you also just highlight. That as humans, this is something that we have. And so the questions that you were asking, were sort of reframing or giving the benefit of the doubt or whatever it might be. So what's the learning here? Because a lot of 360s, some of the reasons people don't like 360s is because people confidentially just offload all the stuff that's wrong, and then it's up to the person who's co-leading to make sense of it. And a 360 done wrong is far more harmful than a 360 well.

Kelly Kienzle:

That's absolutely true. So I use two things to combat that. One, I would remind them that we're not talking about the individual performance of the four of you. We're talking about the model. So to separate out behaviors of people from operation of the model, and it's the latter that we were focusing on. The second thing I did was to ask, instead of giving me feedback, give me feed forward, which is a concept that Marshall Goldsmith put forward a couple of decades ago now. About how it is far more effective for the recipient of input or feedback to receive that as feedforward, which means it's something that is phrased in the positive and phrased in the future tense. So it describes what they can do going forward. What is the positive behavior that the team would like to see from that person in the future? So I would ask feedforward questions about the model. To say, what would you like to see this model be instead going forward?

Tim Cynova:

We covered a number of the themes already that you pulled together, that the model represents encourage diversity, reflects specifically at Fractured Atlas, our values and mission, especially our commitment around anti-racism and anti-oppression. It's exhausting. It's better than a single CEO model. What are some of the other things that came out for you that you think are really important to highlight?

Kelly Kienzle:

One of my very favorite themes was how this model helped people be bold in their creativity. The model for the staff provided a kind of safety net for their new crazy, innovative ideas. Because they knew that if they took their new and crazy idea to the leadership team, that four people would be evaluating it, poking at it, debating it to determine how successful it could be. And so that made the staff feel that they could be as innovative as their imaginations would take them. And that's after building trust as a foundation in an organization, fostering innovation is the true magic fairy dust that every organization wants to sprinkle over their teams. So that was exciting to find out that simply the presence of the model created that.

Kelly Kienzle:

I think another theme that emerged that was exciting was how the model helped unsilo the organization. Because so many organizations struggle with silos, because we have to. We have to have departments across any organization of complexity so that the IT function runs effectively, the operations run effectively, et cetera. And so silos crop up. However, with this shared leadership model, where the four of you are the horizontal band across those four what would be silos, that created a very real connection across those. And so ideas traveled faster across the different silos is what the staff told me. It was easier to get input and perspectives from different groups on changes or ideas that were being batted around. And so that gave a vibrancy and cohesion to the organization that I think is just a wonderful byproduct of this model.

Tim Cynova:

We've touched on this a bit already. But for organizations who think, is this kind of leadership team structure right for us? What would you counsel them to consider?

Kelly Kienzle:

So in addition to considering the potential players and their propensity for trust, I think another characteristic is the mission. Asking themselves how strong is the mission in our organization and how deeply is it felt by the potential leaders we're considering to put in this role? And the reason that I say mission is that one, this role of being a shared leader is demanding, and so you really, really have to believe in the work that you're doing. That is the only thing that can drive you. And because if each person in the shared leadership model believes in that mission, then you are all ready and inherently tied together. You already have that common ground that is deep, and that can help you be that cohesive team from the get go.

Kelly Kienzle:

Because I think that also creates mutual respect for one another. Because you know if the other three people on the team believe in the mission as deeply as you do, that means you guys shared some of the same values. And if you share some of the same values, then there's respect there. Which means when you do bring up an idea, and it gets debated and eventually shut down by your colleagues, it's okay. Because you respect them. They have an opinion that you respect, it's also okay because you know they're shooting it down for the sake of the mission of the organization. And that's what you believe in too. So I think that sense of mission is another characteristic that an organization can look at to determine, are we right for this shared leadership model?

Tim Cynova:

So Kelly, do you have any closing thoughts? Well, probably not final thoughts on the topic, but closing thoughts on shared leadership?

Kelly Kienzle:

Yeah. I think shared leadership is a fantastic model that every organization can strive for. And if it seems like it's something that is too far out of reach, I would challenge you on that and have you look at your organization now and see where you already have shared leadership. Because I would suspect there are several ways in which any organization already does exhibit shared leadership. And so the question then just simply becomes, how can we make that shared leadership broader? How can we make it more embedded in the processes that we do? And how can we shape it so that it reflects the mission of our organization? And then you get started doing that.

Tim Cynova:

Kelly, it's a pleasure getting to work with you on this work. And thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Kelly Kienzle:

I've loved every minute of it. Thanks, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

To close out this episode, I'm now joined by two cultural sector powerhouses, Holly Sidford and Russell Willis Taylor. Both of whom I've had the wonderful privilege to work closely with over the last decade, who have served as mentors and friends, and also as members of the Fractured Atlas Board of Directors during our transition to a shared leadership model. I'm excited to get their thoughts on the topic. Holly and Russell, welcome to the podcast.

Holly Sidford:

Nice to be here.

Russell Willis Taylor:

Thank you.

Tim Cynova:

You've both served together for a number of years in the chair and vice chair roles of the Fractured Atlas Board. Holly, you initially were in the Chair role with Russell as Vice Chair before you swapped roles a year so back? As such, you both were in those board leadership roles working together when we started our exploration into shared leadership, an exploration that coincided with a founder transition. Holly, can you start off by describing what the process was like from the board's perspective? What was going on "behind the scenes" if you will?

Holly Sidford:

Be happy to. I guess I would start by saying, it didn't suck. It was a very, very interesting dynamic process. All the board members had been serving on the board of Fractured Atlas under the leadership of the former executive director, the single Executive Director, Adam Huttler, and had worked very successfully with him in that singular role. When he decided to leave and the opportunity to consider on a shared leadership model came forward, the board was very engaged with us. It was a very interesting idea to us. It was a challenging idea. It had a lot of risks involved. But also we saw great opportunity, particularly to advance some core values that the organization held. That is, distributed leadership, recognizing multiple varieties of talent, actually, affirmative placement of leaders of color.

Holly Sidford:

So it wasn't a slam dunk by any means. But it was a very interesting process of considering what Fractured Atlas needed, what these four individuals brought to the next phase of our development, and how we could support such an innovative model. Just say one other thing, which is, that at the time of the transition, we realized it would raise new questions for how the board functioned. And we knew that, that would take some time to iterate and develop. And I would say 18 months later, we're still engaged in that, but affirmatively engaged in it in a way that still doesn't suck.

Tim Cynova:

Russell, what kind of questions did you have about the shared leadership model when we first started talking about it?

Russell Willis Taylor:

Well, one of the things that I love about being on the Fractured Atlas board is that the default position is not to go to the default position. There's always, should we keep doing it this way? Under Holly's leadership, the board was able to stop and not just get on autopilot about how we were going to replace an outgoing leader. There was also a lot of interest in talent retention, if you don't mind my referring to you and your three co-leader's talent. We had really good people and we didn't want to lose them. And that's not the only or the main reason that we did it, but we were very lucky. We started knowing that we had people who were interested in this kind of experiment.

Russell Willis Taylor:

The questions with regard to how the board would perform is with what would we replace the kind of traditional pipeline of accountability and information that comes from a single person? Where you get to know that person and you begin to be able to communicate almost in shorthand about what's happening and about what their feelings are about the organization. Now, we were going to have four people that needed to do that. And I think we're still finding our way on that. But I also, what I liked so much about this adventure, is I really believe that this outdated notion that we have that leaders are supposed to look like and sound like and be like, it's actually much more kind of bred into our subconscious than we think it is.

Russell Willis Taylor:

By having a four person leadership team, all of whom are very different from one another, but who have complementary abilities, talents and experiences. It's a constant reminder that we shouldn't have an assumption about what a leader looks like or what a leader sounds like or how a leader brings an organization together. It's just this constant reminder.

Holly Sidford:

Could I add just one thing to that, which is, that the idea of a shared leadership model came from the staff. And to me at the time and still reflects a new generation or an upcoming generation of leaders who expect collaboration. It's not that they don't understand that organizations have hierarchy and need accountability and all that. But they are interested each in their own way in a different approach, a more collaborative approach to the role of leader and the advancement of the organization. So that was really, really an important thing. We wouldn't have come up with it on our own as a board.

Russell Willis Taylor:

I think that's true.

Tim Cynova:

Well, in this more collaborative approach is an experiment that is risky, and it's unfamiliar and not traditional and nonprofit boards are not often thought of as risk taking, cutting edge innovative bodies. Can you talk about what that was like for the board to wrestle with something that is more risky than just the status quo of here's another single CEO, and what questions might still exist for the board?

Russell Willis Taylor:

Well, I think the whole culture of Fractured Atlas since its founding has been one of embracing risk in a way that many nonprofits don't. And some of that has to seep through the board. So while we are in some ways risk averse, because our charge is to keep the organization going, not necessarily in perpetuity, but to keep it going, as opposed to the operational charge. So we're probably a little bit more risk embracing than many boards because that's part of the culture of Fractured Atlas, is to experiment and to do new things. Having said that, it didn't feel risky to me because the four people were so good at what they did. And I have to admit that there were some things that I hadn't anticipated. Touch we're very lucky we haven't had huge problems crop up.

Russell Willis Taylor:

We have realized the board needs to communicate, by which I mean, listening as well as talking in a different way with the team than perhaps we would with a single leader. But we haven't had something kind of yet blow up in our faces. But it didn't feel risky because the four of you were so good at what you did, and knew there was alignment between the direction we wanted to go in and the direction that you were already moving in. It would have felt unspeakably risky to me if we had brought in four new people to do this. I think that I probably would have had to label that reckless.

Holly Sidford:

I would only add two things. One that it would have been a bigger risk to go with a single leader. So we did debate this calculated risk or assessing risk. I think if we had said to the leadership team, no, actually we're going to go through a search. We're going to hire one individual leader. I think, if not one, if not all, many would have left the organization because they were themselves so committed to this concept of collaboration. So risk in whose eyes? That's one thing. The other thing is that once we decided, then we put into place staff and board some structures for how we would move forward.

Holly Sidford:

So it wasn't just, we have four new leaders, everything's going to be dancing and happy. We said, here's how we're going to define the roles. Here's how we're going to monitor progress. Here's how we're going to deal with the departure of any one of the members of the leadership team. We worked hard at the very outset in creating some parameters for how it would work. And staff was fantastic in this. Tim, in particular. Just giving ourselves some guideposts that we could rely on. So it wasn't a completely uncharted plan.

Russell Willis Taylor:

I think that, just add to that, we did have a map. What I really enjoy about being on this board is we were perfectly content with the fact that not everything could be mapped. That there were going to be places where maybe I would say there be dragons and we didn't really know what was there. And that I think is where the Fractured Atlas board compared to other boards that I'm on, I'm certainly not universally knowledgeable about all boards, but compared to a lot of other boards with which I've been engaged, the Fractured Atlas board was a little more comfortable with ambiguity than many boards. And I think that's good. I think in the current environment, having a board that's comfortable with ambiguity is probably pretty important.

Tim Cynova:

What do you think are the key criteria for this model to be successful?

Russell Willis Taylor:

We got to have the right people. It all comes down to have you got the right team? And is that team committed? If they don't come to it with the chemistry between them being healthy, are they committed to making the chemistry between them healthy?

Holly Sidford:

Are you talking about staff or staff and board?

Russell Willis Taylor:

Well, staff first and foremost. I think the board has to be ... You've got four people generating information, I think the board has to be more attentive and yet non-intrusive in perhaps more detailed information to understand what's going on. That can be tricky. Like many boards, we have a lot of people who've run organizations, I've run an organization and you have to know when you need to step back and go, okay, I'm not doing this. Someone else is doing this. So we need to be in receipt of information that helps us make informed decisions. But perhaps on a more regular basis than we would if there was just one person.

Holly Sidford:

I think people in the talent it's really key. But I think everybody has to want in, has to want to engage with the experiment, stay in the experiment, whether challenges that come up during the experiment. I mean, people need to want to make it work. And I think with that comes a willingness to be candid and a determination to work on candor and building trust. I mean, I think in a lot of cases, there's very little trust between the board and the staff of an organization, particularly executive director. Anyway, people are hiding certain kinds of information or protecting their territory a bit. Not that we've solved that but I do think that there's a desire on the part of board members and staff to be more candid than maybe truth in the conventional situation.

Russell Willis Taylor:

I think that's a really important point. Because one of the things that makes this work and makes it enjoyable and a learning opportunity for both board and staff is a radical form of transparency. Where the leadership team feels like they can tell us stuff that they don't want us to act on and they don't want us to overreact. Just we need to know these things. Where I think we still have some scope for improvement is how the board reciprocates that radical transparency. Not that we're hiding anything but that we regularly communicate sort of what we're thinking and how we're feeling about things. Because silence or the absence of information, we are hard wired to take as, I wonder if something is not as it should be out there in the environment. I think the will is absolutely there and the personal relationships are absolutely there. But we haven't systematically introduced a way of making communication rapid and a two-way street in quite the way that I think we need to.

Holly Sidford:

What you just said makes me think about another item, which is new in my mind. I do think that another thing that's required of a multi-member leadership team is a relatively small board. Now, if we had 25 or 30 board members-

Russell Willis Taylor:

Absolutely.

Holly Sidford:

I mean, we would be in the Hudson River right now. It would never have worked. So I think that scaling the size of the leadership team to the size of the board is important. We happen to have a relatively small board when this happened. But we're now thinking that we don't probably want to increase the board because of this communication issue.

Russell Willis Taylor:

Right. That then prompts another thought for me. It's easy to think about this staff talent was in place and that was all completely apparent. But it's also important to think about what conditions at board level had been in place for quite a while. Under Holly's chairmanship, we had already Ready devised a slightly different way of the board working. Board meetings work half the compliance and the work that a board has to do in law and that is expected of a board. And then half a kind of no judgment brainstorming or learning. So we had already rehearsed some behaviors that help with this transition.

Russell Willis Taylor:

The second thing is because this board is not required, although we all support the fundraising, and we want to be as engaged as we can, because of the financial model behind Fractured Atlas, this is not principally a fundraising board. So you don't need 30 or 40 people. And I think that Holly's absolutely right, the smaller the group, the more likely you are to be able to build a very high degree of trust. And that's important.

Tim Cynova:

When I was talking to Kelly Kienzle for the interview earlier in this episode, she and I were talking about the issue of succession planning. And it came up rather early when we started to study this model that you were no longer looking at one line of succession, you're looking at X number of the people on the team. So we were now looking at four people for succession lines, because someone who can replace the chief program officer might not be the same people who can replace the chief technology officer. And then she brought up something I hadn't thought about before, was that the speed at which a shared leadership team can work is almost times the number of members as well. I'm still processing this, but a single CEO can work only so quickly.

Tim Cynova:

When you have for people, it's not times for because there are switching costs and coordination costs. But you each can work faster than just a single person. And then she took that to say, it actually is that much more challenging to build trust, because a board is no longer building trust with a single person. You're building trust with four people and you certainly to build trust at four times the speed to just stay up with where you typically were. So it feels like shared leadership introduces some really big challenges between how quickly the board and staff and organization move and coordinate. So I'm curious to get your thoughts on whether you're skeptical of those multipliers or what that might prompt for you in your own thinking about board, staff collaboration when it comes to shared leadership models.

Holly Sidford:

I can I add one and one. So anything beyond that, I don't do times tables. So I'm skeptical of the multiplying factor. I don't think it's that simple at all. I think that there are, I can't finish the metaphor, but it's not a simple equation. And a lot has to do with the skill of a given member of the leadership team in their job. It's not just how fast they can run, it's how well they can do the work and how well they communicate and coordinate their work with the others. So you can have four members, but they could be functioning at a minus one in terms of effectiveness, because they don't have autonomy. Not that a single executive director has autonomy completely, but we don't have four countries, we have one country that's trying to move into the future. So that's kind of garbled. But the point is, I don't think it's as easy as a multiplication of members times speed.

Russell Willis Taylor:

I think you do. I agree. You have four times the ability to generate ideas and start new programs and all that. But actually, we had that before. We just had somebody at the head of the line saying this is what we're doing. And I think that any addition of speed is offset by the fact that the consensus based leadership that you guys have in place, there has to be agreement if there are implications for another program before you launch something new. I do think that one of the things that I've learned about that I didn't think through before is how positive if the four of you trust each other, I don't have to talk to everybody on the team. Because if I talk to you, it's going to filter through to the team.

Holly Sidford:

And what you say, what Tim says to you in response represents the others. Or he will say ... Actually, we need Pallavi in this conversation because it's her perspective. I can't represent her perspective.

Russell Willis Taylor:

Right. Exactly, right. And I think the learning for us as a board, now how do we replicate that on the board where you don't have to talk to every board member? Or I'm fastidious, I'm trying to be fastidious about when I have a conversation with the team, I share it with everybody. How do we absolutely bake that into the culture of the board? That we're sharing information in exactly the same way. At the moment, it's not a problem, but you can see how if we were to launch three new programs at the same time, and they needed resource, all three of them needed resource, and there were board members that were interested in each individual program. You can see how it could become a problem where one board member knows more about something than a ...

Russell Willis Taylor:

So we're trying to figure out how do we get aboard that encounters one is another episodically because we are a first board in the sense that we're not all co-located. How do we get a board that interacts with the organization episodically and encounters one another episodically, to have the same consistency and collaborative trust that you do when it's harder to form the habit, because it's not happening all the time. It's happening, and I feel optimistic about it. I would say that, wouldn't I.

Tim Cynova:

Kelly Kienzle helped us create the assessment process that we used last year, to help assess this specific model, not the individuals in the model, as part of the board's duty to evaluate on a regular basis the CEO. She gave us a 30 page document and there were 17 themes that we've all read and discussed in various meetings. I highlighted a couple words from the themes. I want to see what might resonate with you. But the things about the model encourages diversity, reflects our values and mission, effective, efficient, bold, frustrating, difficult, exhausting, better than a single CEO model, addresses vulnerabilities, reimagine how leadership and board work together. Those and beyond. When Kelly delivered this, what really resonated with you?

Russell Willis Taylor:

Well, I'm biased because I know her work and like her work. So I recognize my bias. I really respect her thinking on these things. I think I was really pleased that what we were seeing in that list and the discussion that was outlined in her paper, was something that embrace the complexity of what we're doing, but didn't make a meal out of it. It's like, yeah, this is great. But here are the pieces of it. I like the fact that in conversation with the team while we were going through Kelly's process, because I think I was probably more closely involved with it in the beginning stages than anyone else as chair of the board. What I really liked was we were recognizing that for everything that's good about this, there's something that could potentially not be good, but we weren't getting bogged down in the stuff that couldn't be good.

Russell Willis Taylor:

We were just saying, okay, let's recognize that. There is a pothole. How do we drive around that? As opposed to, oh gosh, terrible things could happen. I do think that this model is a model for optimists. I don't think this is a model for pessimists. I think you would find that Debbie Downer should not be part of a four person leadership team. Because one of the benefits is that you do bully one another up when necessary. But I think overall, there has to be the assumption of positive intentionality in making this work. Both in Kelly's assessment tools as you guys were building them and the way you were approaching it, there was the assumption. Not naive, but the assumption that there'd be positive intent behind most of this.

Holly Sidford:

What she said. And what I recall being hit by Kelly's report was that we were living our values and being brave about taking the next step on those values. We were willing to embrace something that was uncertain and certainly in our context, untried. What I was also struck by was the concern about the exhaustion the staff was experiencing. I wasn't completely sure whether that was actually the model that was exhausting, or just the transition that was exhausting, or what came with the transition, which was a reflection and review of pretty much everything that we were doing, and resorting about the priorities for the organization's next phase of work. But I do think that this is not easy. The decision to change the management of the first year, two years of the change, and maybe that's true into the future. But this is not for Debbie Downer. It's not for the tired and sleepy either. It requires a kind of energy on the part of all that are involved, which we may not have anticipated.

Russell Willis Taylor:

I think that relates to your question about succession planning, your comment about succession planning. We have the opportunity. We're hoping that we don't have any ... We don't have to deal with this on a practical level for a while. But when someone leaves, there's the opportunity to ask a lot of questions about the structure of the organization that you wouldn't if you have a chief executive, she or he leaves, you go and find another chief executive. We know if one of you, God forbid, were to say, well, it's time for me to do something else, that we would have as a team, a leadership team and board together as a thinking team, we would have a conversation about, should this still be for people or should we look at whether it's three people?

Russell Willis Taylor:

Now, again, something that I think a lot of people ... We live in a culture where there's the mythology of action orientation being always positive, which is not true. And the level of discussion and debate that needs to happen every time there's a change, some people would find it ... Some board member personality types might find that tedious. I don't find it tedious. I think organizations don't ask enough of those kind of structural and existential questions. We have a built in way of making sure that we have to stop and ask those questions, because our succession planning has to be a creative exercise, not rote memorization. I'm pleased about that.

Holly Sidford:

Earlier, you talked about the CEO function. I do think that this whole process has pushed us to think more about functions as opposed to job descriptions. What's the leadership function in an organization? What we've said now is that is not embedded in one person. That's an array of responsibilities and talents that can be broken up and distributed in different ways. And not only that, I think it's raised questions or suggested that some of the leadership function traditionally held by the CEO, can be distributed into the organization beyond the four members or the three members of the two members who are now the "top people".So this has been very interesting to me, as we think about functions. Because I do think that cultural institution generally are required now to think again about their function. What is it that they are here to do and how are they going to do that in a contemporary context?

Tim Cynova:

There's reflection and tension that came in this that also extended to, how do we become a virtual organization? In the same way, what is it conference room for? What do we do in that conference room? Are there other ways for us to do that thing if we don't have a physical conference room? And then going on to the next thing. It was a part of that same exploration into questioning what it is? How we do it? Is there another way of doing it than the typical way from the book about how to run organizations?

Holly Sidford:

Yeah, exactly. And what's the central now that we have to retain? And what did we used to think was essential, but is no longer so essential given that it's 2020? I think that's a continuous process that we're now engaged in much more consciously, which is good.

Tim Cynova:

So for organizations to think, is this kind of leadership model right for me? Is there anything else that we've not covered that you think, yes, you really need to think about this before you take the leap into a shared leadership model exploration?

Russell Willis Taylor:

Well, I'd like to introduce a few questions on that cosmic quiz that people should be filling out. First of all, if your board is dysfunctional, please don't do this, because you'll make four people unhappy instead of just one. So that would be number one. Number two is if communication is not good, you need to get that better before you embark on this kind of adventure. Number three, is if the board's not prepared to be really actively engaged in understanding what the operations of the organization are, without intruding on the operations of the organization, this probably is not going to be a smooth transition. And number four, if the board is inextricably linked to outdated notions of hierarchy, this is not for you.

Holly Sidford:

I would only add to that great list if the organization is in a financial crisis. Stay away. This takes some runway and a fair amount of financial confidence to be able to work out the details and make it work.

Russell Willis Taylor:

Absolutely right.

Holly Sidford:

What would you add to that, Tim?

Tim Cynova:

You need a reserve of energy. Kelly and I were laughing when we went down the list and I was recounting when she delivered the report. And one of the slides said, shared leadership model is exhausting for leaders. And I said, this is going to you have to get bleeped out. But no, (bleep). You're totally [inaudible 01:36:25]. It's a different way of working that requires ... With that intention, you need to be much more on top of how things are working. Autopilot doesn't work.

Holly Sidford:

Well, that relates to the speed with which ... I mean, that equation of numbers times ... Her equation about just a multiple of the number. Not true. In part because of that, if some people don't have that reserve, and can't draw on it, it's going to slow the whole thing down.

Tim Cynova:

There's a catch-22 in that as well though, because in having three other members on this team who understand what you're dealing with, it's a different place than I've had in other organizations that I've been the single executive director where, for the most part, I was just the only ... I had other people I was working with, but no one understood the level of the things that I was dealing with in that organization. So I had to find mentors and friends and other people outside of the organization. So at the same time it's more exhausting than just the regular model, you have that camaraderie and support and understanding in that group that makes it almost net equal or almost equalizes that. So there's pros and cons to that.

Russell Willis Taylor:

And how would you characterize ... Now we're going to turn and in interview you.

Tim Cynova:

We just run out of tape. So I'm not sure.

Russell Willis Taylor:

I'm sorry. We're out of time. Matt Damon cannot be on the show tonight. How would you characterize this as, be careful what you wish for or I told you I was right? I mean, as an experiment. Because there have been some revelations for this staff as well.

Tim Cynova:

I did a lot of research before we jumped in. Looking at a lot of different organizations and different models of shared leadership and criteria of high performing teams and what needs to exist. For the most part, pros and the cons, I remember talking with Kelly, yep, all those things were on our list and those are the pros. The things like trust, you have to have a great degree of trust. There has to be psychological safety in the team. And then the flip sides, all those things were there, it's a little difficult to separate our transition into entirely virtual organization from this. So to say this is specific to the shared leadership team, but at the same time, halfway through our time into shared leadership, we are transitioning the organization to become entirely virtual.

Tim Cynova:

Which added another complexity, more complexity around change and change management, to how people are adjusting to this different way of working at Fractured Atlas, where you start to have different conversations. Which might make it more exhausting if you just went to shared leadership model without transitioning the organization to be entirely virtual, I'm sure it would feel less exhausting. For me it's intertwined and it's tough to pull out, this is the shared leadership part, this is the entirely virtual transition, and then this is just business as usual for Fractured Atlas.

Russell Willis Taylor:

Success of either virtual working conditions or shared leadership puts some really heavy onus on communication, communication community all the time. So you're kind of doubling. I mean, you could say it was a really appalling piece of judgment by the leadership team and the board to do both at the same time, but it wasn't, we hope. Either one of those things would require stronger communication, more regular communication, a more intuitive way of communicating. And when you do the two of them together, you really are adding quite a lot.

Holly Sidford:

Could I add one more thing to that? Which is that we embrace the shared leadership model after you'd actually been working it for a year, more or less, while the then executive director was on a sabbatical. So you had already piloted it. And while you were piloting it, one member of the team was not in New York, was not in the office every day, was essentially virtual. And then another member of the team decided to move outside of New York. Two points I want to make. One, shared leadership model has to be based on trust and some prior collaborative experience.

Holly Sidford:

But also it enables organizations to tap talent outside of the location of the organization. And that that is really a virtue. Not only does it allow you to hire somebody who doesn't want to move to where you are, but it allows somebody who you already have in the team to move where they want to go. So it seems to me that that was one of the kernels of becoming totally virtual. Is in and of itself, you don't have to go totally virtual and you can still have some members of the leadership team which are basically off site.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. It was all very organic. It just felt like that was the next thing. As we close, any other thoughts you have on the topic that we haven't discussed? That you think, if this doesn't make it in the podcast, this would have been a waste of time.

Holly Sidford:

I would just say that it's an ongoing experiment, and likely to be so into the future. And that that's a good thing because it requires us to stay alert, sort of in the moment if you pardon the expression, and not default to old behaviors or old concepts of what the organization is, what leadership is, or what the board's role is.

Russell Willis Taylor:

I am as I often do, anyone listening to this who knows me will laugh hilariously, I like to compare this to quantum physics, which I never do, obviously. That will be like a sports metaphor for me. I mean, what is she talking about? She has no idea. But in quantum physics, one of the premises that's been proven is, by virtue of looking at something, you change the nature of that thing. I think that's what we've done here. By virtue of looking at the leadership format, if you like, and saying, does it have to be that way? We've changed the way the organization works just by posing that question because we said, we're going to test that assumption. Does everybody have to be in the same room? We're going to test that assumption. Posing the question changes the way you view the organization, giving board members and staff members the permission to ask those sorts of very basic questions.

Russell Willis Taylor:

The challenge is to not do that so often that nobody ever knows where they are and what are we doing. There's a joke in our field that you can always tell in art conference, because the first 20 minutes will be spent talking about whether or not the conference was properly titled. Is this really what it should be called? I kind of love that. It's a ritual of our field, where language does matter and we do want to make sure that we're expressing ourselves clearly. But you don't want to be reinventing things so often that it's just disorienting and dispiriting for people. But having said that, particularly if we want younger people in an organization to look at things and say, well, really is the status quo the most positive and healthy way for us to proceed? You have to create that environment in which it's okay to do that. This creates an environment in which it's okay to do that. You look at something and by asking the question, you change the nature of the way you do business.

Tim Cynova:

Holly and Russell, it's a huge privilege to know and get to work with you. And thank you so much for being on podcast.

Holly Sidford:

Thank you for asking us.

Russell Willis Taylor:

Thank you.

