The Podcast

Tim Cynova Tim Cynova

Democracy and Creative Practice (EP.82)

In this episode of Work Shouldn’t Suck, host Tim Cynova and guest Shannon Litzenberger explore how creative practice and relational leadership can cultivate collective thriving and drive societal transformation.

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Updated

February 25, 2025

In this episode of Work Shouldn’t Suck, host Tim Cynova connects with the ever-awesome Shannon Litzenberger to explore the intersections of democracy, creative practice, and collective thriving. Together, they dive into how artistic methodologies can expand leadership frameworks and help shape more caring, equitable communities.

In this episode:
✅ How creative practice informs leadership and systems change
✅ The importance of mutual care and collective thriving
✅ Sensory attunement, attentional awareness, and improvisational leadership
✅ Disrupting default systems and embracing world-making as a practice

Fresh from the national tour of her production World After Dark and moments away from presenting at a social theory, politics, and the arts conference in Spain, Shannon shares insights on how creative practice can serve as a catalyst for personal and societal transformation. They discuss the power of mutual care, the significance of sensory attunement, and the need to reimagine default patterns in both the workplace and society.

This episode also touches on the enduring influence of Shannon’s friendship and collaboration with the late Diane Ragsdale, their shared exploration of aesthetics and embodiment, and their co-authored chapter in Democracy as Creative Practice. Plus, hear how Shannon is bringing her artistic ethos into unexpected spaces—like reimagining an academic panel as an improvisational score.

Tune in for a conversation packed with practical wisdom, unexpected insights, and a reminder that thriving workplaces and thriving communities are built on mutual care, relational leadership, and a willingness to embrace the unfamiliar.

Quotables

“This is where I find a lot of fertile ground for transformation, and why I feel it's so important for creative practice methodologies to gain purchase in this conversation around change, because they're practice-based, and practice is how we change habits. We can have lots of fruitful conversations that evoke ways of knowing that we understand, but to actually become something different than what we've already been conditioned to be requires practice, not just a kind of conceptual knowing.” – Shannon Litzenberger

“ Practice is the pathway to change. If you want to be able to expand your repertoire of being and doing, you have to practice things that are unfamiliar.” – Shannon Litzenberger

“Identity is a very powerful organizing construct in society. The pandemic especially I think really highlighted identity significantly as an organizing structure, as a way of revealing structural harms and inequities. It also started to deepen the way that we are relating in these identity-based affinity groups, and in a sense, this is a challenge when it comes to developing practices that are supportive of a pluralistic democracy. Because, in a pluralistic democracy, we need to develop an ability to be together in ways that are not so strictly codified that we are all twisting ourselves in a knot to try to belong, that actually we need to be able to embrace differences within a dynamic whole in order to work well and co-create well together.” – Shannon Litzenberger

Highlights:

  • Values in Creative Practice (02:14)

  • Exploring “World After Dark” (04:08)

  • Leadership and Collective Action (09:32)

  • Navigating Post-Pandemic Challenges (11:10)

  • Creative Practice in Organizations (17:43)

  • Improvisational Leadership (27:09)

  • Collaboration with Diane Ragsdale (35:33)

  • Improvisational Score as Panel Discussion (42:29)

  • Final Thoughts and Reflections (45:52)

Related Resources:

 

Bios

Shannon Litzenberger (she/her, Tkaronto) is an award-winning choreographer, director, researcher and embodiment facilitator. She creates sensory-rich multi-disciplinary performance experiences that animate our relationship to land, community and the forgotten wisdom of the body. Her imaginative collaborations connect art forms and communities, centering participatory experiences in artistic processes. Throughout her 25+ year career, her work has been presented across Canada and the U.S., in collaboration with many of Canada’s leading artists across disciplines. The creative principles and embodied practices she works with regularly in the studio are also central to her work in relational leadership, organizational development, and systems change. Her approach to personal and collective transformation focuses on recovering our capacity to sense and make shared meaning of our complex, rapidly changing world. The collective experiences she designs focus on strengthening our ability to respond generatively to what a moment is asking of us, in service of mutual thriving. They invite a conscious recovery of embodied capacities like sensory attunement, expanded attentional awareness, reciprocity, imagination, collaborative play and worldmaking. She works frequently across corporate, academic and non-profit spaces in support of creating a healthier, more interconnected, caring and resilient society. She is currently a Public Imagination Network Fellow and Artist Researcher in Residence at Creative Community Commons, within University of Toronto’s School of Cities. www.shannonlitzenberger.com

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of WSS HR LABS, an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast for thriving workplace practitioners. On today's episode, I'm joined by the ever awesome Shannon Litzenberger to explore democracy and creative practice or the importance of mutual care, collective thriving, and the potential of creative practice on societal transformation. We discuss how connections between artistic practice and methodologies can inform and expand what is often considered the bounds of leadership and team development and create more caring and equitable communities. I was excited to catch up with Shannon fresh off of the national tour of her production World After Dark and moments away from her hopping a flight to Spain for a panel at a social theory politics and the arts conference where she happened to be presenting her panel discussion in the form of an improvisational score. So much fun stuff to explore. So without further ado, Shannon, welcome to the podcast.

Shannon Litzenberger:

Hello. So nice to be here.

Tim Cynova:

Why don't we get started with how do you typically introduce yourself in the work you do these days?

Shannon Litzenberger:

I, first and foremost, identify as an artist. I'm a dance artist and choreographer director, and I also think a lot about my role in society as an artist, and so that has kind of opened up my practice and career into other spaces including leadership development and systems change work. I am based in Toronto, Canada or Tkaronto, which is a Mohawk name for Toronto and it means where the trees stand in the water. So I mentioned this in part because I also, through my practice, have a significant connection to land. I grew up in Canada's rural prairies in Saskatchewan, and so this beginning of my life really informed how I relate to the natural world and it's quite inherent in my artistic practice.

Tim Cynova:

We talk a lot about value centered work on the podcast. You've mentioned some things that I think are probably values in the work that you do in your own work. How do you define the values that you center in your work and unpack them in the context of what they mean in the workplace?

Shannon Litzenberger:

Something that I've been thinking a lot about lately in terms of values is a value of mutual care. This is something that comes up for me a lot in my work in a studio and also in context of leadership development. Mutual care for me is also connected to the idea of mutual thriving. It's something that I really center in my work is that how are the ways that we relate to ourselves, each other and the world around us really supporting this idea of collective thriving? So not just a kind of thriving or care for the thing that we're doing, like the mission that we're on or the thing that we're working on together, but how are those decisions and actions having impacts that extend out beyond ourselves in the larger set of interrelationships that we're a part of? This for me is something that I also look for in the relationships that I enter into in work and in life. Is there a sense of mutual care so that there can be the potential of mutual thriving?

Tim Cynova:

Following along on your Instagram feed, it seems like you are in the midst of several significant projects this year or have been in the midst of several significant projects this year, recently landed back home after a tour with World After Dark, there's a wild soma. I'm just curious what's in this mix that you've had this year? And I know because you're also headed off to be on a panel about another project you're working on. So what's it look like to be Shannon Litzenberger and the things you're juggling?

Shannon Litzenberger:

There's really never a dull moment. It is sort of the nature of my work that I am engaged in a lot of different spaces, but yes, I have just returned from a national tour of my production called World After Dark. This work premiered in 2019 at Harbourfront Centre Theater in Toronto. Of course then there was the pandemic that happened and now it has just returned from a national tour where we traveled to Guelph, Ontario and then to Yellowknife Northwest Territory, so the far north, and then to the West Coast to Coquitlam and Salt Spring Island. I'm kind of starting by talking about this because this is the creative artistic manifestation of a lot of the values that are inherent in the other kinds of work that I'm doing. World After Dark is a show about night. Some of it is about the actual night, our changing relationship to night and how the advent of city light has really disconnected us from our experience of darkness, but it's also for me, night is a metaphor for our lost connection to be embodied and to the feminine polarity of our nature.

I took ways of knowing that our not rationalist or that can't be reduced to data and algorithms, ways of meeting the self and the world that are part of our felt experience of being alive. And it was so interesting on this tour, especially in the Northwest Territories, we were there, we at a time of year, like it's November, so we're a month away from the solstice and the days are short, the days are short, so the sun was rising after 09:00 A.M., setting before 16:00 P.M. and I could feel in that community a kind of preparation for the hibernation of this time of year and it made me reflect on what the significance is of that way of being, of this kind of contemplative time, this time of moving out of a state of and what that feels like in our being to recover that sense of maybe slowness of stillness.

It's interesting as an artist, I forget who said it, but there's a notion that artists keep making the same work over and over their entire lives, and I feel like this work for me. I had my first rehearsal for this show in creation really 10 years ago. We started developing it in 2014. And so came to life before the pandemic and now is had a life after the pandemic. It's so interesting to me when I look back at it, how many layers of ideas are embedded in there, many of which were intentional and explicit, but some of which were my own unconscious manifesting in this show. The show takes us through the experience of a male protagonist who, in a sense, represents us as society and he is someone who's sort of this corporate boss that is instituting his policies and procedures and wreaking havoc on the workers around him.

The whole work is how he goes through this intense process of transformation where he moves through phases of the night and encounters his antagonist, a woman who portrays a kind of personification of night. And at each turn he keeps meeting this new way of being or this order of things that are so unfamiliar to him until eventually he sort of remembers something that he had forgotten and what he remembers is something from the beginning of his life, something from his childhood, this sense of curiosity and wonder and discovery and love even. And so as I keep rewatching this work over the last several weeks, seeing the cast perform it over and over, it's been also rekindling in me the power of creative practice and what it does in the world, why it is that we need art as a way of knowing the world and the way that art can offer us things for our consideration that don't need to turn through our rationalist minds, but can be felt and can evoke a kind of recognition of something that is very difficult to explain.

Tim Cynova:

When we first met, we were on the cultural leadership program at the Banff Center, and then we kind of moved on to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the creative leadership program. You also participated in the Ethical Reopening Summit in between there that Lauren Ruffin and I produced, so it's been a ten-year arc. I'm curious, as you think about your ideas that you brought into those spaces, how are you thinking and approaching it differently or what's still the same in how you would approach your work?

Shannon Litzenberger:

In these spaces of leadership, I think one thing that hasn't changed is my orientation toward leadership as a collective act and leadership as relational and leadership as a pathway to shifting our current paradigm that is very long-tail work. So in that bigger vision hasn't shifted for me in this timeframe, but all of these spaces and as time passes, these ideas and practices meet a different moment. When we spoke at the Ethical Reopening Summit, this was a kind of in the midst of the pandemic moment. It was a moment of clearer recognition of the systems that we are conditioned to buy and living inside and working within and a kind of hopefulness around what needs to change, what is possible in terms of a different kind of future. If we're recognizing some of the ways that our world is not in alignment with our sense of wellness or aliveness or just like thriving, I'll use that word again, if it's not in alignment with that, then what needs to change in order to orient it in that direction?

Now fast-forward a few years and we are in a kind of post-pandemic lockdown moment and deeply feeling the impact of that time of closure. I think we're in this tension where we're quite burnt out actually, and also maybe from that state of burnout, finding it difficult to over and over enter into a state of learning and growth and novelty. That's kind of the tension that I'm feeling now is that there is this absolute imperative for change and growth and co-creation of new worlds from this moment and also this paralyzing condition of exhaustion and burnout and when we're in that state, we just return to the familiar habits. It takes a lot of energy to grow and change. So I think that's something that's really top of mind for me right now. Thinking in particular in the culture sector, I'm really seeing that there's this push and pull a recoiling in a way to the familiar and simultaneously, a kind of push or movement toward change by those that are still really working for that paradigm shift and so what to do about that now, how do we orient our efforts?

I think it's important to acknowledge that this state of change is constant regardless of what we do. It won't be our actions that determine change, that actually the planetary forces will decide for us. Like the earth will decide how much change is going to happen and how fast and how soon, and we will always be in relationship to that because we are a part of that. This condition of burnout is something I've been thinking about a lot in relationship to leadership development because of course, I want so much to bring to life these practices that come from creative work and believe so much that they can support and expansion into new possibilities, that they can support a movement away from old habits and toward creating new habits and support co-creation across among differences. I think that is all possible, but that isn't easy from a state of exhaustion and burnout. And so I think one of the things that's really top of mind is how do we embrace care back to that value of care?

How can we better care for ourselves and how can we better recover our sense of wellbeing so that we can continue doing from this paradigm shifting change making work. When it comes to care, I think this idea of self-care comes up a lot. And self-care is, I think, connected to this idea that we go to work and we work really hard and we get burned out and then we leave work and we go home and we take care of ourselves and then we go back to work and we burn out and then we go home and we take care of ourselves.

And so I think this is really just a triaging strategy for trying to maintain the status quo. It's really through some of the research that I've been working on with some of my collaborators, like you mentioned Wild Soma and also a collaborator that I work with through an entity called PlaySpace as well, that we've been exploring what it means to create collective care, so how does care manifest in the collective space, which really is about creating cultures that don't lead to harm and burnout in the first place. So how do we do that?

That's been part of my research and exploration as of late, is really looking at, how do we actually work and create together while also feeling cared for so that we don't have to go home and take a bubble bath to recover from our time at work.

Tim Cynova:

So important and so challenging. We're going from one really challenging thing in the world, one after that next, after the next, I've sketched out a piece that I'm calling hedonic adaptation and the snapback.

Shannon Litzenberger:

Oh yes, the snapback. I want you to tell me more about that because I like this term. It resonates with me.

Tim Cynova:

I first heard about it through systems change work from another one of our Banff Center cultural leadership program colleagues, Katrina Donald, how systems will snap back. We saw this coming out of the pandemic where organizations had figured out a different way of working. You figured out that not everyone needed to be in the same room as each other to get work done, and then as other pressures came in, we have real estate that's not being occupied or we can't get really creative work done or whatever it might be, the systems were snapping back to everyone in the office five days a week and we're still seeing this. Even though we have proven that there are better ways of doing things, the systems and structures are meant to support the systems and structures. And so they're snapping back to what was before the pandemic.

I think about this now as in the US we're recording this in December of 2024, about a month and change before the next administration comes into office and what systems and structures were in place when this administration was in office four years ago, what's similar, what's different? What's going to snap back? What needs to keep changing? And at the same time, people who are involved in this work are just exhausted. You're exhausted as human beings. Your organizations are exhausted, and yet your idea of collective care, how do we center that in our work and acknowledge that, quote unquote, "work work" isn't in isolation of life? It is a part of that.

I think this is one of the things being introduced to your work in those early days where I'm like, "Oh my gosh, Shannon approaches this in a very different way than I approach my work," and its what I find so fascinated by getting to connect with you and hear about how you approach your work and to see how do you describe the work that you do and oh, that's similar to the way I might describe it, but it's done in a completely different way. I find that so fascinating the times we get to chat and the times I get to actually see you do your thing is really inspiring and energizing.

Shannon Litzenberger:

I do think that some of the ways that I approach my work is unfamiliar to folks in organizational worlds. It's more familiar to those who are in creative worlds. I find this also a fascinating truth that the organizations that exist to facilitate creative work find creative practice unfamiliar. And it also kind of reveals this other truth where creative practice is a practice of creating art, but organization and their structures are very much a product of the corporate world, of the industrial era model of organizing. And why is that? Why does it have to be that way? Does it have to be that way? I don't think so, but this is where I find a lot of fertile ground for transformation and why I feel like it's so important for creative practice methodologies to gain purchase in this conversation around change because they're practice-based and practice is how we change habits.

We can have lots of fruitful conversations that evoke ways of knowing that we understand, but to actually become something different than what we've already been conditioned to be requires practice, not just a kind of conceptual knowing. It's still a bit baffling to me that we have not fully embraced this in our field. It's like the knowledge this way of knowing and doing derives from the practices that are contained within our field and yet we look to the same kind of theoretical strategic frameworks, ideas-based ways to change.

I think if there's anything that I've learned from sharing these practices over more than a decade is that practice is the pathway to change. If you want to be able to expand your repertoire of being and doing, you have to practice things that are unfamiliar. A lot of the work I do is simply providing a kind of space to practice that where the stakes are very low, practicing and being able to experience that unfamiliar thing within you and to feel those reactions of discomfort when it just doesn't matter, when there's no material consequence, to allow that to build new possibilities within us to allow for expansion to occur.

I think in the process of sharing these practices over many years, I've also really kind of in a reverse way formed some theories around it, theories that grow out of the impact of the practice. Some of those things for me are about how rationalist our world is and how we need to recover sensory ways of knowing. It's about how individualist our world is and it's about recovering our sense of relationality and interrelationship. It's about how we have divided the mind and body, how we treat the body as a thing and not as us. That we are bodies and we think with and through our bodies, we shape our realities. How we come to understand our reality is through our sensory motor engagement with the world, and then the story of that actually comes after.

It's also, I think, trying to move away from the conditioning of command and control type leadership models and to move toward sensing and responding. Sensing and responding, you have a very foundational principle in creative practice and embodied creative practice. That's not novel to a movement artist. But maybe it's novel to a leadership team in an organization because sensing and responding acknowledges the unpredictability and complexity of the environment, whereas command and control type leadership really requires a predictable environment because there's no way to always apply the same rules and have the same outcome unless you have a stable container and we are in a very unstable container right now.

Tim Cynova:

I'm reminded of the times when you can trust your gut, different scenarios when you can trust your gut. One of them is like if you have significant prior practice with that thing, and another one is if you're getting immediate feedback from what you're doing, and I forget what the third one is, but it's been top of mind recently, especially in the pandemic because no one's lived through a pandemic. No one has prior practice running an organization through a pandemic. All these different things, and now when can you trust your gut? When can you just use the thing from the book? When do you have to say, "All right, well, no one knows the right answer here, so how do we sense what's going on and then figure out what to do about it?" You've worked with a lot of different groups. When you work with different groups, how does what you do resonate differently?

Shannon Litzenberger:

I have made some really interesting discoveries about this work and working with different kinds of groups. And yes, absolutely this work resonates differently with different ensembles of people, but I would say that most of why that is the case is because of the context in which they're experiencing the offer. As an example, I had an experience with a group of business students who were invited to play different games and were introduced into ways of sensing and tuning different ways of paying attention. Even though I would prompt the group around discovery and sensing as a kind of priority as opposed to trying to source solutions or win whatever the game is, that it's actually all just about noticing what happens as things unfold. It was such a strongly conditioned habit for a group of business students in the environment of a business school to be a certain way, and so introducing things that involved expressive play, for example.

I mean these are human beings who are in their early twenties. They're not that far away from their childhoods. I know that they remember what it feels like to play, but in the environment of the business school and with all of the codes of belonging inherent in that space, it was a challenge to invite another way of being. I think something that I have really learned is that the context matters and how rigidly we understand our identity, also makes a difference.

Identity is a very powerful organizing construct in society, and the pandemic especially I think really highlighted identity significantly as an organizing structure, as a way of reviewing structural harms and inequities. But it also started to deepen the way that we are relating in these identity-based affinity groups, and in a sense, this is a challenge when it comes to developing practices that are supportive of a pluralistic democracy because in a pluralistic democracy, we need to develop an ability to be together in ways that are not so strictly codified that we are all twisting ourselves in a knot to try to belong, that actually we need to be able to embrace differences within a dynamic whole in order to work well and co-create well together.

