Organizing for Unity and Solidarity After a Global Crisis
Thriving on Goodwill
Dr. Olaf Hermans, Relationship Engineer, co-authors this article.
What does “Moving forward together” mean?
Facing a shared enemy like the coronavirus makes most of us gather around a shared purpose to defeat it.
As the President of the European Commission tweeted on April 7, 2020: “By standing united and working together, we can defeat this virus.” It is a call for all around the globe to move in the same direction. Leaders of businesses and organizations should also take a moment to reflect on how well their followers were moving in the same direction, inspired by great purposes and ideas, before this crisis to meet their goals.
The pre-coronavirus reporting on the size of a disengaged workforce — eight-five percent — tells a sobering story. Now might also be an excellent time to take a few steps back and see if one’s leadership moved all followers in the same direction at the desired speed.
During the war on the virus, people in the frontline risked and still risk their own lives caring for those suffering from COVID-19. Others rush to adapt manufacturing processes to produce and deliver the much-needed materials the front needs to administer the scientists’ vaccines to stop the enemy.
Let us look back at Mrs. von der Leyen’s tweet on April 7, 2020, when the race toward a vaccine was on. She vowed to make the fight a success worldwide. Today, the EU is the leading blocker of this vital measure (waiving IP rights on COVID-19 vaccines) to beat the pandemic.
To quote Rosa Pavanelli, “by putting corporate interests ahead of the public interest, the EU is doing lasting damage to its reputation — regionally and on the global stage. It’s time to make solidarity more than just a buzzword. And that starts with supporting Covid-19 vaccine patent waivers.”
The situation begs a crucial question: what were all others who belonged to the disengaged workforce doing, thinking, and feeling during the isolation? What about those coming out of isolation? They probably reflected on how it was before the pandemic struck and likely long to reconnect or refind their purpose. Will they find it within the organization they belong(ed) to, or will they realize that their rediscovered sense will take them elsewhere, as The Great Resignation suggests?
Where were we before the crisis with our organizations?
The pre-coronavirus state of organizations.
People increasingly express their desire to move from single voice environments to empowered ones, all while meaningfully connecting local environments into global ones and integrating economic ones into natural ones.
As a consequence, leadership needs to move strategy, or what activities they can profitably deploy, and pay much attention to their people moving forward together: culture — making sure to hear voices, to use talents, and to connect the right people for positive change to emerge and to be implemented.
Understandably, much attention goes to leadership skills, values and purpose, cohesive communication, motivating workplaces, talent seeking, as well as to providing safety for and managing individuals in organizations and their emotions, and to the understanding of and empathy for people outside our organizations. “Together” and “collaboration” have become the new mantra.
While no one can obstruct against this, and while most of us — before and during Corona — try to bring this to our environment with great solidarity, we were faced and still are with deficient levels of actual engagement; people like to work, feeling they do more than expected, and thus make a genuine contribution yet too all too often fail to be recognized for it. Why is this? Why is this bad, and what can companies and individuals do differently?
Why is this?
Ten years of dedicated research on psychological distance and role distribution has shown that people’s high solidarity and a strong desire and action to help structurally disunites them from their beneficiary. Yes, read that again: working better for people today mostly means working less with people! And it is not about you, but about (y)our ineffective conceptualization of what effective organizing means. Let’s explain this.
Indeed, working hard for others reduces the urge and need of the other to do more than express their need and wait for your solution. Such a reduction is a mind-blowing flaw, not of people or their well-intended purposes, but of how socio-economic systems define performance as someone fulfilling someone else’s need, whereby that person’s role is low.
We have an inclusive definition of performance when it comes to internal members of the organization but an excluding one when it comes to outside members. And that is not just customers; that also is staff excluded from a well-performing management team as a mini-organization/culture within the larger organization.
All our systems and organizations, and mini-systems/organizations within them, are designed to “produce & deliver” profit, care, and satisfaction, whereby the beneficiary of our work — customers, staff, citizens — are requested to state their need, and then “buckle up, relax, and wait for our solution.” Today that is the very definition of “a great performance.”
We are focused on acting, not on waiting for the beneficiary of our work to become a part of it. Moreover, organizations specialize alongside vertical functions, everyone creating a small piece of the puzzle, whereby the beneficiary of our work has a hard time overseeing the whole. The beneficiary of our work is the weakest link in our work. And they know it, even often feel guilty about it, which paralyzes them even more!
Disengagement of the beneficiary of our work then is natural, as (s)he does not see the future outcome nor sees his/her meaningful contribution to your hard work. Globally, satisfaction with work scores 7.5+ yet the sense of “being in this together” at 6.5-. And no matter how much we would like to change that, our current performance standard does not allow us to do so. We do not take time to enable weak outside elements to play a role inside. That is the very purpose of the organization: only include those with added value, and cut the clutter out! We don’t lock outside people out from our business — we do wish to understand needs, but we lock them out from our organizing.