Tim Cynova:

To read more about this topic and a rabbit hole of related information, visit us on workshouldntsuck.co. If you've enjoyed this conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review in iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic and join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don't like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Transparency, Accountability, & Alignment (EP.06)

Last Updated

February 7, 2020

If you don't know where you're going — personally, professionally, as a team, as an organization — you'll have a hard time knowing if and when you ever get there. In this episode, we explore ways to create more transparency, accountability, and alignment in the workplace with tools like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

Guests: Nicola Carpenter & Erica Seldin

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

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Guests

ERICA SELDIN is an organization designer and coach to leadership teams that seek purposeful growth and change. Erica founded the organization transformation consultancy August to spark movements toward a new way of working and organizing inside the world’s most ambitious companies. From global enterprises including PepsiCo and Colgate Palmolive to civic institutions like Planned Parenthood and NYC’s Department of Education, Erica has guided leaders and teams to design operating models better suited for the 21st century. Her approach is supported by over a decade of experience in organization development, digital transformation, and grassroots organizing. 

NICOLA CARPENTER works on the People team at Fractured Atlas, where she finds ways for tools and processes to better align with the organization’s purpose. She believes in tools so much that she sets personal OKRs every quarter. Prior to joining Fractured Atlas, Nicola worked for a variety of arts organizations including MoMA PS1, Walker Art Center, and Heidelberger Kunstverein, and she still has a particular love for museums. Originally from Minneapolis, she received a BFA in Art from the University of Minnesota and continues to stay creative through knitting and sewing clothes. She is currently in too many book clubs, but still somehow finds time to read books about organizational culture for fun. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter at @colacarp.

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Transcript

 Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. On this episode, transparency, accountability and alignment, who's doing what when and how can we know that the work that we're doing on daily basis is actually helping move our organizations forward? My former mentor once told the younger me, “If you don't know where you're going, personally, professionally as a team, as an organization, you'll have a hard time knowing if and when you ever get there.” On this episode, we'll explore ways that we can create alignment, accountability, and transparency around doing the right work rather than that vague sense of more or better, or working hard until we're exhausted figuring that that must mean we're doing the right work.

Tim Cynova:

We're joined by Erica Seldin, co-founder of August Public, an organization transformation consultancy found online at aug.co. Side note, if you're a fan of People Operations and organizational design, and have yet to fall down the rabbit hole of their public Google drive, you've not really lived it. Joining Erica is Nicola Carpenter, currently the associate director of People Operations at Fractured Atlas. You can find their complete bio's in the episode description section. Later in the episode we'll again be joined by our podcasting's favorite cohost, Lauren Ruffin, to get her thoughts on the topic. Both Erica and Nicola have dedicated quite a lot of time and thought to this topic, so I look forward to digging into this with them.

Tim Cynova:

Erica and Nicola, welcome to the podcast.

Erica Seldin:

Hi Tim, happy to be here.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah, I'm excited to be on the podcast again, especially with Erica. I was telling Tim that I feel like the last time that Erica and I had a conversation, we talked both about literature and missing books, and then also just philosophically what is compensation for work. I'm just really excited about this conversation about, okay, I see where it goes.

Erica Seldin:

And I think if you, Nicola, somebody that I run into just everywhere that I'm doing something that I care about. So it seems like you have these naturally intersecting interests with mine and you show up one place and I'm like, “Of course, Nicola is here.” And then you show up another place. I'm like, “Well, obviously, Nicola would be here.” I'm happy to be here in chat with you about this topic, something that I don't think we've ever discussed, but-

Nicola Carpenter:

I think that's true.

Erica Seldin:

-that I know that we both care about, so.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah, thanks for bringing us together.

Tim Cynova:

It's exciting. Great. Let's start high level. Erica, when you hear transparency, accountability and alignment, what comes to mind for you?

Erica Seldin:

What comes to mind for me is that so many people are doing this wrong. Everybody wants transparency, everybody wants accountability, everybody wants alignment, and yet there doesn't seem to be a common way or understanding for how to achieve those things. And creating accountability is something that I spend maybe 75% of my time talking to people about and yet it seems like they still don't want to believe that it is actually as simple as just writing it down and being transparent about what it is that you hope people will do, and then actually following up on those things that you've written down.

Erica Seldin:

We also have a saying in August about alignment, which is replace the word align with magic everywhere you see it and it would be more appropriate. Like we just need to magic on that topic because actually it's the case that alignment is not something that should be a goal of ours, but it's something that we might get if we do a lot of other things correct. Otherwise, it's just like saying, let's magic it.

Tim Cynova:

That's terrific.

Erica Seldin:

My co-founder, Mike Arauz gets all the credit for that.

Nicola Carpenter:

Now I just want to add magic into everything.

Erica Seldin:

Yeah, yeah.

Nicola Carpenter:

Just replace other silly words just with magic.

Erica Seldin:

Right. Like do you want to have a magic about that instead of meeting?

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah. That's good.

Tim Cynova:

People who are more excited to come, “Oh, I don't know what this is about, but it's going to be magic.”

Erica Seldin:

That's right. That's right. It's going to be magic.

Tim Cynova:

You don't want to miss the full staff magic.

Nicola Carpenter:

That's right. Replace work with magic and then you would never say magic shouldn't suck, you know? Right.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. So much to think about already just a couple of minutes into the episode, Nicola, when you think of those things besides magic, what comes to mind for you?

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah, I mean I like a lot of the things that Erica mentioned. I feel like when I think about OKRs especially, I sometimes get stuck in the how does it happen? How do we do it? How is the phrase? But when you step back and think about like what are you trying to do at work? I mean, okay, so we're a non-profit so I feel like it's especially prevalent to say what are we trying to do? I mean, I know that that's true for companies as well, like people who have purposes, but I think that in non-profits, especially presence like okay, what are we trying to do and how do we do that?

Nicola Carpenter:

And if you don't know where you're going and you don't know what you're doing to get there, I don't know how you're going to get there. Like you mentioned in the intro, but also, I mean I think that so many other companies that I've worked at has been… I've gotten hired, they tell me, “Okay, this is what you do,” and then I do that, but I don't really know why I'm doing that and I don't like doing things if I don't know why. At Fractured Atlas, especially with the OKR process, knowing the why behind pretty much everything that I do is incredibly helpful to be encouraged to actually do the things.

Erica Seldin:

Yeah, that's a great point. I think that you brought up OKR, something that I know we want to talk about on this subject. And I think that creating this connectivity between what we're trying to achieve, why we're trying to achieve it, and then how we're going to get there is what's so powerful about this framework. And it helps to connect those dots for each individual, but then also for teams. And the added layer of making those things as OKRs are your what, your why, and your how transparent all of a sudden unlocks this connectivity between each team member of teams and gets to a place where you're actually creating maybe the magic or the alignment that we're striving for.

Nicola Carpenter:

And I think so what we used to do was thematic goals, and I've nothing against Lencioni, but I don't love thematic goals. And I like to tell the story that we had this thematic goal number three, and it went by probably five different words. If you look in past meeting minutes, there's five different words to describe the medical number three. And we had a party at the end of thematic goal number three where we had t-shirts. But I, to this day, kind of could explain what thematic goal number three is, but there is no way that I could explain how my work at Fractured Atlas fit into thematic goal number three.

Nicola Carpenter:

And I just feel like that's a missed opportunity and now I'm like, “Oh no, do I actually remember what my OKRs are this quarter?” I mean, but I like to think that now in my work that I know how my work aligns with what the company is doing and I hope that that's the case for a lot of people in the organization. And I feel like that is the case. I mean, we've heard that people say that that's what they get out of it.

Erica Seldin:

I hope that the tagline on your t-shirt for thematic goal number three was been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Because it sounds like that was what happened there with that particular goal.

Nicola Carpenter:

I don't remember what it said was TG3.

Erica Seldin:

TG3.

Tim Cynova:

And that was the last thematic goal that we had in the organization, which led to OKR. It was an iterative process though. It went from… At Fractured Atlas we've never had a strategic plan. We've had strategic priorities and strategic priorities memos, and those were pretty high level. I'm not sure how my day-to-day works. So then it's like, all right, let's try thematic goal, and you did a couple of those and then it became, “I'm on the leadership team and I'm not sure how my work impacts this, so let alone everyone else in the organization who's not in this room.”

Tim Cynova:

Which led to, “All right, well, let's try OKRs because that seems to cascade.” I guess it depends on the organization. There are smart goals, there are smarter goals, there's thematic goals, there's strategic plans or is everyone sitting in the same room talking about what you're doing until someone passes out?

Erica Seldin:

Totally. I'm sure you're both familiar with James Clear on atomic habits, and this is something that I love on this topic. And my favorite thing that he says is both winners and losers have the same goals. So it's true that both winners and losers, the goal is to win, but some people lose. And why is that the case? And I think that one of the things that's great about OKRs are about coming up with a different framework that gets into more nuance both for individuals and for teams. Then the actual goal itself is that it helps us to break down the difference between winning and losing beyond just this idea that we all want to win.

Erica Seldin:

It sounds like that's the progression maybe that you've made here. And I'm curious, does every team have OKRs and then individuals also have KRs? Are individuals accountable for particular OKRs? How are you thinking about that? And maybe just we should quickly, for all of the listeners, explain that when we're talking about OKRs, we're talking about objectives and key results. And so when I say KRs I mean the key results that ladder up to a particular objective.

Tim Cynova:

Let's take a step back and explain how OKRs work. We've lightly touched on it, but Nicola, you managed the OKR process at Fractured Atlas. What does it look like?

Nicola Carpenter:

I do this a lot where I just assume that everyone knows what OKRs are because I feel like they're so embedded into my work life and personal life. I have personal OKRs-

Erica Seldin:

That you post on Instagram.

Nicola Carpenter:

I do, yes. I did not do it last quarter and I haven't done… I mean it's what, mid-January and I haven't done it for this quarter yet, but it's fun.

Erica Seldin:

Still plenty of time.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah, plenty of time.

Erica Seldin:

Plenty of time.

Nicola Carpenter:

But an objective, I like to think of an objective is why do you do what you want to do? It's aspirational, it's inspiring. It's what gets you out of bed in the morning. And the key result is a measurable way of how you're going to get there. I think that for each individual person, like what their objectives are going to be, what inspires them is going to be different. And also in the key results, there's lots of different ways to measure things, and I feel like we can talk about this a bit more.

Nicola Carpenter:

But at Fractured Atlas currently, how it is, and we've iterated a lot, but currently what we do is that the four-person, non-hierarchical leadership team sets organizational objectives. Usually, there's two or three, occasionally they have a little blurb about why it's important to focus on those things. Often, they're very similar from quarter to quarter, just with a little bit of tweaking to prioritize different things in different ways. And then the leadership team sets their objectives and key results, and then from there their direct reports set their own objectives and key results and further on.

Nicola Carpenter:

We don't have any organizational key results. I know that a lot of organizations do and it helps them, but we haven't necessarily found helpful metrics for the entire organization to work around. But we'd have found that the organizational objectives are a really helpful way to, as an organization, prioritize different things each quarter.

Erica Seldin:

And then how do you hold people accountable for their KRs?

Nicola Carpenter:

Everyone can see everyone else's. I think there's a little bit of that peer pressure of, “Oh no, I'm getting-”

Erica Seldin:

Shame.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah, exactly.

Erica Seldin:

Shame.

Tim Cynova:

Don't look at me. You know I got an 8% on that score.

Erica Seldin:

I didn't know.

Tim Cynova:

It's awkward now.

Nicola Carpenter:

And then we also have a dashboard that has the whole organization. What is our percent complete on an organizational level. And generally at staff meetings I share back what our organizational, the average percent completed across the organization is. And I always like to celebrate when it's more than past. And then we also have a BI team, so I feel like there's builds in a tiny bit of competition. I mean, not like it's a real competition, but some people like that side where they're like, “Oh, I'm going to make sure that my team wins and so I'm going to finish my OKRs more.

Tim Cynova:

By some people may mean Nicola.

Erica Seldin:

Yeah, I mean the person who creates the competition wants to win the competition. That's usually the case.

Tim Cynova:

But it's great because Nicola and I are on the same teams, so I appreciate that.

Erica Seldin:

Right, so winning all around.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Nicola Carpenter:

But also I want to say that we haven't said that the goal of an OKR is to hit 60 to 70%. Will you say the sweet spot is 70%? If you get 80%, that's not winning anymore, so-

Erica Seldin:

No, you're doing it. It's not a bad goal.

Nicola Carpenter:

-exactly. There's some added complexity in there. Exactly. I also am disappointed if I'm at 80%. I'm like, “Oh man, I sent some terrible key results this quarter and then I go the opposite direction, only finished 31% so.”

Tim Cynova:

And there are some teams who cross departmentally share some KRs or maybe an objective, and then some teams, within the team, they have similar ones that when they're creating it rather than having a specific this is the team objective or KRs. And we've iterated, I think we've already on four years now. Three or four years that we've been doing it. Every quarter we've changed something about the process.

Erica Seldin:

That's great.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yes.

Erica Seldin:

That's great, and it means that it's working for you all, so that's also really wonderful. It's a good testament to the value of the tool. And always our journey has been a bit different. I think that we came to OKRs late in the game and I would say somewhat skeptically, but we enlisted OKRs at a moment when we needed to really focus. And we were doing a lot of different work across a very small group of people and we realized that it wasn't adding up too much, it wasn't adding up to enough.

Erica Seldin:

And this is one of the downfalls of self-organization that I've seen being part of a self-organizing business now for almost a decade. We have a bunch of different experiences of how the organization works and it tells us what it needs in lots of cases. And in this particular moment, we were many people working on many different teams against many different goals and not getting anywhere, really to say it quite bluntly. And I think that we realized that if we just wrote down the few things that we thought that we could do and how we intended to achieve them over a short period of time, like a quarter.

Erica Seldin:

At August, we do trimesters. I'm not sure why. It's just a little bit more time to sink into. It works for us, and so we take that amount of time just what do we think we can achieve in that amount of time. And we wrote them down and that was a real pivotal moment for us to start to build some accountability. To start to say, “Okay, these are the things that we believe are going to be the best things for us.”

Erica Seldin:

And that step of itself was really hard, because it's all of the things that you're not doing more than it is the things that you are going to do, and we were looking at it that way in that moment. And choosing to focus on those things meant some people thought they were the wrong things. We did do it very collectively, very holistically. It wasn't individuals writing down cares for themselves but instead a couple of us who were accountable for the business's purpose at that moment in time, sitting down and writing the KRs for the business.

Erica Seldin:

Writing the couple of objectives, but really just focusing on the KRs, because the objective itself where we were was pretty clear, which was these growth goals that we had and also our purpose. That was really the thing that was guiding us. We gave it a shot and we had these KRs and they helped us to make what wasn't working more discussable. And that was the thing that really became clear. That was the big win for us in that transition where we were able to say, “Look, you wrote this down then we were going to do this particular action and we expected to see a particular outcome from that action, and we're not even doing the input.

Erica Seldin:

We're not even doing the things that are necessary to get into that action, and discussing that was a real turning point for our team and helping each other to raise our own expectations, to raise the bar and help everyone hit that bar of what we wanted to do together. And so that was sour experience. It's been interesting since then. I think that we're a rapidly evolving organism of some kind. We're like a very small cell, early days in evolution is how I think about us. The kind that's just mutating faster than we know what to do with and there's all issues from the mutation, but it's a lot of fun being a pioneer in that way.

Erica Seldin:

But we've now evolved our work, our KR work to be much more focused on habits. We've taken our KRs and turned them. Those KRs that worked really well that particular trimester because for us two things don't change that much. Trimester to trimester, things are relatively consistent. The goals look pretty much the same, the work is evolving, but those stuff we need to do to be successful is relatively similar, and so we've found it much more useful to develop a set of habits that we've all committed to, that we're doing on a regular basis.

Erica Seldin:

And that's actually what we measure, is the habits. We have this list of, I think it's 10 or so things that we expect everyone to do, and we're tracking those things on a weekly basis, and then we have a trimesterly average of our performance on those habits, specific activities that everyone should do every week. And it's binary, so either you've done it or you haven't. And that binary metric, everyone wants to debate.

Erica Seldin:

It's like, “Well, I did this version of the thing or I did half of it. Does…” No, it doesn't count, but also sure. Count it, if you want to count it, I don't care. And the idea again is making it discussable. And that's really where we get to the next level of our teaming which is the ability to pull each other forward, help each other to achieve our collective purpose. And that's where we've seen a lot of value from this system.

Tim Cynova:

We started OKRs about the same time that we were going through crucial conversations training, which was about the same time that we started in earnest, our journey in anti-racism and anti-oppression. I think to your point. When you write it down on a piece of paper and you have a conversation with your supervisor about it, then it's easier to come back to it and say, “Remember we had that conversation. You said you were going to do this thing. Why didn't it get done? Now it's three quarters in a row or what do you need?”

Tim Cynova:

And then it's less, you're not doing your work in general and more specific, that is a fact that we all agreed on in the moment. Makes it easier. I think for newer managers too, there's some framework to follow, but it's not… I think because we've iterated every quarter, clearly there's challenges with it and we've debated binary, we've debated various departments that are like, “This framework doesn't work for us.”

Tim Cynova:

And then others who are like, “Well, doesn't work for us in a different way.” And then you just keep iterating while also asking the question, if it's not this, do you remember… Before this happened, no one knew what was going on, and so what's the alternative? I love the idea of the habits as something to-

Nicola Carpenter:

What's funny is that one of my ongoing personal objectives is focused on habits.

Erica Seldin:

Well, there you go.

Nicola Carpenter:

Which is just an objective, which I think is funny that that is one of the objectives, because I try to be more simple because tracking personal life seems silly anyway sometimes, so I try to not think too hard. But I also really liked what you talked about of the needing to focus and coming across OKRs in a time of needing to focus. Because I feel like that's something that it's helped us with too. Because as an organization, we want to do all the things and it's hard to do all the things. It's impossible to do all the things.

Erica Seldin:

We want to do all the things.

Nicola Carpenter:

Exactly.

Erica Seldin:

Even all the things, emoji and slack.

Nicola Carpenter:

Amazing.

Erica Seldin:

And so we-

Tim Cynova:

It's just a pile of books that just keeps adding, because-

Erica Seldin:

-no. Well, yes, it should be that, but if there were animated emojis, maybe that would be it.

Nicola Carpenter:

There are.

Erica Seldin:

Oh, like the party parrot.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yes, we have an absurd number of animated emojis in our Slack. I love it.

Tim Cynova:

We have a very talented people in our team.

Nicola Carpenter:

I need to get in the animated emoji game.

Erica Seldin:

Actually animate. We have people on our team that animate the emojis. Yeah, it's great.

Tim Cynova:

Everyone should have one of those people on their team.

Erica Seldin:

Apparently I'm missing a core skill for the future of work, which is the emoji animator and noted.

Nicola Carpenter:

My favorite is sparkles that animate like rainbow sparkles that animate. It's great.

Erica Seldin:

Oh that does sound very nice.

Nicola Carpenter:

It's magic.

Erica Seldin:

It's magic.

Nicola carpenter:

Back to magic.

Erica Seldin:

You can use that when you have an alignment meeting.

Nicola carpenter:

Yes, exactly. It's the new alignment emoji. But one of our taglines for the past year that we've been trying to focus on is do less better. And I feel also that has helped us change OKRs in our documents, so we have a sheet in our shared Google Drive, and there was a while when I was just auto-populating blank three objectives and each objective had, I think three key results and we're like, “Wait a second. What if we just got rid of one of those objectives and the default was two objectives with three key results each. Is that going to have people create less OKRs, less things so that they could then focus on it?”

Nicola carpenter:

Because we were getting as an organization probably 30% when we were hitting super low. [inaudible 00:21:12] 40%, we were not doing less better very well. One of the things that we used to say all time is focus even over more. That was a really a strategic filter for us, is how can we focus even over more, because we want to do all the things. And then someone on the team says, “Focus is more,” which really worked for me because I was like, “That is so true.” When we are focusing, you get to do so much more depth, and so thinking about fewer objectives and higher output on your KRs, all of a sudden, that's what more feels like.

Nicola carpenter:

It's like you're making more progress against the things that you really care about and so that started to feel really good. It started to feel like, “Oh, I'm getting smarter and better at the things that I care about as opposed to doing more stuff that helps me feel like maybe there's more out there for me to be successful at," so I really liked that. But it also connects into another way that I think about OKRs which is that the objective itself is a version of naming the uncertainty that we have.

Nicola carpenter:

What we would like to have happen in the uncertain context that we operate in. And then the KR makes it certain, it's writing down what the certainness is, what we can be sure about, or at least, what we think we can attain in the context of that uncertainty. My work is all about balancing certainty and uncertainty and helping people to operate more in an uncertain world, and if you think that writing down what you think you can achieve in the form of a KR as a way of making the uncertain more certain, that feels really good.

Tim Cynova:

Some of the good things about OKRs are that they're transparent. They're transparent and they cascade throughout the entire organization, so the idea is that everyone wherever they are in the organization sees how the work that they do day in and day out impacts where the organization is going and what the organizational objectives are… what the organizational objectives are for that period. That's one of the good things, but I know both of you maintain some skepticism on varying levels probably depending on the day in OKRs as a framework. I'm curious who wants to jump in first with their skepticism about OKRs as a framework.

Erica Seldin:

I'm happy to say some of the things that I told you. I was like, “I'll come and talk about OKRs but you have to know that I'm skeptical, which I love the answer because same. Obviously I love them but also you got to have some healthy skepticism in there.

Nicola carpenter:

Totally, and for me, I think it comes down to a couple of things. The first is just the… I have a real problem. I think with this idea of 70% is good. That's what success looks like. I think that it plays into this hyper-competitive over achieving cultural… work culture narrative and I think a lot of that comes from Google, I think mostly popularized. OKRs.

Erica Seldin:

And I think that the culture and this idea of the startup culture and that nothing is really ever fully achievable is something that bakes in this mindset of where the workplace becomes a place of never being able to succeed fully. And that you're always striving for something more, and I think that I want it to be the case that we feel that we're doing things that we can achieve, that are really achievable and I don't know. There's something about the competitive, overachieving, ‘you're never good enough' element of it that just irks me.

Nicola Carpenter:

It's so interesting because I have viewed that in such an opposite way. I feel like that 70% has let me let go of some perfectionism, and I was always the person who was like, “I need to get an A in school. I need to do all these things.” And I also live with multiple chronic illnesses, so I just can't do everything. And if I try to do everything, my body is like, “No, you're not going to do all these things.” And I feel that built-in scarcity is actually really helpful to have in when I'm thinking about work. Because I tend to overthink what I can do and then hit not to a hundred and then I'm sad that I can't hit a hundred. If it's built-in and that 70 is what you can do, I feel like that built-in little bit of buffer is helpful.

Erica Seldin:

Then why not just write down what you actually can do?

Nicola Carpenter:

Great question. I don't know.

Erica Seldin:

I feel fitness, physical fitness and it comes up a lot as a good metaphor for these goal-setting conversations and I've recently… I've joined the Peloton revolution or whatever is happening with Peloton. There's one of my building, it makes it very easy for me to do it, but in particular, I've gotten to be a big fan of this one type of training on the Peloton. I think it's called FTP test. Functional threshold power I think is what it stands for. Are you a cyclist? Do you know this or Peloton or anything?

Tim Cynova:

I'm a cyclist. Aspirational at this point, but we also work with… One of our colleagues is a professional cyclist and also our senior director of finance. You're in good company. Usually Nicola just rides along with the cycling conversations until we get back to the actual topics, so we're good.

Erica Seldin:

We're good.

Tim Cynova:

We can keep going.

Erica Seldin:

We're okay. Well, I'm not a cyclist and I won't spend too much time here but I feel it's so relevant to this conversation because basically the way that this works is I don't feel good about my own physical fitness. I've never felt like I am an athlete or I'm great at stuff. I have arthritis and issues that I cannot actually do these things, but this particular way of working on the Peloton is that you set your own threshold power. You do a test, it's just for you. And then every class that you do is in these zones.

Erica Seldin:

It's still on one to seven and they call out the zone and you're just doing your own zone. You can be successful in the class because you're riding your zones. It reminds me of this conversation because it feels like if you set the goals that you can achieve, it still feels good to achieve a goal, even if you've written it down for yourself, but you know what's achievable and you're able to work in your zones.

Erica Seldin:

You're still getting better, and you can always push yourself to the next zone, but you can also lift yourself up by doing the zone below where you are consistently. And so I think that there's something about that. It was the inverse. It's like write a lower goal and achieve it more regularly, I wonder what that would do to a culture around OKRs and goal setting, so just a thought. And sorry for the cycling tangent.

Nicola Carpenter:

Oh no, it's fine. I enjoy it. I feel I've gotten a whole another side of knowledge of acronyms and things that I don't necessarily need to know, but it's enjoyable.

Erica Seldin:

You don't need to know it.

Tim Cynova:

It comes in handy every July with the Tour de France. You can cocktail party or something like that.

Nicola Carpenter:

Something to talk about, yes.

Tim Cynova:

I love the idea about the equivalent of an FTP as an organizational tool, and what would that look like?

Erica Seldin:

Yes, I think it's a similar concept in a lot of ways. The thing I like about it is that you can choose the zone that you're in. You can be operating at a variety of different zones and to be intentional about that, where each zone has its purpose. Each zone you're maintaining. You know that you're in maintenance or endurance mode, you know that you're maximizing effort, but you can't do it for that long.

Erica Seldin:

And there's something about, we all do that. We all know when we're in a high intensity moment. We're in that moment right now at August where everybody is just cranking on what we're doing and we've all looked each other in the eye and said, “This is one of those moments. We're just going to do it, power through and we know that it won't last that long. It's temporary, so we can help each other succeed in that mode and then we can all commit to an endurance mode for the next couple of weeks once we get through it.” It's really nice to think about different modes of working in that way.

Nicola Carpenter:

It has to be sustainable. I think that engagement is something that we think a lot about and engagement has a lot to do. There's so many different factors in engagement, but one of the things is just feeling you can sustain. You can sustain in the organization and that requires sometimes being challenged and pushing and that requires sometimes having it be okay to coast, and thinking about acknowledging those modes when you're in it or those zones when you're in them is something that's really helpful and to be able to do that transparently with your colleagues. It's also really helpful.

Nicola Carpenter:

I think we use vacation as a proxy sometimes for that and I think things like unlimited vacation policies or work from home or whatever it is as a proxy for saying like, “It's cool to meet a minute and that's okay.” But actually being able to talk about it in the way… And sometimes I need a week. I've had this week which has just been wild, back to back and so much challenging stuff, but it's one of those weeks where it's like, “I can do that too. And it feels good also.” Yes, there's something to it maybe.

Nicola Carpenter:

And I think for organizations who are good at setting realistic goals, then yes, why not have it be 100% as your goal? At [inaudible 00:30:46], we've consistently hit it 30%, 40% maybe 50 or maybe 63% I think is the highest it's ever been. I feel like even just pushing us to get closer to 70 is still a decent goal.

Erica Seldin:

Definitely, definitely.

Nicola Carpenter:

Okay, so where does your skepticism about OKRs come from?

Erica Seldin:

Yes, so I feel I had a falling out with OKRs. I read the book, measure what matters and it may be really sad realizing that they were created in an age of work that was not for me. And if I feel that as a white woman, what do colleagues of color feel? How do people who are oppressed in ways that I'm not feel, and just reading a whole book, I was like, “Ah, this is just so bro-ey and I don't feel comfortable reading this book.” And then there was this whole section about using a sports metaphor.

Erica Seldin:

And I was like, “Okay, well, what is the end goal of football? To make money for the owners.” And then I just went on this rage spiral of sports hatred, especially football and oppressing players to give money into the hands of owners. I was like, “Oh, who cares they're being used for such horrible things? How can I get behind with this thing that is used in such nefarious ways? And is there ways to use that framework in a better way?” And I was just so frustrated with it, but I feel like there's still benefits to it.

Erica Seldin:

In the last podcast episode that I was a guest on with my colleague Courtney about anti-racism, anti-oppression, and Courtney gave the example of that, racism falls through the cracks. If you don't see it, it'll fall through the cracks. We were talking about what can you focus on and how do you focus on things to make sure that you're looking at everything. And I feel like writing down what your priorities are can help you find what those cracks are.