But so often in the example of the business school environment, if there's a very strict code of belonging and a way of being in that space, well then that becomes very apparent when you introduce practices that are about expanding into new possibilities and inviting the possibility of differences and plurality to co-exist in a generative way.

Tim Cynova:

As you counsel organizations and leadership teams to show up differently, what are some of the things that are typically helpful to them?

Shannon Litzenberger:

Something I like to distinguish when talking about this more improvisational or sense and respond type of leadership is that it requires the development of a set of capacities that I am distinguishing from maybe what you might call skills. When we go and do our MBA or management degrees, we have a list of skills that we learn, that to me is different than the kind of capacities that are required to be in a generative relationship with an ensemble in a state of complex volatility, which is really what we're in now. I have, through my collaborations with many different embodiment practitioners and also through my own research and practice over the years, developed a kind of framework that for me is kind of living set of practice-based ideas that contain what I feel is sort of the essence of what those capacities are that we need to develop in order to be in a kind of generative, co-creative relationship with others.

One of those things is what I call sensory attunement. How are we activating the sensing body as a source of knowing? Maybe an example that I can give is that we talk about how do you read a room? How do you read a room? What sensory capacities are you using? Without having any story about what's going on, how are you taking the temperature of things? How are you noticing the energy of the space? And that is a whole set of sensory systems that we can actually activate and bring to life and practice using. That's usually a very strong baseline, is how do we activate the senses as a source of knowledge. The next thing that I work with is what I call attentional awareness. Because we're so into our devices these days, we tend to have an overdeveloped ability to focus directly where we close our field of view and we very task-focused.

We're looking singularly at one thing, but we also have a kind of form of attention that's more ambient where we're engaging the fulsomeness of our peripheral vision, neurologically this peripheral focus is connected to our system of social connection. No surprise. It tends to be a bit underutilized, and so practicing holding our attention in that peripheral, I call it sometimes seeing everything at once, the seeing everything at once space as we navigate the world is just a different way of taking in information and then being in a practice where we can shift between multiple modes of attention, which also supports us to be well. Often our exhaustion comes from really overusing one form of attention for a really long time, but if we're able to shift between different modes of attention, I mean that's sometimes why the conventional advice is get up and go for a walk, because when we go for a walk, we will often open our attention into the peripheral space.

Being connected to nature is another time when we quite naturally open our gaze widely, it's very healthy for us to do this. Practicing ways of paying attention and noticing. I mean, if it's true that our sensory motor engagement with our world shapes our reality, then what we pay attention to has a huge effect on what we notice, what we see and what we understand as relevant information. And we often have a lot of default habits in how we pay attention because those habits actually help us navigate through the world more quickly. Activating an expansive, attentional awareness necessitates really slowing down so that we don't stay in those defaults of only seeing what we think is absolutely relevant to whatever we need to be doing at a certain moment. So those two are quite foundational, sensory attunement and attentional awareness. And then the other practices that I often associate, like these capacities that I associate with this more improvisatorial way of leading together is relationality. So how we are relating then to others.

For me this is about to what extent are we exercising our agency and to what extent is our own will and desires being expressed and met in a relationship, in a collaboration, and to what extent are our actions and decisions in service to the group itself or to the creation, the collective creation? For me, there's an important balance between those things that we need to practice because when we're so in service to everything and everyone around us and we are not expressing any of our own desires or are not exercising our own agency, then this can be actually very bad for us, and you can ask any serial caregiver what this feels like. The opposite of that is when we express so much energy and we impose our desires and will on the group so much that we then start to take away the agency of others or potentially disrupt the aim of the group as a whole.

This is also sometimes what we see in this classic heroic leadership model where it's like the vision and intention of a single individual that dictates the actions and decisions of the group as a whole. Trying to strike a balance between these things is, I think, one of the capacities that really supports generative relational collaborative leadership.

And the last one is what I call world making. World making is this potential of co-creation that is capable of transcending familiar paradigms. So really this is a more exploratory process like the improvisational action itself. What happens when we put all those other capacities in action and we try to create something together? What is possible and how do we notice when we are sliding into defaults? And how do we notice when new possibilities are coming into being or permissed through more expansive actions? So that's kind of the framework that I have been working with. I mean, it's all a work in progress. Everything is a grand experiment, but these are some of the capacities that I see as different than skills building that are so essential to generative ensemble-based improvisation.

Tim Cynova:

I love that. And thinking about how you would map those defaults to team members on a team. And what might be their default and what might be how they operate on the team to think about awareness or my default might be very narrow, but my role on this team is to make sure I'm leveling up. And actually naming that so that we're showing up I think is so intriguing and probably helpful and eye-opening in a way where it's like, oh, right there, we are all showing up in a way here, and how are we showing up together as a team and what might be the fault of the team? I once was on the leadership team where we all did the Myers-Briggs and then we rolled them all into the Myers-Briggs of the team, and the Myers-Briggs of the team was Myers-Briggs of the CEO.

Whether or not you believe the Myers-Briggs is an accurate tool or not, for a different day, but it was really interesting. We all show up in this way, that might be the default, but that might not be how we need to be operating. Talking about different ways of approaching our work, you and our dear friend Diane Ragsdale would actually take participants of the programs that we were in literally into the woods and then talk about the work or into a gallery or into a museum.

When I heard about that, I'm like, "I would not do that. That's not how I would approach it." But once again, one of those really interesting ways of shifting the frames in which we're operating. I know because we have known each other a long time, and I know Diane, that you two had a practice yourselves, a regular practice called Brain Dates and an opportunity to be together to think about things, toss around ideas, and also led, to among other things, you two writing a chapter of a book in democracy as creative practice. Can you just sort of sketch what that is? What was that relationship and then how did it lead to you all writing a chapter in a book together?

Shannon Litzenberger:

I feel like in order to explain that, I have to tell you the story about how Diane and I met because we did meet at the Banff Center and she was teaching a course called The Aesthetic Advantage. And it was a leadership course using the principles of creative practice to train leaders. I think this was at the time just one of the iterations of her work that has come to life in other spaces as well. But I was at the Banff Center because I was invited to audit some of their leadership courses, and so I was there as a participant, actually.

So experiencing many of these practices like going to an art gallery and spending 20 minutes looking at a single image, a single work of art, and noticing how your gaze starts to transform your experience of noticing and seeing. One night we had an epic conversation over several glasses of wine and just the [inaudible 00:37:20] notes a version of it is that we kind of realized that our practices and our interests were two sides of the same coin, that what Diane was exploring through her work in beauty and aesthetics, I was exploring through embodiment and movement.

And so in true Diane style, she immediately within the course invited me the next day to host a session on embodiment. And so I did. I shared some of the exercises that I do, and it really provoked our long friendship and collaboration from that point. And I think we did just really recognize in each other this mutual exploration that we were on. And so we did. We collaborated a lot through the creative leadership or the cultural leadership program at Banff Center, and then we did form these weekly brain dates. Those sort of arose in the pandemic when we all needed to create a little more structure in our world that felt very unstructured at that time. So our brain dates, we met once a week for pretty much four years.

It really was incredible how we sustained this collaboration in both of us. As the lockdowns ended, we started to get busier and busier, but we just really committed to this relationship with each other because I think what we were really trying to do is to express the interrelationship between these aesthetic practices and how they hold the potential to create an inclusive democracy.

Our best attempt at writing about this was published in Democracy as creative practice not long before she passed away, and I'm so grateful that we actually did manage to write the one chapter. We were already starting to plot our book together. This question that we were trying to tackle is what are these capacities, what are the missing capacities from programs like an MBA that we just so desperately need in order to co-create a different kind of world, and what can the knowledge and wisdom of art lend us in that pursuit?

And so my collaboration with Diane through the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and their creative leadership master's program also was really foregrounding those things, beauty, discernment, improvisation, imagination, sensory attunement, attentional awareness, like all of these very human qualities that support healthy interrelationships with self-others in the world around us that are aligned with collective thriving. This was really our shared exploration. And yeah, I'm trying my best to carry on as much of that work without having her formidable partnership, but she is in my ear all the time, let me tell you.

Tim Cynova:

That's really wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. As you two rolled around these ideas, what couldn't you get into the chapter? What didn't land in a way or what still circling? I don't know what to make of that.

Shannon Litzenberger:

There's quite a bit, actually, that didn't make it into the chapter. I mean, she and I wrote a longer version of this chapter that remains unpublished. So I'm working on a way of trying to help this writing find its way into the world. But the chapter was in service of introducing a section of the book. So what we did is a kind of foundational introduction of relationality and pluralism and aesthetics and aesthetic practice as having a relationship with democracy.

But I think in the longer version of this writing that we were doing, we were also trying to map out what are these aesthetic strategies, marrying the work that she had been doing around beauty and the work that I had been doing around embodiments and trying to find a way to list what these things might be. And I feel like that part of our work was always a bit in progress. It was hard to really draw a hard conclusion around what would be the eight capacities that you would really develop in order to be able to animate art as a way of knowing and aesthetics in your leadership? And I think this will be a question for me as I continue my research for a long time. I have a strong sense of what many of those capacities are, but I think there's always new things that kind of pop up that make me think more about it.

Tim Cynova:

That would be usually the point in my conversations with Diane where I'd be like, "Well, just drop it in ChatGPT and ask her what it says are the eight things you should do?" And then she'd be like, "Well, have you read this book?" I'm like, "Oh my God, Diane, every time we meet, I've got five more books on my list to read from you." It's true. You're just about ready to head to Europe to attend a conference where you'll be discussing the book and the chapter and you've decided to approach it in, dare I say, a slightly different way than one might think a panel discussion would typically be delivered. What's in the mix on this one?

Shannon Litzenberger:

I'm heading to Osuna, Spain to attend a social theory politics in the arts conference, thanks to Andrea Zitcer and Tom Borrup, who are the editors of Democracy as Creative Practice. They made a proposal to the conference to host a panel with some of the chapter authors from this book. And so in a conversation with the panelists, we were talking about what does it mean to share these ideas at an academic conference? And of course, right away, my artist self was ready to create a disruption to the usual system. And I think I was in great company because I proposed the idea of instead of having a typical configuration of a panel, that we host the session as an improvisational score. And if anyone out there listening doesn't know what an improvisational score is, it's basically just a set of instructions, prompts of how we might move from thing to thing in a particular duration of time.

And so, I'm so thrilled that my colleagues on this, quote unquote "panel" have agreed to co-create a kind of improvisational score that will be our session. And so we're still in the process of designing that, but I feel like this kind of generative transgression, if I can call it that, hopefully ways of disrupting that our in service to positive change is really part of my ethic as an artist. And I'm really excited about what will happen, what kind of questions will come up, what kind of discussion will arise. But I felt it would've been maybe a missed opportunity to have a panel discussion on democracy as creative practice without actually having any creative practice present.

And so we're really going to go for it and just see what happens. I'm thrilled to have been invited to this event, and I feel like this would've been the kind of conference that Diane would've attended to represent these ideas. And so I feel like I'm going carrying the spirit of our collaboration with me and hopefully doing it justice at this event.

Tim Cynova:

Well, she would've loved that structure. Having worked with her on a number of things where she's like, "How about this?" I'm like, "Oh my God, Diane, that's too much. It makes me too nervous. To try it with real live people? Oh my gosh. Why don't we just all sit behind a table and talk about things?" Yeah, I'm so excited for that. So excited to hear how that goes and what prompts do you use to guide the improvisation.

Shannon Litzenberger:

Those are still to be determined, but I think no matter what, there's going to be some things that include a mix of inquiry, a mix of movement or action-based interventions, a mix of contemplation and conversation.

Tim Cynova:

No surprise, our time has flown by as the plane lands on our time today. Where do you want to land it?

Shannon Litzenberger:

I think maybe a thought I'd like to leave in this conversation is that what's really alive in me about my own creative practice right now is how it can be in service to this moment. Creative process is often understood as a way of making art that becomes an experience or an artifact that lives in a system of cultural production inside a cultural industry. And I think this is maybe one of the biggest challenges that we have as artists and as people who work in service of culture, is that we might be losing sight of the fact that art is also a practice, it's also a process.

It's a way of knowing that can really support transformation if we unleash it from its task of being only in service of creating experiences and artifacts. This is what I feel like I've really dedicated my life and career to, is yes, making art as experience, but also engaging the practices and processes of art as a way of knowing the world and as a way of building community, as a way of developing better leadership that leads to a more just and equitable world. And as a form of world-making that's capable of creating better democracies.

Tim Cynova:

Shannon, so much gratitude for you, for your approach to the work, for sharing your approach to the work, for your ideas that are different than my own. And thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Shannon Litzenberger:

Thank you, Tim. It was such a pleasure.

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. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Climate Justice HR | Part 1 (EP.81)

The conversation explores the crucial intersection of Human Resources (HR) and climate emergencies, discussing how workplaces can prepare for and respond to climate-related challenges, underscoring the importance of planning for the unexpected, building resilient systems, and supporting employee well-being in the midst of these emergencies.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS Feed

Updated

January 17, 2025

In this episode of the Work Shouldn’t Suck podcast, host Tim Cynova begins an exploration into the crucial intersection of Human Resources (HR) and climate emergencies. Recorded amidst recent natural disasters, the discussion explores how workplaces can prepare for and respond to climate-related challenges, underscoring the importance of planning for the unexpected, building resilient systems, and supporting employee well-being in the midst of these emergencies.

Joining the conversation are Jenna Ringelheim and Jillian Wright, bringing their insights on meaningful HR and organizational design practices rooted in equity, anti-racism, and compassion. They emphasize the importance of proactive planning, values-based workplace design, and the integration of equity, empathy, and integrity in HR practices. This spirited discussion highlights the evolving nature of workplace challenges posed by climate change and the need for resilient, people-centered organizational frameworks.

Highlights:

  • Introduction to Climate Emergency and HR (00:00)

  • Unplanned vs. Unexpected Events (01:06)

  • Climate Justice HR: A New Approach (02:31)

  • Guest Introductions and Their Work (03:04)

  • Values-Centered Work in HR (04:08)

  • Climate Justice HR in Practice (10:39)

  • Real-World Examples and Challenges (12:43)

  • Developing Compassionate Leave Policies (18:18)

  • Building Resilient and Supportive Workplaces (22:16)

  • The Importance of Flexibility and Empathy (34:28)

  • Final Thoughts and Takeaways (44:22)

Related Resources:

 

Bios

JENNA RINGELHEIM (she/her) is a skilled facilitator, coach, and HR practitioner that is passionate about igniting liberatory leadership practices within workplaces. She has a keen interest in program and curriculum design, supporting equity-centered people and culture efforts, network weaving and building communities of practice. Jenna is happiest when she is co-creating systems and structures that allow for greater agency, transparency, and shared learning. In her previous work as nonprofit executive, Jenna catalyzed a network of over 2,000 environmental and social change leaders as the Deputy Director of the Environmental Leadership Program. She also served as the Executive Director of Wild Gift, a wilderness-based leadership development program and international network of social impact entrepreneurs. Jenna has a BA in Environmental Studies and Anthropology from Skidmore College, an MA in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning from Tufts University, an MBA in Sustainable Systems from Pinchot University, and a Certificate in Human Resource Management from Portland State University. Most importantly, she is a proud parent, partner, pet matchmaker, foodie, and e-bike enthusiast living in Portland, Oregon. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Jillian Wright, PHR (she/her) spends her days as an HR consultant, but she’s also a dancer, mother, gardener, and puzzle finisher who enjoys helping small businesses succeed. For over 18 years, she’s had the privilege of working with and learning from some amazing folx who have taught her so much about how to facilitate people support BETTER – and she wants to share what she’s learned with other value-driven companies who are ready to do things differently. Her passion for people-support and behavioral psychology in the workplace along with her deep personal commitment to social justice as a member of the queer community has fueled her desire to help leaders create inclusive places to work. Jillian’s background in small non-profit and mission-driven workplaces has gained her valuable skills in the art of prioritization, efficient use of time, and understanding how to make things happen on a shoestring budget, and she’s worked hard to apply those principles to creating affordable, time-conscious, impact-centered consulting projects tailored to a variety companies specific goals, opportunities, and challenges. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of WSS HR LABS, an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast for thriving workplace practitioners. On today's episode, we're beginning an exploration into climate emergency related HR. A topic in its intersectionality we'll be devoting more space to throughout the season. This isn't a one and done, if you will, but given the events of recent months, we thought we'd lay down an introductory track about it now. We recorded this episode about a month after Hurricane Helene caused devastating flooding in Asheville, North Carolina, and communities across Western North Carolina. It was also time in New York City when the skies were hazy for days, as nearby forest fires spewed smoke from such unexpected places as Upper Manhattan, Brooklyn's Prospect Park, and New Jersey's Palisades in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. And as we publish this episode, crews are still working tirelessly to contain the catastrophic fires in and around Los Angeles.

Several years ago, I was researching how scarcity mindsets show up in organizations, and I read about the concept of unplanned versus unexpected events. Coincidentally, it was also about the time when I heard someone use the phrase global weirding to describe some of the more unexpected events being produced by climate change, like snow in Atlanta in April. In the scarcity case study, the idea of unplanned versus unexpected events was introduced in the context of emergency surgeries versus elective surgeries at St. John's Regional Health Center in Missouri. St. John's was struggling to keep up with demand for their finite number of operating rooms. I'll link to the article in the show notes for those interested in reading more about how they approached that challenge. To skip most of the details for now, they boiled it down to, we know what's going to happen, it's expected, we just don't know when exactly it's going to happen, making those events unplanned.

In many ways, that frame of unplanned versus unexpected has been resonating for me when thinking about climate-related emergencies, how workplaces can prepare for them, and who is most impacted by them. At this point, we know these events are going to happen, we just don't know exactly when and where it will occur. I wanted to talk to a few people who have been considering how to approach this intersectionality to better understand what it is, how we can be thinking about it, and what planning for the expected in a values-aligned way looks like, perhaps something we might call Climate Justice HR. For today's conversation, I'm joined by the amazing Jenna Ringelheim and Jillian Wright, who bring a wealth of knowledge, and experience, and insight to this topic. So without further ado, let's get going. Jenna and Jillian, welcome to the podcast.

Jenna Ringelheim:

Thanks, Tim, so happy to be here.

Jillian Wright:

Yeah, glad to be here.

Tim Cynova:

As a way of grounding our listeners in the conversation, why don't I invite you each to introduce yourself and the work you do these days. And Jenna, you want to get things rolling?

Jenna Ringelheim:

I consider myself a strategic partner and accountability buddy. What that looks like on the daily is facilitation, coaching, leadership development training. In my previous life I was definitely an organizational integrator.

Jillian Wright:

I do HR consulting for small mission purpose driven businesses, really with the lens of anti-racism, anti-oppression, and understanding how we can do HR differently with that perspective.

Tim Cynova:

We are each guided by values in our organizational design work. Jillian, you just mentioned some of yours, and it's the thing that has connected us over the years. I also know that we each articulate them slightly different than each other, and that maybe has even evolved over the years as we've been doing the work, so I wonder when I say value centered work, what are those values that each of you are thinking about and holding in your approach? And maybe how you came to articulate those values?