Why is non-inclusive organizing bad? What must(!) we do differently?
Interestingly, contrary to all knowledge we had on an effective and efficient organization, psychology and organization researchers were fortunate to find that:
Leaving out from our organizing any outsider who wants in means missing out on value, which:
1. Makes inclusive organizing of our desirable;
2. Makes outsiders longing for inclusion in our work an imperative.
Including outsiders in our organization who wish for inclusion is always feasible;
1. Makes inclusive organizing of our work imperative
2. Makes non-inclusive organizing a sign of “turning people down,” which is why they will eventually leave; a loss of a valuable resource to the organization, as many organizations are witnessing, albeit with their employees or customers.
We don’t need new stories or new people or new organizations; we need a new way of organizing.
The way we have tried to include others in our organizations was:
■ Going social: sharing and caring with outside people
■ Allowing 3–5% of enthusiastic external members to sit on innovation and cocreation boards
■ Showing empathy for the needs of people outside, which we tried to convert into need solutions inside our organization.
This attempt is all good yet very different from creating a desire for inclusion among 70% outside members, externals wanting to contribute to the day-to-day organizing. So, where to start? Leaders must acknowledge and facilitate the power to relate to those closest to the outside member, not see them as mere executors of standardized solutions.
Traditionally we look at businesses, organizations, and individuals differently. From a relational view, only individuals are a given. Inclusively relating and organizing individuals means that:
■ Organization (from 2, 5, 10, or 10.000 people) is an outcome; clustered insiders and outsiders stick together for a while. There is no a priori “cord” around people.
■ Business definition is an outcome of that dynamic organizing process: what performance is delivered and who does what for whom. There is no business a priori.
The organizational value chain no longer is:
■ Create team > collaborate > understand outsiders > perform for other > build relationships over time > hope future success
■ But: map goodwill inside and outside > relate to create or maintain goodwill > disclose goodwill’s ideal next and future > cluster and re-cluster activated/committed actors to a shared future to which they can adhere > perform with others.
Goodwill especially puts pressure on people who had great finished ideas and solutions (yes, mostly highly responsible leaders, managers, designers, educators, supervisors, and “empowered” people). Pressure mounts because the new way of organizing states that the greater the idea, the greater the need and desire to assume co-ownership by those whom the concept will serve, have their great personal idea about it, and demand inclusion in the development, production, and execution, and not just consume the great finished ideas of the originators.
So the traditional “black box organization” between identified and acknowledged need concern in the beginning, and solution delivery and feedback at the end needs to be opened:
■ Communicate the intention to create or execute a people or AI-based program, solution, practice, or process
■ Express desire and readiness to see the outsider be involved in the organizing process
■ Relate to either build such goodwill for next time or to find out how to position the external individual
■ Use goodwill to co-create/produce
■ Use goodwill to ask for compliance with the built solution, all while acknowledging its flaws
■ Ask to review or to participate in innovation.
All this runs while operating a healthy production environment but remains aware that strong performance for outsiders scares off outsiders. So there is a huge need to be transparent and show true flexibility and orchestration capability that includes the outsider to the inclusion extent (s)he wishes. Failure to do so will lead to disengagement and failure to “move forward together.”
Conclusion
We should not confound today’s survival, solidarity, and responsibility with our sense of bonding and resilience. We have grown bad at inclusive organizing, leaving room for employees, customers, and citizens to act outside standards and apply their own assessment of what needs to happen. We are all surrounded by systems. Take away the stimulus of the virus, and our old performance system will resume.
While we all grow more conscious of people’s well-fare, well-being, and of the broader purpose of what we do, if we don’t change our way of organizing into “open” inclusive organizing and accepting its initial complexity as opposed to the instant benefit, we will drop back, and we will miss out on value, both
■ In economic terms: better profit deals and high growth that capitalizes on organization included goodwill;
■ In human terms: disengagement and demotivation due to unclear position and contribution.
The challenge of business leaders is:
■ To find and attract all internal and external people wishing to volunteer to make a difference together, BEFORE fully deciding the exact nature of the shared activity. The fight for goodwill among people captured in their silos to join an open yet well-organized environment with a clear purpose is on.
■ To appreciate that all individuals inside and outside make processes happen, not the collaborative pre-designers of those processes which never fully fit the context. Require that all designed products, processes, and experiences leave openness for including those who wish to be a part of the business or organization.
■ To keep or share the economic value of that process, but always give each the full credit of success. Cloning success across all contributors based on their clear and acknowledged individual contributions.