Erica Seldin:

And so I feel like even though it is important to say how was this created? What was the environment that this was created in and how is that not necessarily the best way of doing things, but also saying, “Well, how is it beneficial?” But I do think that there are still pros even though don't love the origins.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yes, totally. I think that that's a much better way of articulating what I was trying to get at with this idea of competitive culture at Google or whatever. It's like that is exactly it, which is this very bro-ey and profit-driven environment where goal-setting is a means to an end and not necessarily a way of creating a more transparent, more equitable environment where everyone can succeed. And so it is both sides of that. And I do apologize for the sports metaphor in the middle of sports. I need a little goal-setting-

Erica Seldin:

It's especially football that I have issues with for some reason. There's so many brain injuries and now I'm going to get all hate tweets of football fans, but oh well, brain injuries.

Nicola Carpenter:

I'm a huge football fan. I grew up with football and over the last couple of years, I've been making an active effort to stop giving my money to the football industry. Not paying for cable anymore just to watch football and not going to bars to watch football at that time. I'm just trying to not reinforce that, but it's challenging. I really do like it. Then I feel bad about it.

Erica Seldin:

And then there's something fun about sports. I wish there was a way to make it so that the end of sports wasn't to give money into the hands of owners, but it's the same as so many things.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yes, exactly. It's capitalism.

Erica Seldin:

Capitalism. Is it over? Are we done with capitalism? I think we're getting close.

Nicola Carpenter:

That's a different podcast, but I would come back for that.

Tim Cynova:

As we start to land the plane on this portion of the episode, what are your final thoughts, on this topic?

Nicola Carpenter:

Not on capitalism?

Tim Cynova:

No, we can go with capitalism. I've got an episode that I'm going to have to put together about the conscious capitalism movement and how it might not be all that conscious.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yes, I look forward to that episode. I think my final thought is that accountability and creating tools that help to build accountability is more important than success, than actually the success itself. And so many organizations are striving for just winning in some way. Winning in the market, winning against their competitors, coming up with the next best idea of being best in class, and that success can be very distracting.

Nicola Carpenter:

And in my experience when you have the best people coming together, helping each other and holding each other accountable for a shared goal, that you achieve success that you didn't even know it was possible. It's different from what you would write down. If you could write down a particular goal of yours, you might actually exceed it if you are focused more on the ways that you are getting there and how people help each other to get there than if you just wrote down the goal itself.

Nicola Carpenter:

That's what I hope for from the iterations that we're all doing around OKRs and goal-setting and all of the above. And I think that leads into what I like to tell people too is if they want to try it out themselves, don't worry about it being perfect because the wording is never going to be perfect. You're never going to have a perfect OKR, but that's not what's important. What's important is that you're having these conversations regularly, writing them down and then seeing if you did what you said you were going to do.

Erica Seldin:

Yes.

Tim Cynova:

Great. Eric and Nicola, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Erica Seldin:

Thanks Tim. It was fun.

Nicola carpenter:

Yes, it was fun.

Erica Seldin:

This is a side note and probably something to be edited out, but I've been having a lot of conversations in my overlapping self-organization nerd friend group about whether or not the problems of Holacracy are foreshadowing for the problems in democracy. And if it's the case that… Well, you have self-organization Holacracy and sociocracy are these accelerated microcosm of what's happening in democracy. And I'm compelled by that argument because it feels real.

Tim Cynova:

I was at Zappos probably 18 months after they started their experiment with Holocracy and it was also about the same time after they had been acquired by Amazon. It was a really interesting time to be there, and I was there for a couple of days. I went to their all hands where Tony Hsieh did a presentation on teal, whatever they were doing that quarter. And it was interesting to talk to people and ask them questions and have the very strong feeling that there was a lot going on underneath the surface that they were not telling you about. All of the things being thrown up into the air and being acquired by Amazon and everything else. And I'd love to go back and see where they are now.

Erica Seldin:

Yes. Well, you can do an episode about that with my colleague Alexis Gonzales-Black who is the part of that whole change there at Zappos and led the transition to Holacracy. I'm sure she has much smarter things to say about that. But it does come back to a point you made earlier, Tim, which is about how it's better than the alternative. And that's the thing we never… As humans, we're always looking for the downside or the reasons why it's not working and this negativity bias comes into how we think about stuff.

Erica Seldin:

But actually, it's important to remind ourselves as change agents and people trying new things and having these conversations about how things can be different, that it's not perfect, but it is better. And as long as we keep trying to notice what's not working about it and coming up with solutions for it, then maybe that's okay. It's a lot like OKRs and goal-setting, choosing your framework for how you do that, building transparency and accountability into your organization, building more equity, being on a path towards anti-racism and anti-oppression. I've made more mistakes in that journey than I could possibly admit and probably even more that I don't know, but it's just better than the alternative.

Nicola Carpenter:

I think that brings it back to what we were talking about earlier, is that these are tools to start conversations. And I think that at the end of the day, that's important because we're not necessarily having a lot of these conversations about what are we prioritizing and regularly having those conversations. I don't think it's necessarily the perfect tool, but it is something that gets us to do that regularly in a way that I think is really helpful and important.

Erica Seldin:

Absolutely, and again, writing it down creates more equity. It creates the opportunity for everyone to engage in a way that makes sense and then also gives permission to have conversations when things aren't working, which is something that's really hard to do, but something that we can all look back at and reference and agree that we wrote down.

Tim Cynova:

To close out our episode, it's my pleasure again to welcome back. podcasting's favorite co-host, Lauren Ruffin. Hey Lauren, how's it going?

Lauren Ruffin:

It's okay. I knew it was coming and I still almost spilt my coffee into the microphone. [laughs]

Tim Cynova:

[laughs] That's [inaudible 00:40:12] good morning.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yes. Good morning.

Tin Cynova:

This episode we spoke with Nicola Carpenter and Erica Seldin about transparency, accountability and alignment, because the OKR framework is a tool that we can use on multiple of these fronts. We spent a good bit of time talking about it, the pros, the cons, the alternatives. You've been working on the Fractured Atlas team for about three and a half years during the entire time we've used this tool. You also are a member of the leadership team as we work each quarter to set and articulate our organizational objectives. What has been your experience with OKR?

Lauren Ruffin:

At the risk of undermining everything that we do, I hate OKRs. [laughs] I hate them so much and they're like the dentist, which I also hate. I know that I have to do them. I know they're going to make everything better so I do them, but I don't get joy. They don't spark joy in my life, but they have gotten better. When I first started, they were really an onerous process. Do you remember when we had to do really lengthy everything?

Lauren Ruffin:

And I also feel like I didn't quite understand them and I knew that I'm not a dummy, so if I don't get them, that a lot of people in the organization really didn't understand how to do them. And it's probably really stressful for folks who are in positions of power in the organization to figure out how to do it. I'm glad that we've really streamlined our processes to make them more palatable. But some folks jumped right into them and really love them. It's not me, they're not my jam. They're helpful and I appreciate them, but the dentist.

Tim Cynova:

Has there been any tool that you've used in the past that you prefer in a similar vein that attempts to help with transparency, accountability and alignment?

Lauren Ruffin:

A lot of the organizations I've worked with do strategic planning, and they plan down to the quarter. Well, I should say I don't think that in those sectors, in the human services sector, in the organizations I was working, they were really as attuned with the Google trickle-down of OKRs, so no, we never really called them that. I also think that when you're in an organization that's making incremental improvements over the same four or five programs and two events a year in the non-profit sector, they're probably not as necessary.

Lauren Ruffin:

You do something two or three times and you get in the cycle of, “This is what we do every year and we try and make incremental improvements about it,” but naturally, staff knows what's happening because you're not really making huge organizational changes. But Fractured Atlas is an organization that really does need something like OKRs. Otherwise, people get lost and or they make assumptions, and assumptions are, that's the death toll for organizations that are changing as quickly as we are.

Tim Cynova:

Yes, I can think back to some of the organizations that I used to work for and it probably is 15, 20 years later, it's probably the same cycle. You create two new works, you do the gala, you do the season about this point. This is how we tour. After one cycle you've got it. But yeah, as you introduce more complexity and different types, like drastically different types of things. We have this software engineering team over here which is completely different or works in a different way and thinks in a different way than this team over here, you need some type of tool to help coordinate that.

Tim Cynova:

I remember when you came in, it was starting to get to be like, this is really… this is tough to do. We've got to like a lot of columns that we need to fill out. And it felt like it was moved away from what the initial interest that we had in it. And so quarter after quarter, I think we've paired back to, “Oh here's the thing that is the thing.”

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, and I also think it helps at the leadership team. We have clarity on where we're going in a way that three years ago things felt a little bit jumbled. There were a lot of priorities. Some of them were competing. The organization was in transition from a much larger leadership team to the four of us that we have now. It was hard. So yeah, I'm really glad that we've streamlined it. I also think for other organizations who want to do OKRs, you have to have like an OKR warrior. I know that we're trying to get done with the military terms, but I can't think of it, like you've got to have someone who's willing to go to battle like a happy warrior for OKRs in an organization.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. It really makes the difference that someone deeply understands the way it works, is positive about it, is helpful and in the face of skepticism and delays just continues to go forward with, “Yep, we do this every quarter and here's the thing that needs to be done.” Even when you're like, “Really? The quarter just passed,” we were like, “We're doing this thing again? I just set them.”

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Exactly.

Tim Cynova:

We set hours every quarter, every three months, and the entire organization from the leadership team setting organizational objectives, to everyone in the organization having it locked in, we do that over the span of two weeks. The first two weeks of every quarter we do that, so effectively you get two and a half months for your OKRs, but it never fails. It's like it just feels like we did this and I think that's part of the thing that I like about OKRs and the thing I hate about OKRs. Because you can see the end, but also it comes so quickly and you start to realize how fast time is passing.

Tim Cynova:

And especially if after quarter, after quarter after quarter you're like, “I still have this thing on my list and it's not done. So what's happening that I can't get this thing done that I say is important that I'm trying to dedicate resources to.” Just trying harder is probably not going to get it done the fourth time if it's been an OKRs for the past three quarters.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I mean we settled on the quarter thing because at that time we felt like we needed to make quarterly changes like we need to track by quarter. I don't know. I also think that we should give ourselves the flexibility to figure out as we settle into, because we've had some of the same organizational goals now for a while. It'd be interesting to think about what would happen if we were to lengthen the timeline.

Tim Cynova:

Erica said that August does trimesters.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, interesting.

Tim Cynova:

You get the three to four months and that might be just the month that you need.

Lauren Ruffin:

A lot of mine are, I put them on for the next quarter because I was so close to finishing them.

Tim Cynova:

Well, and for the leadership team, for the past year at least, we've been doing binary. You achieve it or you don't, you don't get any partial credit while the rest of the organization is still doing partial credit. So there are some things where 85% there, but it depended on this other person and maybe I should have written it slightly better, but it was a big enough project that I want the dopamine hit from completing it and crossing it off my list. It was going on the list next quarter.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, the lawyer training in me always wants to gain the words and the OKRs like can I add a timeframe in here or can I add a number that I can… Like if I put that number in, do I want to say complete or started, or just leave it kind of like let it just tail off so I could-

Tim Cynova:

Ruminated over the thing.

Lauren Ruffin:

Exactly. Identified and solicited, not closed.

Tim Cynova:

What does solicit mean exactly? It's like I've drafted the letter or?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I mean, OKRs, I think they've been really helpful for us. I mean going back to the other thing, like I think for some organizations they probably would feel pretty meaningless.

Tim Cynova:

I remember the time before they existed at Fractured Atlas and it really was, if you didn't ask someone, you had to proactively go and ask someone what they were working on, if they worked outside of your team. That transparency and I also liked the breadcrumbs it gives. Like if someone joined tomorrow, if they had time and interest could go back and read all of the OKRs that we've ever created, that anyone at the organization has ever created. See how we've graded ourselves to get the flow for what's happened.

Tim Cynova:

But before that you had to say, “Hey Lauren, can I go have lunch with you and ask you what you've been working on because I don't know what you're doing.” And there was a lot of uncertainty even when we all worked in the same office, that then leads to skepticism and you're filling in the blanks that really with the wrong answers, and then it creates tension in teams that isn't helpful.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I think you're right. I feel, especially for folks, it's been so long since I really reported to anyone other than a CEO or was running something, that that trickled down of confusion. I feel like I've always been in the loop on what's happening across the organization. But I think if I had been at an organization like Fractured Atlas 20 years ago, I would probably be really frustrated if I didn't have something like OKRs. For me, they're like, at this point, the annoying nut that's flying around my head. And I'm like, “God, I got to squash this nut real quick so I can get onto the real work of life.”

Lauren Ruffin:

But they are, like I do understand like how excited my colleagues are when we're talking about OKRs. Like, “Did you see what so and so's doing?” And I'm like, “Oh, actually I didn't, let me go look at that right now.” It helps you be a better manager, it most certainly helps you be a better colleague. And yeah, I do think staff appreciate it because a lot of the questions we used to get around transparency and what people are working on, especially since we've gone to the organizational goals cascading down, I think that really was the game changer for us.

Tim Cynova:

Right, before that it was just CEO singularly what their OKRs were, but they weren't necessarily… some of them were probably organization-wide, but it could have been like write a book and that didn't necessarily cascade in the same way. So yeah, now that everyone can plug directly into things, even if maybe their supervisor or their team isn't directly working on it, you can see how that rolls up to support the organizational objectives.

Lauren Ruffin:

So if let's say tomorrow OKRs are copyrighted patent and nobody but Google can use them, what do we do? Where do we go with that? How we modify them? Make not OKRs or would we totally… have you come across other systems that are interesting to you?

Tim Cynova:

Well, OKRs were popularized I think with Google, but they predate that to OKRs were originally called Management by Objective.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm going to get an OKR history, what a great way to start my Thursday morning. Thank you, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

This might be the end of that history.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, is that it?

Tim Cynova:

I mean, if you look back, I don't know when they started, maybe in the ‘50s, ‘60s, but it was a framework called Management by Objective and that's what OKRs are or became. And then with Google, really popularized the concept of OKRs or Microsoft, the Silicon Valley group there. I'm interested in two things that came out of our conversation with Nicola and Erica. Erica talked about how August has been focusing on habits, the habits that we want and tracking those. Also, what came up in the conversation was this idea of adopting an FTP framework, this idea from exercise, specifically I know from cycling where everyone is able to map what their 100% is because it's different for all of us and that then you work toward that.

Tim Cynova:

Not this 100% is equal across the organization we're trying to get 70%. What might that framework look like if you've meshed it together with OKRs? There's always the Bridgewater Ray Dalio alternative where you just videotape everything and all notes are public. That's probably way too much data, which I think is what they've also found out. Certainly the people I've spoken to who've worked at Bridgewater say it just gets overwhelming because everything is available, but that's probably on the radical transparency side of things and I'm not sure how well that actually tracks to performance and improvement, and connecting what you're doing on a daily basis to the organization's goals.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Can you think of a time when OKRs created problems for us? I also am skeptical of the former lobbyist in me is uncomfortable with transparency all the time. Have they ever created issues?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, certainly from just people issues. When you put what you're working on and the entire organization can see it, you have to expect that people are going to read it and start asking questions. And then maybe it's not fully formed and if people see it in print, they think it's fully formed. And then you're like, “Well, it's an idea that we're working on and it's not really a thing yet. It might not be a thing.” I'm always reminded of a piece of advice Amy Wrzesniewski gave me when I was talking about this way before OKRs, but when she was saying it's not that people who want to make bad decisions, they're making the best decisions with the data they have available to them in the context in which they work.

Tim Cynova:

Defaulting to open, defaulting to more information allows people to see the context in which they work, which will hopefully, and usually leads to better decisions. And so I think there's a messy part though that exists when you default to open because it means you're answering more questions, you're having to explain things in ways that you might not have to if no one knew that that was a thing. But hopefully in the longer run, it's a net positive. I can think of a number of examples where that happened, but-

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, no, I get it. I get it. OKRs.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, I know you're a big fan of Patrick Lencioni. Have you ever experimented with the thematic goal framework that he outlines?

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh gosh, I am a fan of Patrick Lencioni's. I'm fairly certain I only work at Fractured Atlas because that came up during the first conversation we ever had. I don't play around with it too much. For me, the beauty in Patrick's work is giving people a tool, and instead of being that manager who talks about trust in a spiritual, you actually have a tool to be able to really talk about how important trust is in the workplace. And how when there is no trust, people's behaviors are just so convoluted because they're working in all their childhood nonsense in the office.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's been my big take away that and like death by meetings. Oh, what a blessing. Someone who hates meetings. I feel like the more these episodes go on, the more people are going to be like, “She really doesn't like working with people.” Okay.

Tim Cynova:

Do you know that then you can adapt.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I know, exactly. Like the people, I want to work with three people. That's enough for me. Anything more collaborative than that is really too much, too much to manage. BUT death by meaning, I mean, organizations do get in the habit of having meetings and feeling like the meeting is the mission. And to me, those are the two biggest takeaways from his work in terms of helping organizations really have the language and the tools to be able to diagnose themselves.

Lauren Ruffin:

But no, the thematic goals get lost. For me, they're fine. I think we've implemented some of that, but yeah, no, I mean, those are my two big Pat things. I'd love to meet him, I think. I think, I'm not sure. His team's really, really wide and he has zero racial or cultural framework in his work, but-

Tim Cynova:

Well, that's something you can talk to him about.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I want him to rewrite five dysfunctions but actually have a little bit of identity there besides gender, and maybe not have the women perform as men in the workplace. I'd love to see a deeper analysis of that work.

Tim Cynova:

I would love for you to write a deeper analysis of that work and then let's share it with Patrick, and then I-

Lauren Ruffin:

Like fanfic?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Except with organizational development.

Tim Cynova:

There's an audience out there. Look-

Lauren Ruffin:

There probably is.

Tim Cynova:

Totally.

Lauren Ruffin:

Five dysfunctions of your diverse team.

Tim Cynova:

Every time we talk there's an idea like that that comes out of our conversations, whether it makes it on the air or not, so I'm totally game for that.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I think I'm going to update Laurenruffin.com but here's a list of all the ideas I have that are actually viable ideas that I'm never going to do. I have a list that's on a pad, but I need to just publish it so somebody else does it. I don't have time.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, claim the idea. Cross it off. Give me an update.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

That's a great idea. That should also be an idea on your ideas list.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Here's an idea, do it. I only want 3%.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I just know they're like 3% of solid percentage.

Lauren Ruffin:

Listen, I can 3% my entire life and be okay. Can I just get the 3%?

Tim Cynova:

That's the next t-shirt, I'm going to die for you.

Lauren Ruffin:

It's not book supporting your family on 3%.

Tim Cynova:

If you're presenting your life.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Lauren, it's always a pleasure spending a few minutes with you and have these chats. Thanks for making time and have a great week.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, you too.

Tim Cynova:

To read more about this topic, find templates and a rabbit hole of related information, visit us at workshouldn'tsuck.co. If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or a five stars, or phone or friend, whatever your podcasting platform or choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don't like as much. Until then, thanks for listening.

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Decade in Review (EP.05)

Last Updated

December 31, 2019

It's the end of a decade, and Lauren and I totally missed that's what everyone has been posting items about. In this episode, we sat down for a virtual fireside chat to record reflections on the past decade. Soft launch your new decade with a look back at ours.

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

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Guests

LAUREN OLIVIA RUFFIN currently serves as Fractured Atlas’s Chief External Relations Officer where she is responsible for the organization’s marketing, communications, community engagement, and fundraising. Prior to joining the team at Fractured Atlas, Lauren served as Director of Development for DC-based organizations Martha’s Table and the National Center for Children and Families. She was also fortunate to serve in various roles at and various positions at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Children’s Defense Fund, New Leaders, and AAUW. Before entering the nonprofit sector, Lauren held the position of Assistant Director of Government Affairs for Gray Global Advisors, a bipartisan government relations firm. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science and obtained a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law. Previously, she served on the Board of Directors of Black Girls Code. And in her spare time, she can be found mountain biking or gesturing wildly at the teevee in support of Duke University’s men’s basketball team.

TIM CYNOVA spends his time assisting teams and organizations with the things they need to create workplaces where people thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR), a trained mediator, on faculty at Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and New York's The New School teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Leadership & Team Building. He is a certified trainer of the Crucial Conversations and What Motivates Me frameworks, and is a firm believer that Work. Shouldn't. Suck. He currently serves as the Chief Operating Officer of Fractured Atlas where he oversees the FinPOps team (Finance, People, and Operations, as well as is a member of the organization’s four-person, non-hierarchical shared leadership team). Prior to that, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville Courier-Press. Also, during a particularly slow summer, he bicycled across the United States.

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Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about that. On this episode it's the end of the decade as we know, it but for Ruffin and me, we actually didn't. Who saw that coming? Now that we've figured out why everyone has been posting those 10 year recaps on social media, we're game for our own reflections.

Tim Cynova:

For this journey into the past, I'm again joined by podcasting saver co-host, Lauren Ruffin. Lauren, how's it going?

Lauren Ruffin:

Hey. It's good. So, how is your vacation? You've got a nice fireplace behind you.

Tim Cynova:

I do, it's really heating on my back. So-

Lauren Ruffin:

You look a little red in the face. But we should really do this with a video at some point because this is amazing. We're wasting a video.

Tim Cynova:

Well, I've go one image that I'll post to show our listeners what this is like.

Lauren Ruffin:

Okay.

Tim Cynova:

So yeah, it's the end of the decade, neither of us saw this coming, but we've decided to go year-by-year and pick out something that is a memorable highlight or just something to fill the space. So we'll let the listeners be the judge at what falls into which category there.

Tim Cynova:

How did you approach your compiling of your top 10 list for the decade?

Lauren Ruffin:

I did one of my favorite exercises which is I just picked random dates in my email. I've had the same Gmail account since 2002 or 2003, so there's lots of nuggets of fantastic-ness in there.

Tim Cynova:

All right. Let's get going.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Let's do it. Are you going first or am I going first?

Tim Cynova:

Do we want to go one by one?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Let’s just take turns.

Tim Cynova:

Okay, great. So 2010, start of the decade, what did you pull up?

Lauren Ruffin:

My random email from 2010 was my dad, an email scam, where my dad and I had started this charter school and it's a board of older people, and he apparently got hacked and it said he was in Mallorca, Spain without the money. And so, I wake up in the morning to all of these emails from old people being worried about him. My dad is definitely not in Spain. He is most certainly in Woodstown, New Jersey where he's been for the last 25 years.

Lauren Ruffin:

So that was my random email. But yeah, email scams were a whole thing.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I like that. That's the second time I've heard that story. It still is funny as the first time. All right. So, for mine, I decided to flip through all of my photos on my phone starting back in 2010 and pick something that seemed like a highlight from the decade.

Tim Cynova:

For 2010, I have photos of us moving into our new Fractured Atlas office which you'll see a theme for how this bookends my decade. It was the first time I ever had a chance to envision what an office might be like. It was pretty generic though, it looks like an office from 1980s, 30 years later. That was the first thing that I came to. I had a lot of photos from that office, so it's more quantity than quality, I think, for 2010, but that was what I picked for 2010.

Lauren Ruffin:

It didn't occur to me to look at photos. That's brilliant.

Tim Cynova:

I think picking a date and looking in email is also brilliant.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, my list is such a random hodge-podge of randomness.

Tim Cynova:

We're only a year in, so-

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Okay. No, I have something to do for the next decade, actually have an account with photos on it would be a step up for me.

Tim Cynova:

Well, in 10 years we'll come back and I'll do the email and you do the photos.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, I should also say that 2010 was the year I switched from government affairs, lobbying corporate stuff to the non-profit sector. That was the year it happened.

Tim Cynova:

That's nice. Well, and so that also bookends your decade.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I hadn't thought about that. That's why I need you.

Tim Cynova:

All right, so that's 2010. What's 2011?

Lauren Ruffin:

2011 was a lot of basketball games because I was playing in four different leagues. So there's a lot of emails about basketball, and the occasional one about volleyball. I don't remember playing in a volleyball league, but apparently I did.

Tim Cynova:

You just played in so many leagues you forgot.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm a terrible volleyball player and I need to email people on that chain to be like, "Did I ever show up to these games?" I have no recollection of playing volleyball.

Lauren Ruffin:

And then Netflix. Getting the red envelope. I was getting emails constantly about what I was getting, what I needed to return, and then taking these to other people's houses to watch a movie.

Tim Cynova:

Oh, nice.

Lauren Ruffin:

Remember that?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And then, it was the person who had the Blu-ray machine.

Lauren Ruffin:

Nobody I knew had a Blu-ray machine.

Tim Cynova:

I had a friend that had a laser disc machine, but all he had were operas to play on it, so we never went over to his house.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Do you want to watch a six hour opera about somebody pulling a sword out of a tree?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. No.

Tim Cynova:

No.

Lauren Ruffin:

No, I don't. Remember those mini discs? What happened to those? They seemed like they could have been cool, but they really never took off.

Tim Cynova:

They were so much easier to lose than the regular sized discs.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I don't know.

Tim Cynova:

I had a mini disc that had my business card on it for a little while when I worked at the Parsons Dance Company.

Lauren Ruffin:

And you hand it out?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Okay.

Tim Cynova:

It was the cool thing to do for a year.

Lauren Ruffin:

Huh. New York. Only in New York.

Tim Cynova:

You only could do them in the tray disc players and you couldn't do them in the ones that inserted in, and so once those became popular with Apple, whatever.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

All right, so a lot of leagues. That's great. And Netflix. Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

So let's see. 2011, I have that it was the fifth and final time that I attended the Tour de France.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh.

Tim Cynova:

I used to be a regular. Well, for five times, it was a summer vacation, to go spectate at the Tour de France. It was the year that I came to realize that it was disillusionment with elite professional cycling, and if it seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true, because that was at the end of the Lance Armstrong, where people were still doing amazing things and it was just getting too tough to believe. So-

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

It was still a great vacation, you just have to ignore-

Lauren Ruffin:

The drug scandal?

Tim Cynova:

Ignore the drug scandal and it's beautiful. It's castles and-

Lauren Ruffin:

Wealthy white men doing drugs in public, in plain sight.

Tim Cynova:

That's right. While everyone picnicked. Picnics along the side of the road.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

So quaint. All right. So that was 2011. 2012?

Lauren Ruffin:

The Olympics. Every Olympic year is a highlight for me.

Tim Cynova:

So you had a lot of emails that included information about the Olympics?

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Watching parties, or?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, watching parties. Where are we going to go hang out? Yeah, no I guess I spent a lot of time thinking about the Olympics that year. There were a lot of emails of the Olympics. That was also the year Katie and I started dating. That was also the year that I got laid off from my first non-profit job. I didn't know non-profits laid people off. I thought only corporations did that.

Tim Cynova:

That's quite the list.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

You're covering a lot of bases on that year.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, I did, I found a lot of... There was an email thread that I found in September of 2012 that recapped my summer of the Olympics to a friend.

Tim Cynova:

What were the highlights of that?

Lauren Ruffin:

Talked about hurricane Sandy which, the house that I grew up in, slid into the ocean, and so there was a picture on the front page of the Express that day. I had just gotten laid off, so I had a job interview that morning, and then talking about me and Katie and how we'd started dating.

Lauren Ruffin:

So that happened to be the day, the email that I found for that day.

Tim Cynova:

That's a great email.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. No, it summarized apparently the entire year. I was done in September.

Tim Cynova:

Just play this one out for the next four months.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

What are your Olympic highlights? What do you watch? What do you have to watch for summer Olympics.

Lauren Ruffin:

I have to watch track and field. That's the most less interesting. It's one of the few. Basketball is an option but it's a little less interesting to me, but for me, it's track. How about you? Do you watch the summer Olympics or you a winter Olympics guy, or neither?

Tim Cynova:

I do. I seem to get really invested in obscure sports, but not every Olympics. I think I usually watch, at this point, winter Olympics more than summer Olympics. I get invested in winter Olympics in a way that, I don't know.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Summer Olympics don't hold it for me.

Lauren Ruffin:

I got hooked on winter Olympics, was it last year? Yeah, 2018? Yeah. I discovered this sport where you're cross-country skiing for a million miles, and then you have to do it with a gun, and then you have to take the gun off, lay down on the cold ground and shoot at a target, and then get back up and ski some more. I got obsessed with that sport.

Lauren Ruffin:

What crazy person said, "Let me just have these people ski through the woods in a pack with loaded guns on their back, lay down on the cold-ass ground and shoot at targets."? That is insane.

Tim Cynova:

I could see you getting really into actually doing that sport.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh yeah. When I was 16, if I had known this existed, it would have been all in. It was like me spending two and a half hours just screaming and laughing at the TV, being like, "This is amazing. Why didn't I know this existed?"