Jenna Ringelheim:

It's definitely been a journey both in understanding what values are important to me personally, but how they show up in the workplace. So similar to Jillian, equity is front and center for me in my work. Continuous improvement and creating an environment where folks actually have agency to be themselves. I know that's become kind of a cliche term, but it truly is what values based org design is striving for.

Jillian Wright:

When I started my own business, Begin Again HR, this was a really important exercise for me, getting really clear about how I say how my values show up in the work I do, helping small businesses. My four words are inclusion, meaning HR shouldn't support some humans, they should support all humans. Intention, so for me that's about dedication to thoughtful, holistic impacts, considerate approaches. Integrity, do what you say, be honest about what's possible, and admit when you make a mistake. And then empathy, listening, caring deeply, understanding that nobody's lived experience will identically match your own. And a quote that I reference all the time is Brené Brown says, "I'm not here to be right, I'm here to get it right." And trying to think about, how do we continue to morph and think about supporting the people we work to get it right?

Tim Cynova:

With that values orientation, how do you show up differently maybe in this work than, say, "traditional HR" or traditional org design? How does that change the orientation to how you think about it, how you imagine new processes, and practices, and workplace initiatives?

Jenna Ringelheim:

For me, it comes back to that initial exercise, figuring out what the values are, whether or not they are shared, and what you're striving for over time. I love that Jillian has added some definition to her words because words can mean a lot of things, and I'm sure all of you have been through that exercise to figure out what the mission, vision, and values of our organization is. And then at the end of the day, when you're working in the organization, it doesn't match up. For me, values-based org design, or leadership, or whatever you want to call it, really is about the practice of being with each other, and checking in, and making sure that you are still continuously striving towards that future vision, both on the daily, but the things that you're building over time, whether it's into your business or into your programs. So it's really an exercise and a journey, it's not a one and done sort of thing.

Jillian Wright:

Absolutely agree. For me, part of it is about the pause. So much of traditional HR, we all have work experience where it was done in a hierarchical way, it was done in a way that, oh, this is the one answer for the thing. And it's really about pausing and thinking, are all voices included? Is this the way that makes sense that aligns with the values that we have, or are we just sort of reinventing the way things have always been done? And that pause is what's really important, I think.

Jenna Ringelheim:

I think I would also layer in humility. I hear integrity and then my mind shifts to humility because we don't always get it right the first time around. We might think that we write the most perfect policy, but actually how it gets carried out is the exact opposite of that. And so as an HR professional or practitioner, really the pause is also an opportunity for us to slow down and make sure that whatever we did dream up with the team is meeting the needs of the organization over time.

Tim Cynova:

That was one of the really significant moments in our early work at Fractured Atlas to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization in 2013, 2014, was acknowledging that the policies and initiative that I thought were really great, that we had been working on, actually really weren't all that great when you considered who was included, who felt like they were included, who got to use them, who felt like they had the space to use them. And really pausing to say, how do you do that in an anti-racist way? How do you do that in an equitable way? How do you do that in an adjust way? And like, oh, the policy actually isn't as great as I thought it was, and then teasing it apart into those pieces. One of the most interesting exercises I've used in my consulting work is the misunderstood words list, where you go into an organization, and getting to know people, and you start writing down words that people are using like innovation and integrity that you think people have different definitions for than everyone else, right?

So it's like 10 people here all define integrity in 10 different ways. And using that as an opportunity to come back and be like, "Before we even work on integrity as a value or how this plays out in practice, what do we mean when we say integrity?" And I think right now, especially at this moment in time, what do you mean when you say those words? What does that mean to you before we can start to move that to action? Because how easy is that to work in cross purposes or do harm because we've not taken that moment to, at least a baseline understanding of what the words are that we're using, what we mean by them.

Jillian Wright:

I think pertinent to this conversation today are the words sustainability, or resilience, or thinking about those things as it relates to climate.

Tim Cynova:

Using the title for this episode as climate justice and HR or climate related emergencies in HR. How climate is impacting how organizations are run, and what we as people designing practices, designing support systems, should be thinking about as this is becoming an increasingly prevalent challenge in our organizations. Certainly, the United States and in other countries around the world. As practitioners who are designing systems and structures to support people to create thriving workplaces, what resonates for you when you think about Climate Justice HR or climate related emergencies in HR, and the role that people in the positions that we hold have to play in creating more resilient organizations that are people centered?

Jenna Ringelheim:

I really appreciate the opportunity to look at this question because I've been in the environmental sector my entire career. My first environmental job was when I was 14 years old, and this concept of climate change or climate justice has been a train of thought that has been in my mind for a long time. And at this point in my career, I consider myself climate justice adjacent, in the sense that I support a lot of leaders that are working in the environmental sector to help them better match up their external intentions and work with the way they show up for their workers.

I was thinking back to the podcast that you had about creatives and how they don't always have the opportunity to show up creatively in the work. And I think it's a similar sort of syndrome here where environmental organizations don't necessarily walk their external talk. And so for me, Climate Justice HR is really this opportunity to slow down and take a look at, not only the ways in which climate disruption will impact organizations, but what are the ways that we can support our folks when things go sideways? Because we know that this world we live in will continue to get weirder and weirder moving forward.

Tim Cynova:

You both have connections to the Northeast and Vermont. Vermont in particular is a state where the past couple of years has seen devastating flooding, and that's likely to continue. It might be unexpected when it happens, but it's likely going to happen again. Jillian, we connected a couple weeks ago because your current phase career includes working with a number of organizations as an HR consultant, as a resident of Asheville, North Carolina. Connecting with clients, and friends, and communities that, similarly, have been devastated by the recent hurricane. I'm curious, as you think about how this actually shows up to human beings in place, what does this look like right now for you, recording this maybe four or five weeks after the hurricane came through in North Carolina? What are people experiencing right now? And also, what are you hearing from an HR lens that's maybe not helpful now, but would be useful to consider in the future?

Jillian Wright:

That's rough right now. There's the things you can do in advance. There's the on the ground phase one of what needs to happen right now. I'd say we're in the process right now in Asheville of heading into phase two, which is challenging. I mean a lot of folks had the initial rush of emergency aid, sending water, sending all these donations, and now you don't hear about Asheville on the news, a lot of the volunteer groups have left. What are we doing now to rebuild and to be supportive of the community in this moment? And it's rough, people are really downtrodden. But I think what people are able to do is pivot and be creative about how do we think about what's next? I'm doing a lot of work in unemployment and helping companies strategize what people and staffing looks like for the next phase.

Hindsight's always 20/20, what could we do to be better prepared next time because these once-in-a-century storms are likely not going to be once-in-a-century anymore. Places that people thought were environmental havens and safe spaces like Asheville, like Vermont, that doesn't exist. What can we do to be prepared, to be mindful about who will be most impacted, and build out policies, and structures, and ways of support that help in those communities? I've actually been looking a lot right now into leadership training and crisis, so there's a organization called Crisis Relief and Recovery. And they have a leadership program, they have trainings you can do. I'm just trying to understand how best to help support leaders in these moments that will happen again.

Jenna Ringelheim:

Thank you, Jillian, for showing the emotion, because for folks that are working in these spaces trying to support organizations, trying to support real people, it's tough work. We do live in unprecedented times. What I feel sad about is, I think in some ways, the environmental sector has set us up for this moment, in the sense that we've always talked about climate change as something that's going to impact the polar bears or people on islands in Fiji. Now, we're in this moment where it is in our backyard and it is impacting your neighbor, it is impacting maybe you, as a practitioner in the space.

Tim Cynova:

One of my defaults is to look to see, is there an example we can use and then retrofit it into what we need right now? Let's go out and see what exists before we reinvent the wheel. There might not be these specifics, but trauma, healing, processing, loss, grief, anxiety, all these things that people bring as human beings into the workplace, and then we're trying to design places where people can show up and thrive, while also carrying a lot of stuff with them. Jenna, I'm curious with your lens on this one, what comes to mind as you think about what might be replicable? Where do you look for things? Do you even use this kind of copy and paste framework, or are they unique in what's needed?

Jenna Ringelheim:

Maybe we look to the six pillars of climate justice, where they really have unpacked the different components of what looks like a climate-just future. Part of that has to do with centering indigenous voices and actually doing the work to do planning around emergencies and the equity components that we talked about earlier. I mean it is one body of work where there has been work done. I'm also hearing Jillian talk about just the trauma-informed care that is needed in this moment, that maybe historically HR professionals haven't been trained in. We know that HR professionals haven't been trained in a lot of anti-racist theory or anti-oppressive theory, and so this is another moment in time to double down on the skill set that practitioners need to show up to these new challenges.

Tim Cynova:

You started to tease apart, in this work there are policies, and there are practices, and there are workplace initiatives, and there's language that we use, and/or things that we're like, "Oh, that's a great thing that that organization is doing, let's figure out how we can bring that in and copy/paste initiatives." And one of the things that, Jenna, you've worked on in the past, was a compassionate leave policy. I'm curious both about that, and as we think about, what are some of the things maybe that are specific or that could be repurposed when thinking about climate related emergencies in organizations?

Jenna Ringelheim:

I've been really fortunate to partner with an organization called the Earthwatch Institute. The CEO there is actually the organization's first female CEO in its 50-year plus history. And over the last year and a bit I've been helping her rethink their employee handbook and a lot of the policies that were very, very antiquated, and bereavement leave was one of them. For me, compassionate leave is really bereavement leave reimagined. I think traditional bereavement policies are really steeped in the traditional family. You get this number of days for this individual, you don't get individuals that aren't blood related, stuff that makes no sense to a grieving individual.

As we know, grief shows up in lots of different ways, and connecting it back to climate disruption, as Jillian has showed us a little peek into just in this podcast, there's big feelings and real stuff that comes up when people are dealing with these catastrophes. And so it was really cool to write this policy last year, and then honestly, it was the hurricane that impacted North Carolina, where we had an employee based there, that was able to tap into the policy. And I was able to connect with her just recently to say, "Did this policy actually meet your needs in the way that it was intended?"

She was very appreciative. I was also just thrilled that her manager knew to say, "Hey, use this. This is for you." I guess linking back to, you can write the best policy, but if you don't train managers on how to activate it in times of need, it doesn't really matter, right? In this compassionate leave policy, I was very explicit in writing, or including I guess, domestic catastrophes, and being explicit in stating that means forest fires, that means floods. Then it becomes a conversation about what people need in that moment. Ultimately, I think helping people process these challenging life events and having a policy that really states, "Hey, this is for you." Is an important place to start.

Tim Cynova:

Well, in that addition too about forest fires, I live in New York City, and right across the river there are fires that are impacting people in New Jersey and slightly north of the city. One might think forest fires that happens out west, but as we've pointed out already, just because maybe historically is what you might think of, all of a sudden this is actually impacting commutes, and people's health, and the air quality, and all these different things that maybe, even being a company based solely in New York City, you haven't had to think about before, having these things on the books.

And especially, I think your point, Jenna, around making sure people besides you know how to use them, is such an important point of this work that I often find so frustrating, it's like, I'm not in every meeting, I can't be there to hear this conversation. Most of the work is like designing systems and structures that other people are going to use, is orientation of the work that I think makes it more resilient than, "Tim wasn't in that meeting, Tim couldn't explain the nuance of how to use that." Or even that, "Maybe you should go talk to Tim." It's one of those big pieces where the whole thing, as you pointed out, kind of just can fall apart if that key piece isn't linked up.

Jenna Ringelheim:

Yeah, I would add that I am a proud pandemic parent. I had my first son in April 2020, and five months later we were evacuating our home because the air quality in our house was the worst air quality in the world. So if I retrace the steps of what helped me get to the place to develop this policy, it is super real to me and super important that we think about, again, these moments that people could never imagine in their lifetime having to go through, and yet here we are. Vermont, here we are again, two years in a row, this sort of disaster, this sort of flood. So the future is now. If your organizations at least haven't started the conversation, it's a great time to get started.

Jillian Wright:

One of the exercises I did in one of my last tenures was around all the different types of crisis or "emergency" that could come up, and what is our plan in those things? And just simply articulating what department is going to deal with that or how are we going to communicate to our customers what's going to happen, and who will do that, just so that it's written down somewhere and people have an understanding of those pieces and elements of it. Also, thinking about emergency contacts, and when would they be contacted, and why, and what would you say to them? I think that gave staff both a clear understanding of their roles, but also helped them feel more knowledgeable and secure, and oh, okay, I see, so I have to give this piece of information that's very personal to me. Who is my emergency person and what are the parameters and the boundaries in which my work life in that life are going to intersect? And pieces like that took intention. Let's be really clear about that.

I was thinking about, as you all were talking, is something like job descriptions. In a situation where you might need to transition quickly and pivot to virtual versus in-person, something like, what are the essential functions of your role? What things do we need you to be able to do? We can do them in a different way, but we need you to be able to do these things. And knowing and having clarity around that, so important. And I think can be such a pivotal piece for people to latch onto or have stability in when things are very unstable. That's another piece that I've done work in job descriptions, sort of articulating what those are as they relate to accommodations, or other components around compliance and work. But I think for an employee, being able to understand exactly what it is that is essential to their role and say, "We don't have to worry about those other things right now, all we need you to do is this." That can be really helpful.

Tim Cynova:

Julie, there's an earlier version of a framework that I still use today when you first went on parental leave. We took apart your role in minutia to say, this isn't just a job description, but it's like all the minutia things, and then who's going to be the primary person to take this on? Who's going to be a secondary? And I've iterated over the years to be like, let's record a video of the person screen sharing, or talking about that, or linking to the document that has the details.

And I think that that's something that could be helpful in an instance where we can't contact this person or we need to quickly pare down what someone's able to do because they don't have internet or they don't have access to various things. Talking about what we can do in advance, it's a pretty lightweight way I found to articulate those different things, to identify them, and it can be used in a lot of different use cases. But this I think is certainly one of those instances where you have it on file and you can just pull it up and use something, especially in these instances where there's crisis or unexpected things arise regardless of what they might be.

Jenna Ringelheim:

Yeah, I think that's so important. We've talked about, in other spaces, Tim, working agreements, and team charters, and the how of the work. And I think organizations that have that really well-dialed when these unexpected events pop up, you've kind of done the work already and there is an element of plug-and-play. One of the things that's been interesting to me is just reflecting on the remote work environment, and what are the things that we did learn in COVID time? Remember those years that we were in our homes experimenting with different ways of working when things are not normal? On one side it's like, yeah, we know these things, and on the other side it's like, how quickly we forget how to use these things.

Tim Cynova:

Jillian, you and I have talked about things like furloughs, and layoffs, and what organizations might all of a sudden need to be thinking about in climate-related emergency, where that business, it physically no longer exists a restaurant or whatever it might be. What happens to the staff that you have? How can you quickly have these policies rolled out so you're not trying to figure out how do you approach this in a kind and caring way while everything else is going sideways on you?

Jillian Wright:

That's been a really hard part of the work I'm doing now. Places need to make really hard decisions, and trying to walk them through, what are the options? Reductions in staff, RIFs, furloughs, those are all really hard and they require a lot of logistical things, but there's also ways that you can do them that help address some of the questions, or concerns, or worries that folks have as they're departing. Something that I've worked with folks on here is around, okay, well maybe you need to let people go, but maybe part of that letting go can be around giving them one-to-one support on applying for unemployment or outplacement services.

How do we get you connected with somebody who's going to help you update your resume? How can we be thoughtful about severance? Do we need to do that? Can we furlough people? Can we shift people to part-time? I do have a background in finance work. Numbers can be scary, especially in moments where it feels like everything is up in the air. Understanding, okay, scenario A, what is that going to look like? What does scenario B look like? And making those things approachable. And then support for both the employer and the employee, the leaders making the decisions and then the folks that are so desperately impacted by it.

Tim Cynova:

We used to work with an organization that helped people who were trying to resolve healthcare-related challenges. I keep getting this bill, why is this bill different than it's supposed to be? I can't get ahold of anyone at the insurance company. And it was kind of an add-on for medical plans in particular. I was wondering recently, and Jillian, I think we talked about this too, we're like, is there a kind of equivalent that isn't about outplacement? But you know in an emergency people will have to fill out FEMA paperwork or housing, all these things that are on the list. And when you're in the emergency, it's not always easy to figure out, who do we call that could easily come in, that can help our team figure out what they need? And so I'm curious, if that doesn't exist, either if we don't know if that exists, we can't find it online, if any listeners are like, this is a great resource that organizations can essentially have in their back pocket, that can be useful to staff when they're in that moment where there's everything on their mind except for work.

Jenna Ringelheim:

That makes me think about mutual aid as a concept that has become more familiar to the average person, so it might've historically looked like a neighborhood association or your faith community. I've really seen an increase in people coming together around challenges and trying to, again, get the answers, or get the email, or get the phone number into a centralized place, so at least people know where to start. I think the translation for me into organizational culture is like, how do you create that culture of care? How do you not lose sight of the things that you've learned in the past, maybe in other contexts?

There's a lot to learn through the parental leave policy and how we support people through that journey, as you described, is like covering their roles and things like that. There really are, I think, examples in the workplace that translate well, but it's also about thinking beyond the boundary of your organization or your business. I've primarily worked in small organizations, but highly networked ones that are committed to supporting people across those boundaries, and so what is the networked approach to resolving some of these challenges? Again, we're all trying to figure it out, especially in these moments that everything feels upside down.

Tim Cynova:

I think that's one of those approaches that hybrid workplaces can benefit from, especially when I think about organizations that have people working in different states, across the country, across the world, it's not all located in one area. How do you leverage that network of staff? To make things even more challenging, we're talking about this in the context of a workplace, where there are power differentials oftentimes, and other things at play than just maybe your neighborhood community or an affinity group that exists outside of something that's a formal workplace.

Jenna Ringelheim:

One of the things that really stood out for me in these most recent rounds of hurricanes were the organizations that actually did speak out and say, "Hey, we're not okay, but we're centering our employees in this moment." It sounds like, Jillian, you and I both have an affinity for some pottery in North Carolina, East Fork. They're definitely one entity that stood out to me of, they got on the line and said, "First and foremost, we're making sure that our employees are okay. We're sorry that our plates aren't going to get shipped out this week, but they're just not." And so I think that sort of modeling of organizations that are really saying, "This stuff is real, this stuff is happening, this stuff is impacting us." Is a good way to encourage other organizations to be bold enough to make those sometimes hard decisions to center their people over profit.

Jillian Wright:

Absolutely. There is a locality associated, but leveraging those networks back to that sort of communicating with each other when all communication was down here, certainly on the ground, felt very palpable communicating, to your point, Jenna, we need help. There isn't pride involved in this moment, we need help with this thing. We need whatever the need is, reaching out within the networks and finding that. I mean I find this in all sorts of HR situations, start with the humanity and the empathy of, this is really hard. And a thanks and a gratitude for when that reach out happens. You don't know what people need, so I would say don't make assumptions about what people need, even in the work context. But I think sometimes it's even stepping outside of the box of what your parameter as a company is for your employees.