Tim Cynova:

I bet you're going to spend maybe half an hour on the internet trying to find places where you can actually go and do this, and then that's going to be a vacation soon.

Lauren Ruffin:

Well, that's the best thing about being in Albuquerque. All the outdoor stuff that I want to do here is around the corner. I can just go throw knives at a knife-throwing range here. I'm like, "Awesome. I don't have to do it in my backyard anymore.", where the neighbors got really angry at me downtown. Someone throwing those knives poorly at a wooden board makes a lot of noise.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I might get angry for different reasons than the noise. Errant knives flying through your backyard. Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. No, metal slamming against wood at high velocity. The butt of the knife. It was so bad. But my attitude is as long as I can hit the thing, you could take somebody out with the pointy end or the blunt end. It doesn't matter. I'm just throwing them.

Tim Cynova:

Oh God. All right. The Olympics, great. 2012. Yeah. Just on the completely opposite end of the spectrum, that was the year my mom died.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh gosh. Yeah, that's more grieving.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah this is the regular point in our episodes where we talk about grief. So that's about all I'm including for 2012. That's a pretty life-changing experience.

Lauren Ruffin:

I have been thinking about the holidays so I'm hugging people a lot. So I'm thinking about the story you told about how your mom gave great hugs. I've been thinking about someone I've never met way more than is probably normal.

Tim Cynova:

You would remember the hug.

Lauren Ruffin:

I love a good hug.

Tim Cynova:

All right. So that was 2012. 2013?

Lauren Ruffin:

2013 is pretty short. The email I found reminded me that I was in my first development director job that year, and more basketball. Still playing a lot of basketball, still probably pretty fit and sexy. Yeah. That's it for me that year.

Tim Cynova:

Nice. Do you still play basketball? Still doing development-ish, so.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Not a whole lot. Just a basic year. No elections, no Olympics, no nothing.

Tim Cynova:

That's right. Just regular emails.

Lauren Ruffin:

Regular odd-numbered year.

Tim Cynova:

2013 was the year I biked the 340 miles from my apartment in Manhattan to Canada in two days. Started on the first day with a double century.

Lauren Ruffin:

Wow.

Tim Cynova:

And that's the first time I've ever biked 200 miles in one day.

Lauren Ruffin:

Wow. That's a thing.

Tim Cynova:

The idea was to bike Manhattan to Montreal because the alliteration is great. Montreal, I think where I was going to stop was about 40 miles north of the Canadian border. The first time I tried, it was about 50 degrees and raining and I made it 156 miles from Manhattan to Albany and pulled the rip cord. I was stopping every 10 miles at gas stations to fill up with hot water because it was just on the verge of being too cold.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. 50 degrees and raining is pretty miserable in the saddle.

Tim Cynova:

The next time, it was beautiful. It was one of those days where you get out on the bike at five a.m. and the sun is just coming up and it was clear skies, no wind. The 200 mile day, it was actually 202 miles. During the last two miles, a half mile of that I had to walk because I was going through an unpaved road.

Tim Cynova:

It was at that point, my legs were just cramping. I couldn't get my leg off the bike without it seizing up and I couldn't get it back on without it seizing. So it was this really painful thing, but it was a great day in the saddle.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. That's awesome. I can't imagine going that far, and then having to relearn how to walk like a little baby. How do you do that?

Tim Cynova:

If you're ever up for a 200 miler, let me know.

Lauren Ruffin:

I will, especially now that I have an electric bike. I can do it pretty much any day.

Tim Cynova:

What's so hard about this?

Lauren Ruffin:

What are you complaining about, Tim?

Tim Cynova:

But I made it to Canada, took a picture, hopped in the car, called it a day. All right. That was 2013. 2014?

Lauren Ruffin:

2014, from my emails, from what I can tell I think that was the year that I finally stopped bartending. I bartended well after I had a well-paying job just because I felt like I needed to keep talking to people, force myself to be an extrovert.

Lauren Ruffin:

Also, I worked really hard that year. So the organization that I was working for, the National Center for Children and Families, had its centennial celebration and it was the entire year. I found the host letter that we sent out in February and the thing wasn't until October.

Lauren Ruffin:

And that was my entire year, was wrangling a huge, affluent, incredible host committee and fundraising for the thing, and doing logistics for the thing. That was just the beast of a year. It was no sports, man. I couldn't find any. Did I play basketball? What did I do that year? It was just the centennial.

Lauren Ruffin:

We had people which had been involved with the organization who were still alive for 60 or 70 years. So it was wealthy, affluent people, and then really old people who didn't do email, so I was doing house visits, and they all had their memories that I became this basket of memories for this organization that was 100 years old. It was just a lot. It was a very busy work year.

Tim Cynova:

How were you collecting them?

Lauren Ruffin:

Paper. Paper, in my head, in notes, people sending letters. I had a lot of handwritten letters.

Tim Cynova:

What did you do with them?

Lauren Ruffin:

They're probably archived still at NCCF.

Tim Cynova:

Were they supposed to be in some book or something, or?

Lauren Ruffin:

Everyone had a memory of the organization. The organization was originally 140 acres and they sold off the land to build the community. So the entire community that is North Bethesda now was part of this orphanage, it's all Baptist homes. And so, there are people who are still alive who had bought the plot of land and built their houses in the '40s and '50s who were still living there, who remembered, who had this longstanding relationship with this organization that had these kids living on the grounds.

Lauren Ruffin:

There were kids who had grown up on the grounds who were now in their 50s, 60s, 70s who remember being there. So you do become, not the actual memories physically, you became this holder of memories that everybody wanted to be involved and celebrate this thing.

Lauren Ruffin:

But it was really meaningful and it I look back at my emails and remember how tired I was that entire year. I just worked. It was emotionally hard work, just a lot.

Lauren Ruffin:

So that's the second oldest Baptist home in the country. It might be the longest continuing, so the records there. One of the things that I really wanted to do that I didn't have a chance to do there was to really build out an archive. There was just so much stuff that I came across just, I'm not an archivist. But someone should do that. They have pretty meticulous records, there's never been a fire or a flood, or anything. Digitizing that stuff would be amazing.

Tim Cynova:

Well, for any of our listeners, there's a project there.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Seriously.

Tim Cynova:

Right, so that's 2014. My 2014, I have a random collection of things that I find very interesting. So that was the year that I visited Zappos, which was a highlight in itself. I started a daily micro-journal that I still continue to this day, where I write a one sentence journal entry at the end of my day, and sometimes include a photo, and it includes a lot of commas and semi-colons to make it one sentence and capture everything for my day.

Tim Cynova:

I read Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, and she had mentioned something about that so I started that. So I still do that. And that was also the year that I got hit by a car on my bike and broke my collarbone and five ribs. So a little bit of everything in 2014.

Lauren Ruffin:

That is a little bit everything. Was your collarbone break the most painful break you've had?

Tim Cynova:

No, ribs are far more painful. The collarbone was annoying in that, until they plated it, it slides back and forth, and every time you moved you could feel your collarbone slide back and forth because it's not connected to itself. But the ribs, by far, were the most painful because you breathe, you laugh, you can't sleep laying down. You have to sleep sitting up and you can't do anything about it except just wait.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I've heard ribs but I was talking to someone not too long ago about breaking his collarbone and he's broken a fair number of bones. He said that was the most annoying. But he's also a basketball player so I imagine that I'm using the collarbone probably.

Tim Cynova:

It's also, if you could break one at a time, and then compare them then maybe it is, but five ribs compared to one collarbone, the amount of pain that was going on, the ribs felt worse than the collarbone. Yeah. That was my 2014.

Lauren Ruffin:

2015 right? Is that where we are? So 2015 was the year I got married, at the very end of the year, and I also think, in reflecting on it, it was the year that my attitude about work changed.

Tim Cynova:

How so?

Lauren Ruffin:

We had that conversation early on about work as a vocation and I stopped feeling like work was a vocation in 2015. I really felt like the work I was doing an NCCF was really meaningful. It felt like a calling to me. I grew up, my father started group homes, and I grew up with kids whose parent's couldn't take care of them. We had 130 of them.

Lauren Ruffin:

And 2015 was the year where I was like, "I just need a job, so I'm just going to go ahead and..." I hopped over to Martha's Table, we did a capital campaign, and yeah, that was when work became a job. That was when my understanding of laborer versus owner really changed. That was 2015, but other than that, I was, again, just working.

Tim Cynova:

As I look back on this decade, it was, for me, the decade that my relationship with work and understanding work changed, maybe because of the work that I actually do around trying to understand work, for myself and others, and I would say this is the decade that I found what my purpose is in work. But if I looked at other decades, it would be a different thing. It would be a different relationship to my work.

Tim Cynova:

Well, it's a good thing that this podcast is also about work because then we just talked about it. So, great.

Lauren Ruffin:

I did that on purpose. See how smart I am?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. That's right. As if we had planned it. 2015, this is also... I came across a number of different photos in my highlights. It was the year I turned 40. It was the year I raced the Gran Fondo in New York, which is a 100 mile race from the George Washington Bridge up to Bear Mountain and back. Except for that other race, it was my sole race-race that I actually trained for.

Tim Cynova:

I went to Prince Edward Island for a vacation to cross something off my mom's bucket list for her.

Lauren Ruffin:

Cool.

Tim Cynova:

And the thing that they don't tell you, the thing Anne of Green Gables doesn't tell you is that in certain places of Prince Edward Island there's a lot of mosquitoes during the summer, so it's not very pleasant. Yeah. It's beautiful but you don't want to stop for too long.

Tim Cynova:

2015 was the year that my journey in anti-racism and anti-oppression began.

Lauren Ruffin:

Cool.

Tim Cynova:

It was the year that we really started doing work at Fractured Atlas and I found pictures of some of the sessions that we did together, and then as it related to training in crucial conversations that I did that year.

Tim Cynova:

So it was a busy year, a lot of different things, photographic memories and proof.

Lauren Ruffin:

Prince Edward Island. I felt the same way the first time I went to Assateague, because you read those books, Misty of, or something like that, those books about the wild horses on an island off the coast of Maryland. I feel like those books never mentioned the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes are unbearable, and the wind. It's a barrier island.

Lauren Ruffin:

I probably missed a big event that must have been maybe in 2013. I think that spring, I took Katie and the kids camping for the first time. We went to Assateague. We went there for spring break in March, and when we booked, I have this habit of booking things two weeks early because the weather is nice. The weather was beautiful when we reserved the camping site. We reserved it for the first day the park was open, and then there's a snowstorm that happened two weeks later.

Lauren Ruffin:

So it's me and Katie camping on a barrier island on the beach with wind. Enzo might have been two years old and Cassidy might have been five. It was winter survival. So there were these angry, skinny, hungry horses from the winter and they were wild and running around the campsite and I'm trying to pitch the tent and I'm trying to figure out what's going on. As I'm putting the stakes down, Enzo is so little he doesn't know. He's running behind me pulling the stakes up. And the wind is blowing.

Lauren Ruffin:

At one point, and it was actually really serious wind. It's maybe 20 or 30 miles an hour wind. We should not have been out there. And the tent falls over and smacks me so hard in the face I thought I broke my nose. But mosquitoes, islands.

Lauren Ruffin:

It was so bad that my dad, who doesn't worry about anything, he was at his girlfriend's house. She happened to live 15, 20 minutes away. I didn't have a cell phone so apparently he drove around the island looking for us because he was worried.

Lauren Ruffin:

He said he was outside yelling my name into the wind. I have this image of my father standing at the beach, click Ahab yelling. Yeah. Anyway. That's a flashback to 2013. Islands and mosquitoes. Ugh. What a trip.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

So where are we? 2016. Dun, dun, dun. The schism. That's when I started working with you.

Tim Cynova:

Seriously a highlight of a decade, getting to work with you.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. It might have been. Yeah. That was the highlight for that year. Low lights, I stopped playing basketball pretty much that year. That was when I started traveling too much to really be in a league. The

Lauren Ruffin:

That was also the year that the election happened and I talked a lot about moving to Belize.

Tim Cynova:

Every other conversation, you were mentioning Belize and looking into Belize.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh yeah. I had a lease ready to sign in my email. I was ready to go. Let's really test out this remote work policy at Fractured Atlas.

Tim Cynova:

That would have been too soon. Oh.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Too soon.

Tim Cynova:

All right. 2016, let's see. That was the year that I studied for and passed my senior professional in HR exam.

Lauren Ruffin:

Awesome.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. That was a crap ton of work, a lot of studying. I don't have a formal background in HR so it was three months non-stop of studying for that. Passed it on the first try so very thankful for that.

Tim Cynova:

That was also intertwined with our entire office renovation. I remember studying for that exam in different stages of prep for renovation, completely gutted, and then in our new space. So yeah, that was 2016 in photos.

Lauren Ruffin:

So I think your year is pretty front-loaded because I don't remember '80s office.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

I don't remember office number one.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. March to May was that part because our colleague Pallavi had to work from a picnic table in the middle of our... We had great cubicles except we took out some in the middle of the office and built a backyard with a picnic table, an umbrella and synthetic turf, and a fence around there, like a backyard fence, and pink flamingos, and a garden gnome.

Tim Cynova:

And we were all out of desks by time Pallavi started so she had to work from the picnic table.

Lauren Ruffin:

Knowing Pallavi, that's really priceless.

Tim Cynova:

I think Pallavi was excited that we didn't have that in the new office. A couple months sitting on a picnic table bench, not the most comfortable.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. And I also missed your exam, because I remember you, that must have been toward the beginning of the year too.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I think that was April or May is when I took that.

Lauren Ruffin:

I have to tell you. Before I met you, I didn't know HR was an actual profession. I didn't know that people studied for things. I had never met someone who actually knew what they were doing. Yeah, I just didn't know. You changed my mind about it. There are actually skilled professionals in HR. There should be more of them.

Tim Cynova:

There should be more of them.

Lauren Ruffin:

Do you think you would ever go to law school?

Tim Cynova:

I thought I would go to law school. Early in this decade, actually, I was really considering going to law school, and then I thought, "Why don't I just take all of the books that my friends who went to law school studied before they passed the bar, and then just see if I can pass the bar without going to law school."

Lauren Ruffin:

New York is one of the few states you can do that.

Tim Cynova:

I got that far. And then I thought, "Do I really want to spend all that time studying for the bar exam or maybe...", and then that's where I saw HR stuff, and I thought, "This is actually the law that I get really interested in." Yeah. I don't know. I've got a lot of things on my wish list for life.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Law school is tumbling down toward the bottom. All right. So that was 2016. We've got three more years. 2017. What's on your list?

Lauren Ruffin:

Man, I only had one thing. Artist Campaign School.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. That was a great one. That's a great highlight.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's all I had.

Tim Cynova:

It's one of the examples that I go to when I highlight the diversity of teams, and thought, and backgrounds, and what can happen when that actually happens. Artist Campaign School is the perfect example.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

You knew the people, you heard what people were saying. It was the right moment and you just did it. We didn't have a strategic plan for that.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, exactly.

Tim Cynova:

MVP, and it was terrific. And then, someone came out of that, ran for office and got elected.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I talk about it on how non-profits and their boards need to be nimble, and give the staff the flexibility to do what they want to do. I just didn't hire someone that year, and did the program. I made the sacrifice that we were just going to pick up a little bit more workload because the program needed to happen.

Lauren Ruffin:

Not to spend forever and ever planning and fundraising and just do it. Yeah. That was the highlight for that year, and again, I had never worked some place where I had the flexibility to be able to do something like that. Every place else I'd worked would have made that so complicated, and I was like, "Let's just do it. Let's bring in a consultant, let's just do it." So yeah, that was my highlight.

Tim Cynova:

My 2017, I think the highlight is, it was the year I started to slow down. I bought a camera, an actual camera. It actually caused me to slow down on hikes, or if I went to the beach because I was trying to get the photo. Of course, that led to a whole series on site-specific bourbon that was an unintended consequence of having a camera.

Tim Cynova:

But that was also the year that I started meditating with regularity. Daily meditation, and also owning a camera and noticing what's around you in the world were highlights for 2017.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's awesome. So I'm two years behind you on the slowing down and buying a camera. I wonder if there's a correlation between camera-buying and slowing down.

Tim Cynova:

I think there probably is. You could take a lot of really crappy photos, I guess, but to actually figure out how you want to photograph something and you have to get up earlier, you have to stay up later, you have to try different settings.

Tim Cynova:

There's a course that Diane Ragsdale teaches, she created and teaches, Beauty in Business, the Aesthetic Advantage, and part of it is she takes business people without arts backgrounds out into the woods and just lets them stand there for a little while and just start to notice what's around you.

Tim Cynova:

And I feel like she was creating that course at the same time that I got a camera and I felt like, "Oh yeah, right. That's what that camera does." You just have to stand there and wait to see what's happening. And then, if it's not sunny, you've got to take different photos because photos with a gray sky aren't that interesting, unless you're Ansel Adams and you're shooting in black and white.

Tim Cynova:

So you have the new camera.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. It's New Mexico so I could take pictures of the landscape here, and the people, and random little... Katie and I were driving down the Turquoise Trail yesterday and stopped into Cerrillos, they turned the entire town into the set for Young Guns forever ago.

Lauren Ruffin:

We go into this little saloon yesterday and it's just gorgeous. You could just wander around New Mexico taking pictures of interesting things forever, and maybe that's just me because I'm not from here. I understand what as far as the eye can see means now. I've got bad eyesight and I was, "Whoa." But now I'm like, "Oh wow. Even my bad eyes can see really, really far."

Lauren Ruffin:

So yeah, but slowing down. Yeah. And I never was one of those people who had my iPhone out taking pictures all the time anyway. I take more pictures now with a camera than I ever did with my phone.

Tim Cynova:

The newest iPhone has a pretty awesome camera. I've seen professional photographers that I follow on Instagram that are posting some pretty amazing low light shots especially. But I think it's just a different thing. When you pick up a camera, you're doing something different with it than when you have your phone in your hand that also has a really good camera on it.

Tim Cynova:

The common phrase is the camera you use is the camera you have on you, or something like that.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I took a picture of local, neighborhood coyote on my little two megapixel Nokia phone the other day.

Tim Cynova:

Nice.

Lauren Ruffin:

I was like, "Oh, you can kind of see it there." So yeah, you're right. I had a camera in my hand and I used it.

Tim Cynova:

That seems like an Instagram feed you could do. Just photos on your Nokia.

Lauren Ruffin:

I've been thinking about posting that one because it just looks weird. You don't see things in such poor resolution anymore.

Tim Cynova:

All right. Cool. So, let's see. That was 2017. So, 2018. What's on the list?

Lauren Ruffin:

I moved to Albuquerque, 2018. Squeezed that in at the end of the year. And then Crux. That's when Crux really crystallized in my head, and everything that started in 2015 around workers and ownership, and tech, and everything else fell into one place. That was my 2018.

Tim Cynova:

That's great.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Oh, hamstring is seizing up. So I've got nothing to come back.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm like, "Tim really didn't like that story at all."

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. No. Oh yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

Sorry. Do you need-

Tim Cynova:

The searing pain is, no, no. It will be fine. I've got a hamstring on one side, and then I've got a hip that might be getting too old to go running.

Lauren Ruffin:

They make new ones now that are amazing. It almost makes sense, I think, at this point to get new hips when you stop growing at 18 or 20. Apparently the titanium ones are amazing.

Tim Cynova:

It's probably not medically sound advice. So if anyone is listening.

Lauren Ruffin:

There's a reason why I'm not a doctor.

Tim Cynova:

So why did you choose to go the Albuquerque?

Lauren Ruffin:

Low cost of living. Depending upon who you ask, 320 or 340 days of sunshine. And just the pace. I've been done with the east coast for, God, probably 10 years. It was time to go some place else and broaden my horizons. It's a great place to live, and it's just visually stunning. Artists hang out here because of those things too. I think people who are ready to make the leap and who realize they can have a life outside of either coast, this is a really good place to call home.

Tim Cynova:

Crux is two years old?

Lauren Ruffin:

Crux is two years old. Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Time is flying.

Lauren Ruffin:

It really is. It really, really is. I think 2018 might have been the year when I knew how to do my job at Fractured Atlas too. It took that long.

Tim Cynova:

Well, it's not a typical place where you just go through one cycle and you're like, Okay, I've got it."

Lauren Ruffin:

Yup.

Tim Cynova:

Which is the interesting thing but also the thing that is exhausting.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, yeah. So I feel like I finally, by 2018, had a 90% understanding of the job. The job, we do so many things that just haven't been done before, so it was that, but the routine stuff, I'd wrapped my brain around by then.

Tim Cynova:

I feel if you've got to 90%, that's 5% better than I have at this point. Get above 80, and then it's like, "Okay. Great."

Lauren Ruffin:

You're dealing with people. People will always keep you on your toes.

Tim Cynova:

That's right. Yeah, if you could just operate at 50% if you're dealing with people, you're doing well.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

All right. 2018. It was the year that I was invited to serve on the faculty of both the Banff Centre and the New School. Yeah, my habit of saying yes to things that sounded interesting has proven to be deeply rewarding and extremely exhausting, because neither of those things are my full time job and they're a lot of work when I'm doing them.

Tim Cynova:

But that was 2018. It was also the year that we officially started our shared leadership team.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh yeah. Officially.

Tim Cynova:

Officially.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. We had been doing it for the previous year when Adam was on his sabbatical, so unofficially, about three years now but that was two years ago we started doing that.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, that's been really rewarding. I should have put that down.

Tim Cynova:

Well, that's shared leadership. One person puts it down.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

We don't all need to put it down. Just one of us needs to remember.

Lauren Ruffin:

We all might now be thinking that it's a great thing.

Tim Cynova:

That's true. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's totally a good thing. I was going to put that one down too.

Lauren Ruffin:

It was on my mind. I just figured somebody else would say it. Oh man, I crack myself up. Oh man, we are coming up on two years of that. Okay. I might have to do a reflection there too.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Well, I think that's the exciting thing that we have the entire leadership team together and you're all going to be guests at my New School class around leadership and team building, so 2018, the strings are coming together on that one.

Tim Cynova:

So both New School and shared leadership, and then we'll share our pros and cons in other things with people who are interested.

Lauren Ruffin:

2019. 2019 was the year that I officially felt like I had three full time jobs at various points of the year.

Tim Cynova:

Seems to be a theme.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I had two with Crux and Fractured Atlas for most of the year, and then, thanks to you, Tim, I crossed something off my bucket list, which was to teach a college course. When that was in full swing for six weeks, that was another full time job.

Lauren Ruffin:

It was a lot of just karmic and intellectual, and also systems. The systems that people use to work really matter. And that became a full time job just because I wasn't accustomed to working with the systems and maybe they were a little clunkier than they should have been.

Lauren Ruffin:

But that was something you hooked me up with that crossed off my bucket list. I would love to teach more at the college level. I think it's something I've always wanted to do, but I think I'd be pretty good at it.

Tim Cynova:

Well, I'm glad that you're able to do that. I think that's a really exciting thing to watch you pull together from the idea that you had, of just an idea that you were thinking about doing, and then how it developed into an actual course that people were taking.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. The whole thing. Okay, so what's your 2019?

Tim Cynova:

So 2019, continuing with the theme for the decade, so I lost my dad earlier this year, so I lost both of my parents this decade, and also, on the less grief-related, fully virtual organization, and closing out the decade similar to how I started the decade with looking at how people use physical and virtual spaces to do their work and thrive.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. You've done such a good job with that. It's cool hearing the arc of everything at Fractured Atlas. You might be Fractured Atlas at this point, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

Ooh. That's a heavy mantle.

Lauren Ruffin:

No, exactly. You've done a lot. If you were to summarize your decade, for you, in one sentence, how would you summarize it?

Tim Cynova:

Probably something around what it really means to live and how you can use that information to help others thrive. How do you summarize your decade?

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm just torn between, I'm still not very grown up. I might be as grown as I'm going to get. I think this was the year that I grew up as much as I'm going to grow up. I still really prioritize fun, but I've gone from being a wilding Ruffin to being a little bit more anchored.

Lauren Ruffin:

I always think about mortality because my mom died when she was so young and I was so young, but as I approach her age, I'm probably thinking more than a healthy 38-year old should think about mortality, and it's increasing all the time.

Lauren Ruffin:

But yeah, probably just this is probably the decade I grew up. People grow up in their 30s, I hear.

Tim Cynova:

Thinking about mortality allows you to recognize what being present actually means, and I think that's, for me certainly, it's been reflecting on mortality allows you to show up in a way that's more present, and engaged, and more meaningful, and I think people deal with that at different ages, having realizations where that comes together.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, and I guess it's less morbid mortality. I've been on my own since I was 17 years old. I've always taken care of myself, but I've also crammed a lot of fun into my life because I know how life quickly can be gone. Sleep when you're dead. I'm legit trying to suck every ounce of life out of what I have.

Lauren Ruffin:

And for some reason, I feel like this is just a decade where I got a little bit more serious, maybe. We'll go with Patty Pan grew up. That was probably what it is.

Tim Cynova:

Are you a person who does New Years resolutions?

Lauren Ruffin:

I do.

Tim Cynova:

Are you currently making them?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. They're good to ground. Yeah, I've got a couple. They're not super-serious.

Tim Cynova:

I have a to-do list of things I'd really like to get done but I don't make resolutions. We're recording this right before the new year. It would be the end of January before I'd go, "Oh crap. I probably need to write something down."

Lauren Ruffin:

I don't know. I'm continuously improving. So my New Years resolutions are, 1) I'm only going to wear sweatpants two days a week. This is going to be very hard for me. I anticipate that going quicker than a gym membership. [crosstalk 00:38:43] That's probably not going to last through week one.

Lauren Ruffin:

And then, my second is, I've never been to Europe, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

Where do you want to go in Europe?

Lauren Ruffin:

I want to go to Prague. I've never been. Whenever I've had the time I've not had the money, whenever I've had the money, I've not had the time, because of work. I'm going to go to Europe this year. Those are my two resolutions. But yeah, the sweatpants, I'm already going to fail. I haven't actually bought any pants. I don't have any pants. If New Years is really coming in a couple of days and I don't go shopping, which I'm not going to do, then it's not happening. I just don't have enough pants in my world.

Tim Cynova:

Go to Prague instead.

Lauren Ruffin:

So my New Years OKR is going to be at 50% for this year. I already know it.

Tim Cynova:

That's a solid percentage.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Well, Lauren, I hope you have a restful and restorative rest of the decade and look forward to seeing what's next in the years to come. Getting to work with you has been a highlight of my 2010 decade so very excited for the 2020s to roll around here too. Happy New Year, Lauren.

Lauren Ruffin:

Happy New Year, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

If you've enjoyed the conversation, or are just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up, or five stars, or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don't like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Workplace Journey in Anti-Racism & Anti-Oppression (EP.04)

Last Updated

December 28, 2019

In this episode, we discuss Fractured Atlas's organizational journey towards anti-racism and anti-oppression. We'll also discuss how unlimited vacation days, shared leadership, and fully virtual organizations can further this work, while at the same time creating new and different challenges.

Guests: Nicola Carpenter & Courtney Harge

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

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Guests

COURTNEY HARGE is an arts administrator, director, and writer originally from Saginaw, MI who has been working in the service of artists for the last fifteen years. She is the founder and Producing Artistic Director of Colloquy Collective, an emerging theater company in Brooklyn, NY. Courtney is also a proud member of Women of Color in the Arts, and a 2016 alum of both APAP’s Emerging Leaders Institute and artEquity’s Facilitator Training. She holds a Masters of Professional Studies, with Distinction, in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt Institute. You can find more information about her at www.courtneyharge.com and find her on Instagram and Twitter at @Arts_Courtney. Her credo (#HustlingKeepsYouSexy) is not merely a hashtag; it’s a way of life.

NICOLA CARPENTER works on the People team at Fractured Atlas, where she finds ways for tools and processes to better align with the organization’s purpose. She believes in tools so much that she sets personal OKRs every quarter. Prior to joining Fractured Atlas, Nicola worked for a variety of arts organizations including MoMA PS1, Walker Art Center, and Heidelberger Kunstverein, and she still has a particular love for museums. Originally from Minneapolis, she received a BFA in Art from the University of Minnesota and continues to stay creative through knitting and sewing clothes. She is currently in too many book clubs, but still somehow finds time to read books about organizational culture for fun. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter at @colacarp.

Interested in exploring the topic further? Check out Nicola’s collection of Resources for White People to Learn and Talk about Race and Racism.

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Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. I'm Tim Cynova and on this episode, Racism and Oppression, more specifically Anti-racism and Anti-oppression. And the work we need to engage in to co-create that future world. What can individuals, teams and organizations do to embark on and continue with this journey? We're joined by two people, Courtney Harge and Nicola Carpenter, who have a wealth of experience working together and separately to bring this work to Fractured Atlas among other places, the company which we all currently work. Both of their bios are included in the episode description and we'll learn more about their backgrounds in the work during our chat today.

Tim Cynova:

And their bios are packed with interesting work to things that might not make the cut. Both are originally from Midwestern States. That started with the letter M in both among a myriad of other fascinating things. Enjoy talking about fabric, shopping for fabric and talking about shopping for fabric. Conversations that I've had the privilege to listen to and have made me more conscious about the sourcing and sustainability of my own apparel choices. Courtney and Nicola, welcome to the podcast.

Courtney Harge:

Thanks Tim. Happy to be here.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah. Same. I'm excited.

Tim Cynova:

You both are deeply engaged in Anti-racism and Anti-oppression work, working together at Fractured Atlas in separate and other aspects of your life. How would you describe your activities?

Courtney Harge:

My activities, this is Courtney, are connected to one, just making work, a sustainable place for me as a black woman. I've been in a lot of working environments and so I tend to approach it like how can I thrive in whatever space I'm in. And so that includes running the POC Caucus, previous included facilitating the Anti-racism, Anti-oppression committee, in Fractured Atlas. It also includes doing the actual work that focuses on women of color and existing as a black woman in 2019.

Nicola Carpenter:

And I increasingly having these conversations realize that a lot of my motivation is to make sure that Courtney doesn't have to do it all by herself. And so at Fractured Atlas, I am currently the liaison for White Caucus and have been for the past three-ish years and kind of helped with Courtney form the current format for the Anti-racism, Anti-oppression committee and outside of Fractured Atlas. Just making the knitting and slow fashion communities that are quite White, better and more inclusive places.

Tim Cynova:

Starting with Fractured Atlas, can you talk a little bit about the journey that the organization has been on? Fractured Atlas is a non-profit arts organization with a public commitment to being an Anti-racist, Anti-oppressive organization. You both are deeply involved in that work to people unfamiliar with the journey that Fracture Atlas has been on and the work that we're doing. How would you explain it?

Courtney Harge:

I can offer that it's been a process. I walked into fractured Atlas five years ago, actually. At the beginning of January, 2020 it'll be five years for real. And the statement was made that Fractured Atlas was committed to be an Anti-racism Anti-oppressive organization and as a new employee, my concern was what does that mean? There's a lot of language thrown out, anti-racism, anti-oppression or diversity equity and inclusion work or diversity and inclusion work or there are a lot of words that happen, but what are you doing? And so for me, that moment kind of five years ago I was saying, okay, what do we do?

Courtney Harge:

And engaging with leadership thing about how does that play out when you're saying the thing and releasing the statement, that's one thing. But what does it mean in your policies? What does it mean in the everyday existence? And so there definitely been some steps that we can talk about more specifically like what some of those steps have been. But it has been ultimately the goal of we say this thing and then what do we do to back up the thing that we say. And that is I think manifested in a variety of different ways over the last five years.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah. And I think that at Fractured Atlas, it was started as a staff driven effort even before I started working here. And for a long time was talked about in relation to our mission, specifically the eliminating practical barriers. And I think that framing kind of helped the organization figure out that it wanted to make this commitment. And then yes, ever since then it's been figuring out how do we live up to this commitment because lots of organizations have statements, but do they actually do anything? Not so much.

Courtney Harge:

And to list some of the things we did before I joined members of the staff and the leadership team specifically to The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond Anti-racism Training. There was commitments to address hiring and making sure that was operating both in from a functional lens and from an anti-racist lens. There was commitment to all staff trainings as we persuaded with outside facilitators that kind of grew in length and purpose and really trying to create a baseline of what is everybody's understanding of what it means to be anti-racist and anti-oppressive. And then a variety of different tools that weren't necessarily specific to anti-racism but were specific to If we are understanding that something we were doing is an equitable, what can we throw at it? What resources can we throw at it to make it more equitable, to move in a way that is directionally correct.

Courtney Harge:

And so being able to recognize it doesn't have to just solve racism. Sometimes it feels like when organizations make these types of choices, they have to do a thing and it has to be, this thing directly says that this is anti-racist and it's like, or this thing addresses an equity as a whole. And sometimes they're like, well, if it's not anti-racist or if it's not specifically like about race and it's not fixing the inequity, and it's like, no, sometimes you can just do things better. That also as a byproduct will help support everyone. An example I'm thinking of is the Unlimited Vacation day policy. That's not an anti-racist policy. So much as it is something that allows work to not suck and having a workplace that doesn't suck actually becomes a tool to address inequity because people can enjoy their work. People can then bring their whole-ish selves and or can be more supported and that sure isn't an anti-racist policy. However, it is a policy that informs and it's connected to our values.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah, and I think that that's something that I've also recognized recently is that we've been on these kinds of concurrent paths of striving to be anti-racist, anti-oppressive and then also making work suck less and they have been kind of happening in parallel and at some point realized, Oh they actually do work hand in hand. I don't know. I kind of love that they work together and, working on The People team. It's exciting to think about policies in that way. But I don't know if Fractured Atlas would've ended up now if we didn't have that component along with it.

Tim Cynova:

One of the things at Fractured Atlas that you two get a lot of questions about. Because you both have written about A Race-based Caucusing that we do. We have People of Color Caucus, we have a White Caucus that meet on monthly basis and a lot of people want to talk to you both about why do we caucus and then how does that process look practically.

Courtney Harge:

The first thing simply, we started caucusing because we met with an outside facilitator who was like this is the thing you should do and we were open to the idea that we should do that thing. And I say that story, I want that to be an example of like some of it doesn't have to necessarily be driven from a giant external space or even a like morally motivated space. This is a moment of we needed to try something and somebody was like, this is the thing. And so we did it and it has been working for us. But yeah, it wasn't a deep compelling reason. It was as a result of working with a trainer, this is what they suggested and so we did it.

Courtney Harge:

Our approach, however, was very one I think driven by who Nicola and I are there ways in which we sat next to each other for a long time in the office and our energies are compatible. And so there is a bit of kismet in the sense of we both try to be really thoughtful about spaces that we cultivate and spaces that we operate in. And so given the opportunity to cultivate these spaces in accordance with these values and to do that in conversation with each other became an opportunity for us to be thoughtful about what these individual spaces were for the individuals who you're serving, but also what they were in relationship to each other.

Courtney Harge:

I facilitate the POC Caucus liaison for that caucus. And the practical thing is once a month we meet based on people's self-selection, people's identification, and there's an hour of space that's given to really talk about what is needed for the people in that space. And we recognize the White Caucus operates very differently from the POC Caucus. And I can give some insight into what the POC Caucus is like, but it is ultimately a container for POC to process whatever they need to be processing without the White normative gaze. Sometimes you just need a space to be a Person of Color without White input or White commentary or White observance.

Courtney Harge:

And knowing that hour becomes a very precious hour. Knowing that that's the rule of the space and it becomes an hour that can also be very casual. It can be very supportive. It can get really serious, but knowing that this is a secure hour in the day to just not have to engage with Whiteness as a whole, as a property makes it a really powerful space for us, for the POC who are experiencing and engaging with it.

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah. White Caucus, as Courtney mentioned, as a different objective or our only objective is to talk about whiteness, which there are professional spaces where there are only white people, but there aren't that many professional spaces of white people talking about what it means to be white and what whiteness is and how white supremacy culture embeds itself in our organizations and work. It's really a time of education and there's often homework involved. We take notes and just in that structure there is some accountability involved. All of the notes are sent to the POC Caucus after the White Caucus finishes just so that people know what is happening and just have some transparency there which is kind of built into that structure and on the structured side.

Nicola Carpenter:

The White Caucus meets for one hour once a month. POC Caucus meets for one hour once a month and then Courtney and I are currently the White Caucus and POC Caucus liaison and we meet monthly and kind of I present what White Caucus did and what the topic was and go over the notes without the expectation that I received any information back from the POC Caucus, which I think is another important thing built into the structure.

Nicola Carpenter:

Also, at fractured Atlas kind of early-ish on the POC Caucus, gave the White Caucus the opportunity to ask questions and so we often try to come up with questions, but we also don't have the expectation that those questions will necessarily be answered.

Courtney Harge:

To speak further on that. The practice of accountability in this case being unidirectional like this, accountability goes one way in a way that everybody is aware of and everybody understands really is one of the strongest tools in de-centering Whiteness as a focus and in really practicing what anti-racist, anti-oppression values are because White supremacy culture centers White comfort and centers White authority in a variety of ways and so having to make an act of practice of de-centering White authority.

Courtney Harge:

Yes you White people are required to report and be accountable to this other group who actually owes you nothing in return. One is a challenge. It is worth knowing that that is a struggle. It takes a second to really understand because it's really easy to fall back into this concept of fairness, welfare reporting and we should be reporting and it's like, no, this is a corrective action. We have to in this space practice something different.

Courtney Harge:

And also even in the POC Caucus very early we had to de-center whiteness. The POC Caucus was receiving the White Caucus questions and they were spending time dealing with them and it's like there are no White people here but we are talking about what the White people need. Again, it's like this is not right and so it became a commitment that even if we don't have an agenda, whatever the White Caucus has asked us is the last thing on the agenda as a practice and so also communicate to the White Caucus like there is a strong chance we won't get to you.

Courtney Harge:

That's again by design this one hour of no, we are not centering Whiteness at all and it became the consciousness of the practice. This'll be the last priority and that makes engaging with it the highest priority. Making it a point to not bring that into the space unless we all choose, unless we all kind of consent.

Courtney Harge:

Making a conscious decision to deal with whiteness. And sometimes it's been like these are the questions from the White Caucus. Do we want to engage with them? Do we have something else we want to talk about? Now it's like, okay, we can spend our hour with this, but being able to choose become super powerful as opposed to trying to replicate this idea that this is a work meeting and so we need to be productive in a way that really is just replicating the ways that white supremacist culture says that we are productive and it's like no, taking care of ourselves is productive.

Courtney Harge:

Giving us the space is productive even if it's just the hour to exist. We've actually sometimes met at the in the first five minutes and decided that what we wanted was this an hour where nobody could deal with us, nobody could talk to us, so we keep the hour on the calendar and don't meet. The hour is to take care of us. It's an hour where we are not accountable to anybody else and that has been helpful, particularly in the transition to virtual.

Tim Cynova:

We recently realized that we have been caucusing on a monthly basis for three years as of this month, December, 2016 and it's right now it's December, 2019 which initially blew my mind.

Nicola Carpenter:

I know so weird how time works.

Courtney Harge:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

But that has been three years where we've not missed a month caucusing. As you also mentioned, there have been mandatory all staff trainings around depression, around racism, around disability and accessibility that have been part of this work as well. We've done things like the negative interaction document that would be useful to hear I think, but think about caucusing and looking over three years. What do you make of that besides the exponentially increasing passage of time is really not great.

Courtney Harge:

The POC Caucus is going through a really active transition and we're figuring out what that looks like. We still want the space below three years of having this safe space has actually meant that we need it less or at least we need it to be different. Where it was primarily a space for us to gather and support and hold each other up in a particular way that still exists there. But the parallel of three years of being able to do this work and three years of the organization actively making work, not suck and three years of just life and being able to create better tools, has meant that the container that we previously needed is very different from the container that we need now. Particularly again connected to this virtual work now that employees have more control over what their working space is like now that it is not the same coming to the office in engaging with the White gays in a workspace in a particular way.

Courtney Harge:

How we can serve each other and how we can support each other is different and what we need is different. And so that's been fascinating to really consider what happens when you get to the next level of doing the work. Three years of support leads to people feeling more supported. Now what nobody you do when there's still clearly issues to address or there's still space to address. But if the fundamental kind of baseline is people feel safe and cared for and able to exist more fully with themselves at work, then how do you go to the next level of care and respect for the space? And that is a conversation we are having in the Caucus.

Courtney Harge:

It is worth, we're all kind of all on board with we want to protect the space, but we need to really make sure that you're actively using the space and the resource that it allows us to have. But that was fascinating. That's just a question we never, I know three years ago we didn't think about what does it look like when we don't have to have this space?

Nicola Carpenter:

Yeah. I was recently looking at all of the topics that White Caucus has talked about in the past three years and it's been really interesting to see the topics that we come back to, the topics that change. Also, I was surprised at how many, I have facilitated, this is a slightly funny story, but the only reason why I became the White Caucus liaison is because when we were working with an outside facilitator was wondering who would be the White Caucus liaison. I knew that it was someone that needed to find some time on schedules and would meet with the POC Caucus liaison once a month and I knew that was either going to be Courtney or another person that I also enjoy talking to.

Nicola Carpenter:

It was like, "Okay, I can schedule stuff and I will for sure have a meeting with this person once a month." Great. Sign me up. But when no one was volunteering to facilitate, I quickly then became the facilitator for a lot of them and which I'll do and it's fine, but I don't think it's the most helpful for the organization to have only one person do that. We found an outside facilitator. Also, it's hard for someone within the organization to keep the group accountable. I think that it was helpful to have someone outside of the organization help us figure out what it means to be a White Caucus.

Nicola Carpenter:

And then we revisited and had someone do that again periodically over those three years. Yeah, and I think that we're also trying to figure out how do we get more people to facilitate and how do we spread that out to more people and I don't think that's necessarily something we've figured out yet, but I think it's something that we are figuring out and we do still feel like we have a lot to learn that there is still value in White Caucus and infinite numbers of topics. We're not going to dismantle White Supremacy in one hour a month.

Tim Cynova:

It's been an interesting challenge really because we're doing this work inside of an organization. I know many of our colleagues and coworkers are active in similar spaces outside of work, but having caucusing inside of a workplace where you also have people who are hourly and only have so many hours in the week to work. It's been an interesting constraints to have to figure out how this becomes DNA-level part of our organization to have the conversations. It's not the only thing that we've been doing. We think about the three years in the three years at Fractured Atlas that we've been caucusing on a monthly basis.

Tim Cynova:

We've gone from a single CEO to a four person shared non-hierarchical leadership team. We've grown our programs. Whereas you both have alluded to, we're days away from being an entirely virtual organization with team members currently in 12 States and six countries. That's adding an additional component maybe worry, concern that the three of us have talked together and separately about what does this work look like when none of us see each other in person but maybe two to four times a year and how might we need to double down on some of this work so that a virtual organization doesn't benefit white people but we're-

Courtney Harge:

To jump into that. It feels like White Supremacy like fills in the cracks. If wherever we are White Supremacy is the water and if there's a hole in the boat, if you heard mindful about it, White Supremacy culture or oppressive culture seeps into the cracks. It is about how do we engage in once we change but once we pivot into a place that we haven't been so where we don't necessarily know how to identify the cracks, how do we make sure that we are being mindful enough to keep White Supremacy at bay in the spaces that we can now that we are going into new spaces.

Nicola Carpenter:

And I think it also comes down to who do we look to when we're doing things like this as well. Because, I mean we really love seeing what other organizations are doing. And I don't know of that many other organizations who are fully distributed, who are also committed to inter-racism and oppression just based on talking to people. Because there are a lot of people who think that you can't have a conversation about racism on video. But my argument is, well, if we can't have that kind of conversation, how can we have any other kind of work conversation? If we can't do that, then we are not functioning as a fully distribute organization in a way that works. I think that there's a lot of things in here, but I think that we've gotten good at communicating virtually and I don't think it's impossible to have difficult conversations in that way.

Tim Cynova:

... I've had the pleasure of getting to do workshops with both of you always have a great amount of fun. One of the things we often start with is a disclaimer. We're going to tell you about our story. It's not the only story. It's certainly not perfect. We've made plenty of mistakes along the way. We couldn't even follow this if we were to do this again because it's a different place, different world, but what can we learn from other companies? How can we continue to iterate on this and how can we continue to share what we all in organizations have done so that there's more information that people can draw upon.

Tim Cynova:

I'm not sure how to do this thing. I've never read about it, so I must not be possible. I can think about the questions that are next. Well, how do you do it? Or what if the leader in the organization isn't receptive to it or I'm the leader in the organization. What if the board's not receptive to it? Is it possible to even do the work or should I go to a different organization?

Courtney Harge:

I have a lot of feelings about that question. I recognize progress is not linear, but go with me in the sense of like let's say progress is linear and it goes from like one to 10, 10 is the utopia. The utopia of everybody's fine, Everybody's taken care of. No racism, no oppression or whatever. One is the world's most racist organization, you know like the DMV inside of the Klan rally. The worst thing with all the hierarchy, all the terrible things, right? It actually is the same net gain. If you take an organization from two to four as it is. Take an organization from five to seven that gain is two. But the amount of work it takes to get an organization that is starting at two up to four, the amount of effort and energy and resources it's going to take to get you there, so much more than it takes an organization to get from five to seven.

Courtney Harge:

From two to four is still only two deviations of progress, but it's burned through you and for other people and they're still not even on the right side of history. Five is the middle. They aren't even still there. And so organizations and institutions will protect themselves. You are more valuable as a person than any organization or any institution. And so burning through you to get an organization from two to four an organization that is not doing some of the basic things that are just necessary is not worth it, frankly for me. If you can find an organization that's already at five or already at six and then you can use your energy to get it further on the right side of history, that is I think far better for the world and for you than it is trying to get a bunch of organizations that are on the wrong side of history to just be slightly less terrible.

Courtney Harge:

Because if we can tip the scales to where more organizations that are starting at five get to seven, eight, nine, 10 they can then offer pressure as an institution, as a field for these other organizations to change. But the organizations that are again at two three and four they're actually going to spend all their work trying to maintain that. Than they are going to be to like address the field. My short answer is, if you can properly assess what the change is and how you can make it happen in a way that's sustainable, that can maybe last after you leave, then make the change. But if you can't, if it's not going to change, and if you're again operating in the two, three, four level and you're going to burn yourself out trying to get them to make minor changes to quote LeBron James, "Take your talents South beach," go somewhere where you can be appreciated and recognize that frankly the institution will be fine, it'll survive. Take care of yourself over it.

Tim Cynova:

The six, seven, eight reminds me of the pyramid about the three ways you get people to do something or change. The top, being inspiring. You try to get the most people in the inspire bucket and then the next one is motivate. You try to get the next people and do that. At the bottom of that inverted pyramid is coerce. That's the other way, but it's oftentimes, forget it. They will never come along the amount of time it'll take you to get that group to not realize that they will not do the thing. It takes so much time and energy. It's better just to cut your losses and go someplace else or realize that's never going to work. I'll focus on the other areas where I actually can impact to change.

Nicola Carpenter:

I fully agree with that. And I also think that sometimes when White people say, well I can't do this because leadership doesn't want to, or I can't do this because the board doesn't want to. I wonder how much of that is the case. Cause I know that white people like to pass the burden to other white people. Sometimes I like to push back with that and ask, well what is something that you can do in your current position to do something? Maybe you won't be able to get a full staff training without getting senior leadership on board, but there's probably something you can do.

Courtney Harge:

And not everything requires permission. I recognize not everybody is comfortable with taking like work risks and I don't want to advocate or forcing people to do things that they feel are reckless or dangerous, but some of it is just like is the worst consequence of this and awkward conversation. That's actually not a consequence really. It is a mildly unpleasant moment. I guess to follow up on what Nicola's saying, sometimes asking what are the real consequences of this thing? If I like include my pronouns in my email signature, does that just mean that one jerky coworker is going to ask me about it every time? That's annoying, but that's not actually a consequence, right? Or am I going to have to explain it? Yes. Annoying, maybe, but not really a consequence. The impact is that somebody who's receiving your email may feel more open or may feel that you are better understood or at least can have a conversation about it.

Courtney Harge:

That might be it. I think about the ways in which White supremacist culture and work culture and professionalism really maintain each other in a variety of ways. They work to this culture of quote on quote understanding. When I say understanding, I mean this idea that these social norms, these ideas that we just aren't supposed to do this thing, but the thing that we aren't supposed to do is almost always a thing that holds up White Supremacist culture. I'm thinking about salary transparency. Where you're just not supposed to talk about what you make and it's like, well that's just so people can underpay you. That's actually the consequence of that. It's that people get upset because they find out they are being underpaid. And so being transparent actually helps overturn the system. But the norm about not talking about being paid is a thing to support the system.

Courtney Harge:

And so I think about other training that Tim and I did in Dallas. We went to work with an organization and I made the room say the phrase White people just say the words. Because we do a lot of time, we do a lot of work protecting Whiteness by not being able to say that this is the thing that's going to make white people uncomfortable. And we use coded words like donors. We use code words like the board, we use coded words like people. It's going to make people uncomfortable. It's like no, it's going to make White people uncomfortable. And one of the first things we can do is say the phrase White people in a professional setting. And so I could see we were in the room and we're getting pushed back and I was like, we're all just going to take a deep breath and we're going to say the words White people.

Courtney Harge:

We're going to get through this barrier together. And there are some people who resisted. And so then I said, I see some resistance. That means we're going to do it again. We're going to take a deep breath and as a community we're going to say White People and we're going to see that the office didn't blow up, nobody got fired. There are no consequences. We are just, we're going to call the fact that what we're talking about is whiteness is White People. And being able to say that is one of many first steps to being able to address the issues. But if you can't even just say whiteness, White People, White Supremacy, there's so much more really hard work after that.

Courtney Harge:

That like if that's the barrier, there's so many ways in which you're not ready, so it's worth it to know that when there is something you can do, but one of the things might be able to just say, this is a problem because of racism. This is a problem because it's oppressive. This is a problem because it is systemically a problem. It's not just a business problem. It's not just a, well, some people might be bothered by it as a problem because it replicates oppressive systems. Let that be enough of an argument for something to be addressed.

Tim Cynova:

One of our colleagues in the field was speaking at my new school class last year. He has a friend who was recounting the number of years of sleepless nights and stress and worry that people endure for the awkwardness of a 90 second conversation is amazing. You just need to have a little awkwardness for 90 seconds, but you're worrying about, should I say this? Should I not say this? You're lying awake at night asleep or whatever it is. It goes on for years and years and years for just, this is going to be awkward for a couple of minutes or it's going to be stressful. If I do this then I can move on to the next thing rather than have this as a blocker.

Nicola Carpenter:

Just put the information into the Shared Pool of Meaning.

Courtney Harge:

Yay. Shared Pool of Meaning.

Nicola Carpenter:

Tim led crucial conversations training and me and Courtney especially loved the Shared Pool of Meaning and talk about it all the time because it's just so good. It's like if you just put the information into the Shared Pool of Meanings, so many things will be solved.

Courtney Harge:

It's both perfectly accurate and also corny in such a way that it's just fun.

Nicola Carpenter:

Right. It's so corny.

Courtney Harge:

Right and all of the... I mean it's both corny and useful, it is like one of my favorite sub genres of existence.

Tim Cynova:

One of the things we often hear is, well what if we do this work in our organization and we lose people?

Courtney Harge:

I have an answer for this. I'm going to let Nicola go first because I get super excited about it.

Nicola Carpenter:

I was just going to say, well Courtney would probably say you're already losing people-

Courtney Harge:

That was my answer.

Nicola Carpenter:

... And then I was just waiting for Courtney to say it, but I'll just say it anyway. I mean we have this conversation a lot that you are losing people. I mean I think this works for any kind of loss of version. If you're afraid to lose something, how do you reframe that and show that your current situation is also losing something? I mean, I think that some of these questions are helpful, but I think that oftentimes these questions are coming from people who want to make it more complicated than it is, which is whiteness at work.

Nicola Carpenter:

But I think it's helpful to reframe it as also, I mean if you're not working towards being into racist, you're being racist. And so in various policies also people are like, well, Oh this is going to take so much time and effort and how are we going to do this? And it's like, well you're already being racist. So what is your argument to continuing being racist?

Courtney Harge:

I love to make people argue for the racism because very few people... It becomes a fun, like rhetorical trick. But very few people want to be on the wrong side of history. And so if they can talk way out of being on the wrong side of history, they will. And so that's why we get some of these questions around like, well, if we lose people or it'll be difficult or it'll be there. And by presenting the fact that not doing this is racist, so now I need you to make an argument for keeping the racist thing for doing the racism, right?

Courtney Harge:

If you're going to do a racism, choose it, and you have to convince me that that's the better answer, that the racism is the right one, and all of a sudden it becomes much easier for people to do the other thing, because very few people want to go on record and say, I want to do the racist thing. I want to be a racist. There are people who do that, right? Here's a whole subset of people who are like, no, I choose the racist thing and that's fine, but the majority of people who don't want to be in that group when forced to argue for racism won't. There are just ways to talk about the reframing.

Courtney Harge:

You're already losing people. If you have staff of color or even staff who are just uncomfortable with perpetuating racist systems, one, very few people are going to tell you that in their exit interview. They aren't going to be like, PS, this department is hella racist and so I don't want to be here. That's not how people communicate. It's not how people communicate at work. Partially because oftentimes we can't say racism at work. It becomes this proving how racist it was. It becomes this whole thing and it's just much easier to say, I got a different commute or I want a new opportunity or I just got a better offer and it's been really great to work here and now I'm just ready to move on. Those phrases do a lot of work to cover what they want because particularly if they feel like this working relationship with you was over, they are going to invest in the 90 second awkward conversation about saying, well I think you're racist because they're already exiting.

Courtney Harge:

They're already done. If you know that, and if you see that like, hey, we keep losing some really great people and Oh well it's just not the right opportunity. Consider that there's a bunch of stuff that you don't know that may be why they are actually leaving and that's why you're losing them. Just because you're the one donor would be like, well I'm uncomfortable with this and so I'm going to stop because we're an arts organization so I'm going to stop supporting it because you guys are getting political.

Courtney Harge:

That donors may say that thing or that board member may say that thing, but and so sure that looks like that's why you're losing them. But again, there are all the other staff members who are dealing with toxic environments, who are dealing with like racist and oppressive policies are just not vibing with what you're doing because they can see what you value and they aren't going to say that. They're just going to assume that you're not going to listen to anyway and they're going to walk out.

Nicola Carpenter:

I actually think this is similar to when people say, well, I just can't find diverse candidates for this job opening. I like to push back and I was like, why? Why is that? What are you projecting to the world that is causing that? There are lots of people out there, there's lots of very qualified people and maybe there's a reason why they're not applying to jobs at your company.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, there's 7 billion people in the, I'm reminded of a comment, one of our awesome board members said when confronted with someone saying, "How do we do the work? What do we do and do we need a plan or something?" And she said, "When I decided I want to be a vegetarian, I just stopped eating meat one day." I didn't have a strategic plan. I didn't go into a planning process or anything. One day I ate meat, the next day I didn't. What's the equivalent of that to this work? We often use the question, what can I do right now to move towards what I really want? You don't need to ask permission to introduce yourself with your pronoun. You just do it. What else do you want people to know?

Courtney Harge:

Well, don't be afraid to fail. Nobody's going to fix racism. You can't. We want racism to be fixed and oppression to be fixed, but it is not a one size fits all multi-year analogy is great about how doing things like it is not vegetarianism. It's like, Oh, today we eat meat and tomorrow we don't eat meat. It is like today we're racist and tomorrow we're not racist. Right? Racism is a system. And so acknowledging the ways in which we participate in the system is helpful and knowing that we're all going to fail at some point, but then we have to keep doing something else. We've talked about oftentimes there are policies where like people try to actually nickel a story where somebody is like, we're looking for candidates and we submitted a job application and we just, we just didn't get the right candidates. The assumption is that well the candidates aren't out there, which isn't true.

Courtney Harge:

Because the candidates are out there. Okay, so you didn't do it and so you don't just make the hire. Actually you do the thing where you go back and you fix your process and you come back or you say, hey, is our workplace actually safe for People of Color? Is that why they aren't applying? You have to maybe ask more questions and you might find these failure points that you have to fix that aren't about implementing a EDI program. They are like, "Oh, our hiring is fundamentally problematic." Racist is one of the issues.

Courtney Harge:

Yeah, do things. Know you'll fail and then keep doing them. Whatever you can do, throw everything at it because racism is the train. Everybody likes to think that progress is a train and if progress gets far enough, then we will have fixed racism and that's not true. The train is racism and all we can do is throw whatever we have at it to slow it down a little bit. And so if you threw something at it and the trained in stop it all, keep throwing things at it, you have to.