I've seen examples of companies just like getting pallets of water. That's not part of what we do, or our job, or whatever it is, but if it makes it easier for people in this moment to have what they need. Or to front load payroll because we know a storm's coming and we don't want people to be without. Typically, everybody gets paid on the Friday, but it's like in this situation we're just going to pay everybody on Wednesday, so you have what you need. It's working in that flex of, how can we pivot? How can we be creative? How can we do things a little differently to put the people first? And then communicating those things.

Jenna Ringelheim:

I love that so much, partially because I actually went back to do more HR credentialing. I did that to figure out what the rules were, so I could essentially break them or bend them in those times where there are some rules. I think what you are talking about is exactly that of, we are inventors of our own domain, and sometimes in these HR decisions, we do have the power and ability to do something that we've never done before. And that's where bravery, I think, really shows up in these roles for individuals that have gone on that journey to understand who's going to be most deeply impacted by these events. And make sure that whatever it is you're designing is supporting those folks. I think that's the most exciting part of this sort of work, is when we find those moments and when we do the follow-up to say, "Hey, did this actually also help you in the way that it's intended?" But yeah, I think that's so key of figuring out, yeah, maybe we've always done it this way, but do we have to?

Tim Cynova:

I think that goes back to the earlier conversation about values and using those questions, how might we, what if, to this payroll question, why is pay usually on the first and the 15th or every two weeks? Why is that? What if we could pay people every single day right after they worked? How might we do that? I also think something you both are raising is around the fact that people who do this work are also people, right? It's not like we somehow have checked our humanity at the door, like grief, anxiety, productivity, like, "Oh, cool, I'm just going to show up as the HR person or as the CEO and not be a person."

These are still people who are showing up in the work when, perhaps they're also wrestling with it themselves, thinking about the different scenarios you've been sketching out, and the need to do this in advance because when you get there, you might not be able to do it yourself, so what might we want to put in the queue when we have the time, when we have the space before we actually need it? And so how do you prioritize what would be most helpful, so that it's not reliant upon you to be a hundred percent there and able to roll this out as the person of the organization?

Jenna Ringelheim:

The field of disaster management has the four phases, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. In unpacking that a little bit, I was really honing in on the recovery piece too of, maybe we do a great job of giving someone leave, and Jillian, you talked about it a little bit of, yeah, we had this moment, we had all of the attention on Asheville, and now we have to get back to it, but we're still in the middle of it. Thinking about the lingering aspects of whether it's grief, or trauma, or anything related to these moments. I've always been really curious in understanding more the disaster management field because I do actually think that it's pretty well-defined, and they do have really incredible systems in place of, how do we get into communities fast, and set things up, and all of that? And how that could translate in the organizational sphere.

Tim Cynova:

There's something really helpful around frameworks that give names to things that maybe you might be unfamiliar with, to know that this isn't the first time someone has gone through this. There are certain phases, as organizations, as people who are setting up plans, that maybe what we need in the initial first three months is different than what we need in the second three months. Or this is a framework that says these are all of the emotions that we all are feeling right now, and you can see it on one page.

Jenna Ringelheim:

I think anything that can help normalize that these moments in time are both happening and continue to impact folks long after the initial event occurs, and having those conversations in the workplace. And bringing it back to teams to brainstorm both the individual, first, obviously, of what is going to be most supportive to them. But also to the team level of thinking about, what are the ways that we can support each other through these periods of time? I think about the difference between an organization that's directly impacted in a community versus a remote team that has maybe a few team members that are in Florida or in other places that are impacted. There's not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution to this body of work. The conversations can start.

Tim Cynova:

There's a exercise called the premortem. In this case, before we launch this program and initiative that we think is going to be amazing and everyone's going to love it, let's talk about how it's just going to go all south. All the things that might happen here, and then the next step is to plan for those things. All right, what are the top five, maybe 10 things that could go wrong? And what would we do if that happens? And so I think there's some element of this as a group to say, "All right, so climate-related emergencies likely will happen. What are the high probability things that might happen to this organization? And then what will we do if forest fires affect our business in New Jersey? What policies do we need to think about?"

And then co-designing, co-creating the thing that we think would fit the organization and sort of using that as an exercise to engage in that kind of conversation. Oftentimes, can't do everything on the list, but at least it brings up maybe the most high probability things and then starts to build this structure and that conversational framework for engaging in the design conversations that are necessary.

Jillian Wright:

Well, I would say even not getting specific at the what is it that happened, but what sort of impact base. What if we all can't communicate in the ways we usually communicate? Or what if utilities don't work? Because in Western North Carolina we never thought we would have severe flooding, so I don't know if our brains have expanded to the like, let's prepare for that thing. But more of what if utilities are out, what is the next thing? Or what if cell phone service is down, how will we communicate? Or kind of thinking through the impact-based side of it could be the way to start to think bigger about the systems, and structures, and how do we... Oh yeah, what would we do if that was down? But I think being able to tap into your logical brain in a moment when you're not in crisis and fight or flight, is when to have those conversations and to think through those things, because once that's engaged, it's so much harder to be able to think about strategically, what should we be doing?

Jenna Ringelheim:

I think I'd be remiss also to not bring in this concept of climate anxiety that is so front and center, even if you aren't directly impacted or it was a miss. I'm thinking about the folks in Florida that thought they were going to have the worst hurricane of all times and then it didn't happen. But that doesn't mean that there weren't multiple days leading up to that event where people probably couldn't focus on anything outside of whether or not their family was going to be safe. For me, personally, I think about that a lot, being a parent. If we get the big one, if we get the earthquake here in the Pacific Northwest, which way do we go? What neighbors are safe? Do we have enough water set aside? And so even though that's not something that is directly impacting my work on the daily, it is this kind of in the back of my mind thing that contributes sometimes to the brain fog or the feelings of anxiety that arise when you really start to think about what is happening to us in this moment in time.

So that's a piece of it too, of making sure that your employees, whether you have specifically a mental health PTO policy or other things, again, to just encourage people to take the time to get grounded, to take a breath. For me, the mantra has been, the work can wait. There are sometimes that the work just has to wait. We, as leaders or organizational designers, need to figure out ways to build that in to systems, and structures, and offerings, so everyone in the organization truly believe that in these moments or these days, where work just isn't going to happen. I think about that one a lot, because it's less of a in your face, than your house going downstream in a legitimate flood. It can be as overwhelming.

Tim Cynova:

As expected, we've covered a lot of different areas related to this topic, and also just scratched the surface of it, how this can show up in organizations and what to do about it. As we bring the plane for landing on the conversation today, where do you each want to land it?

Jenna Ringelheim:

I think the thing that really stands out for me is HR futures. The fact that we as practitioners are designing for a future we still don't know. These incidences in the last year are just a small glimpse into what could happen. Do the work before the disaster occurs. Do the work when your brain is actually calm and not in that fight-or-flight mode. Have these conversations, talk about people's needs in a way that feels supportive no matter what their situation is. People are going to be impacted in all different ways, and we as workplace practitioners may not even know the depths of how people are being impacted by these sorts of incidences. Have the hard conversations and build up that muscle memory in teams, in leadership conversations, to really be able to show up when the hard stuff happens.

Jillian Wright:

This is the unplanned versus unexpected, right? We know that climate change is here, and how do we plan for the unexpected as we move forward? And hold the tension too, that people are going to be impacted in all different ways. We don't see all the layers of that. How do we help build in support for the unseen as we move in this ever-changing climate space?

Tim Cynova:

Jenna and Jillian, it's always a pleasure to be in conversation with you two, hear how you're thinking about specific topics related to values-centered workplace design, and exploring and inventing new approaches. Thank you so much for your inspiration and ideating today, and thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Jenna Ringelheim:

Thanks, Tim.

Jillian Wright:

Thanks so much.

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. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Startups and Scaling (EP.80)

The conversation explores the intricacies of startups and scaling, including the critical transition points, calibrating risk between staff and boards, the importance of intellectual honesty, and the role slack plays in supporting a culture of learning.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS Feed

Updated

November 14, 2024

In this episode of Work Shouldn’t Suck, host Tim Cynova is rejoined by co-host Lauren Ruffin and special guest Adam Huttler, the founder of Fractured Atlas and current head of product and technology at MonkeyPod, another company he founded. Together, they dive into the nuances of starting and scaling organizations, drawing from their shared experiences at Fractured Atlas and beyond.

The conversation explores the intricacies of startups and scaling, including the critical transition points, calibrating risk between staff and boards, the importance of intellectual honesty, and the role slack plays in supporting a culture of learning.

Key Highlights:

  • Product-Market Fit [02:09]

  • Startup Phase Challenges [02:56]

  • Transitioning to Scaling Mode [03:22]

  • Experimentation & Intellectual Honesty [04:45]

  • Evaluating Team & Leadership [08:35]

  • Nonprofit Sector Dynamics [13:51]

  • Risk Calibration in Nonprofits [20:08]

  • Strategic Planning & Strategic Thinking in Organizations [26:11]

  • Hybrid Workplace & Organizational Culture [32:27]

  • Building High-Performing Teams [36:30]

  • Creating Space for Learning & Growth [44:55]

 

Bios

Adam Huttler is the founder and head of product of MonkeyPod, an all-in-one software platform for nonprofit organizations that supports accounting, donor management, fundraising, collaboration, and more. A serial entrepreneur at the intersection of technology, culture, and social justice, his career emphasizes developing innovative business models and revenue strategies for mission-driven companies, in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors.

In 1997, Adam founded Fractured Atlas, a non-profit technology company that helps artists with the business aspects of their work. During Adam's twenty years as CEO, the organization grew from a one-man-band housed in an East Harlem studio apartment to a broad-based service organization with an annual budget of $25 million. When he left in 2017, Fractured Atlas's services had grown to reach over 1.5 million artists across North America and distributed over $250 million to support their work. From 2003-2013, Adam also ran Gemini SBS, a software development firm serving the nonprofit and public sectors. Before being acquired by Fractured Atlas in 2013, Gemini worked with clients such as the US Department of Education, New York University, and the University of North Carolina, among many others. In 2017, Adam left Fractured Atlas to launch Exponential Creativity Ventures, a boutique venture capital fund backing early-stage technology companies that support human creative capacity. ECV was fully deployed as of late 2019, but Adam continues to support and advise ECV's 18 portfolio companies. In 2019, a personal side project became a bona fide startup when Adam publicly launched MonkeyPod. Adam has a B.A. in theater from Sarah Lawrence College, an M.B.A. from New York University, and is a self-taught software developer. In 2011, he was recruited for the inaugural class of National Arts Strategies' Chief Executive Program. He is also an alumnus of Singularity University's Executive Program and the University of California at Berkeley's Venture Capital Executive Program. Adam was named to Crain's New York Business's 2016 "40 Under Forty" class and was listed by Barry's Blog as one of the "Top 50 Most Powerful and Influential Leaders in Nonprofit Arts" for five consecutive years.

Lauren Ruffin (she/her) is the Director and Lead Strategist of Art & Culture at Michigan Central. An expert in responsible innovation, her work centers on defining and implementing best practices for organizations reshaping the world through technology to ensure their platforms are safe, equitable and beneficial for all users. From 2016-2021 she served as Chief External Relations Officer and co-CEO of Fractured Atlas, the largest association of independent artists in the United States, where she oversaw marketing, communications, community engagement and fundraising for the nonprofit. In 2017 Ruffin co-founded CRUX, an immersive storytelling cooperative that collaborated with Black artists creating content in virtual and augmented reality (XR). In addition to her work as co-director at Michigan Centra, Ruffin is an Associate Professor of Worldbuilding and Visualizing Futures at Arizona State University where she explores the unprecedented and rapid political and social changes taking place in every facet of modern life due to advances in technology. Ruffin has held various positions at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Children’s Defense Fund, New Leaders and AAUW and has served on the governing and advisory boards of Black Innovation Alliance, Black Girls Code, ArtUp, Black Girl Ventures and Main Street Phoenix Cooperative. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science and obtained her J.D. from the Howard University School of Law.

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of WSS HR LABS, an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I am Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. Today's episode, Startups and Scaling, is a particular treat, because after a brief sabbatical from the podcast, I'm rejoined by podcasting's favorite co-host, and thrower of curveballs in said podcast conversations, Lauren Ruffin. And we're reuniting with a colleague from our Fractured Atlas days, founder of that organization and more, Adam Huttler. We have so much to unpack and explore this conversation, that I don't even want spend any more time on the preamble. The conversation is going to be great. We're going to cover a lot of ground, answer frequently asked questions about startups and scaling, offer a few unconventional approaches. Lauren will probably throw a curveball or two, so let's jump right in. Without further ado, Adam and Lauren, welcome to, and back to, the podcast.

Adam Huttler:

Hey, Tim. Hey, Lauren. Great to see you both. I'm really excited to be here.

Lauren Ruffin:

The three of us haven't been together in this way, in so long, I'm excited. And Adam, it'll be really good to learn more about what you're up to.

Adam Huttler:

Yeah, thank you. That's cool.

Tim Cynova:

Well, and speaking about what you've been up to, Adam, why don't we start with how do you typically introduce yourself and the work you do these days?

Adam Huttler:

I guess I would say I'm the founder, and I'm the head of product and technology for MonkeyPod, which is a software platform for nonprofit organizations, kind of a true all-in-one nonprofit in a box, helps you do everything from nonprofit accounting to donor management, fundraising, budgeting, email marketing, really everything you need to run an effective nonprofit organization.

Lauren Ruffin:

Whenever I think about folks who have been super intentional about the distinction between being a startup organization and an organization that's about to scale, I think about you, and I think it would be really helpful, Adam, if you could talk a bit more about how an organization can recognize that nexus point, and sort of make that jump between the flurry of being a startup, into a more perhaps thoughtful, or planned moment of scale.

Adam Huttler:

In tech startup land, we often talk about product-market fit, that's the term that gets used. This is kind of the key milestone for an early stage startup, and the idea is that you're looking for confirmation that you've identified an authentic market gap, and that you've built a product that effectively serves that market. Now, I would say the concept applies equally well to nonprofits, you just have to have a less literal definition of product. But until you hit that milestone, I would say you're in startup mode, and this is going to be defined by experimentation and a lot of pivots. You're learning about the market, you're talking to constituents to better understand their needs. You're identifying the core value proposition that you can offer to meet those needs, and of course, you're trying to figure out if it can be delivered at a price the market will accept.

I would say in the startup phase, the critical challenges are things like being intellectually honest about what's working and what isn't, being rigorous, and asking specific and intentional questions, and then setting out to answer them, almost like a scientific method approach. Being able to pivot quickly without over-correcting. And of course, you've got to be really lean in your operations during this phase, because you probably don't have a lot of resources, so you got to make do with what you've got. But then of course, after you hit product-market fit, once you feel confident that you've reached that inflection point, that's when you shift to scaling mode. You've got a product, a service, a program, that works fundamentally, and so now the goal is scaling it and growing your market share, or reaching more constituents, and doing so as efficiently as possible.

One of the interesting differences between for-profits and nonprofits has to do with sources of capital and funding. If you're in for-profit startup land, investors really, for the most part, are looking for startups that have already hit that product-market fit. They don't want to pay for your flailing experimentation, right? They want a functional engine that they can just provide fuel for it, because that's the business they're in. And I would say some funders in the nonprofit space have a similar attitude, and that's fine. That's an important part of the ecosystem, but I also think some of the more enlightened creative funders are going to be a little more willing to invest in that initial phase of work than you might find in the for-profit sector.

Lauren Ruffin:

That really resonates with me on a couple of different levels. I keep thinking back to how often we talked about experimentation openly at Fractured Atlas. And in some ways, Fractured Atlas had a very long tale of experimentation, which was really, really lovely.

Adam Huttler:

I agree. I mean, I think experimentation, and maybe more importantly, intentional experimentation, honest experimentation, is really critical for any organization, nonprofit, for-profit, et cetera, right? You got to do it all. You have to ask the right questions, or ask good questions at least, set out to test them in a way that's rigorous, and then you got to be honest with yourself about the answers, and unsentimental about changing course if something doesn't work, or if your hypothesis was wrong, that's equally valid information.

Tim Cynova:

We've already referenced Fractured Atlas a bit already, so I want to flash back about 25 years or so, because you've actually started and scaled multiple organizations, and those organizations in turn, are helping other organizations start and scale themselves. I imagine the number of organizations you've helped to scale is well over 10,000 by this point, so you've seen this arc many times to say the least, this arc of what people need, what organizations need, what approaches are likely to be successful, what approaches are likely not to be as successful, when you should scale versus when you might want to stay the size you are. And so I'm curious, if we can go back to those early days of Adam Huttler, to unpack that exploration of how you, yourself, were testing ideas and deciding which ones to keep, which ones to jettison, and which ones still inform your current approach and work with MonkeyPod.

Adam Huttler:

I was only 20 years old when I founded Fractured Atlas. I was still in college, it was summer between my junior and senior year. And in my 20s, I think I kind of had the advantages of arrogance and ignorance to some degree. I'm sure I had some legitimately good ideas, but I also was unburdened by nuance to some extent. So a lot of what I would advocate today, I don't know that I was doing back then. I was definitely experimenting. I was moving fast, I was trying things. I was going all in on this idea or that. In some cases, I got lucky. In some cases, it was just a function of persistence and sticking with it, and keeping at it, and whatever. I would say I'm a lot more sort of rigorous and intentional, I guess, in my approach today, and I also have more cognizant of edge cases and nuances, and all of the ways in which sort of simple bold ideas don't always fit every scenario, and that is both a good and a bad thing.

I think it's mostly a good thing. But just in terms of efficacy at launching and building an organization, there are times when you get too bogged down in that kind of thinking. I think the nonprofit sector does that a lot, where they kind of overthink problems, or they get paralyzed by [inaudible 00:07:32] and nuance, and understanding all the angles, and all the different wrinkles and issues of a complex subject. Whereas I think one of the things that startups often do well, is they're untroubled by those kinds of complexities, and they just rush on in. And I think that's a little bit how I did things, for better or worse, in those earliest days of my career.

Lauren Ruffin:

Recently, I've been talking to more and more organizations that are sort of at that point. These are largely nonprofits, and the ones that aren't explicitly nonprofit, most certainly have some sort of social enterprise, or social impact bent. They've come to some understanding of product-market fit. They've got some, either community support or customer support or funder support. They've sort of reached that inflection point where they understand that what got them to that point might not be what gets to the next level, especially when you're talking about small, intimate teams that often form the sort of early stages of organizations. That can be a really hard leadership challenge to really have to face. And also it's because the people who got them there provided the opportunity to be ready to scale.

I guess the question is, and you and Tim together, have gone through so many different iterations of this question around hiring and upskilling. So how do you know if it's a matter of upskilling your existing colleagues, or it's time to encourage some folks to move on, or move out, or to find some other role as a supporter of an organization? I've watched both of you, and Tim, I wouldn't mind if you jumped in on this a little bit too, because I know it's something you think about a lot. I don't know if I've ever asked you, in all of our years of doing this together, asked you to also respond to a question, but I feel like together, y'all are going to give a really meaty answer to that.