Nicola Carpenter:

I think one thing that I would want people to take away also is that you're not doing this alone, that lots of people are doing this and any idea that you have, there are probably lots of people that are also working on it. And I think that there have been times in the past years where it can feel slightly lonely. Like if you talk to your friends. I mean especially as a white person, you're talking to friends, they're like, what are you talking about? I don't know what you're talking about. Which can sometimes feel weird, but there are so many people doing so much work and finding those people and working with people I think can kind of counteract some of them. A lot of people are doing it, which can make it less discouraging.

Tim Cynova:

Well, Nichola in the description for the episode, I'll include a link for the resources that you compiled from a variety of places, specifically for white people to talk about race and racism. It's a lengthy, an incredible list of various media. What are the other things we've done at fractured Atlas was to create a negative interaction guide. Courtney, can you talk about how that came to be, what that is?

Courtney Harge:

To go to something I said a bit earlier, sometimes it's not just about doing the thing that is anti-racist, it's about doing the thing that fixes a problem. And so this is an example of the majority of our customer service I've had the time where a young woman of color and we're noticing, just like observationally that they were staying on the phone in negative interactions. Just way too long. And so this is the thing where it's just like customer service. It's ingrained. You're talking to people and this notion that the customer is always right was translating into kind of a racist practice where they were enough members particularly are a kind of White middle-class artists. Were basically using the time to yell at these young women of color. Nobody is saying that. I don't think anybody's making that choice or it's like, I am a white person and I'm going to call and yell at this person because that's just what I want to do today.

Courtney Harge:

That's not how it's going. But it ended up being falling into this customer service mentality that meant that people felt like they could not get off the phone because this was a member and this person was paying or was going to engage in our services, that the power imbalance was automatically in their favor and that if they complained or if they exited the conversation or something, that the institutional power would not support them. Those are the assumptions and I remember having a conversation with our then CEO about it. He was like, why would you think that was like part of the question? It was like there's no way that if somebody's mistreating you and if somebody's like that, that's not it. And I was like, it's easy for you to say that partially as a white male, partially because a lot of white men in power have said that and then have fired people who went against that.

Courtney Harge:

And so it becomes something that people say, but there is a visceral understanding that that's not how institutional power plays out. Even if somebody is saying that that's how it will. And so the negative interactions document kind of came from really understanding that and saying we have to make explicit both what people on staff's options are and what the support will be if they choose to enact those options. And it was very important to me that the document did a few things. One that it gave a variety of options without prioritizing or ranking the options. Because people have different capacities. I'm a talker. I can talk through most things, it particularly uncomfortable or possibly confrontational interactions, but that is a particular skillset connected to my personality. Not everybody can do that. A lot of people, particularly if they are faced with something that is racist or sexist or just outright rude, shutdown and can't process through what's necessary to like continue the confrontation or even to continue the interaction.

Courtney Harge:

And so by having a list of eight different tools, including being able to hang up on somebody, no question to ask, just hang up the phone allowed people to one, be able to trust their own instincts, know where they are in a space and act accordingly. Two, it didn't prioritize one solution over another so that, and if people are in different spaces or differently resourced or if the level of disrespect was different, they can make a different choice and it detailed how senior staff would support them in that space. You hang up on somebody. Specifically right away you don't have to try to justify why you hang up. You can just simply say, I hung up here is the number so that person can't call back and continue to harass or bother other people and knowing that somebody who has more institutional power than you then is responsible for taking care of it.

Courtney Harge:

You don't have to manage both that person and your feelings and your manager. You can just say, I had to walk away from this. This is what's up, and that has been I think, helpful for staff, but it is also really just led to a conversation around how do you trust your instincts and how do you take care of yourself in these interactions that prioritizes the fact that you are the person working here. You're the team member, you have the skill set, you have the information and the customer is coming to you for your expertise. They don't get to both ask you for your expertise and beat you up for it. You can't do both of those things and if we are in community with each other, we can all respect each other and I'll be in community and be equitable in this community.

Tim Cynova:

What are the next things we did with that was that you publish that online. There's a public document that anyone who's a member who is interacting with us can see. If you go to workshouldn'tsuck.co it's linked there, it's on the Fractured Atlas blog. I know of organizations who have taken that and repurposed it in their own organizations as a document to guide interactions, but for those who call in and engage in that type of behavior, it's public. We say exactly what we're going to do and what people have available to them.

Courtney Harge:

Yeah, because it's helpful. Again, I believe in transparency and accountability and sometimes people want to prioritize simplicity and I believe things can be simple. But I think actually it's more important to say this interaction can be complicated. These are all of the tools we have at our disposal to deal with it. And so you knowing that choose to kind of misbehave, then you also know what the consequences are. That is helpful. And so that people who choose to misbehave are making a choice. Are in fact doing that and so they know what that response could be. It becomes, for me also both a matter of consent, a matter of transparency, but also making the implicit explicit is a strong driving force for me. The ways in which I talked about norms and talked about like these things that are understood and it's like, or we can take the understood and write it down. And if we're committing to it, then everybody knows what the rules are.

Courtney Harge:

But our working knowledge is based on this. Well, we just know that this is just how it's done. Again, that's where racism, White Supremacy, that's where it seeps into the cracks. Normally, this is just how it's done this is the racist way we've learned how to do it. And we can make changes, particularly once we take these implicit biases or these implicit understandings and make them explicit and make choices about what they are.

Nicola Carpenter:

I do actually love that to tell people, re-examine anything where your answer is, this is just how it's always been done. Because those are the things you don't necessarily think about. It's not necessarily the obvious things, but those are the things that probably need the most changing or to be explicit. Otherwise, yeah, you get those cracks.

Tim Cynova:

Courtney and Nicola, thank you so much for your time today for joining the podcast for your work you do at Fracture Atlas. Getting to work with both of you on this work and through Work. Shouldn't. Suck and thinking of new ideas to put Work. Shouldn't. Suck on whether it be buttons or track jackets.

Courtney Harge:

I want the tracksuit.

Tim Cynova:

We'll see what 2020 brings. It could be the year of the Work. Shouldn't. Suck tracksuits.

Nicola Carpenter:

With the anniversary gift Tim, come on.

Tim Cynova:

It's a perfect gift to give. It's a gift that says "Happy Fifth Fractured Atlasversary."

Courtney Harge:

Yes.

Tim Cynova:

It's an absolute pleasure getting to work with both of you and I want to thank you for your time today. If you want to follow along with Courtney and Nicola's adventures, you can follow them on Instagram and Twitter at @Arts_Courtney and @Colacarp. It's my pleasure to welcome back to the podcast everyone's favorite co-host, Lauren Ruffin. How's it going Lauren?

Lauren Ruffin:

It's good. And I am still everyone's favorite podcast co-host.

Tim Cynova:

Two consecutive episodes running.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

In this episode about Racism and Oppression in the workplace, I talked with our colleagues, Courtney Harge and Nicola Carpenter. We chatted about the work that they'd been deeply involved in at Fracture Atlas. I want to get your take as a co-CEO in an organization that you joined relatively early in our Anti-racism, Anti-oppression journey with also perspectives and other organizations doing the work. Want to get your thoughts on what that journey has been like for you and how is it the similar or different or met expectations or didn't?

Lauren Ruffin:

I just think the journey of our organization is sort of watching the personal journey of our colleagues in so many ways. I go back to starting at Fractured Atlas in the summer of 2016 where I feel like I walked in the door in June and was like, "That man is going to win." Do you remember, I was like, "Are we serious about remote because I'm moving to Belize. Do you remember that?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I do.

Lauren Ruffin:

And you all were like no, he's not going win. I'm like, "Oh, he's going to win." And I'm moving to Belize. But going from having those early conversations with White male colleagues like you, and it's been, I think really rewarding to watch you and Shawn, your personal journeys as white dudes and quietly Tim, you're like a bit of a radical in a way that like a preacher's son, probably never from Indiana. You've gone from really sort of just thinking everyone should be treated equally, which is a beautiful place to be in. But also recognizing that that's not what happens in the world and standing up at a conference full of white guys and being like, you're not diverse enough and everything you're saying is BS until you get better until you get people of Color on this panel.

Lauren Ruffin:

I mean, I think an organization's journey is really a journey of individuals. I think Fractured Atlas has come a long way because the White people in our organization were willing to do the work and the People of Color and the overwhelmingly sort of Black female population, I would say makes up our People of Color on staff. I think we've been willing to struggle together. And that doesn't really happen, but we have the people on staff who are willing to do it together. And that to me has been the coolest thing about watching it because I think a lot of organizations just don't have the staff or the culture to really be able to struggle together and to make mistakes and to be patient with each other.

Tim Cynova:

We work on the leadership team together. It's a unique group of the four of us and you and Polity do not let Shawn and I off the hook on a thing and it's made real change in the way that I look at my own journey and my responsibilities as a White man and what needs to be done in organizations. You're always helping with, you should read this thing or you probably shouldn't include that quote because that person was a racist.

Lauren Ruffin:

I forgot about that-

Tim Cynova:

... It kind of really-

Lauren Ruffin:

... I'm not a racist. It says that person was an actual Nazi.

Tim Cynova:

... Good and done in a caring way. We're like, Oh God, I had no idea and now I need to yet again. Something I need to add to learn more about and as I go through this personal journey, it's one of those things where the more you learn, the more you know that you don't know and the more that you just need to read more and-

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm always amazed by how our history has been whitewashed and even the history that we think is radical or we sort of take for granted. It's been simplified and it's sort of turned our brains to mush and really stifled our ability to analyze and think and speak and engage with each other critically. And it just makes me crazy. But we could all read, we can spend the rest of our life reading about race and racism and then the more we read, the more we learn that it's not just people of color and black people in particular in this country who have been, a native people who have been really oppressed and held back. But White folks suffer from it too.

Lauren Ruffin:

And I think that's the piece that folks don't really think about. I will also say in the workplace that the conversation that you've had at a leadership team level have been sort of my probably least professional conversations at moments where I just completely blow my lid at somebody. It's been about just like what the (beep) I can't remember who I unloaded on the day after the election. I can't like white guy facial blindness. I can't remember, which one of you white guy said something about let's just wait and see what happens. And I was like, what's the (beep) talking about?

Lauren Ruffin:

I just totally unleashed on somebody and I don't remember where it was but passion and professionalism often walk very different paths. I am like the grace of the organization to put up with me and my mouth when I'm like, this is absolutely unacceptable. It's also something that I think is really unique to Fractured Atlas.

Tim Cynova:

We talk about traits of high performing teams and how trust and psychological safety. I think also the willingness to be vulnerable. I think those are three things that come together that allow us on the leadership team to have conversations that we might not otherwise have in leadership team settings outside of this organization. And I think that's why I find that group to be, well I don't think I'll ever find another group like that in a professional setting. And it's one of those moments where I see this right now and I realize this and that makes it even more special to be a part of that group as you grow personally and professionally because you have people willing to say because they care that is completely messed up.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, it is a weird thing. It's also weird to work someplace where in this particular regard, even though it is not perfect, it's likely to be the, I would say unless the four of us worked together again, you know like after we transitioned from Fractured Atlas, it might end up being maybe the healthiest work environment to do this sort of work in a way that's challenging and respectful and yeah, it's a really good place to be. It's weird to be in the thing. And know that because usually when you miss a job, it's after you're gone and when you left, you're like, man F this place.

Tim Cynova:

It's funny. You're saying, yeah, we could just all work together and be like, "Oh right. We could just all work together and we still have that." When I was a cashier at a grocery store, as my high school job, someone came through and I rang them up and all their groceries equal to $100 and they're like, "I could never do that again." And I said, 'Well you still buy the same groceries."

Lauren Ruffin:

Okay, good to know High school Tim was exactly the same.

Tim Cynova:

What about you said like, "Oh, we could all just work together again." I'm like, "You are right."

Lauren Ruffin:

We could just work together forever. I mean that could happen. It can happen.

Tim Cynova:

Speaking of workplace culture. We recently were on a Slack chat with Courtney and Nicola about the verge article about a [inaudible 00:53:50] corporate culture. It's an article that seems to have prompted the resignation of their CEO. Courtney said it also because she knows I have an away bag. I remarked that, oh God, as an owner of an away bag, I'm now greatly conflicted about I really like my bag, but what does it represent? To which she responded, "I got to tell you everything that we love is tainted, which is why my only brand loyalty lies with Celine Dion." If she's terrible, I'm officially staying in the house for the next 40 years. I did not [crosstalk 00:54:21]-

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm just saying, she's been in public forever and she's amazing.

Tim Cynova:

I did not expect that that was... That the sentence that was going to be a part of our conversation there.

Lauren Ruffin:

What? The Celine Dion point or all your favs are terrible?

Tim Cynova:

No, I did not see Celine Dion coming in that conversation.

Lauren Ruffin:

I think in a future episode we should interview former colleagues of mine and people who've known me forever, who know how I was a stand before stands were thing, for Celine Dion.

Tim Cynova:

Maybe just like a birthday episode for you.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Maybe it's like this is your life. But for everyone who has a Celine Dion story about me.

Tim Cynova:

Have you ever met her?

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh my God, I can't. Like you said it and my heart jumped. For Christmas one year I got the album that she did with Barbara Streisand. I love her.

Tim Cynova:

It's amazing.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

This is so beautiful.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, but all your faves are really problematic and that's why I vet my people very carefully because I can't deal with a heartbreak. I'm a delicate flower, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

Oh, well on that note Lauren, thank you again for joining the podcast as America's favorite co-host. And until next time, thanks.

Lauren Ruffin:

Thank you.

Tim Cynova:

If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.

Working While Grieving (EP.03)

Last Updated

December 20, 2019

The process of grieving in the workplace goes often undiscussed. This episode connects with people who have experienced the death of loved ones while working, and explores how we might improve this journey that most of us will confront during our careers.

Guests: Sophia Park, Melissa Haber, Jim Rosenberg

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

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Guests

SOPHIA PARK is part of the External Relations team at Fractured Atlas. She studied neuroscience at Oberlin College, and conducted research in neurotoxicology and neurodegenerative disorders before pivoting into the arts. Before joining Fractured Atlas, she worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She loves the arts, and runs a small exhibition project called Jip Gallery based in New York City. She is also a writer - you can find her writing in StrataMag and Womanly. In her spare time, she likes to run longer than normal distances, find a good spot to go salsa dancing, or sit in front of art work she enjoys.

MELISSA HABER is the Assistant Director of Volunteer & Student Services at Montefiore Medical Center. Previously, she was a Project Manager for Community Workforce Programs at Montefiore. Melissa was born and raised in southern Brazil and moved to the United States as a teenager. She has a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Boston University, and master’s degrees from Sarah Lawrence College (Health Advocacy) and New York University (Arts Administration). She is passionate about increasing equity in the health care workforce, eliminating disparities in outcomes, and improving patient experience. In her previous career in Development, Melissa raised funds, wrote grants and planned events for organizations such as the Joyce Theater, Parsons Dance, and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. Melissa lives in Westchester with her husband, daughters (ages 10 and 13) and dog. She enjoys reading, writing, taking pictures and yoga.

JIM ROSENBERG is Lecturer and Director, Corporate Engagement, Healthcare Division at the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee where he works with healthcare leaders who are transforming access, affordability, equity, and excellence in healthcare. Jim designs and delivers degree and non-degree executive education programs, and supports leaders through personalized consulting, teaching, facilitation, and coaching. Jim also works with a diverse mix of mission-driven leaders on strategy, innovation, and growth projects through Workbench, his consulting business. His background includes experience in both nonprofit and commercial organizations, including venture-backed startups, mission-driven nonprofits, and Fortune 500 corporations. Jim holds an M.B.A. from Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. You can learn more about Jim's work at www.workbenchdc.com and his career at www.linkedin.com/in/jimrosenberg. 

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Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck., a podcast about, well, that. I'm Tim Cynova, and in this episode, we're spending time with a topic we seldom talk about in life, let alone in the workplace, death and grief. We're joined by three colleagues, Melissa Haber, Jim Rosenberg, and Sophia Park, who have all experienced the loss of people close to them during their careers. They'll offer different and similar thoughts on what it's like to go through the grieving process while working and what coworkers and organizations might consider to help the process be just a little bit easier. They will be joined by podcasting's favorite cohost, Lauren Ruffin, who will help us close out the episode.

Tim Cynova:

One of the things I often have to clarify when I say that work shouldn't suck is that it's not that work won't suck or can't suck sometimes, but that it shouldn't. One of those times when work shouldn't suck is around grieving the loss of a loved one. While it can be tough to make things better, workplaces can certainly make things worst. We'll hear from our guests that sometimes it's the seemingly littlest of things said or not said that can make a big difference. A workplace is a collection of people who come together for a common goal.

Tim Cynova:

It also can be a place where people show caring and concern and support not just during the company softball game or the 5K fun run or when your team scores above 70% completion rate on their objectives and key results. We're human beings working with other humans and we sometimes forget that at the very moments that matters the most. This episode isn't meant to be a downer. It's a risky move launching a podcast and then including an episode about grief so soon in the queue. In our recent episode, we talked about augmented reality and virtual reality, how many bikes would be too many bikes to own, and mail flow in virtual workplaces. This episode focused on grieving while working might feel like we're taking a pretty hard right turn.

Tim Cynova:

But it's a deeply personal topic for many of us and a topic that often goes undiscussed in the workplace, so we want to give it some space. Because when it goes undiscussed, that makes it even more challenging for us to know what to do or how to respond when death and grief show up in our workplace. While these things are near universal, their impact and how they're felt is deeply individual and personal. My guests and I aren't speaking for all those who had grieved while working, but as people whose individual journeys might be useful to hear. Without further ado, let's get going.

Tim Cynova:

My first guest is Sophia Park. Sophia has a degree in neuroscience, which led to several years of conducting research in neurotoxicology. She was a teaching artist with RoboFun, creating stem curriculum for little engineers, PreRobotics, and maker technology courses among others. She's worked with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She's currently an external relations associate at Fractured Atlas, where I have the pleasure of being a coworker with her. She's the co-founder of Jip Gallery, a small arts exhibition space in Harlem, and she recently completed the New York City Marathon. The idea for this podcast episode came from an exchange that Sophia and I had on Slack. We both experienced the death of someone close to us in the past year, and we both have been trying to write separate pieces about this topic.

Tim Cynova:

We both haven't been making much progress, so we thought, let's just try and record a podcast episode instead. The topic for today is working while grieving. Something that we often don't talk about a lot, that doesn't get a lot of space in the workplace to discuss. How do you come to the topic?

Sophia Park:

This past summer, I lost one of my close friends that I met in college, and we were close because of my tie to neuroscience. He kept on pursuing science, but we met initially because we were both setting science and science is really hard. It was really sudden. He was very young, and I also happen to be at a conference when I found out. It was also a marketing conference that started every day at I think 8:00 AM and they had a DJ and lots of loud music and lots of people talking about marketing and selling things. It was just really tough. It was tough because internally I was hurting, but externally I was like, "Wow. There's a lot of stimulation and there's no space." Then I kept on working.

Sophia Park:

Obviously I finished out the conference in somewhat one piece and then thought a lot about what I was doing. I don't know. Many thoughts that go through your head when something like that happens also out of nowhere. Yeah, the next I think probably around a month was pretty tough. I think what really helped was actually working from home because I could just turn off Zoom and just be kind of sad for a bit and then get back to it. Other people might want the company of others in the office kind of doing things around them. but for me personally, it worked best that I was at home and I could be comfortable. I can have some tea or text a friend who knew my friend as well.

Sophia Park:

I think my hesitancy talking about this in a blog post or in any kind of public setting is that I don't want it to seem like I'm just doing this because I want attention. I just think that so many people go through this. I think that's where my kind of block personally came from was how do I talk about this in a genuine way especially when I don't have many answers of how to navigate it, and then just coming kind of to the informal conclusion that maybe the best thing is to just talk about it and be okay that it's not going to be perfect.

Tim Cynova:

It's like uniquely individual, yet also universal experience to go through. Being at a conference and all of a sudden having a different lens to view things through. I mean, you see things differently. You weigh differently. What's really important when we get caught up in life, we would just keep moving and then all of a sudden something happens and you're like, "Oh."

Sophia Park:

Breaks.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, something breaks. You have a different perspective especially for people who might not have gone through it, or even if they do, again, it's an individual thing. Sitting in meetings, I was at a conference a couple of months ago and someone was talking about how they loss their mom. I think she was 95, 98. They knew it was coming. They said still they found themselves for months just sitting in meetings probably being about 25% there. There's this disconnect in work I think when you see like companies have a bereavement policy that's three days. That's just for logistics, for maybe going to a funeral, but that doesn't cover grief.

Sophia Park:

There are I guess tangible things that a company can give, things like time, and there are also intangible things that a company can give, especially your colleagues, right? I was very fortunate that my manager was just very understanding. But even getting there, for me, I was so surprised because I was so sad and I knew I needed the time to travel, but I just didn't know how to say it. I realized that's partially because I've always been uncomfortable with asking for time off in any regards, whether it's for a vacation or anything like that. I think that comes from this belief that you shouldn't ask for time off even in cases like this. I was just very grateful for the understanding, not the...

Sophia Park:

I don't know how to describe it, but I think it depends on how someone says like, "Are you okay? Yeah, do whatever you need," instead of kind of creating roadblocks, right, for you to grieve. It's emotionally difficult and then if it's also logistically difficult, then it's just bad, right?

Tim Cynova:

It's one of those times where I think if you've gone through something personally or know people who have gone through it, just talk about it. I think this is one of the reasons why it's important for companies to talk about it so you know when this happens, part of that is supervisor is being very opinionated about, "You need to go now. You need to take the time. We'll be here when you get back." Because you have a rush of how do I get there, maybe how do I pay for... I need to get there. There might be financial concerns. There's certainly logistical concerns. Where do I stay when I get wherever I might need to go if you're traveling?

Tim Cynova:

Having to get up the courage to ask for time when you might not even know that that's something you need. I have former colleagues who is like, "Well, no, it's fine. We're in the season. It's busy. We have shows going up. I can't take this time," and then they realize several months when they're at Walmart and they have to sit down on the floor because that's the first time that they've had a chance to process.

Sophia Park:

I think you bring up a good point. I think it taught me in the future if I'm in a position where I need to be supportive, I think I learned a lot of how to's and how to be supportive and just be generally understanding. Well, I would think that I would already be like that, but I think in a work environment it's very different, right? In a personal case, if it's a friend who's grieving, it's a slightly different attitude that you would take towards that person. I think that's also part of navigating being a professional is how do you say things and how do you do it in a kind manner. I think that's also something that I definitely learned.

Tim Cynova:

You mentioned this upfront when you talked about writing the piece and realized, "I just need to start talking about it." It might be not perfect or right the first time, often feels like that when we're providing condolences to someone. I truly mean this. It might not be the right way. Hopefully it came across as I'm caring, but you sort of learn better ways to provide condolences and caring. You're right. It's complicated because it's also a workplace where a lot of times people check a lot of themselves at the door.

Sophia Park:

It's just so interesting to see how different people bring different parts of themselves to the workplace in general. But something that I also thought about was in terms of that, as a colleague and a co-worker, I can't expect someone to fully understand what I just went through, and I don't think it's fair to expect that they'll understand it. I think navigating how different people react to you grieving is also part of the workplace kind of grieving situation as well, knowing that there are certain colleagues who will understand it a little better and some that may want to just have the time to not really engage in it because maybe they went through something similar and it kind of triggers them.

Sophia Park:

Navigating that field is also something interesting as well. Just being mindful. I think learning how to be mindful also helped me grieve in a way in the workplace because it just kept on reminding me I'm not alone. You never know what's happening on someone else's end, but everyone's okay. Ultimately they're okay. They show up to work and kind of reminded me like, yeah, it kind of sucks right now, but ultimately it'll be okay. You show up for work every day and it's kind of a reminder that maybe you're only like 75% there or 75% present that day for work, but at least you're 75% present for work versus just not showing up.

Tim Cynova:

Was there anything particular that people said or did that really resonated with you that maybe you even thought, "I totally need to remember that thing that someone said because they said it so well or whatever they did was really caring and I appreciated that."

Sophia Park:

It was actually in my first day meeting one of our new colleagues who flew in. I just felt really bad because I was engaged, but also not engaged. It was my first time seeing her. They're talking about data and data's kind of dry. Then it just happened that she found out and then she told me grief comes in waves I think not just within the workplace, but outside. That has been really true. Whenever I'm really engaged in a work project... When I went to New Orleans recently and we were just kind of running around, shooting video content, I felt really alive. In that moment, I really thought about my friend because it's an experience that he won't have anymore.

Sophia Park:

Then even just like what you said with the marathon, I remember running it and everything was fine up until mile, whatever, 15, and then I was just so... It just hurt everywhere and then kind of just living in that kind of pain that my legs were going through, I was like, oh. I thought about my friend again. It really does kind of hit you in random moments. There are other instances where I feel very much alive and that's when I feel it the most. Sometimes, like I said, that's either during work or outside of work. But yeah, I think that stayed with me and actually helped me cope really well with it.

Sophia Park:

Because something else that was really helpful was all of my friends were grieving as well, so it was really hard to ask for advice or for words of care. In a way, it's an outside voice, right? Someone from work. If they've gone through something like that, then it's kind of a good reminder that your support comes from all sorts of places. I tell my friends, "Oh yeah, a colleague at work told me this and it really helps," and it actually has helped other people. Yeah, that's something that stayed with me.

Tim Cynova:

That's great. When I lost my mom, one of our coworkers at Fractured Atlas just put a card on my desk. When I came back, we never even talked about it. I assume she knows I got the card. It was very simple. I think she had like two lines in. She had lost a parent. It was one of those thinking of you cards, let me know if you want to talk. There's just different ways of showing.

Sophia Park:

Any little reminder that you're not alone I think really helps. It's interesting because I think I'm fairly young and in kind of like the beginning stages of figuring out what I'm doing for work and what I like doing. I always think about what skills do I need, so professional, do I need to know how to use Airtable, et cetera, and then you forget about all of these I guess they're called soft skills, right? I think resiliency is one of them and resiliency can be developed from anything. But this in particular I think is a moment when I felt myself kind of building that skill.

Sophia Park:

Because it's easier to say it now, "I know how to do this thing on Excel," but it's really hard to say, "Now I know how to grieve better at work," right? You can't just quantify that.

Tim Cynova:

One of the other skills is ability to be vulnerable. Certainly Dr. Brené Brown has talked about this in plenty of TED Talk and Netflix specials about people who are able to be vulnerable, especially in positions of leadership. It makes it easier. Because if you can't, then you wouldn't say something.

Sophia Park:

Yeah, I think that's also very hard because I think vulnerability at the workplace is tied to how comfortable you are, right, also in the workplace. Something that I really talk to a lot of my friend about is how they don't feel comfortable in the workplace. I'm very fortunate that I can bring that sense of vulnerability, but I wonder what it would look like if you could bring at least a little bit of that. Because I think if you're able to be vulnerable with someone, no matter whether it's in the workplace or not, it kind of expands your relationship with that person.

Sophia Park:

I talk about this all the time with my manager where I kind of had some difficult workplaces in the past and kind of building that trust and opening up and being vulnerable has been something that I've been working on. I know I'm very privileged in that way, but I just hope that... Or I don't know if there's a way to grow that culture in a place where it doesn't exist.

Tim Cynova:

That's a big challenge. A lot of people ask, if leadership isn't onboard with it, is it still possible to do in an organization? Yeah, it could be a team-based or it could be a group of people inside the organization. But if there's not a lot of psychological safety there, then people aren't going to be as vulnerable or won't put themselves out there in the same way.

Sophia Park:

Yeah, that's very tough I think to navigate. I think it's easier in a smaller group, like you say, maybe in a team. But once you start adding a bunch of people, then I think it gets a lot more difficult.

Tim Cynova:

Probably some recipe for life in general.

Sophia Park:

Yeah, that's true.

Tim Cynova:

Once you add more people, it just gets really difficult.

Sophia Park:

Yeah, too many cooks.

Tim Cynova:

What is it? The research that more than seven people in a meeting have declining or diminishing returns for each additional person you add to that meeting.

Sophia Park:

That sounds like a lot. Can you imagine just seven people in this room and just going at it and trying to make decisions?

Tim Cynova:

Well, the irony there is that a lot of organizations have seven or fewer people, but act like they have hundreds of people. You're just seven people. You could easily come together and make that decision with just seven people. But it's like, "Well, we have all these committees and all these ways of doing things." I think about a lot of nonprofits and arts organizations.

Sophia Park:

Yeah, that's the difficult part of I think just being in a nonprofit arts organization in general.

Tim Cynova:

Or a group of people trying to organize to do something.

Sophia Park:

Yeah, literally anything.

Tim Cynova:

That's right.

Sophia Park:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Is there anything else you'd like to say on the topic? Things that resonate with you, or when you do get around to writing the blog post that you want to make sure you include?

Sophia Park:

I was actually able to finish draft and I tend to always have more questions than answers. That's kind of how it ends is there are just so many more questions than answers when it comes to this. Also, you can't just differentiate it, right? Grieving versus any other stress that you encounter in your life. When someone gets sick who's close to you or someone loses a job who's close to you, those are all things in some way I think require the same skills as grieving does to be able to deal with in the workplace. I think it's okay if you don't know what you're doing when it comes to dealing with any of those stresses as long as you're satisfied that you're navigating things well for yourself in that moment.

Sophia Park:

While that might sound very spiritual for a workplace topic, I think just gauging whether you're okay, right, and being okay with having something that could be a challenging conversation with either your colleagues or someone else, all of those little pieces is how you "deal with it." I feel like I'm being very vague about it all, but I likened it to when someone asks how do you know you want to marry someone. The answers are always like something like that. I think it's the same way like how do you grieve, how do you deal with stresses in your life, and you say, "Well, I'm me and this is how I dealt with it, but that doesn't mean that you have to do anything that I did."

Sophia Park:

Especially during the holiday times, I know it can be very tough whether you're grieving for someone or not. Especially for younger professionals, I hope that you're okay with asking for help, you're okay with asking for time off because you deserve it in order to be your whole self no matter what the situation is. I think the more you keep hearing that, the more it'll hopefully stick to others, trying to be a gentle person navigating the world and the workplace when it's hard to be that way especially now.

Tim Cynova:

Thank you for spending time and for your openness to chat. I really appreciate the time today.

Sophia Park:

Thank you.

Tim Cynova:

My next guest is Melissa Haber. She currently is the Assistant Director of Volunteer and Student Services for the Montefiore Medical Center. She has a master's of arts in health advocacy, also degrees and background in arts administration and journalism. She's a certified translation professional. Fun fact, Melissa and I worked together in my first job in New York City nearly 20 years ago. It was my first stint as an executive director where she witnessed me making a myriad of mistakes. To her credit, she still agrees to be my friend after all of these years. Can you talk about your intersection with the topic?

Melissa Haber:

My very first intersection was actually when we worked together and my father died. He was in his fifties. Certainly not expected, but awkward because I had to leave the country very quickly and wasn't really sure how long it would be, and then flew back. I was new I think at the job, so it's not like I had all this time to take off, which was really excruciating. But I came back and sort of jumped back in very quickly. Then like five years later, I lost a baby while her surviving twin sister was very, very sick in the NICU. She was in the NICU for five months. But in any case, I went back to work without having really processed the lost of one of them and the fact that the other one could go at any minute.

Melissa Haber:

It was interesting going back to work and jumping into gala planning.

Tim Cynova:

Certainly changes prioritization and just view on life and importance.

Melissa Haber:

It does and then it doesn't because the stuff still has to happen. Whether you're sad or happy, it still has to happen.

Tim Cynova:

Well, in that context, coming back into work, what was helpful? What did people in your workplace do that were helpful, and what wasn't so helpful?

Melissa Haber:

It's hard because not every day is the same. There's days when you really want to talk about it and there's days when you really don't. You can't expect to read your mind and know today is the day when I want to talk about it. But I think that in very small close workplaces, people give you the freedom and the space to just jump in and out if needed. When it's a tight knit group, it's a little easier. You can say, "I'm having a hard day today." When it's a bigger situation, you kind of just go with the flow and do what you have to do. I think what's not helpful is when people avoid you because they're uncomfortable. I mean, death is a part of life, right?

Melissa Haber:

It's worst when it's a child, obviously, or a young parent, but you have to deal with it. Avoiding the person, turning around when you see them walking down the hall is probably not the most helpful way to deal with it. People will say stupid things, but it's better that you're trying I guess. I was just saying to one of my colleagues that one of the least helpful things that people can say is like, "I can't even imagine. I just can't even imagine." You're like, "No, you can because you're putting yourself there, but you don't want to go there. You're saying you can't imagine. I'm living it, so there you go." But even that's better than avoiding.

Tim Cynova:

When your dad passed away, I remember that. That might have been the first time that I worked with someone where they experienced loss.

Melissa Haber:

Oh, really?

Tim Cynova:

Other than grandparents, which... Loss is a deeply individual thing, also a universal thing. People feel it in different ways. I certainly grew up... My dad, he was a pastor, so went to funerals as a kid.

Melissa Haber:

Death was definitely part of your life.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, I certainly knew what that was like, but it was the first time that someone who I knew as a co-worker and friend was going through it. I remember I didn't know what to say at times because it was a different... Because you don't about like grief in the workplace and we were earlier in our careers.

Melissa Haber:

No, because you're supposed to come back ready.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, you're supposed to take your three days and then be just like you were before you took your time.

Melissa Haber:

Right.

Tim Cynova:

I think it was also like because we don't talk about it a lot, I think partly because we're... Certainly I was earlier in my career and I hadn't seen examples of how should a workplace-

Melissa Haber:

Deal with it?

Tim Cynova:

...deal with it and be supportive and understanding.

Melissa Haber:

There's the paid bereavement, which is nice. But then when you come back, you may not necessarily be ready to take on everything you were dealing with before. I always thought both times, both when my dad died and then later, the fact that the world continues turning as it did before in much the same way is offensive when it's raw. It's just very offensive. It's like, do I have to sit here and do a mail merge and do I have to book the whatever for the gala? But I mean, the world doesn't stop because you lost somebody, but the mundane is just really hurtful. But what are you going to do? Somebody still has to do it. If it's a small staff, there's nobody there to back you up.

Melissa Haber:

I mean, here in a major medical center, we hire temps, but it's certainly not the case when we worked together.

Tim Cynova:

Well, I wonder what it looks like in smaller organizations to say... What might it look like. Why don't we hire temps?

Melissa Haber:

Because there's no money.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, right. 20 years ago that's the knee-jerk response that I would have given as well. Resource scarcity is...

Melissa Haber:

There's a learning curve, right? You're going to train somebody to do what the person does. Yeah, it's clunky. It's awkward. But I think having somebody come back full-time and full force when their brain is just honestly not there is also not great for productivity. Not that that should be the main concern, but it's business.

Tim Cynova:

I often wonder if there's bereavement tempting. I don't know. I'm thinking out loud here. This is clearly going to be the part of the podcast that gets cut, but I'm going to pocket this one as an idea like what might it look like for there to be assistance around this, recognizing people don't come back maybe even 50% for a long time. It could be 25% for months.

Melissa Haber:

We had somebody here who passed away a few months ago and it was an associate. It was an employee, not a family member. But he was young, was super young, like in his thirties I want to say. Died in his sleep. It was very unexpected, but they have this employee assistance program and they swooped in and they were available. Any colleagues who wanted to talk, they were set up in a conference room. They rented a van so people could go to the funeral. There was a lot of support for colleagues and the family. We have 40,000 employees. Yeah, there should be. If there weren't, it would be terrible. I don't know.

Tim Cynova:

The conversations that I've been having with people about working while grieving, there are themes around just be human.

Melissa Haber:

Try. I think we're expected at work to be professionals and to get our work done and be on all the time. It's very hard to be on when you're sad. There's sad and then there's grief. When you're in grief... I mean, there's like movies when people were in grief and they say horrible things and they say what they also thought and never wanted to say. It's impossible to be on when you're that vulnerable. That just totally goes against work because you're supposed to not be that way. Vulnerability at work is a no-no, particularly in certain industries. Yeah, it's hard.

Tim Cynova:

Vulnerability in the workplace makes better teams and stronger organizations.

Melissa Haber:

Absolutely. If we acknowledge each other as human beings before anything, before we're colleagues or reporting structure or whatever, we're all people. Ultimately we love our parents and our siblings and our children and we try to do our best, and then there's all the other stuff that comes on top. But that's our common denominator, right? We're all people, whether they report to us or we report to them or we share a cubicle. I think that's what makes death awkward because people... First of all, death is taboo, right, even though we all die. But you know exactly how that feels. If you don't, you can imagine it. Then that makes it uncomfortable because you don't want to touch it.

Melissa Haber:

We all do. That's kind of the one certainty is that we're all going to lose somebody someday, whether we work or not.

Tim Cynova:

I think Christopher Walken has a quote, "None of us is getting out of here alive."

Melissa Haber:

No, we're not. We're all very good about somebody who's 99 passes away. We're all very good at that. It's like, "Oh, they lived a great life. So nice that the family could be together. Whatever you need." We're good at that I think. What we're not so great at is like, "Oh, your father was 55 or you lost a baby," that we suck at because it's, first of all, less common, thankfully. Second of all, just so painful. The flavor of pain that people don't want to imagine. That's why they say the stupid things or they don't say anything at all. When the person who I reported to at the time when my baby died and her sister was in the NICU wanted me to jump into a conference call from the hospital bed.

Melissa Haber:

I was like, "You know, I'm not going to do that." I'm usually one to like sort of not say no, but I was like, "I can't. No. I just can't." The fact that he followed his condolences with, "Oh, so we have this call tomorrow. Do you want to get on?" It's like now I laugh about it. At the time, it was like, "What?" Maybe he thought he was being helpful and distracting me from the pain. Maybe. This wasn't like a bad person.

Tim Cynova:

It's seldom people who are like, "I'm going to wait until that moment, and then I'm going to deliver this piece to inflict harm."

Melissa Haber:

Right. Yeah. I don't think the intention is ever to inflict harm. It's just cluelessness or just... I don't know, a lack of humanity I guess.

Tim Cynova:

What do we make of it? What do we about it besides talking more about it?

Melissa Haber:

Like I said, there's the official policy. HR has a policy. There's bereavement. There's how many days paid, but there has to be like a structure for that person to come back. I mean, whether they're somebody... I don't know. I mean, we have tons of social workers and psychologists here, so it's easy, but somebody who's sort of like checking in on the person. I don't know who that would be necessarily, but just... Or maybe come back part-time or maybe take a personal day a month. I don't know. There's a combination of policy and like flexibility I guess. I recognize that bigger organizations are less flexible.

Tim Cynova:

Interesting though because the bigger organizations are less flexible, but have more resources to do some of the things that small organizations couldn't.

Melissa Haber:

Right. It depends who you report to. I mean, I work with people now who, if God forbid, something happened, they would... I'm 100% certain that it would be fine and I would be allowed the space that I need. But what if I'm hourly and have a union job? You get what you get and that's it. I don't know. I think open honest conversation is a start. When there's trauma involved, if it's something unexpected or a young person who died, there needs to be some healing because you can't just... Once the person's six feet under, you're not better and ready to go, right? Most religions have some kind of mourning process that you're supposed to observe and I think there's a reason for that. But like a week is certainly not enough.

Tim Cynova:

Really even getting through that mourning process, you're usually on adrenaline.

Melissa Haber:

And surrounded by people.

Tim Cynova:

And surrounded by people and everyone leaves and adrenaline stops and then you're hit with this wave at the same point that you're going back to work and trying to reestablish a routine.

Melissa Haber:

Right. The people on your commute are still going to be jerks. They don't know what happened to you. I just remember like wanting to cry when people in the subway were rude. That's something you encounter every day because people are always rude. But when you're so raw and sensitive, it's just like everything gets to you. Like I said before, it's offensive because how dare the world continue to turn when I'm in so much pain?

Tim Cynova:

I was walking down the street after my mom died. I was back in New York. I think about something and walking home and someone walked past me and were like, "Man, why don't you smile? Come on, man."

Melissa Haber:

Oh no.

Tim Cynova:

It's like I'm not going to engage here.

Melissa Haber:

That's another thing is that grief is not linear. It's very cyclical. You could be like totally fine and "getting better" and then something will just hit you and you're back at that beginning. You're very upset, but then immediately self-judgment jumps in and you're like, "Why am I this upset? I shouldn't be this upset. It's been however many months. I have no business being this upset." It sneaks back. I think that's hard too because yes, everybody expects you to be upset in the beginning, but there's like a statute of limitations on your being upset and showing it, God forbid. But it is kind of cyclical. It comes and goes. Yes, the holidays are hard and milestones are hard and that first anniversary and the firsts.

Tim Cynova:

What else do you want people to know?

Melissa Haber:

What is that saying? It's like silly. Everybody's fighting a battle and you don't ever know what people are dealing with. Yeah, you just don't know what people are bringing with them. Yes, your immediate colleagues and your supervisors and the people you work with directly may know what's going on, but other people don't. They maybe super insensitive without knowing or without knowing enough, but it's important I think that we all do it and we all face it. You could be dealing with somebody tomorrow who had just had great loss and not know it. The cashier helping you at the grocery store maybe lost somebody and it's their first day back.

Melissa Haber:

Clearly you're not going to think that at every interaction, but I think if we go back to just we're all human and if we treat each other with humanity and kindness, then it'll be okay. But you just don't know if the person you're dealing with had a great year, a horrible year, and anything in between.

Tim Cynova:

Melissa, thank you for taking time out of your day to chat.

Melissa Haber:

Of course. Yeah, no, thank you for making me think about these things.

Tim Cynova:

Lastly, we're joined by Jim Rosenberg. Jim and I have known each other for many years, dating back to the time when he was vice president at National Art Strategies. He's currently a lecturer and director of corporate engagement at the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee. He's the founder of Workbench Consulting and also recently complete The Coaches Training Institute. He's worked with and for a myriad of organizations around entrepreneurship and organizational change, and he created and led a project several years ago called I Know Something that created a network of individuals sharing their experience of dealing with chronic and advanced illness.

Tim Cynova:

Our topic today is working while grieving, as much as you're comfortable discussing sort of how you intersect with the topic.

Jim Rosenberg:

Thanks for having me on the talk about the topic. I've had the experience of losing a parent and working while losing a parent. But really for me, the more intense experience was my wife Amy had cancer. She died not long after diagnosis. She was diagnosed end stage. About four months later, she was no longer with us. When I think about grief and my experience with grief, I think about that period before Amy died, which is caregiving. But the reality is that you're also emotionally... You know that the person you love is going to die and you've got that preparatory grieving happening.

Jim Rosenberg:

I think about that intense period after she died, really that first year or so, and I think about now further removed where grief means a really different thing, really different part of who I am, but it's around that experience with my wife and my experience of grief at work comes from.

Tim Cynova:

Let me read part of the mission for people. I hadn't gone back to the site for a while to look at the material. As I was prepping for this episode, I was reading back through some of your back. You wrote, "I've met a lot of people who are living with complex illness, caring for an elderly parent, or have lost someone close, and everyone says the same thing. When it happens to you, it's like you're the first one. Suddenly you need to find your way through a new world and make constant decisions where there is never a "right choice." Millions of us have been in those situations before. What if we could unlock all that knowledge to help families in need today?"

Tim Cynova:

As you worked on that project, as you talked to other people, what resonated for you in people's stories and going through grief and terminal illness?

Jim Rosenberg:

It's a great question. I find myself stopping to think. What resonated was just how common it was, how unavoidable the experience really is, how much it touches all of us, how close we all are to it, how many of the challenges are the same, whether you're dealing with a situation where you've known for a long time that somebody is sick and you're caring for them for a long time, whether it's much shorter and more sudden, whether it's an instant experience, come home and the person you love has had an illness or heart attack and is no longer with you. Given how common it is and how close we all are and how much we share in it, how little we talk about it.

Jim Rosenberg:

How much people appreciated the opportunity to have an intimate conversation about their experience because we don't talk about it? We keep death as far as away from us as we can in the U.S., at least, in American culture.

Tim Cynova:

In a work context, that's even more heightened or exacerbated, right? We rarely talk about this to begin with. Then when you add work to it, you might not bring your whole self to begin with. Then something like this happens or you don't know what to say and people don't know what say. You get your bereavement leave, come back, and then you're supposed to just keep going like nothing happened. I think part of that stems from because we don't talk about it. We go through the process. It's personal. Maybe we have some friends outside of work who we talk with about it, but it's not a conversation about like what's the place of grief in the workplace.

Jim Rosenberg:

We always bring our whole selves everywhere we go. We don't share our whole selves at work. We're not invited to. It's uncomfortable. We have a façade we're keeping. Grief's a really big hole in that façade.

Tim Cynova:

What were some of the things that people said really were helpful, specifically around work, but what do you appreciate hearing? When you're grieving, what's the better thing to say and what's the thing you probably shouldn't say? From a workplace, there's oftentimes where we can be harmful and make things worst, but what are ways that we can approach things to make things better?

Jim Rosenberg:

Part of it is that even now or having gone through this experience or having been in this several month intense experience of the person I love most in the world being sick and knowing that she's dying and then losing her, I talk to people who say, "Oh, my daughter just got this diagnosis," and I still don't know what to say. I think we all want... I hear from people, we want to have the words. I'm going to say this and you're going to know everything I feel. You're going to feel cared for, and it's going to be perfect, right? My experience is that there really aren't right or wrong words. I guess there are wrong words, but like most conversations, I just always found that it came down to intent.

Jim Rosenberg:

If you're coming from a place where you're concerned about me, you want to know I'm okay. You want me to know you care. Whatever words come out, we see intent. We're really good at intent. One of the funny things in that trying to hide stuff in the workplace is nobody's very good at it. We, as humans, are just so wired, we're so tuned to understanding the words not said between the words. But if your intent is from a positive and caring place, for me at least, that connected. I could tell that and I appreciated it.

Jim Rosenberg:

If the intent was more for better or worse like, "Wow, I want to keep away. I want to say something so I can move on. This is scary. I don't like it. I'm uncomfortable. I don't know what to do," I would just feel that discomfort and in some ways I just want to help you move along as quickly as you could, right?I want to get you out of your discomfort so I can be out of your discomfort. I talk about Amy having died. I don't tend to talk about her having passed or left or moved on or not being with us. People wince when you say the word died. It's unvarnished, right? Something that I always appreciated just for me was I say that because it fits my spiritual beliefs.

Jim Rosenberg:

It doesn't mean that I don't have a belief about where she is spiritually, but it fits my real feeling of things. I've just appreciated when people can accept that, not be scared of the word, not be scared of the sort of unvarnished description of yes, the person I love died. Let's think about this question. I think back, there's this moment that had nothing to do with words. I used to study martial arts and my sensei heard that Amy had died. She came over to my house. I hadn't seen her in a couple of years.

Jim Rosenberg:

She just hugged me. It was just like this hug, this holding you, this intense hug, that was just this physical way of saying, "I am here." It's been several years, and I remember that moment because in all the different people coming by and saying and the sort of gentle hugs that you get, it's like, "No and I'm not letting you go. I'm here," was probably the most powerful... That's the most powerful communication I remember from somebody just wanting me to know something about how they felt for me. Maybe the work equivalent is just inside the hectic busy running around day, that intentional sit down, be present, I'm really here with you right now.

Jim Rosenberg:

I'm not getting up to runaway in 30 seconds. Maybe that's the work equivalent of that hug.

Tim Cynova:

A hug like that, you're distracted by other things. You're entirely present in the moment. Yeah, I think you're right. That's other ways of being entirely present in the moment with someone else to share that with them. My dad passed away in the spring. As I was getting condolences from people, I was making a note like, "Wow. They said that in a really great way. I should write this down some place." It's sort of like when you look at someone else's resume and be like, "I totally need to copy that format because the way they say that is perfect."

Jim Rosenberg:

A friend of Amy's from college, one of her best friends, Emily McDowell, has this amazing collection of greeting cards that were started for cancer and then sort of expanded from there, but they were just funny and they're incredibly frank. They're complete irreverent and they just blew up. She was on the Good Morning America and The Today Show and all over the place because people were so hungry for this honest way of communicating around illness and loss. Her cards have just been amazing just for that.

Tim Cynova:

Wow. Do you know where you can find them?

Jim Rosenberg:

Emily McDowell Studio. EmilyMcDowell.com. Yeah, her cards are great.

Tim Cynova:

Usually I go to Papyrus because it's the only place I can find sympathy cards that don't have long poems or flowers on them or something.

Jim Rosenberg:

I'm sitting here looking at the site and I remember this being one of the... I think one of the first cards. The cover of is beautifully hand-lettered and there's flowers and it says, "Please let me be the first to punch the next person who tells you everything happens for a reason." It's in that vein at all of her cards. They're true. They're honest. That's what you want when you're going through these experiences. There's not a lot of room left for that veneer of bullshit that we deal with day to day. You just want honesty.

Tim Cynova:

I know grieving is individual. Certainly in my own grief, laughter is a part of it. I guess like in life, there are a lot of feelings, a lot of things going on, but that laughter and joy can also be a part of that in a weird way I think, at least for my experience.

Jim Rosenberg:

I agree. I think again it's part of that... For me, it's just part of that honesty and honest experience of things. That even when things are going to hell, there's still funny stuff that happens. Your nine month old still tries to pull the IV stand down, right? You're just like ah and you're jumping around to get the baby, right? That's just normal human life. Normally that would be pulling the table cloth off the table, but you're still living, right? You're still going through these experiences.

Tim Cynova:

Is there anything else on the topic that you like to say or you like for people to know or think about?

Jim Rosenberg:

Just coming back to the workplace specifically and some things that I experienced that were helpful and not helpful. I think the helpful ones stick out more for me. Things that organizations do to be supportive. Even in the middle of Amy's illness, we used to talk about how in so many ways we were rather blessed, right? In that I had a job where if I took a day off or I took a week off to be at the hospital with Amy, I wasn't going to lose my job. I wasn't on a, oh, you're 10 minutes late for your shift, kind of a situation. We had really good health insurance. We had the wherewithal to make sense out of how you get through the health system, right?

Jim Rosenberg:

We had people around us to help us try to make sense out of that. A couple of specific things, Amy was at the State Department. She had spent her career. State Department has a policy where anyone at state can contribute leave to somebody who is sick and absent from work. Through the generosity of all the people in her organization, Amy was sick for four months, but had a salary the whole time. That's directly off a policy that allowed people to contribute. From my organization where I worked, we always talked about being family-centric, but we truly were family-centric. There were things that the team did. One was I had lots of responsibilities, right, like anyone doing a job.

Jim Rosenberg:

Some of those were things that it was essential I did and some were just things I did. The team really let me focus on those contributions that I was the only one in the organization who could make that contribution, that particular way of solving a problem or that particular process I knew how to do. Everyone picked up the rest of the work so that my workload could go down a bunch and I could continue to be a useful part of the team even as I wasn't there 50% of the time. That allowed me not only to continue to be effective with less time that I was working, it allowed me to feel effective.

Jim Rosenberg:

It allowed me to feel that I wasn't letting down my colleagues, I wasn't letting down my friends at work, or needing to make this choice between failing at my job or failing my wife.I wasn't put in that situation. The other thing is that my organization is incredibly flexible about the time off. I was treated as a professional. I knew what I had to do. No one was checking about, did you let us know that you weren't going to be here on Monday? Did you let us know how many days you were going to out to stay with your wife at the hospital? I just took care of the things I had to take care of. I made sure that I didn't leave anyone waiting for a phone call because I was just treated as a professional.

Jim Rosenberg:

Yes, you have important things to do in your life. You know what you need to do. Go ahead and do it. I think also after Amy died, the group was great in sort of allowing me to kind of stair-step my responsibilities back to my normal job.Those first few months were overwhelming and a bit surreal if you will. I remember there were days where I'd go to the office and I'll be working and I realized that no matter what I did, there was no way I could get any work done right now. I just couldn't take this overwhelming experience and put it over the shelf for a minute. I would just go home because there wasn't anything else to do at that point.

Jim Rosenberg:

Overtime, as I was adjusting, then our CEO would sort of ratchet up like, "Hey, I need you to do this now too. I need you to do this." Those were just some really practical things that happened while Amy was sick and after Amy died that were a big help to me that honestly any organization can do. it's a matter of the will and the intent to support each other in that way.

Tim Cynova:

I've been writing a blog post for months now and it's about working while grieving. This podcast actually came out of a conversation with another colleague who's similarly writing a post. It was like, let's just record something because we've got these blog post that are not done. The reason that I got stuck in my blog post is we're doing a lot of work at Fractured Atlas personally around racism and oppression and white privilege. I realized while I was writing that post the privilege that I had in grief, and yet another thing that I had not even considered, the ability to drop things at a moment's notice and the means to fly back and forth to be there with my family, to work remotely, and all of these things.

Tim Cynova:

I guess that where I'm stuck because I'm still wrestling with that. I think, as you pointed out, there's really great things, simple things that make a big difference. I'm forever thankful to Fractured Atlas where I work when both of my parents passed away because I've had great teams that I've worked with and the flexibility. That's not the case for a lot of people.

Jim Rosenberg:

The thing that really struck me and I remember Amy and I talking about while she was sick is I said that we would talk about how fortunate we were even inside of this situation where we knew Amy had a prognosis that she wasn't going to live three or four more months. But recognizing that there's bad things that happen, right? Like getting cancer, right? There's suffering that happens in the world that we can't do anything about. They're sort of parts of the universe, if you will. What struck us is that there are these layers of additional suffering that we create, that we as a community, as a society, as an organization, we create those.

Jim Rosenberg:

The pain you're feeling because the person you love is dying, that just is. But the pain you're feeling because you're stressed about whether you're going to lose your job or not, you're stressed about whether you're going to go bankrupt or not, you're stressed because you can't figure out how you're going to take care of your young child during this illness and afterward, you're stressed and suffering because you can't get access to the medical care and specialist that you need, these are all layers of suffering that we just create those. Because we create them, we can change them. It's a matter of will.

Jim Rosenberg:

It's a matter of recognizing how we as people and as a community experience grief and loss has only partly to do with those bad things that happen. They have a lot to do with how we want to commit to each other to alleviate that suffering.

Tim Cynova:

Work shouldn't suck is the phrase that our friend, Russell Willis Taylor, sort of picked up from a presentation that I did. I often have to clarify that it's not that it can't or it won't, it's that it shouldn't. As leaders, it's our responsibility to continually be working to make sure that it doesn't. We're shirking a core responsibility of our duties if we're not constantly trying to make things suck less. When it comes to grieving like working, why does it have to be so hard?

Jim Rosenberg:

Recognizing as leaders that grief is out there, right? It's happening. No one is far removed. When I would talk about the I Know Something project, this project to lift out the stories and the lessons from people who'd gone through end of life experiences, when I would tell people that, they'd be like, "Oh my gosh, I wish I'd had that when." There wasn't anybody I talked to who said, "What would that be for?" Right? Because everyone's been there. As leaders, to recognize that grief is out there, the fact that we have a culture that pushes death away, means that we don't... I'm trying to think if I've ever had a conversation where we talked about policies around how to support people dealing with grief.

Jim Rosenberg:

I don't remember ever having that conversation. We talked about other kinds of events, both positive and negative ones. When we stop pushing it away, we bring it closer to ourselves, we can make choices, as you say. Work shouldn't suck. We can make it suck less. I recognize there are trade-offs. When I was working less, other people were choosing to carry the weight for me. Yeah, there's financial cost to it, but it's a choice to say, "Yeah, we're not getting the same output from Jim that we were last year, but he's a part of this community. He's a valuable part of our organization. We will down the road. We're not going to ask for part of his salary back. It just is."

Jim Rosenberg:

But those are choices that as leaders it's one of the privileges of being in a leadership position. You get to actually make those choices. You get to create that environment for other people.

Tim Cynova:

Jim, thank you so much for taking time today to chat about this, your openness, for your honesty, for the laughter we've shared. Really appreciate it.

Jim Rosenberg:

Yeah, no. Glad I could take some time and chat. Hopefully some of that wasn't just stuff that make sense to me because I lived through it. Hopefully there's some ideas in there that will be useful and interesting to other folks who are listening.

Tim Cynova:

Most definitely. It's my pleasure to welcome back podcasting's favorite cohost Lauren Ruffin. Lauren, how's it going?

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm good. You're really silly. Favorite. I like it though. Keep stoking my ego.

Tim Cynova:

We just need to claim it.

Lauren Ruffin:

Okay. You're right. I got to get a shirt made. Christmas is around the corner.