Adam Huttler:

I don't know that there's an easy kind of blanket answer, it's so circumstantial. But we talked about the need to be intellectually honest and unsentimental in experimentation, in identifying what works and what doesn't, and I think that attitude applies here as well. To be an effective leader, you have to be self-aware, you have be unsentimental, I think. Founders in particular, especially in the nonprofit sector, are often really [inaudible 00:09:45] domain experts. You don't fund a nonprofit organization because you're excited about budgeting or impact analytics. You start a nonprofit because there's an impact that you want to make in the world, and maybe you're a great choreographer, or you're passionate about environmental preservation, or education, or food security, or whatever it is, but that's the thing that's driving you, it's not the logistics of running an organization. So in some ways, I think those kinds of founders often have a great head start at that product-market fit piece because they do usually have a pretty good understanding of the problem that they're trying to address or mitigate, and so they can often move pretty quickly to an effective solution.

But then of course, it's easy to become a victim of your own success. One possible difference, or sometimes a difference between nonprofits and for-profits, is that I think nonprofits, in my experience, are a bit more likely to perceive a kind of moral obligation to dance with the one that brought you. I would argue if the mission is being held back by the one that brought you, then you've got a moral obligation to find a new dance partner. Sometimes that means designing job scopes and an organizational chart that puts that founder, or other early employees, in the best possible position to contribute to the organization's work on an ongoing basis, and sometimes it means compassionately, humanely, gracefully transitioning that person out. And this is where that self-aware part is so important for leaders, because if you've got a founder who can't, or won't acknowledge their own limitations, that can easily become an existential obstacle to the organization's growth and success from that point forward.

Tim Cynova:

A couple of things about this question resonate for me. Adam, you pointed out earlier that this work is happening within resource realities, resource constraints, right? Organizations don't have unlimited time and money to do the thing that they're trying to do, and so there are various related constraints. Also, knowing how people are calibrated to their learning edge is important. Are they oriented to learning and development and growth, or are they like "This is what I do and how I do it?" And I'll add, you could possibly be really high performing with that ladder calibration in certain settings, but we're specifically talking about startups and scaling. If people aren't calibrated to learning and development, no matter how much time or hope you put into it, they're probably never going to have the subject matter expertise, or what the organization needs of them in the role, in the timeframe that it's needed.

So I think your point about let's find ways with care and humanity to say, "How can we use this opportunity to get to what's next?" But everyone banging their heads against the wall is not helping the current scenario, and it's just going to get more frustrating for everyone. I think the other point here, is when is it a solved problem that you can just adapt, and when is it reinventing the wheel? Especially, when we think about organizations who are trying to be anti-racist, or center justice, equity, inclusion into their policies and practices, that's often not a solved problem. You just can't pull the book off the shelf that tells you step-by-step, exactly how to do it. So every piece of this is constantly iterating while you're trying to make enough money to keep this thing going, and do it in a values-aligned way. And those couple of pieces have been marinating for me, because unfortunately, this isn't just do these three things and you can figure out if this is going to work or not.

Adam Huttler:

I love that you brought that up about solved problems versus reinventing wheels. One of the things that I really loved about working with you in our collaboration over the years, was that I think my instinct is always to invent a new wheel, always. And your instinct is always to try to figure out who's dealt with this before, who can I talk to, who has solved this problem? The truth is some wheels are crap and need to be reinvented, but often they don't, and so I think you and I really complimented each other well in that respect, and we're able to find a nice balance and mix of approaches.

Lauren Ruffin:

I feel like we're dangerously close to going down a rabbit hole about the value of square wheels. So Tim, you should take that next question.

Tim Cynova:

Adam, the two of us have spent the bulk of our careers working in, with, and for the nonprofit sector. The creative part of that sector more specifically. And the nonprofit creative sector ironically, isn't particularly known for its innovation, creativity, and risk-taking when it comes to how those organizations actually operate. Even though they might be producing some amazingly creative, quote-unquote, products or art, their operations are pretty dusty. I'm wondering, having spent 20, 25 years in, and with this space, how does that resonate for you these days?

Adam Huttler:

We were talking earlier about the fact that particularly, small nonprofits, almost everyone, certainly the founder is usually going to be passionate domain expert rather than a functional expert. These are people who are drawn to the work in the first place because they care about the substance of the work, and maybe they have some aptitude for it, rather than the mechanics of the work and the logistics, the budgeting, marketing, et cetera, right? If you're running a small theater company, your director of marketing is more likely to be somebody who trained as an actor and has a good instinct for marketing or messaging, than somebody who has an MBA in marketing and then learned ropes of Procter and Gamble. That's just the reality of that landscape. I don't mean to imply that this is entirely a bad thing. In fact, many ways it's a great thing. You've got a team full of people who are passionate and dedicated. They're not going to leave for a dollar more in salary when the opportunity presents itself.

But the downside is what you pointed out, namely that small nonprofits in particular, are not often crucibles of innovation with respect to operations or financial management. Throughout my career, I would say my work has focused on productizing smart management strategies for nonprofits, and it's partly about addressing this issue. I feel like my job is to identify ways of working, or ways of thinking about your work, that tend to be effective. I don't want to call them best practices, because often so-called best practices are really not, or certainly not universally applicable. But the idea is that if you can find some good ways of doing things, you can kind of embed it in the product, or the service, or whatever it is, and that allows, or that puts those domain experts in the best possible position to make the most out of what they bring to the table without having to be necessarily innovators or experts on some of the behind the scenes logistical stuff.

Tim Cynova:

Well, that's one of the things I appreciate about the work you're doing. It's like don't reinvent how to track restricted grant releases because it's usually going to turn into a really convoluted process. It's more like, "Oh, my God, just do it this way." But sometimes you don't know until you know, and along the way you end up reinventing the wheel because you didn't know it was a solved problem. Building it into the process, into the systems and structures, how do you do that thing so you don't need to even think about? It allows people to make the best use of their limited time and resources so they can think about all the other things that are a better use of their time and expertise.

Adam Huttler:

Back to sort of solve problems versus new wheels, MonkeyPod is unapologetically opinionated, similar to the way Fractured Atlas was, in so far as there are ways that we guide you toward doing things in the product. Some of them are very established conventional wisdom, like this is a solved problem, et cetera, and some of them are not. Some of them depart from industry norms and conventions very intentionally. These are things that, throughout my 25 years of working in and around nonprofits, where I feel confident that there is a better way, and we've tried to make that into the product and give people a platform that allows to leverage that.

Tim Cynova:

Is there an example you can share with us?

Adam Huttler:

A lot of them have to do with how you think about money and how you think about tracking money. There are little things about how MonkeyPod encourages you to set up your chart of accounts, for example, or to use other dimensions of tracking your financial activity in a way that was designed to facilitate good board financial reports. I've been on a million boards. I worked with the board for a very long time. I've seen no small number of terrible financial reports at board meetings, some of which I probably was responsible for, none of which you were responsible for, Tim, I should point that out.

Tim Cynova:

Well, there's one glitch in that memory. My very first board meeting at Fractured Atlas was a month or two after I arrived, and also coincided with me racing to get to the airport to catch a flight. I quickly emailed you the financials for the board packet, which included a balance sheet that did not balance.

Adam Huttler:

Oh, nice. Oh, good. Somehow I blocked that out of my memory.

Tim Cynova:

But yeah, after that it was great.

Lauren Ruffin:

And then Adam found himself wondering whether he could upskill or not.

Adam Huttler:

Right, yeah. God, this Tim guy is really passionate about the work, but he just can't do the logistical stuff, so how do I put him in a position to not suck so much? Yes.

Lauren Ruffin:

Exactly.

Adam Huttler:

That was the question I was asking myself. So the point is I've seen bad board reports, I've seen good board reports, and I've known lots of otherwise brilliant executive directors at small nonprofits who don't necessarily have enough perspective or experience to be a good judge of what makes a... Because often what your board is asking you for is not actually what they need, and what's actually going to make them a more effective board. In fact, I would say you're thinking more than 50% of the time that's the case. The answer isn't just about giving your board what they're asking for, it's about giving them information that's actionable, that's useful, that is at the appropriate altitude for them to be able to advise and guide and provide that oversight without getting too deep into the operational needs. There's an art to it, and it's a little bit of a tightrope walk. That's just one of the ways that we try to set folks up for success when they adopt MonkeyPod to run their organization.

Lauren Ruffin:

The innovation, or lack thereof, around nonprofit finances, I mean, that's a whole separate conversation for the three of us to have at a later date.

Adam Huttler:

It is, yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

But on the topic of boards, I did want to talk a bit about risk tolerance and how we assess risk. Getting back to that conversation about the various stages of organizational development, maybe there's an idea that the riskiest period for an organization is when it is in startup mode. I wonder if that's really true, because then you get into sort of the steady or unsteady state of nonprofit management, which involves boards and governance, and the disconnect between what a board views as risk versus what staff feel is risky. It always comes up with regard to budgets, definitely with regard to deficit budgets. I'm curious if, as you've gotten further away from having that sort of board, maybe having even more autonomy around assessing risk. When we were working together, I really appreciated your super high tolerance for risk, and I always wondered was that because it was in opposition almost, to folks who had less risk tolerance sometimes? And I'm wondering if that's recalibrated, maybe it's a growth circle, both for you and as organizations are maturing, but I'm just really curious about risk tolerance.

Adam Huttler:

If I can praise my former partner in crime, Tim, for another minute. That was another thing that I really appreciated about that collaboration. Tim was great at putting guardrails in place, because I do have a pretty high risk tolerance by nature. I like to try things. I get excited about an idea, I want to run off in a particular direction or whatever, and Tim was a great COO because he fundamentally tried to create an environment where it was possible for me to do those things, but also where there were guardrails in place to protect me from my own worst impulses at times, or from going too far afield, or falling off the edge of the Earth in some cases. So you talked about was my risk tolerance partly a function of having an opposing force in place, and I don't know that I would put it quite that way, but it's easier to have a high risk tolerance if you do have people who you're collaborating with who can help rein you in and keep you in check.

And I suppose it could go the other way. You could have a CEO who's more grounded and bounded, and COO who's more... But probably that wouldn't work as well. And you talked a lot about boards and board risk tolerance, I do think it's a chronic, nearly universal problem in the nonprofit sector, that boards are bad at risk calibration and risk assessment. In some ways, they're too risk-averse, they tend to be, but in other ways they can be bad at recognizing serious risks that you can only kind of perceive if you're really close to the ground and in the weeds on a day-to-day basis. Even with a good high-functioning board, for the most part, these folks are not really thinking about your work until an hour before the quarterly board meeting, when they review the packets on the way to the meeting.

And even if they're thinking about it in between meetings, or whatever, they don't have as much information. They don't have as much, either structured or just unstructured information about the work, as you and the staff do, and so they often miss a lot of that nuance. And they also tend to have very short memories, which was the thing that I sometimes struggled with. You talked about the deficit budgets. Fractured Atlas was fortunate in that we had a pretty strong balance sheet, and we could afford to operate at a six-figure deficit one year because it would be a bigger six-figure surplus the next year. But if you've got new board members who weren't there for the last five years of six-figure surplus budgets, and now they see a six figure deficit budget, they're going to panic because they don't have that full context.

I don't know that there's an easy solution for that, other than to just be patient and keep providing that context, and reminding them. And to the extent that you can put policies or structures in place that sort of codify some of that risk taking, that's something that we tried to do at Fractured Atlas with things like the strategic opportunities fund. They were giving things names and concepts that help to talk about and frame risk at the board level.

Tim Cynova:

A couple of years ago, I calculated there are 261 working days a year for full-time staff. If a board meets, I don't know, bimonthly, even monthly, the most active board members, those who attend all the meetings, serve on committees, are doing other related work, et cetera, you tally all of their hours, they're likely spending 10 days a year on board things. I'm not knocking those 10 days, especially considering that it's volunteer time for people who could be spending that time in countless other ways. I'm just using that comparison, 261 to 10, to illustrate, of course there's going to be a mis-calibration and disconnect between what staff are experiencing and know about the nuance of the organization, and what's happening with the board, who hold a governance role for the organization.

Lauren Ruffin:

I know that a lot of folks that listen don't understand how Fractured Atlas worked with funders. Can you just give a quick paragraph on that?

Adam Huttler:

Our rule from the beginning, was that we tried to keep the doors open through earned revenue. All of our core products and services and programs, and whatever, ultimately needed to be either self-sustaining based on earned revenue, or they needed to create enough of a surplus through their operations that they could subsidize other key programs and services so that they could operate based on this sort of aggregate earned revenue. When we went to funders, it was usually for growth capital. It was almost like that sort of startup versus scaling thing. We would typically get funders to help with investing in R&D, investing in creating a new program or service or product, or whatever, or trying some major new expansion or whatever. It was always intended to be a one-time capital infusion that would transform, or not, the organization, but then from there we'd be able to keep running on our own steam. That was the idea anyway, it worked pretty well.

Tim Cynova:

I'd like to get your thoughts on operational planning these days. I know back in the day, you had what you described as an aversion to strategic plans, opting instead for strategic priorities that offered flexibility to be opportunistic as unexpected things arose. How do you think about planning and strategic plans these days, both for the organization as a whole, and as you're trying to calibrate participation and understanding among various audiences?

Adam Huttler:

I would say yes, I still am skeptical of strategic planning as it is conventionally or traditionally practiced in the nonprofit sector. Now, I want to be clear, I think strategic thinking and planning, lowercase P, is vitally important. In my experience, where nonprofits can get off track with strategic planning, often they'll plan too far in advance. They'll do a five-year plan, or whatever, and it gets maybe at too low altitude, and it ends up getting into tactics and operations and administrative stuff, which it ends up being a straight jacket more than anything else. And it can also provide a false sense of clarity. We don't know what the heck the world is going to be like five years from... I don't really know what the world's going to be like six months from now. We're two weeks from a pretty critical election. I don't know what the world's going to be like three weeks from now.

Having a plan on paper, that says, "This is what we're going to need to be doing in a year or two years or three years," you got to take it with a full handful of salt because you don't know what you don't know, and I think false clarity around that kind of stuff can be just as dangerous as admitting that you have no idea, and therefore aren't even going to bother trying to plan. Having said that, I do think there are a lot of different tools and frameworks for strategic planning, lowercase S, lowercase P, that can be effective and that can work. Tim, you mentioned the strategic priorities memos that I used to do every year at Fractured Atlas, and that was a very kind of egocentric approach to it as the CEO.

But I would lay out every year, these are the things that I'm thinking about, that I think we ought to be working toward as an organization. These are the opportunities and threats that I see on the horizon, and let's try to be cognizant of those, so as opportunities, positive or negative, arise, we have some context. This isn't the first time we've thought about them. We have some context for thinking about them and reacting. These days, I would say my favorite approach is one that you introduced me to years ago, Tim, which was based on the work of Patrick Lencioni, who's a management consultant. He wrote Five Dysfunctions of the Team and The Advantage, and he's got a kind of strategic play book model, where you establish a thematic goal and certain defining objectives, and standard operating objectives.

Anyway, you're typically looking at something like a three to nine month horizon, and it's really just about establishing clarity among the whole team, and a coherent shared view of what's most important. And I find that really effective. We're actually using that at MonkeyPod now. But there's other approaches that work too. There's OKRs, there's a lot of tools. They can all work. You got to find one that fits for your organization, and then you got to be disciplined about actually doing it, doing the work and keeping on top of it, and tracking how it's going. And if it's not working, finding something else. I think the things to be careful of, particularly in the nonprofit world, are too long of a time horizon, too low altitude, and be wary of false clarity.

Tim Cynova:

Adam, I love that you drop Patrick Lencioni's name, because if it wasn't for Patrick Lencioni, we might not know Lauren Ruffin. When we were hiring the external relations role at Fractured Atlas, in the last paragraph of the job posting, we mentioned something like, "If you enjoy reading the work of Patrick Lencioni." Ruffin has relayed that that was one of the things that stood out for as she read the job posting, and it prompted an, "Oh, maybe this is a different kind of organization where I might enjoy working."

Lauren Ruffin:

There were two things, one was earned income and the other was disagree and commit. That's when I knew I liked you, like both of you. I was like, "If we can really have a freedom to really disagree on an approach but still say I'm going to suck this up for X amount of time, and stay the course," yeah, Lencioni did bring us together.

Adam Huttler:

I love that. There's two of those nuggets that I think came from Patrick Lencioni, one is disagree and commit and one is directionally correct, that really worked well for me, and really resonate with me. Disagree and commit. Yes, to your point, Lauren, having that robust conversation where you can disagree, and you can be candid and open, but once a decision is made, you got to go with it, and commit to it just as hard as if it had been your idea in the first place.

And then directionally correct, the idea that not every decision has to be perfect. In fact, it's almost impossible to ever make a perfect decision. But if you can get to a point where you're directionally correct, you know that this is, generally speaking, the right direction for us to be going in, and we're confident enough of that to commit to it, that kind of gives you the freedom to act. I think that's great, and especially in the nonprofit sector, where there can be so much kind of decision paralysis and overthinking things, and making perfect the enemy of good, and all those kinds of things. Directionally correct can be a really liberating concept.

Lauren Ruffin:

I agree. And for all of Patrick's flaws, I feel like I've been talking about rewriting his book and outlining, rewriting his book to have some sort of power and intersectional analysis of how that shows up in the workplace.

Adam Huttler:

That would be great.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. No, it's going to be a best seller, and then I can go on and be on a real podcast.

Adam Huttler:

I look forward to that.

Lauren Ruffin:

The strategic planning process conversation, it has such a close connection to the unexpectedness that we've gone through over the last decade-plus, because I remember when doing a three to five year strategic plan made sense. I mean, you'll say it never made sense.

Adam Huttler:

It never made sense.

Lauren Ruffin:

But where I was working, which was we had homeless people 20 years ago, we'll have homeless people 20 years from now, both political parties generally agree that that's a bad thing. It made sense in that context, but it absolutely makes no sense now. I think a lot about how what was really apparent to a number of us, who were probably better equipped to look change in the face between 2015 and 2020, the need for a different way of working, and to be really innovative around how people work, really came to the fore during the pandemic.

Adam, you've run successful remote companies for a really long time. Now we're seeing companies sort of... I think Amazon just announced they're going back to five days a week, from three. We're seeing companies sort of go back to an office mandate. I'm wondering what you think about that, because I actually don't know many organizations... I mean, there's probably, where we've worked at Fractured Atlas, and then maybe Automatic was on the early edge of work-from-anywhere remote work, but there aren't a whole lot of companies who can say, "Hey, we've been doing this for this level of duration," with some level of thoughtfulness, like we didn't get forced into it, per se.

Adam Huttler:

I think Fractured Atlas started down that path in 2003 maybe, I think that was when we sort of went paperless. I got a sheet-fed scanner and a good shredder, and we decided to start digitizing everything and get rid of paper records, and that was a step in the direction of having a hybrid workforce, right, where some people were in office, on site, and others were remote. The truth is there are benefits to face-to-face interaction. It's not a complete miss. You can be cynical about the motives of companies like Amazon or whoever, who are trying to force everybody to come back, and I think there are some legitimate critiques that can be made, but they're not wrong that some things work better, or work well, more easily, when people are in the same physical space. There's just this kind of propagation of information throughout an organization.

You can rely much more, on kind of informal channels and overhearing people at the next cubicle, and whatever. That's a real phenomenon, and that doesn't happen nearly as much when you've got a remote working environment. Organizational culture has a lot more inertia, for good or ill, when you've got people in the same physical location, right? Assuming you have a culture that you want, it's easier for new buyers to ease into that culture, and it's easier to maintain the culture that you have. I think the key to making remote work work, is you do have to be intentional about it. You have to find other ways of simulating, or accommodating for some of those benefits that you're not getting on easy mode, by having everybody in the same space. It's just different. You have to make more of an effort on communication and on propagating information.

I think this is maybe especially true when you have a hybrid workforce, where some people are on site and some people are remote. Even little things, like I remember at Fractured Atlas we'd have 15 people in a conference room, and then 10 people on a monitor. You really have to remember that those 10 people on the monitor are every bit as much participants in the meeting as the people around the table, and actively work to include them. And if you do, it can work quite well, but it's easy to be lazy about it and forget, or whatever. You have to be thoughtful about the limitations and opportunities that remote work presents, and not just running an organization the same way you would if it were an in-person thing, just over Zoom, just doesn't work.

Lauren Ruffin:

I did appreciate the rules that we established around having a shared experience digitally. If one person is remote, then everybody's remote. We got to the point, maybe in 2018, 2019, where there was someone who was remote. If we were on with an engineer who was in Seattle, we were all in the office on our laptops, because then there was really a shared experience digitally, of what was happening, as opposed to someone having to constantly say, "Hey, I can't hear the audio on the big screen in the room."

Adam Huttler:

I think that was probably a smart move.

Tim Cynova:

Earlier in the conversation, we talked about risk tolerance, and about how that can be differently calibrated on teams, either because it's your operating default, or because you put it on that role. If everyone has a high risk tolerance, maybe somebody in that room needs to play through how it could all go sideways. I think about this when it comes to building teams, either high performing or higher performing, and how you set the structure for that. How trust is fundamental in that, right?

It's like I'm not just trying to be a stick in the mud on this one, but we've known each other long enough that if Tim feels strongly about it, there's probably something for us to unpack here before we get to disagree and committing. How do we know that we're still going in the right direction, and how do you test for these things when you're hiring for people into roles that are key decision makers in startups, where every new hire is a pretty significant percentage of the team? If you go from one to two people, that's a big percentage. So you're hiring a key role, what questions do you ask? What scenarios do you roll through? How do you know that they're bringing the right knowledge, skills, and experience into the team, and that it'll get you from here to there, wherever there is?

Adam Huttler:

The most important thing is to have a really clear idea of what it is that you're hiring for, first off, for each role, right? And there's some times where you're hiring somebody to be a cog in a machine, and they need to do some functional task repeatedly and whatever, and then you need somebody who, A, can do the task, and B, isn't going to mind doing it again and again. More often, particularly at higher levels, that's not the case. But sometimes, yeah, the most important thing is expertise in a particular thing, either a functional area or a domain area, and you need somebody who, on day one, is going to have the most existing knowledge and experience that's relevant. I think that's less often the case than people maybe think.

What I think is maybe more interesting, is when you're in a position to hire, not for a role in isolation, but you're trying to hire somebody to be on a leadership team, or on a particular high functioning team, and that's where some of the stuff that you're talking about, Tim, really comes into play, because you do have to be able to anticipate how is this person going to affect the group dynamics? How is this person going to affect the conversations we have? Are they going to open up new avenues for exploration that we currently don't have the capacity, or perspective to see? Are they going to bog us down in stuff over here? I think it's important in the hiring process, and in the interview process, whatever, to try to really actively think about that and explore that.

One of the phenomenon that I find most interesting, and that I've observed a million times over the years, has to do with diversity versus homogeneity in teams. I think all of the data shows, or certainly, experience shows, diverse teams outperform in the long run. I mean diversity in demographic diversity, but also cognitive diversity, people who think differently, people who come from different backgrounds, people who have different current life experiences for whatever reason, and also just people who tend to think differently from each other. Over time, if you have a high-functioning, healthy team that has that diversity of perspective, experience, cognitive instincts, you're going to really have a high ceiling for what you can achieve. However, it's not free and it's not instant.

I think one of the things about, for good or ill, and maybe more ill than good, in Silicon Valley, there's a lot of homogenous teams. There's a lot of 24-year-old Stanford grad, white guy, tech bro, and they all get in a room, and they all do their thing. And they're never going to achieve the kind of unexpected, or discontinuous innovation, or really new ways of doing things or thinking about things, as you might get from a more diverse team, but they're going to gel really fast because they have a shared vocabulary on day one. There's a high level of trust from a certain tribal instinct, "Oh, I see myself in that person, therefore I can trust them." More diverse teams take a longer time to come together and to reach their potential. I'm always interested in the long-term more than the short-term, so I do strongly prefer being a part of, and trying to build those more diverse teams, but you got to be honest with yourself about what the constraints are.

Tim Cynova:

I'm curious about the concept of the dip, or the trough, when it comes to startups and scaling. The dip being we need to keep pushing, and we'll eventually get there, versus the trough, which we're never going to get there. We're in a trough and there is no getting out of it, we just need to cut our losses. How do you know which one we might be in? Either we need to wait it out, and then it's all going to click, versus "I wish I would've known three years ago that we should have changed course, changed people, changed approach."

Adam Huttler:

That's so tough and so important, being able to know there's sort of two competing adages. One is try, try again, or persistence wins in the end, and then there's also fail fast and pivot, and those are diametrically opposed in some sense. And I think they both sometimes have merit. And knowing how to recognize when something that's not working would be working with the right tweaks, versus is just fundamentally not the right way to go, I don't know that there is a trick or technique or framework for making those kinds of judgments.

For me, that just comes down to experience and pattern recognition with intellectual honesty, because sometimes the sentimental choice is to want to persist, is to want to believe. I really like this idea, and I think there's parts of it that are working, and if we just keep tinkering, maybe it'll work. That's emotionally satisfying because it doesn't require going back to the drawing board. It doesn't require admitting that you were wrong in first place. You want to be careful of that. But also I think people do sometimes give up too early, or not recognize, fail to recognize that actually, this could work. We just identified the one little missing piece of it that needs to be swapped out, or adjusted, or something. Really hard to do.

Lauren Ruffin:

Admittedly, that question has my mind in a bit of a blender, but I keep thinking about the level of relentlessness that some organizations have about culture and developing a really, really rigorous culture. I've worked for, and with, people who were CEOs, who did nothing but think about how they showed up for the organization, and how the organization showed up in community, and how they were very direct about to how they wanted staff to show up for each other. And I think there's something in that level of really clear and transparent relentlessness about dictating organizational expectations, that outside of workplaces like that, you only really get when you're in kindergarten. Teachers know how to onboard children to education. I think it requires that level of intentionality in organizations. I'm going to be thinking about that for a bit, Tim, because... And maybe it was around the diversity of experiences, and how you develop trust. I hadn't worked in an organization with white people ever in my career until I joined Fractured Atlas.

Adam Huttler:

I don't think I knew that.

Lauren Ruffin:

I didn't really even think about it in the interviewing process, and it didn't hit me probably... Well, it hit me. I started the day of several high profile police murders.

Adam Huttler:

I remember.

Lauren Ruffin:

I really hadn't thought about it in that way, but I'd always come from organizations that were typically led by Black women, or had Black women in leadership, who there was a shared culture, but the staff was super diverse, and they were all united by a mission around serving folks who were living in poverty. And so that mission was the unifying factor that had people quickly get to trust, but it's a really interesting thing thinking about how you build that level of... I don't want to say it's like you dictate a culture, but to a certain extent, leaders, good leaders do.

Adam Huttler:

Well, they model it.

Lauren Ruffin:

They model it. This is how I run a meeting. This is how I talk to my colleagues. This is just how we behave. There's a lot in that question, Tim, that I think is super important, and that I'll have to keep chewing on for a bit. Tim and I have been talking about culture of learning, organizations that are really constantly on a learning edge. What are the incentives for leaders to learn new things and to try new things? And in particular, in a nonprofit sector where you know you're not necessarily be bonused out for a new skill. If you go and get a PhD or this certification, you're not necessarily going to make more money. If you're not a naturally curious person, how do you keep that culture of learning going in an organization?

I was at an event at University of Michigan last week, it was a generative AI event. I was surprised that one of the faculty was saying every day, he got out of bed and said, "How much time am I going to invest today in learning something new?" And he really quantified it by saying, "Some days I only have 15 minutes, but some days I have six or eight hours. What new thing am I going to learn today?" And really thinking about learning as investment, and Tim and I were really thinking about is there a way to incentivize leaders to invest the time in learning new things?

Adam Huttler:

I do think one of the real pernicious problems in the nonprofit sector, is the a sort of asymmetry of risk, in so far as people at nonprofits, whether they're foundations or operating nonprofits, whatever, they often are exposed on the downside. Things go poorly, they can get fired, but they don't have much upside exposure, right? There are no stock options, there's no big IPO at the end of the tunnel, or anything like that, and that can be challenging, and that can be structurally problematic. And I think that's a big part of why we see less healthy risk taking in the nonprofit sector. To your question about learning, you're right, some people are naturally curious, some people less so, but you also do have to have the space for it. So I am, I think, a bit of an autodidact. I like learning new things. I like trying new things, but I have to have the space to do that.

If my job on a day-to-day basis, is such where I'm constantly just putting out fires, or being reactive to things, and dealing with this crisis or that crisis, or crisis, fixing this bug, or whatever it is. When you're in that kind of reactive mode on your back feet, it's almost impossible to learn anything new. One, because you just don't have the time and bandwidth, but also your brain is literally just in a different mode of thinking and operating, where you're thinking defensively rather than creatively. There's an essential prerequisite for having a learning leader, is putting the leader in a position where they're not so bogged down with batting away a million arrows that are constantly flying at them, so that they do have the space and the freedom to explore new ideas and take them wherever they go. Most of them are not going to end up with some great innovation for the organization, where you have to accept that too, but maybe one out of 10 is a home run. Wow. That's totally worth it. Totally, totally worth it.

I know I keep coming back to this, but that's another thing that I appreciated so much about having Tim at Fractured Atlas. I think before Tim got there, I was very much in a reactive mode. I was just dealing with day-to-day, little problems and minutiae, and stupid stuff. It just bogs you down. It became impossible for me to play offense, for me to try new things, learn new things, experiment, whatever it was. And bringing Tim in, and over time, putting structures in place, and putting a team in place where I was less bogged down with that stuff, that was incredibly liberating, and that allowed me to shift my brain back into that creative entrepreneurial learning mode. That's a constant struggle for leaders, I think. But leaders have to have slack, they have to have some space, literally in their calendar, but also just in their brain, to be able to explore.

Tim Cynova:

What you just said about slack and the role you developed at Fractured Atlas, reminds me of one of the biggest challenges of the shared leadership co-CO model, that I don't think we ever solved, if you will. It related to the slack that you brought to the leadership team. Before you left, we had five people on the leadership team. Then you remove one person, we go from five to four while still maintain the CEO function, and we lost the 20%, both slack and as a utility player, who was able to take over those other roles in other's absences. It became four people who never had a day off, right? Because there was no other person on that team to slide in.

And so I think as organizations are wrestling with how to share leadership, how to share power, how to share decision-making, having that slack is, in an organizational context, it's important in a lot of different ways to have the space to learn, to experiment, but also to slide into these other areas. Because when you don't have that, it's a detriment to so many different aspects of the organization's growth and development, and what you're trying to actually achieve.

Adam Huttler:

I wasn't there for that shared leadership experiment, but it's not hard to imagine what you're describing. I mean, I think it's a really difficult thing to pull off. And yeah, you could build in slack for everyone to be able to have that exploration, creative space. I think it's easier when that is concentrated in one person, for whom it's really part of their job.

Lauren Ruffin:

We were working our way towards slack, and then the pandemic happened. And then it was a year of us trying to find our footing, and then we had two folks leave that shared leadership team. We were down to just you and me. The benefit, that's sort of the price of mission, because I think we were still in a much better place psychologically and emotionally, because we weren't leading an organization solo, without anyone to commiserate or talk to about how hard a lot of decisions we had to make, were.

Tim Cynova:

No surprise, our time has flown by. We've covered a lot of ground and still only scratched the surface of so many things, including the work of how values influence the decisions organizations make around how to scale, how to hire, how to plan, and how to risk. So as we bring the plane in for a landing on the conversation today, I wonder, Adam, if you want to land it in any way that picks up an element or two of this work?

Adam Huttler:

On our website, MonkeyPod has a quasi manifesto on the future of nonprofit technology, and in it, we articulate a few core values. One is that community-driven design leads to better, more equitable software. One is data-driven tools amplify mission-driven work. Humans should do human work. And transparency is empowering, not scary. Now, as two people who have worked with me in various contexts for a very long time, I'm sure this all sounds pretty familiar. And obviously, these are framed from MonkeyPod's current work and market, but these basic underlying ideas, I think, have guided me from day one. You do have to know what you believe in. You don't take it on face and never question it. It's important to challenge yourself as you go. But if there are some of those guiding principles that can ground you and provide a sense of direction, I think that can be pretty useful and important for a leader. So there are personal values, there's organizational values, you need to know what do you believe to be true about the world, and how can that guide you toward effective experimentation and solutions.

Tim Cynova:

Well, we've come to the end of our time together today, folks, so I'll end with a heartfelt thank you to both of you. Thank you for sharing your insights and perspective today, yes, but also thank you for being wonderfully inspiring colleagues who have encouraged and pushed my own thinking and learning over the years. It's been a great honor to be in the mix with you two. And thanks so much for being on podcast.

Adam Huttler:

Thank you. Thank you.

Lauren Ruffin:

Been good catching up with y'all.

Adam Huttler:

Yeah, this was a lot of fun.

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. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Embodying Shared Leadership (EP.79)

The Bridge Live Arts team shares the origins of its distributed leadership model, how their particular model works, how engaging with community informs and evolves the model, some of their “ahas” and lessons learned along the way, and where to from here.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

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Updated

October 31, 2024

In this episode, host Tim Cynova dives back into the world of shared and distributed leadership with three leaders of Bridge Live Arts, a Bay Area-based nonprofit dedicated to equity-driven live art. He's joined by Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Rebecca Fitton as they unpack the unique journey of implementing a distributed leadership model at BLA as it transitioned from Hope Mohr Dance.

The team shares the origins of the distributed leadership model, how their particular model works, how engaging with community informs and evolves the model, some of their “ahas” and lessons learned along the way, and where to from here.

Episode Highlights

  • 03:50 Understanding Bridge Live Arts

  • 05:27 The Journey to Shared Leadership

  • 08:20 Implementing Distributed Leadership

  • 14:45 Challenges and Assumptions in Shared Leadership

  • 19:47 Exploring Dancing Distributed Leadership

  • 20:35 Initial Phases and Learnings

  • 22:47 Improvisation in Shared Leadership

  • 24:26 Future Directions

  • 26:47 Challenges and Reflections

  • 30:36 Advice for Implementing Shared Leadership

Related Resources 

 

Bios

Cherie Hill (she/her) is a curator, co-director, and the Director of Arts Leadership at Bridge Live Arts (B.L.A.). She has co-curated Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, & Community; Anti-Racism in Dance; Money in the Arts; and Transforming the Arts: Shared Leadership in Action series. In 2023, she curated Liberating Bodies: dialogue and movement workshops with Black Diaspora dance artists. She co-presents on distributed leadership, advocates for equity and inclusion, and is a choreographer, dance educator, and Assistant Professor in Dance Studies at CSU San Marcos. Cherie collaborated with B.L.A. former co-directors Hope Mohr and Karla Quintero to lead HMD/the Bridge Project, an organization with a hierarchical model to Bridge Live Arts, a model based on Distributed Leadership. Cherie is a researcher and has published articles in Gender Forum, the Sacred Dance Guild Journal, Dance Education in Practice, Stance On Dance, In Dance, and most recently co-authored "Embodying Equity-Driven Change: A Journey from Hierarchy to Shared Leadership" for Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography. Cherie presents at national and international conferences and has held multiple residencies, including choreographic residencies with Footloose Productions, Milk Bar Richmond, the David Brower Center, and CounterPulse’s Performing Diaspora. She holds a BA degree in Dance and Performance Studies and African American Studies and an MFA in Dance, Performance, and Choreography with graduate certificates in Women and Gender Studies and Somatics. Cherie is a mother of two incredible sons and lives in Luiseño-speaking Payomkawichum homeland/Temecula Valley, CA, with her life-long partner.

Hope Mohr (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and arts advocate. She has woven art and activism for decades as a choreographer, curator, and writer. After a professional dance career with Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs, she founded the nonprofit Hope Mohr Dance and its signature presenting program, The Bridge Project, which for over 15 years supported over 100 artists through commissions, residencies, workshops, and collaborative performance projects. In 2020, Mohr co-stewarded the organization’s transition to an equity-driven model of distributed leadership and a new name: Bridge Live Arts. Mohr’s book about cultural work as activism, "Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance," was published in 2020 by the National Center for Choreography, the inaugural book in their publication series. She is a contributor to the anthology "Artists on Creative Administration" (2024), edited by Tonya Lockyer and also published by the National Center for Choreography. A licensed California attorney and a working artist, Mohr works at the intersection of art and social change as a Fellow with the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Movement Law, Mohr's solo law practice, is dedicated to supporting artists and changemakers. movementlaw.net  and www.hopemohr.org

Rebecca Fitton (she/they) is a queer, mixed race asian american, disabled, and immigrant person. Their work as an artist, administrator, and advocate focuses on arts infrastructure, asian american identity, and disability justice. They currently serve as a Co-Director at Bridge Live Arts (CA) and as Director of Studio Rawls for choreographer Will Rawls (NY/CA). From 2017-2021, she coordinated community gatherings about local abolition and justice movements with DELIRIOUS Dances/Edisa Weeks (NY). She was a Dance/NYC’s Junior Committee member from 2018-2020 and participated in Dance/USA’s Institute for Leadership Training in 2021. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, the National Center for Choreography – Akron, SPACE 124 @ Project Artaud, Center, LEIMAY/CAVE, EMERGENYC, and The Croft. Their writing has been published by Triskelion Arts, Emergency Index, In Dance, The Dancer-Citizen, Etudes, Critical Correspondence, and Dance Research Journal. As an access practitioner, she narrates audio description for experimental dance and performance artists. They hold a BFA in Dance from Florida State University and an MA in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin.

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of WSS HR LABS, an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck a podcast about, well, that. Listeners of the podcast know that a frequent topic of conversation here is exploring shared and distributed leadership models and for those of you who are excited about those episodes, do I have another great one for you in that series? Today I'm joined by three leaders of the Bay Area based Bridge Live Arts, Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr and Rebecca Fitton. We'll be exploring their particular adventure in distributed leadership, how it started, how it's going, and where to from here. So let's get going. Cherie, Hope and Rebecca, welcome to the podcast.

Cherie Hill:

Thank you Tim. We are so excited to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Tim Cynova:

As a way of grounding us in the conversation, might I invite you each to introduce yourself and the work you do?

Cherie Hill:

My name is Cherie Hill. My pronouns are she/her and I am zooming in from Luseno-speaking Payamkuichem Homeland, which is in the Temecula Valley of Southern California and I am a woman with brown cocoa skin and dark brown dreadlocks. My ancestry stems from Africa, the Caribbean, the UK and the US. And I am a mother, lifelong partner, spouse and forever learner. I dance, I choreograph, I write and I teach and I work as an independent artist and entrepreneur, a professor in dance studies and a co-director at Bridge Life Arts, which is a nonprofit organization based on the unceded lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples aka San Francisco, California. Our mission is to create and support equity-driven life arts that centers artists as agents of change.