Tim Cynova:

Who knows what'll arrive on your doorstep in the next week? In this episode, we talked about working with grieving. I had the opportunity to speak with three people who have each experienced the death of someone close to them while working a full-time job. Many expressed some of their thoughts and sentiments about what's the right thing to say, something that's sincere, and what can workplaces do. Don't forget humanity at a moment when it matters a lot. I want to get your thoughts on the topic.

Lauren Ruffin:

Before I started working at Fractured Atlas, my very first job managing a decent size team, we started off being known as the D Team for development, and quickly over like six months we moved into the D Team for death, which is really messed up. Everybody on this team that I managed as a new manager lost someone close to them in the first six months I managed the team. I hadn't thought about that until this very moment, even though I knew that we were going to be talking about grief for this episode. It is one of those times when regardless of what someone's vacation policy says, two or three days for bereavement is not enough.

Lauren Ruffin:

Also, when you start looking at the science of it, we know that grief hits everyone differently and it often can last for years. It can be legitimate when someone says two years or three years after someone dies. I'm actually grieving right now. As a manager, one, I think it's important that you let the space exist in your team for that conversation. My mother died 31 years ago this year in November, and I still like every year take November 14th to myself, but it never stops, right? I don't think your standard HR policy ever really takes that into account.

Tim Cynova:

You're right. It covers those couple of days, but because it is such a deeply individual thing. One of the things I came up was anniversaries, firsts, all of those things resurface or can resurface. I was recounting the holidays are particular a tough time for me as I think about the loss of my parents. You're walking down the New York City street corner. You turn the corner, it's like there's a brass quartet that's playing holiday music. You're like, "Damn you for playing the holiday music." Tears in my eyes. I'm going to have to edit that curse word out or I'll have to put explicit on this episode, which is going to be a really weird-

Lauren Ruffin:

Hold on. Get you... That gets an explicit?

Tim Cynova:

I don't know. I don't know.

Lauren Ruffin:

Is that explicit? I thought it was just the f bomb or like a nipple.

Tim Cynova:

I'll review the rules.

Lauren Ruffin:

I felt like we were... Yeah, please do.

Tim Cynova:

We need to know what kind of curse words we can use on the show.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, because we're going to be editing out a lot with me. Yeah, I do hold the title of the only person who's ever been edited out in ESPN Magazine.

Tim Cynova:

Let's take a tangent here. Did you appear in ESPN Magazine?

Lauren Ruffin:

I was quoted in the ESPN Magazine, and I can't remember if I said... I don't think I dropped the F bomb. I think I said like and they edited me out. I'm like, "You have rappers and athletes and these things and I know they curse more than I do, but you give me the little star dollar sign in the middle of my word? What the heck!"

Tim Cynova:

What were you being interviewed for?

Lauren Ruffin:

Homophobia in sports. I used to do a lot of work because I was like the first black female athlete in college sports to come out publicly. My friends used to call me Lauren Ruffin... For whatever reason, there were several articles that had like Lauren Ruffin, openly gay basketball player. That was my life description. They'd be like, "Oh, OGBP is here."

Tim Cynova:

I did not think that our working while grieving episode would pick up this anecdote.

Lauren Ruffin:

Brent used to segment on like how did Dick Vitale get to this particular sentence. It'd be so winding. In any case, I feel like you could probably do that with me because I go off on so many tangents.

Tim Cynova:

One of the things that came out in a conversation was that grieving takes a lot of different forms, but there's also laughter during the process. That's natural and human and also can be really confusing. I see Tim laughing. It must be fine now. Really you can laugh even in the darkest times of being faced with the death of a loved one.

Lauren Ruffin:

Grieving is so cultural and like so familial. My family has a tradition of we tell jokes about the person at their funeral. The first time my wife met my family was at my great-great-aunt's funeral. She just did not understand why we were all essentially telling snarky jokes about this woman at her funeral. That's my family's tradition. We laugh a lot. She's Irish and she's like where the pub and where's the alcohol?

Tim Cynova:

I don't know if I told you this. When my dad died, it was at his home and I was able to be with him. The electricity went out in the subdivision 20 minutes before he died. Did I ever tell you that?

Lauren Ruffin:

No.

Tim Cynova:

You don't know when the end is going to come, but you sort of sense that something has changed over the past couple of days. All of a sudden like all of the power goes out. I'm calling my sister who had just run to go get coffee and be like, "Does this happen all the time?" She's like, "Oh, just call the power company." I'm at hold for the power company waiting to see what's happening.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh my goodness.

Tim Cynova:

Then I think wait, he was a pain pump. I'm like, "Wait, is that plugged in? Is that not working?" Thankfully, the engineers foresaw this so there's a battery power thing. Yeah, the power went out 20 minutes before he died. About 10 minutes after he died, the power came back on. Immediately I thought, dad would love this story. How absurd is this? You're at sort of the depths of grief and at the same time you're like, "What's going on with the power grid here?"

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I mean, there are always moments like that. No, you didn't share that story, but you were just such a shell of yourself because we have a shared leadership team. The three of us, Shawn, Pallavi, and me, were just sort of trying to figure out how do we support Tim. One day it's okay and one day it's not okay. Again, how do you just help someone if someone's in grace? It's really hard and I can't imagine working in like a big corporate with really structured rules or like in government. I feel so grateful as a manager to have worked places where I had the flexibility to sort of say, "Just take the time. Be a shell of yourself for the next three months."

Lauren Ruffin:

It's just really, really hard in a workplace, but people have to work. Work has to accommodate that. It has to accommodate like the grieving process.

Tim Cynova:

It's interesting. You go through the process and it's not the same. I lost my mom and I lost my dad and it was different things. It hits you in different ways. I can remember sitting in meetings as soon as I came back from leave when my mom passed away. I just sat through meetings and I sort of just floated through a meeting and I'm not sure what people were saying. It was similar, but different when I lost my dad. One moment I'm like with you and the next moment someone has said something and my mind's spiraling off. Some of it's time. You just need to just get back into a rhythm. Other times it's hard enough knowing personally what to do, let alone I don't know what you're thinking and what's going to be best.

Tim Cynova:

Just being human and being flexible and understanding. If this person was able to do the job beforehand, let's give them the space and time and support.

Lauren Ruffin:

I've lost so many people close to me, close family members, close friends. I'm very comfortable talking about death. I've been through it a lot. When I was eight years old, my mother died. I've had subsequent people die since then. As I sort of approached my forties, it's a totally different experience when you are close to someone or approximate to someone who's our age and never lost anyone. I can't imagine being 40 and losing someone close to me for the first time. I think that is just in terms of life experience has got to be so difficult because you don't have the tools to really cope with it. It's such a new feeling, whereas I feel like death is very close to me, has been close to me for most of my life.

Lauren Ruffin:

I also as a manager and colleague realize that the first time somebody losses someone, they're just going to be need a lot of time. It's going to be really, really hard for them to navigate the world for a while.

Tim Cynova:

That's partly why I wanted to do this episode because it's not something we talk about in the workplace much if at all, which makes it even harder when something does happen to know what to do. Do you just not say anything? Do you just act like it's fine? As managers, how do you approach it if you've not lost anyone and gone through that experience?

Lauren Ruffin:

You want to talk about the themes that sort of came up?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I remember the themes were just to be sincere. There's a conversation that started with Jim Rosenberg who lost his wife from late stage cancer right after their daughter was one year old. He was remarking that one of the things that stood out to him was someone gave him a really sincere hug after his wife passed away. What that led to was this conversation to realize what happens with a really sincere hug is your entirely present with someone. You're not thinking about what's next. You're just right there. What's the equivalent of being entirely present with someone in the workplace to show I care, I'm here, I'm not thinking about other things right now. In this moment, you're just present.

Tim Cynova:

There are a number of conversations that came out of this episode, but that was one that really stood out to me. I think also because my mom used to give really great hugs. My friends still remark, "Man, your mom gave really good hugs." You're going for like the quick hug and there she's like, "No, we're going to do this for like at least 10 seconds." You get pass it like, "This is a weird long hug." She'll be like, "This is a really good hug." I mean, that's probably why that resonated with me. My mind started to go like, what's the equivalent in the workplace of a hug like that? There are other things, sort of practical things like the ability for people to trade days off so they could give them to people who needed paid time off.

Tim Cynova:

Also, coworkers who had come walking toward you, see you, turn around and walk the other way. Those were some of the things that came out of it. You just don't know when thoughts of a lost loved one and grieve will hit you. It becomes part of your life.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yup. That's so true. That is so true.

Tim Cynova:

Well, Lauren, thanks for starting the day talking about grief and working while grieving. Pleasure and highlight of my day getting to chat with you. Thanks again to our guests, Melissa Haber, Jim Rosenberg, and Sophia Park. Thank you so much for sharing your personal stories. If you've enjoyed the conversation or you're just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others who might be interested in the topic can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up or five stars or phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. If you didn't enjoy this chat, please tell someone about it who you don't like as much. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Meet Lauren Ruffin (EP.02)

Last Updated

November 8, 2019

In this episode, Tim chats with Lauren Ruffin about the launch of a new AR/VR co-op, Black capitalism, Work as the new religion, Vocations & Callings, Figuring out physical mail distribution for an entirely virtual workplace, and at what point you might own too many bicycles.

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

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Guest

LAUREN OLIVIA RUFFIN currently serves as Fractured Atlas’s Chief External Relations Officer where she is responsible for the organization’s marketing, communications, community engagement, and fundraising. Prior to joining the team at Fractured Atlas, Lauren served as Director of Development for DC-based organizations Martha’s Table and the National Center for Children and Families. She was also fortunate to serve in various roles at and various positions at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Children’s Defense Fund, New Leaders, and AAUW. Before entering the nonprofit sector, Lauren held the position of Assistant Director of Government Affairs for Gray Global Advisors, a bipartisan government relations firm. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science and obtained a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law. Previously, she served on the Board of Directors of Black Girls Code. And in her spare time, she can be found mountain biking or gesturing wildly at the teevee in support of Duke University’s men’s basketball team.

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Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hey, this is Tim. I wanted to include a quick preamble to this episode. We've envisioned the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. podcast to have two different formats. For some of our episodes, I'll be conducting one-on-one interviews. For others, I'll be co-hosting episodes with my friend and colleague, Lauren Ruffin. To get to know Lauren a little bit better, we sat down to record this get to know you episode at the Eaton Hotel in Washington, D.C. Eaton loaned us their radio studio, so we likely are launching this podcast series in the fanciest way possible and it's all downhill from here. Without further ado, here you go.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, we've got like 30 hours worth of time here, so.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, yeah.

Tim Cynova:

We're going to be good. It's like three o'clock. No, we're going all the way to Tuesday. Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck., a podcast about that. Today I'm joined by Lauren Ruffin. She does fascinating things. I'm lucky to actually be coworkers and colleagues with her at Fractured Atlas. Welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. podcast, Lauren.

Lauren Ruffin:

Well thanks, Tim. We're back in D.C. Together. Very cool of you to make the trip down Amtrak, riding our country's aging infrastructure to get from point A to point B.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, that's great. For those who don't know you, you're currently the Chief Operating Officer at Fractured Atlas.

Lauren Ruffin:

No, that's you.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, that's right. You are not.

Lauren Ruffin:

That's you.

Tim Cynova:

We spend so much time together, you're actually taking on my job. One less thing on my plate.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. No, you're the Chief External Relations Officer at Fractured Atlas where the two of us are two of a four part shared nonhierarchical leadership team. You are the co-founder of Crux, working in Black Storytelling in Immersive Technology. You are currently on the board of Black Girls CODE. You are the founder of Artist Campaign School. You're on faculty at New York University where you're teaching a course this semester and you are an avid fan of world-building games.

Lauren Ruffin:

And Duke basketball.

Tim Cynova:

And Duke basketball. We will cover, how do you decide who's a bigger basketball fan later in the show because we have a colleague, L J, who I think come March madness, there's going to be some tension in the office.

Lauren Ruffin:

I can't wait for there actually to be tension in the office. Just really excited that someone else cares about the best month of the year.

Tim Cynova:

We'll have to do an episode with you and L J come March.

Lauren Ruffin:

We should. That's a great idea.

Tim Cynova:

One more...

Lauren Ruffin:

It has to be video because she and I have to do the map on the wall.

Tim Cynova:

Okay. Want to talk about a couple of different things with you because you're engaged with and co-creating around the future of work in a number of different capacities. Do you consider yourself a futurist?

Lauren Ruffin:

I know people who are actually futurists who would hate that I would co-op up that term. So no, I don't. I think that I am good at reading data and turning data that feels far out into action now. So when you look at some of the data points around work and around the future. There was an interesting article that ran, I think, and I read in the Times last year that talks about how our government was almost defunded.

Lauren Ruffin:

We almost ran out of cash because so many people filed for extensions. And when you dig deeper into the data around, because I was like that's really curious. Why so many extensions this year in particular? Is everyone a conscientious tax abstainer? I was like that'd be really cool. But it turns out there are 40 million people who are on the verge of having to file some sort of 1099 and with that comes a different way for taxes to work because all of a sudden tax dollars aren't automatically being deposited into government accounts. So what do we do about that? I don't know, but I just think about the way that we work is going to change the way for everything. And I think there probably aren't a lot of people thinking about it. So how do we prepare for that and how do we talk about it?

Tim Cynova:

I was thinking about how is work going to change? You are in leadership of two different organizations that have shared leadership teams both at Crux and at Fractured Atlas.

Lauren Ruffin:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tim Cynova:

And Crux is working in some really cool new ways around structure. So you just had a convening, an uncommon Crux convening what, what went on and what are you just launching? What have you just launched?

Lauren Ruffin:

For the last 18 months, Crux has been a public benefit corporation. It's really designed to partner with black artists as we begin to think about the future of immersive storytelling look like. Virtual reality, augmented reality as an industry doesn't really exist outside of a handful of large corporations. So how do black people start to organize now before all the money and all the content is being concentrated and sucked up by a couple of big studios. And then two weeks ago we announced that we had formed a cooperative. We have an opportunity for us to begin to pull our resources to fund our own content so that we can retain our own intellectual property and begin to carve out a brand in this new space. So that's crux in a nutshell, but really thinking about the entire pipeline of creation from sort of when we first begin, when people first need $2,000 to spend some time working on a script all the way through to distribution. So the cooperative will begin to accept members at the middle of December and then we'll soft launch the distribution platform for XR content in January. So things are moving.

Tim Cynova:

You just came off of a presentation at COCAP called "You Can Keep Your Black Capitalism" and based on the enthusiasm that I heard on the recording, it was incredibly well received. Can you talk to me about that?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot. You hear about these singular black people who are wealthy, billionaires, millionaires, Bob Johnson, Oprah. There is this question out there which is, do black people have a history or do we have a duty to treat our workers differently because of our history in this country as enslaved persons? Should we spend some time thinking about how we organize and how we start our businesses, what our business do and how we operate and how we create and share wealth because we were marginalized for so long? There's a current controversy with Jay-Z and the NFL. When you look at black capitalists, there's something more disappointing in it because they've not chosen to take a different path. And then you have to ask how much is enough? At some point, you have to think about what would your ancestors want?

Lauren Ruffin:

And I don't know that our ancestors would have wanted us to sort of hoard wealth in the same way that your traditional capitalists do. So that's where that really sprung from. And then just at a basic level, Bob Johnson was the first black billionaire. And I keep thinking what if BT had been a cooperative? What would our country look like if there had been, instead of one billionaire, there had been thousands of black millionaires? How would that wealth have been distributed differently? What would our communities look like? What would the narrative around black wealth and wealth disparity, how would that have changed? So yeah, you can keep your black capitalism, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

And that's the show. So what was the reaction like after your presentation? Because it was about a five minute long presentation that you gave.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. It was just a quick one. I think people were interested. I think I was the second or third person. It was a lightning round type thing. I'm always surprised that I think back to the world building and some of the things that you and I talk about a lot. I'm always surprised that people don't ask why more often and I think there are people who were like, I had never thought about that before. And I'm like, that's why you're so sad when you have essentially capitalism has pitted Jay-Z against Colin Kaepernick. That's why it feels that way because we do have sort of different expectations of a guy who grew up in poverty, selling drugs and has made it. We want him to do something different with his wealth. And the reality is, he hasn't and people are sad about it. We don't have the words to talk about it.

Tim Cynova:

You said people don't ask why enough. We've had conversations recently around the why around virtual work and fully distributed organizations and sort of the disconnect that people have with even imagining what the future of work might look like when it does include a physical space. Has that conversation surprised you in any way or what do you think that will help connect the disconnects?

Lauren Ruffin:

There are a couple of things happening. One is the shift in just the demographics of the workforce in the U.S. generally. Folks in leadership tend to be a little bit older and have really latched onto this notion of the idea that you owe some loyalty to your employer and what the employer, the sort of worker-owner relationship looks like. I mean since I'd been in the workforce even, last 15, 20 years, that's changed right down to how much, one like technological advances mean that you really can have almost the same level of oversight. I'm going to use that word with air quotes up. You can have the same level of oversight of virtual workers that you can, and in some cases even more depending upon how like creepy you want to be with Big Brother technology, than you can when they're in your work environment.

Lauren Ruffin:

There's a health and wellness piece. So many of our staff members at Fractured Atlas live in New York. I got to say like, how can you expect someone to bring their best selves to work when several of our employees who are black and brown people and especially women of color, have experienced harassment in the subway system? How can we expect them to have to do that, to show up to work and do their best work when at some point there's got to be some nervousness about what it feels like to just get on a train? I think there are a lot of sort of reasons why virtual work works, but I think it's definitely the right choice for us, for our sort of tenants of trust the people you work with to do their job and leave them alone. Let them figure out when they want to do it, where do they want to do it, how they want to do it, and trust that they're going to give you the best work possible because we're a cool organization and we're fun to work with.

Tim Cynova:

I read an article recently about work as the new religion and it included a lot of statistics about the changing demographics around those who consider themselves affiliated with organized religion. I don't know the exact specific, but between 18 and 25, those who identify as being a part of organized religion is so much smaller than it was in previous generations and how there's this effect where work you see work as your calling, as your religion. And I've been wrestling with this idea of how do organizations take care of those who work for them and what's the line? But this shouldn't be your entire life. And even if you see it as a calling, it shouldn't be your entire life because you're missing a lot and you'll probably burn out really quickly.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, that's really interesting. I grew up in the country, in a rural community, that still had a vocational school and I also grew up in the church. So we talked a lot about sort of vocations generally and to sort of feel like you had a calling and everything else. I remember that's so interesting that the trades, like my friends who would go off and get their CDL or become a hairdresser or barber at vo-tech would have like a vocation. Meanwhile, I was just in college prep and I was like, well that just means I haven't found my calling yet and I guess that was always the way I thought about it.

Lauren Ruffin:

There's something to that. I'm going to have... But I also think that there, and we struggle with this at Fractured Atlas as well, because I mean I feel like you and I are the ones who are like, please don't bring your whole self to work. Bring 85% of you and I don't bring my entire self to work. I think that work has started filling a void in some way and I don't quite have the words for it, but there are moments at work where I'm like, something's going on with this person that I care about, but that isn't my family. I don't want them to think that we're family, but I care about them and I want them to be happy. But I also feel like this is a job. I don't know. I don't know how to fix it.

Tim Cynova:

Calibrating caring.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh yeah. I mean, I don't... It's a struggle, right?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Well, I think of the work that Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton are doing around job career and calling and how you perceive what you do. One of our former colleagues went to a dinner party once where people weren't allowed to talk about what they did for work. You could talk about anything else, but you couldn't talk about what you did. So this is a similar conversation or a question in my mind about if you view your work as a calling, that can be difficult to have a conversation where you're like, I don't know. I mean my dad was a Lutheran pastor and viewed his as a religious calling. I don't know. I guess these are points I'm wrestling with as we think about what does the future of work look like and where are healthy boundaries so that people can bring as much of themselves as they want to work but also don't end up in a charred mess because they can't calibrate that and turn it off.

Lauren Ruffin:

Fractured Atlas for me was sort of a random place to end up because I'm not an artist and I didn't know anything about the arts. Fractured Atlas for me is not a vocation. It's a job that I enjoy my colleagues, I like the work, I like the autonomy but it's in this weird place where it's not a calling but it's also not a job because I bartended forever and I bartended all through law school. I loved that I didn't have to take that work home with me but I take Fractured Atlas home with me and there are two things I miss about work. The first is that like just having a job and the second is because I feel like even if Fractured Atlas was my only sort of hat I was wearing, we still do so many things and add on to all the other things I'm doing.

Lauren Ruffin:

I miss that feeling you have when you're in school where you get to go into the library, walk into the stacks and spend hours sort of pulling every book off the shelf about a topic until you get to know that topic really, really well and I feel like I don't know anything really deeply anymore. People will call me an expert and I have to push back because I'm like, I remember what expertise looked like. I wrote a paper on Jim Jones. I was an expert in that for this finite period of time. I read everything that the library had on it, as much of an expert as you can be at 19, but do you feel like you are an expert in anything or do you feel like the more you learn, the more you like are like, Oh, I really don't know this at all?

Tim Cynova:

Two different ways of looking at this? Yes. I think the more I learn on various things, I think, Oh God, there's so much more to learn about this and you just realize you're never going to get that curve that never reaches a hundred. The closer you get, the farther you are away from it. And then at the same time though, there's moments where you can pull yourself out of the thing that you're in and realize, wow, we've done a lot on this. We've thought a lot about this and I probably know a lot more about this than I thought and sort of that perspective shift of saying, Oh right, everyone else hasn't been thinking about in an entirely virtual organization, how should mail work? We have colleagues that spent a lot of time, like granular stuff like how do you deal with 13 different mail flows where you have no physical place to send the mail?

Lauren Ruffin:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tim Cynova:

And so I think things like that. That's why I always people they should write blog posts about it. The work that went into mail distribution and how we handle mail flows. There's so much learning, I think that would be useful. Other organizations just take this and use it, probably not, but I think it shows steps that you walk through that can be applied to different ways of thinking.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Maybe someone on our staff is, well, certainly an expert in how Fractured Atlas has figured out how to deal with it's mail flow. But I think there's just a lot of things, I didn't even name everything that you're involved in and you come and talk to my class at the new school every year and one of the things every year they remark, you're introduced as the Chief External Relations Officer at Fractured Atlas and then we go down the list and they're like, wow, Lauren does a lot of different things and it's so great that she does a lot of different things. It's not just like she's a Director of Development at XPlace. That probably speaks to the type of person you are and the interests you have.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. I mean, no shadef to development directors at XPlace. Yeah, that's a hard job.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

But there's a sense of privilege there. Who else has the freedom to start a company openly while they're at another company? How privileged am I? I had a friend who worked on a really cool board game a couple of years ago in DC. She launched her Kickstarter and her company found out about it and they fired her. And I'm like, how could you? Penalizing someone for entrepreneurship really stinks, but that's the reality of being a worker. So I mean there's a lot of privilege there. I come from a family of workers. I kind of expected to be sort of approaching 40 and having to work really, really hard to get to the place where I could do the things that I really wanted to do and do things like this, talk to people I like to talk to and work with people, sort of Marie Kondo my life. I want everything to spark joy. Tim, you spark joy. Working at Eaton sparks joy.

Tim Cynova:

Thanks to Eaton for letting us sit in their cool radio lab here. This is way more professional than inaugural episode or how the podcast should be.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, this is actually, it's all downhill from here.

Tim Cynova:

It is all downhill.

Lauren Ruffin:

I'm pretty sure that it's all downhill.

Tim Cynova:

To both of our listeners, you're welcome. So Lauren, besides working at Eaton, what sparks joy? When you decide what you want to work on, how do you decide if it makes the cut or not?

Lauren Ruffin:

It's that. It's I'm excited to do it. I was a lobbyist for a long time. I worked with a lot of people that did not spark joy in my life. Yeah. It's like, am I excited about the idea of partnering with this person for the next three to six or nine months? And that's really it. Someone would say like, it's either a hell yes or a fuck no. And that's how you make decisions. I want to say it was Warren Buffet, but that feels way too vulgar for him to say publicly. But it's someone who's very wealthy who was like, that is how you make decisions and you should feel that strongly about the work you do. It's pretty simple. People make time for the things they care about. And so when someone approaches me, especially for Crux with a project that I believe in, it's like I find a way to make the work.

Lauren Ruffin:

I find a way to sort of lean in and do these things that I care about. I think we all do that to a certain extent. I feel like I've just had the freedom to kind of be able to do that.

Tim Cynova:

Why do you think that's not the norm in work?

Lauren Ruffin:

It's got to be either scarcity mindset or trust issues. It's kind of the root of all things evil, especially in the work we do.

Tim Cynova:

It starts with resource scarcity.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Yeah, it's got to be either that or just you don't trust the people that are coming to you to do things or you don't trust yourself maybe to make the leap. I don't know.

Tim Cynova:

I wonder if it's just, you don't think about it. It's that thing that you do and it's like this is how an organization should work, this is how a board should work, this is how people should work and you don't ask the why and question it in a way that allows you to see the autonomy and agency that is there.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

That's certainly not the entirety of it. That's probably several books long.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, and someone way smarter than us.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. [crosstalk 00:18:45]

Lauren Ruffin:

Or at least if they're not smarter, they're most certainly more charismatic. They've definitely been thinking about this for awhile.

Tim Cynova:

As we wrap up, I want to know how many bikes is too many bikes to own? You're an avid owner of bikes, so what's too many?

Lauren Ruffin:

This is a really relevant question in my life because I'm moving into a place with a garage.

Tim Cynova:

The sky's the limit.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, that's exactly it. I'm sitting here being like the garage is approximately 200 square feet and each bike takes up this footprint. So, I don't know. There's a difference between having a hobby, which is bike riding, and buying bikes, which is kind of what I do. I buy bikes. I think 10 has to be the number that I have to keep beneath and I'm at five right now.

Tim Cynova:

10 is almost like a small bike shop.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, so I think 10 is my personal bikes, but I also have three other people who I cohabitate with, two who have little bikes and one who has a full size bike. There are nine bikes in the house right now, but I have just limited myself to 10.

Tim Cynova:

If you enjoyed the conversation half as much as we did, you're in luck, maybe a quarter as much as we did, you're in luck. Lauren and I will be co-hosting a mini-series within the Work. Shouldn't. Suck. podcast where we chat with cool friends and colleagues. So stay tuned if you like this or you didn't like it, let your friends and/or people you don't like know. Thumbs up, add stars, whatever combination is on your podcasting platform of preference. But until next time, thanks for listening. Thanks Lauren.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Thanks, Tim.

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The Pilot (EP.01)

Last Updated

November 1, 2019

Pilot episode of the new Work. Shouldn't. Suck. podcast. What’s in store for this adventure? Listen to find out.

Co-Host: Tim Cynova

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Host

TIM CYNOVA spends his time assisting teams and organizations with the things they need to create workplaces where people thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR), a trained mediator, on faculty at Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and New York's The New School teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Leadership & Team Building. He is a certified trainer of the Crucial Conversations and What Motivates Me frameworks, and is a firm believer that Work. Shouldn't. Suck. He currently serves as the Chief Operating Officer of Fractured Atlas where he oversees the FinPOps team (Finance, People, and Operations, as well as is a member of the organization’s four-person, non-hierarchical shared leadership team). Prior to that, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville Courier-Press. Also, during a particularly slow summer, he bicycled across the United States.

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Transcript

Introduction, Host:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck., a podcast about, well, you know, that. On this podcast journey, we'll be looking at the intersection of creating environments where people and teams thrive, that have commitments to anti-racism and anti-oppression, and that are grounded in resilience and self-care. Along the way, we'll be chatting with coworkers, colleagues, and friends, sometimes even a combination of those things, to hear about the different approaches and perspectives people have when they're experimenting with crafting the future of work.

We'll explore how people are creating community and connection among teams when no two members live in the same state. We'll look at tools and frameworks for better collaboration, alignment, and transparency, like objectives and key results. We'll talk shared non-hierarchical leadership structures, and what it's like to be a part of a fully virtual organization. We'll dive into meditation and mediation, words that have many of the same letters in them, and it can be invaluable skills and approaches to building thriving teams. In the end, if you're a human being working with other humans to achieve a goal, there will be something in this adventure for you.

We'll start dropping full-length episodes in early December. In the meantime, if you're interested in hearing about a specific topic or want us to dig into a burning question, drop us a line at hello@workshouldntsuck.co, or ping us on Twitter @WrkShouldntSuck. Until then, thanks for listening.

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The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS Feed

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes to help others discover the podcast.