Hope Mohr:

Hi everybody. Thanks Tim for having us. My name is Hope Moore. I use she/her pronouns and I'm zooming in from Ohlone territory, also known as the Bay Area. I am a white, queer, cis female. I am a multidisciplinary artist and an attorney with a practice focused on supporting artists and arts organizations. I am a former co-director at Bridge Live Arts. I founded Hope Mohr Dance in 2007 and beginning in 2019 I co-stewarded the organization's transition along with Cherie and Carla Clintero to a model of distributed leadership and its new name Bridge Live Arts and I transitioned out of co-directorship last year and I'll pass it to Rebecca.

Rebecca Fitton:

Hi everyone. I'm Rebecca Fitton. I use she they pronouns and I am on Chiqueno speaking Ohlone Lands, otherwise known as Oakland, California. I'm a mixed Asian-American person, queer. I'm an immigrant and I'm disabled. I have short brown hair and I'm currently wearing a black and white ginkgo pattern shirt. I'm an artist-administrator. I joyfully bounce back and forth between those two roles and I spend a lot of time researching and writing about the infrastructural shifts in the nonprofit dance ecosystem. So I'm a frequent listener of the podcast and I did cite some episodes in my recent research. I'm also the studio director of Choreographer Will Rawls, who I've been working with for the past eight years, which has been great and I'm the newest co-director at Bridge Life Arts. I joined in 2023 and now lead the organization alongside Cherie and I'm also a relatively new Bay Area resident, so I'm deep in the process of learning and being in the community here, which has been a joy.

Tim Cynova:

I'm so excited for this conversation. Thank you all for being here. For this one, maybe before we get into shared and distributed leadership, what's Bridge Live Arts? How do you explain what the organization is, what it does and then we can get into the leadership aspect of it.

Rebecca Fitton:

As Cherie said, Bridge Live Arts is a nonprofit arts organization based in the Bay and we present and support equity driven live art, so that mostly focuses in its current iteration on dance and movement artists in the Bay Area who have a commitment to social justice and other equity driven work. Our main program is our community engagement residency program, which supports artists who are looking to invest in their communities and strengthen programs that many in fact are already doing without institutional support. We offer them a year of both financial support but also thought partnership in how they can work best and within their community and basically just uplift what the work that they're already doing.

So for example, an artist that we just announced, 7,000 Coils is based in East Oakland and they are a DJ and movement and sound healing group and they operate out of Black Yard and they're looking at increasing their public programming for Black and Brown artists, artists in their community. Other artists this year are Carla Florence who have a great street dance community workshop festival that happens and Alice Herr who's a cornerstone person in the San Jose whacking scene. So we get to uplift the work that they're already doing and place some institutional support there, which is really great. That's our core program.

Tim Cynova:

To set the scene for the conversation on this one and getting into the whole shared and distributed leadership model, how did it come about? What happened, what existed before, what was going on, why a distributed leadership model and let's go from there.

Hope Mohr:

I'll take that. This is Hope. Our transition to shared leadership began for several different reasons, sustainability reasons, racial equity reasons, and also commitment to collaboration. So I'll talk about each of those briefly.

 The sustainability piece was as the founder of the organization after 15 years of running the organization, I was starting to experience real burnout. It's a challenge to balance arts administration and an art practice and so I was interested in shifting to a more sustainable leadership model, curious about what that might look like and I wanted to find more time for my work as an artist. So that was one of the impetuses. The second one was equity and anti-racism. As Rebecca just described, our public programming Bridge Live Arts community-based arts programs had become increasingly focused on equity, anti-racism and social justice work and most of the artists we partnered with were and continued to be artists of color. So I had been hearing the call from many of these artist partners for white arts leaders like myself to move back from power and to share power and I was really curious about what it might look like to apply that call to myself and to the organization.

Relatedly, there was also a real disconnect between the artists that we work with in community and the internal demographics of the organization. For example, the board was mostly white. And the last I would say river of inquiry that really drove the work is this commitment to collaboration. Collaboration is really integral to dance making. Like many choreographers, I had worked collaboratively in the studio for many years and I was really curious about what it would look like to apply that ethos to leadership, to the administrative side of the organization

Tim Cynova:

And that last piece is so fascinating to me. Having grown up, working in arts organizations, working for dance companies and often realizing there's so much creativity that happens on the stage, on the screen in galleries and public space and then everyone just uses the old book from 1980 about how you run your organization. People are checking their creativity at the door that they would otherwise be using in spaces, but when it comes to arts organizations or their organization, well that's just the way it's done. Which is why I'm so excited about organizations that are experimenting with different ways of organizing and making decisions and sharing power and not checking that part of their personality, that part of their brain, that part of their creativity when it comes to this. And so I'm curious from a practical experience, what kind of distributed leadership model is this? How does it work? Maybe beginning with the overarching and then we can get into more of the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day, like how do you make decisions of consequence when there's more than one person doing that?

Cherie Hill:

Oh my gosh, Tim, Cherie here. I couldn't agree with you more. I've had that same question working in different arts nonprofits for about 20 years now of why as artists we bring so much creativity and passion and love to our work and our artistry and then we get in an office and it's like the same thing. I'm doing the same thing that my friends in corporate America, which they hate, almost are doing except I'm getting paid half the wages to do it. That is definitely something that drew me to the invitation from Hope when I started out as a community engagement coordinator for the organization in 2019 to join her and Carla Quintero to really create a model along with our board and community that could share leadership, could be more collaborative and could invest in artist and artist thought process. That is what I've been excited about at Bridge Live Arts and I think this question around how does it work is a great question and something that we're continuing to discover and explore. I can't say we've nailed it.

We recently talked to other leaders who are in the arts and dance who also have shared leadership practices that they're experimenting with and there's still a lot of questions which I think is really good. Our staff currently is comprised of five persons and each of us have a specific focus area within Bridge Live Arts and in our early stages of distributive leadership back more in 2020 to 2022, Hope, Carla and myself really worked on unpacking power within the organization and how we could delineate task from Hope as the founder, more of the executive artistic director, how that power could be shared and how Carla and I could then take on more leadership work.

At that time it was us three as co-directors. There weren't any other staff on board as far as running the organization, and so a lot of our discussions happened between the three of us and as we became more accustomed to what this model could look like for what became Bridge Life Arts, we found that all three of us or everyone on staff doing everything at the same time all the time was pretty taxing.

In this next stage, in 2022, we decided to really focus on our internal structures and we consulted with authentic arts and media to help us create a more solid organizational infrastructure that allowed staff to have more clarity on how and when they should be involved with organizational discussions and decision making so that not everyone was in the kitchen a hundred percent of the time, which, if you've experienced that, can be overwhelming. From that work, we currently really utilize two documents. One is the MOCA and the other one is a decision-making matrix, and this evolved out of our work in the last year or so where we really focused internally. MOCA, the way we've done it is we've broken it into three main categories that really sorts out the leadership task and responsibilities that employees have to do for the organization and those three categories are executive, strategic and creative.

Each year we review what we're doing and we utilize the MOCA to really decide who's the manager, who's the owner, who's consulted, who's the helper or who's the approver of each of these responsibilities. And we found that documenting leadership in this way has helped us understand better what our organizational responsibilities are as well as acknowledge that all those staff may not have co-director titles, because we do have staff that are assistants, managers and coordinators now in addition to two co-directors, that they are sharing leadership and they're doing executive strategic and creative roles.

The other document we created is a decision-making matrix and it's divided into four parts that identify who's responsible for each project or part of the organization, the term of that part. Is it short-term or is it long-term? And the type of decisions that are being made such as is this a routine day-to-day operational decision or is it more strategic, more creative and long-term? And that has really helped us have a blueprint for how it works, right? The nuts and bolts of the workload, the tasks that we're doing, who's doing it and how they fall into these categories of being executive strategic or creative. That's been a huge help for our organization.

Tim Cynova:

I love that teasing a part of decision-making and how the thought and intentionality goes into that. It's one of the things I find so exciting thinking about shared and distributed leadership models is because in the words of my colleague Katrina Donald, it offers moments to pause. You had to pause and reflect on what is leadership? What is a CEO? What does that function do? How might we do that in different ways? And whether you have a distributed leadership model or not, your organization is still making decisions and it can be thoughtful and intentional about is this a strategic decision? How many people or how few should be involved in this one?

 I love when it comes down to how do you just do that thing? And what can other people take from that and then kind of retrofit it into their organization or iterate on these experiments that most people aren't going to do? They aren't going to say, "Well, we had one leader and now we have three," or whatever it is. I'm curious, as you went through this process, how did your assumptions meet reality and what you thought was going to happen and then what actually happened throughout the organization? What went well and what was like, all right, well that's our learning edge. We need to spend some more time iterating on that one.

Rebecca Fitton:

The assumptions are a tricky place to go because sometimes you don't quite realize you have an assumption until you start parsing apart what Cherie was just saying about the various matrix fees that we use to make decision making. I think an assumption as the newest co-director that came in is that I assume that this work would be slow and I would say that one is true. It takes us time to make decisions. We are also all part-time. Even I, who have the most hours currently within the organization, don't work 20 hours a week. And so we just work at a pace that is slower than most people expect, but we want to align ourselves with the true pace of creation and art making, especially for the bike walk and disabled artists that we work with whose reality is that work is slower. The assumption that we come up against is perhaps from other stakeholders who say, "Why isn't this happening quicker than we think that it should be happening?"

And it's because it takes us a long time to make decision even with clarity around who's making what decision. There's a deep patience required for shared leadership. Then the other assumption is around the fact that shared leadership and distributed leadership can often get conflated with non-hierarchical labor. We've been pretty clear, especially over these past two years when we shifted out of three co-directors to two co-directors with staff that we are not in a non-hierarchical model anymore. There is hierarchy now within the organization and we still have shared leadership and this leadership is distributed amongst the staff and staff who, as Sheri said, don't have director in their titles are compensated for that task as much as possible. And so in the community conversations often will be called to speak on horizontal leadership or non-hierarchical leadership models and we have to always put the asterisks there saying we are not quite doing that. It's not to say that the ethics of that reason why you have reached out to us are not there, but let's be clear about we don't operate in the full consensus model. We divvy up. Yes, there's certain consensus among certain stakeholders, but we aren't in the more consensus model of the '90s perhaps, which is everybody sit in the same room and we hash it out until everybody is exactly in agreement. We don't work that way.

And so those have been the two frequently asked questions and it's coming out of this assumption, but it's been exciting and people are really receptive to hearing how we are thinking about this differently and the ways in which their expectations don't meet reality. It's always been met with a positive reaction which is life.

Hope Mohr:

As Rebecca just said, I think the leadership model at Bridge Lab Arts has been truly emergent and really done in a spirit of experimentation. So those moments of pause that you're talking about Tim, have happened really all along the way. And I remember one moment at the very beginning of the process we were working in partnership with Safi Jarreau at LeaderSpring as a consultant and one of the first things we did was pull a couple of community meetings about what distributed leadership could look like for the organization. And I remember that moment really cracked the work open for me because I realized that the work wasn't just beholden to staff and board. It has been beholden to a wider community, which has meant that all along the way there's been a real process of listening and dialogue about what the work has needed instead of relying on cookie cutter or default models

Tim Cynova:

That decisions take time and what exactly is hierarchy were some of the things that came up a lot for us at Fractured Atlas when we moved from a single CEO to a four-person co-CEO model and we got a lot of questions about, and we heard a lot of critique about "Your decisions take longer as four people." And I often reflected that they might take longer, but usually they were better decisions. You don't factor into decision with a single person, the fact that you need to come back because it wasn't a great decision or there wasn't buy-in around the decision. Maybe take a more holistic look at the arc of a decision and its impacts reframes what goes into a decision process and that not all hierarchy is bad. It can be troublesome when you don't question why there's hierarchy or when there shouldn't be, especially as those systems of white supremacy culture are baked into many organizations. But recognizing when do we lean more toward hierarchy, when do we lean more toward consensus and what type of decision is this? I think it's really exciting and unusual.

You're talking about community and when I was on the Bridge Live Arts website, I saw that you had sessions called Dancing Distributed Leadership where you took the concept of distributed leadership into the studio and moved in space. I'm so fascinated by this. Can you describe what you did and maybe what resonated from embodying this concept that might not have translated if you didn't do that with community?

Hope Mohr:

This is Hope. A big question in this work has been how shared leadership on the administrative side might translate into art making. In other words, when an artist is an organizational founder, what happens to the art when the founder moves back and dancing? Distributed leadership I think has been responding to those questions. Dancing Distributed Leadership began a couple years ago and in the first phase of the project, the three of us as co-directors, the time made new dance works in parallel and we also began a conversation about what shared leadership might look like in the context of making performance and in the context of studio practice. I think we learned a lot about how getting in the studio is really a whole new level of intimacy and vulnerability than doing administration together. And I'll pass it to Rebecca and Cherie to talk about more recent developments in the project.

Cherie Hill:

This is Cherie. I feel that the Dancing Distributive Leadership project was really different and really experimental and really exciting for an organization, an arts organization and for Bridge Life Arts and a lot was learned and there's still a lot more to do with it, which we hope will continue. And it was also very supported. We, for the first time as a staff, were able to have a retreat. We also had a residency at NCC Akron, much thanks to Kristi and Erin for really helping us think through before that residency what this project could look like and how it could apply to our administrative aspects. We also had the opportunity through NCC Akron to work with two mentors, Bibi Miller and Paloma McGregor, which was such a gift and such a blessing to have outside perspective, which continues to be quite an asset for the organization.

Having consultants, having artists, mentors, community members be able to pour into us and help us see from an outside perspective what we're doing both in affirming way and in questioning way I think has been very powerful and has really helped the organization grow into what it is. Just chiming in on what hope was saying earlier is that I don't feel like I can take credit for Bridge Life Arts as a co-director because so many voices have been a part of it and it really has been a community project though US three as well as other staff members have taken the lead on that. Something that was an "aha!" Moment for me during Dancing Distributed Leadership was how improvisational shared leadership is and the skills that are needed from improvisation in order to be able to share leadership, to make decisions, collaborate with others, to shift into different spaces, both head spaces, physical spaces.

I was like, wow, this is an improvisational practice in itself that made me think about who we're working with and who wants to do that kind of work because in the dance world, I have dance friends who resist improvisation. They're not interested in it, they want to be told what steps to do, they want to do the choreography and they're very happy doing that and it's a beautiful part of our art form. And then you have people who are way into improvisation and are on the opposite side. And then you have people in the middle of the spectrum, which I tend to be. I do both. I go both ways. And so it was so enlightening to me because I was like, wow, I do think that someone coming into leadership in a shared process and in this type of structure probably needs to want to improvise and if they don't want to improvise, this could be a very challenging structure to work in. And so that was a huge aha moment for me.

Rebecca Fitton:

I'll echo that. I would say all staff right now have a really strong and propositional practice, which is exciting. I'll also add that out of DDL, there's kind of two branches into the future that are happening. The first is that we, three of us, developed a curriculum called Embodying Shared Leadership, which we were able to, last January, teach one session on Zoom and one session in person in which we asked and invited other leaders in the community to play around with some scores that we had developed for an improvising body that related to our shared leadership work, maybe some basic improvisational scores. But in this context, such as sharing weight or finding distance and passing certain movements among each other, we practice those with groups of people and then ask them, "How does this relate to your experience of shared leadership?" Or, "How might this change your leadership experience?"

And so we are currently working right now to further share that curriculum and expand it into the community because so many of the administrators who we are community with are also movers and we so rarely get the chance to move with each other. And so that's a core piece of curriculum we want to hold onto to. And then the second branch, which the other two have alluded to is this question around how presenting choreography continues to exist in the organization. And the next experiment of that will be we are inviting Primera Generacion Dance Collective, which is a Southern California based dance group to present their new work nostalgia pop in January 2025. And it's a quartet that collaboratively choreographs and offer their work and they're going to come to the bay and present that newest work about being first generation immigrants. So we're super excited about that. And also to extend the DDL question to other groups who are in collaborative choreographic practices,

Tim Cynova:

I really love that there is a solid practice around improvisation and considering it in the frame of leadership and better understanding how each of us calibrates differently with regards to uncertainty and ambiguity. Then how do we take that thing from over there and explore it over here in that frame and what do we learn along the way from that exploration. And speaking of learning, I'm curious, what do you think are the gems of learning here in your own distributed leadership exploration? When you distill down what you've done, what's the important learning for people to know and take away from it?

Rebecca Fitton:

Trying to figure out why in the studio dance collaboration looks a certain way, why that feeling is often so different than the way the administration of the dance field is done and trying to bridge those two chasms sometimes. How do we make those two things more equitable and more similar so that the ethos around both administration and choreography and making and being are more sympathetic and better support our ecosystem? There's something there that we're trying to get at.

Cherie Hill:

This is Cherie. I'll also add a learning moment for me is that our society doesn't necessarily support models like this. It doesn't necessarily support sharing leadership or collaboration in the way that it needs to be supported. And we've talked a little bit about how it's slower, our work is slower than the average pace of maybe a non-profit organization or company. And also it takes time to work through decisions. It takes time to work through planning things because there are more voices and we feel that's important. That means that we're spending more money as well because more people are getting paid to be a part of these conversations and these decisions, which also budgetarily I haven't seen be super supported yet in our field or in our society, unfortunately shared leadership, there's a lot that goes into it and I think people are attracted to the concept of it and maybe the outcomes of it, but we're still in a place where the funding for it needs to increase.

And something that came up in our conversation yesterday in a panel we had is that the labor is different. When you're working with multiple people the labor is different than just working isolated by yourself. There's a question around how do we compensate that labor? How do we make sure our staff and us as leaders that we are being taken care of, knowing that we are being asked to do more than the average person in a non-profit because of this model. I also feel like for Bridge Life Arts shared leadership, because we're very diverse, all of us are coming from different places and our values have to do with equity and anti-racism, is that we need to be involved in furthering our knowledge and training around equity and anti-racism, which is a whole other thing and whole other workshops and a whole other type of labor.

So you add that on top of what we're doing. This is a very expensive project. It's a very expensive experimentation and not just financially, but emotionally, mentally, and even physically at times. And so how can we as artists advocates and funders who want to create a better sustainable ecosystem for dance and for the arts, make sure that these type of experiments are well funded and supported so that we can continue doing this type of work.

Hope Mohr:

This is Hope. I think some folks think that implementing a shared leadership model, it's just a matter of you hire a consultant, you adjust a few job descriptions, you make some structural changes in the organization and boom, you're there. As Cherie was just describing, it's not just structural work, it's organizational culture work. It's very much about relationships, it's about values. It's a process. It takes a long time.

Tim Cynova:

I wrote a number of pieces while we were going through the shared leadership experiment at Fractured Atlas and I'm working on one that's reflecting on it a few years now looking back and having been asked by countless organizations about, "How do you do shared leadership?" My response these days is usually, "You probably shouldn't." And to unpack that just a little bit, usually I get a call when a CEO's leaving and there's three people on staff who want to propose a co-CEO model to the board. And I'm like, if you've never talked about and explored how power and decision-making and leadership show up in your organization, you probably shouldn't start with a co-CEO model. It likely won't be successful. Maybe you should explore decision-making processes like MOCA and Darcy or maybe think about building leader full organizations because starting with the CEO function right out of the gate is a complicated and often fraught way of approaching how do you share power in decision-making and leadership? Something I believe that more organizations should be doing.

In the recently published anthology "Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography" with editor Tonya Lockyer, Cherie and Hope, you along with your colleague Carla Quintero offered reflections in an essay titled "Embodying Equity Driven Change: A Journey from Hierarchy to Shared Leadership". That essay has been in the can for a bit at this point. So I'm curious, when organizations come to you and ask you about shared leadership these days, what do you typically advise them to do and how to think about it?

Rebecca Fitton:

This is Rebecca. I think my experience so far in the organization of folks coming to us is that it's been the folks in our community engagement residency. We, through that program, have a year long relationship with them. Most of the alumni of that program we are still in relationship with. And so we have this precedent of long-term relationship. And so when even new artists who come to the meetings with us and say, "Can we learn more about how you're doing these models?" There's already a precedent knowing that it's going to be durational and that they know because they've applied to be in the program and we've accepted them, and there's already been conversation there that there's already a buy-in, there's willingness to go in it for the long term. And so we tend to share at first the very simple MOCA manager, owner, consultant, helper, approver, or also Darcy, those are I think the first two spreadsheets that we share, but it is only after already having multiple conversations with artists and asking about their current infrastructural models.

 I think the other two may be able to speak better to folks who are reaching out to us who don't have an existing relationship with the organization. But I will say with the CER artists, I can name several groups who are now alumni of the program who continue to reach out and say, "Hey, what's the latest update on this?" Or the panel that we had yesterday about navigating shared leadership, there were several alumni in the Zoom room who were still listening and still interested in how it's being evolved across organizations. So that's been nice. We kind of already have a built in process of relational durational work.

Cherie Hill:

Yeah, absolutely. This is Cherie. I'll also add, we have had organizations come to us and we have done just conversations with them or helps them think about our process in distributive leadership and shared leadership. And something that we continue to emphasize is we are not experts in this work. It is experimentational, we are learning and we are planning on being more structural around how we can assist organizations or artists in thinking about ways that they might implement some of the tools or strategies that we have in Bridge Life Arts. For us, it's not about us being experts and consultants. It's about us sharing our story. It's about us sharing our experience and saying, "This might be something that can help you. This is how it helped us," or "This is how it did not help us." To me, that's more about building community relationships and working together collaboratively to help versus us telling people, this is how you should do it, or this is the model that will work for you. Because we are all just in the experimentation process and I feel that is what we honestly can share with others.

Hope Mohr:

Since transitioning out of co-directorship about a year ago, I've been practicing as an attorney and my practice focuses on helping artists and arts organizations. And when I talk to folks who are interested in this kind of leadership shift, I think the most important thing I can do is simply listen to where the people are at. Because as Cherie and Rebecca have said the model needs to be emergent. It can't be imported from outside. The model needs to come from the people and the mission and the values of the organization. And so I listened to how much buy-in there is, what the capacity of the organization is, and then go from there. I really don't know any other way to do it.

Rebecca Fitton:

I'll just add briefly, maybe the place we also start is in that embodying shared leadership curriculum in which we invite others to move with us. Let's dance together. Especially because we mostly work with arts organizations. Those are the people in our community, and we say, "Have you moved the score of your organization? If you embody these questions, what emerges? Are you ready to truly share weight?" So I think that's been the joy of the curriculum too, and we hope to further share that in the future.

Tim Cynova:

Amazing and no surprise here, our time has flown by today and there's so much more we haven't even gotten to yet. Things that are really juicy, like board relations, equitable compensation, there's so much on this topic, and as we bring the plane, if we're landing on our conversation today, where do you each want to land it?

Rebecca Fitton:

Yes, to board and equitable compensation. We are in the middle of a year and maybe longer of figuring out how boards relate to our shared leadership model. That's maybe the last piece of this current cycle of figuring out shared leadership is really aligning the board's leadership model with the organization while also still, of course, maintaining the certain legal compliance structures that we have. So we have a lot of questions around can boards receive a form of compensation, whether that is financial or a resource share. We're looking at Recess, which is a arts organization in New York City that has recently been experimenting with that. We're wondering about the value of sticking with Robert's Roles, which is a decision-making process that doesn't align with our current staff and also comes from a military background. And so we're exploring different decision-making models that relate to that. And our pay equity, which is related to our MOCA and our decision-making matrix is a big point of conversation. What does it mean to compensate staff members who have leadership roles in their title or who don't, but still take on leadership roles? So there's a lot of work still to be done. We are going to go slow and we're going to keep talking about it. I'm excited to see what comes next.

Hope Mohr:

Thank you so much, Tim. This has been a really great conversation. I'll end just by uplifting that this work is a form of creative practice. I think framing it in that way has been really helpful for me in sticking with it and in feeling like it's sustainable and related to my humanness as an artist. And I think that framing encourages experimentation and fluid roles, both of which, I think, are conditions that support the practice of shared leadership. I just want to thank Cherie and Rebecca and Tim, it's been a great conversation and I'll pass it to Cherie.

Cherie Hill:

Thank you, Hope. And also I echo that. Thank you so much, Tim, for having us on. And I just want to invite anyone listening, if you are doing this type of work to reach out and connect, something that we talked about in our panel with other leaders in this model yesterday is that it can feel very isolating because it's still rare within our field to work in such deep collaboration and to recreate models like this. So please reach out to Bridge Life Arts, we'd love to hear from you. We'd love to chat more and let's work on supporting each other to recreate a type of ecosystem that we really want to see.

Tim Cynova:

Cherie, Hope and Rebecca, thank you so much for all you've offered today. Thank you for your brilliance in this work. Thank you for your sharing orientation, and thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Rebecca Fitton:

Thanks so much for having us.

Hope Mohr:

Thank you.

Cherie Hill:

Thanks, 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. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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On Creative Administration (EP.78)

In organizations dedicated to creative expression and innovation, why is it that so many have workplace practices and policies that are dusty? This episode explores reimagining of value-centered workplaces through Creative Administration.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

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Updated

October 24, 2024

Season 6 of the WSS podcast here!

In our inaugural episode of the season, host Tim Cynova is joined by Katy Dammers, Indira Goodwine-Josias, and Christy Bolingbroke as they explore reimagining of value-centered workplaces through Creative Administration. In organizations dedicated to creative expression and innovation, why is it that so many have workplace practices and policies that are dusty?

The spirited discussion dives into the challenges and opportunities within the creative sector to rethink “traditional” approaches, asking when it might be better to reinvent the wheel or even asking if a wheel is what’s needed. The conversation underscores the critical balance between stability and creative experimentation, reflecting on how new approaches can support long-term change and longevity in the arts.

Episode Highlights

  • 02:15 Meet the Guests

  • 05:44 Diving into Creative Administration

  • 09:20 Balancing Structure and Improvisation

  • 17:26 Challenging Conventional Wisdom

  • 20:46 Navigating Institutional Change

  • 24:26 Reevaluating Policy: Balancing Ethics and Values

  • 25:09 Navigating Crisis with Established Policies

  • 25:51 Incremental Change in Nonprofit Organizations

  • 26:37 Creativity and Experimentation During COVID

  • 26:58 The Snapback to Pre-COVID Norms

  • 27:38 Fear of Change and Embracing New Solutions

  • 28:44 Creative Administration and Sustainability

  • 29:49 The Role of Artists in Institutional Change

  • 34:11 Balancing Administrative and Artistic Growth

Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

 

Bios

Christy Bolingbroke is the Founding Executive/Artistic Director for the National Center for Choreography at The University of Akron (NCCAkron). She is responsible for setting the curatorial vision and sustainable business model to foster research and development in dance. Previously, she served as the Deputy Director for Advancement at ODC in San Francisco, overseeing curation and performance programming as well as marketing and development organization-wide. A key aspect of her position included managing a unique three-year artist-in-residence program for dance artists, guiding and advising them in all aspects of creative development and administration. Prior to ODC, she was the Director of Marketing at the Mark Morris Dance Group in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a B.A. in Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles; an M.A. in Performance Curation from Wesleyan University; and is a graduate of the Arts Management Fellowship program at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She currently serves on the Akron Civic Commons Core Team; as a consulting advisor for the Bloomberg Philanthropies Arts Innovation Management initiative; and on the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Advisory Panel. In 2017, DANCE Magazine named Bolingbroke among the national list of most influential people in dance today.

Indira Goodwine-Josias was born and raised in Queens, NY, and believes in the power of art to educate, inspire, and advance change. With a dual background in dance and arts administration, she is currently the Senior Program Director for Dance at the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) where she directs NEFA’s National Dance Project and major dance initiatives in New England. Previously, she served as the Managing Director of Camille A. Brown & Dancers (CABD) where she shepherded the organization through the attainment of 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, established the organization’s founding Board of Directors, increased the institutional and individual fundraising efforts, and provided oversight of the development, implementation, and continued growth of CABD’s dance engagement program, “EVERY BODY MOVE.” Prior to her leadership role with CABD, Indira held various positions at Harlem Stage that deepened community partnerships and enhanced the organization’s annual dance program, “E-Moves.” A 2016 New York Community Trust Fellow, American Express Leadership Academy Alumna, and Dance/USA DILT Program Alumna, Indira is widely recognized for her entrepreneurial and artist-centered spirit. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees for Dance/USA, the Advisory Committee for The Black Genius Foundation, Grantmakers in the Arts’ Individual Artist Committee, and is a member of Women of Color in the Arts (WOCA). Her contributions to the dance field also include serving as a programmatic thought partner, grant panelist, and conference speaker. Indira holds a BFA in Dance Performance from Florida State University and an MA in Performing Arts Administration from New York University.

Katy Dammers (she/her) is the Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Performing Arts at REDCAT, CalArts’ center for the visual and performing arts in Los Angeles. Her curatorial practice presents, organizes, and contextualizes contemporary practice in performance commissions, exhibitions, festivals, site-specific installations, and publications. She has held past leadership positions at The Kitchen, FringeArts, and Jacob’s Pillow. Dammers has also worked as a creative administrator, and worked with choreographers Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener as General Manager from 2014-2022, in addition to organizing projects with Jennifer Monson, Donna Uchizono, and Tere O’Connor. A writing fellow at the National Center for Choreography Akron, her essays have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Motor Dance Journal, and MOLD as well as edited volumes by University of Akron Press and Princeton University Press. Dammers was a member of the Inland Academy and holds degrees from Goldsmiths College and Princeton University.

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of WSS HR LABS, an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I am Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. Frequent listeners of the podcast know that we spend a lot of space here discussing in many ways how to craft the values-aligned workplaces we want from the workplaces we have, whether that be reimagining power and decision-making leadership models to decolonizing the employee handbook in company bylaws to reconceiving of quote, unquote, "performance management structures" or centering candidate care in our hiring processes.

Frequent listeners will also know that one of my frustrations in the work of designing and co-creating value-centered workplaces, particularly when those workplaces are in the creative sector, a sector I grew up in and around and I've had the privilege during my career are working with and for a number of amazing ones, a frustration is that many of these organizations produce some incredibly creative and innovative work for the stage, screen, galleries, public spaces, you name it, some are considered world-class institutions, the pinnacle of their craft, but behind the scenes their operations are about as dusty as it comes. Most are filled with incredibly creative people, artists, innovators, and for a myriad reasons they check their creativity at the door and operate the organization like a book from 1982 says they should. Their workplace policies, practices initiatives are more or less a copy-paste from another organization. And as many of these organizations have fewer than 500 employees, many fewer than 10 employees, it's ironic that they're using things designed for the military and multinational organizations.

As we start season six of the podcast, we're dedicating the first few episodes to exploring this question of creative administration and unpacking it in a few different ways, from embodying shared leadership to startups and scaling to today's conversation on creative administration, where I'm joined by three people who have given this question of re-imagination a good deal of thought and exploration and I'm excited to hear where this conversation takes us. Our esteemed guests today include Katy Dammers, Indira Goodwine-Josias, and a Work Shouldn't Suck fan favorite, Christy Bollingbroke. Lots to explore. So let's get going. Christy, Indira and Katy, welcome to the podcast.

Christy Bolingbroke:

Thanks, Tim. I didn't know I was a fan favorite and I didn't even campaign for it. That's exciting.

Tim Cynova:

As a way of grounding us in the conversation, might I invite you each to introduce yourself and the work you do these days?

Christy Bolingbroke:

Christy here. I have been a longtime fan of the podcast and even your earlier work when we used to record conversations as an Unconference. But yes, Christy Bollingbroke, I use she/her pronouns. In my current work, I'm the Executive Artistic Director at the National Center for Choreography, one of two such centers in the country, here in Akron, Ohio. And my visual description, I am a pale white woman, pretty tall, reddish-brown hair, wearing a pink shirt with a myriad of keys all over it and I'm standing in front of a wall of post-it notes in a myriad of colors.

Katy Dammers:

Hi, I'm Katy Dammers. Thanks so much for having us on this podcast, Tim, and Christy for crafting such great moments for intersection and networking and relationship amidst the field. I use she/her pronouns. For my visual description I'll note that I am a white woman with blue eyes and pale skin with long wavy-brown hair and wearing a colorful top with a lot of different patterns all at the same time.

I think I'm coming here from a lot of places, so I'll give a couple of ways to describe who I am. I'm an arts administrator and curator and deputy director, and have also been a producer and a writer and a thinker and a person who accompanies artists in any number of ways. Right now I'm talking to you from Los Angeles where I'm the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Performing Arts at REDCAT, which is the Downtown Center for Cal Arts. But I imagine today we'll also talk about my long history working directly with choreographers, notably Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, who've had a number of residencies and intersecting points of support from the National Center of Choreography, and where I was once a creative writing lab resident. Really glad to be in dialogue with y'all.

Indira Goodwine-Josias:

Greetings everyone, this is Indira Goodwine-Josias speaking. I use she/her pronouns and I am a Black woman who today, while you cannot see me I will acknowledge have long box braids, wearing my blue and black frame glasses with a black dress. Currently I serve as the Senior Program Director for Dance at the New England Foundation for the Arts where I direct NEFA's National Dance Project, known to many affectionately as NDP. And I also direct major dance initiatives in New England. Prior to that I was the Managing Director for Camille A. Brown and Dancers, which I'm sure may also be a part of this conversation as we talk about leadership and administrative trajectories. So I'm looking forward to the dialogue. Thanks for having me.

Tim Cynova:

One of the things that brought us together today was the publication of NCCAkron's new anthology, Artists on Creative Administration. Christy and I were talking about the book and talking about different ways that this shows up in various organizations, however you define organizations, large, small, whatever and wherever you might be in the organizations. And I'm curious, you've all worked for relatively small organizations and relatively large organizations, you've held, quote, unquote, "official" leadership roles, and those less so I guess if we're talking hierarchically speaking. To sketch the scene for everyone as we think about organizations, as we think about leadership at this moment in time and in particular creative leadership in creative administration, how do you frame this for yourself when approaching your work?

Christy Bolingbroke:

This is an extension of the Creative Admin Research Program at NCCAkron with lead support from the Mellon Foundation, but is by no means only about the CAR Program as we refer to it. Just because we have published a book. It is to highlight those stories, but it is not by any means exhaustive. I think that creative administration is happening everywhere. What really resonated for us to have this discussion, Tim, though, was one of the basic premises in CAR is the reality that we have a fairly nascent field in the performing arts and arts administration. The NEA itself was created in the 1960s, and so nonprofit administration was evolving along the same time that a lot of our single choreographer companies back in the 20th century were first coming onto the scene. So they were making these things up as they went along to try and fit into nonprofit models, which is a tax distinction, not an operating model.

So in CAR we ask ourselves what are the 20th century practices, the working knowledge that's been developed that we then may need to grow out of and developed a 21st century way of thinking? And that dichotomy in conventional dance companies to the idea that you have a single artistic director and a single executive director and they are supposed to be doing this sort of co-leadership but as we know has gotten super messy and wasn't always smooth sailing.

And now you have more artists than ever, when the New England Foundation for the Arts 2016 report Moving Dance Forward came out, the count was 80% of the dance field was working on an independent or project basis. I would hazard a guess after and coming through COVID, it's even higher now. That you might not even have a full-time staff person. So what is that co-leadership, what dance between administrative and artistic partners inside of that? So I might offer that as an invitation, because I particularly hold a lot of what I've learned from Katy and Indira and especially how, Indira, I'm going to emphasize to you how you worked with Camille Brown and would love to have you elaborate more now that we're recording it for posterity.

Indira Goodwine-Josias:

Indira speaking. Thank you so much Christy for that warm invitation. I'll start by just acknowledging for me that I am an artist before I am an administrator, before I am a funder. I believe that this is really important because the experiences that I've had as an artist have informed the way that I perform as an administrator, which also keep me grounded as a funder. So part of my creative leadership and administration I would say starts with a warm-up. And, Christy, you know we've had these conversations a lot because of course the warm-up doesn't look the same as it did when I was preparing to perform on stage or in community, but it does require a check-in of self that I must be responsible to and care for in order to do this work that requires much collaboration, deep exploration and even excavation as well as honesty.

So I hold all of those in this space and also for what you shared and re-emphasize back to me, I always share that I did not work for Camille A. Brown in dancers, I worked with Camille A. Brown and Camille A. Brown and Dancers to really uplift and amplify what her vision was. And so I think that's really important as you talk about roles and even responsibilities because those can become fluid depending on what the circumstances are. But the trust that is built between the parties involved remains critical to whatever success you're looking to have. And so I'll end thought there. Katy?

Katy Dammers:

This is Katy speaking. Thank you, Indira. I love this phrase of the warm-up, and I think it segues pretty seamlessly into some of the relationship dynamics that I talk about in the chapter that I wrote for this book. I too always emphasized when I worked with Rashaun and Silas, that kind of adverb or phrase, that really spoke to the dynamic aspect of the partnership. Especially working with a partnership already, there's a lot of dynamism and tension and back and forth and love between Rashaun and Silas. And as I joined that it already was a triangle, which I would say in a more normative, hetero-patriarchal understanding of our world, the triangle kind of screws with everything and working with a queer company that was really seeking to reconsider time and our relationship to space, we were always in a dynamic flow of maybe I'm leading, maybe they are leading, maybe all three of us together are in a line. And we really thought about that from a choreographic standpoint.

I too trained as a dancer. I would not call myself a creative artist in so far as a choreographer, but I do think the writing that I do is creative and I do think the administration and the curation that I do is creative. And in all of those I have to think about space and how I'm orienting my body in relationship to other bodies. And that awareness, particularly in dance class of like, "Are we in the same line together? Maybe I need to pull back." We're improvising live, "What's the balance between that person's movements and my movements? Where are we energetically within a landscape? What's the topography of that shared plane?" Is something that had to animate our relationship all the time and allowed for us to have I think a very strategic relationship to movement through what can be a really ever evolving and frankly confusing field.

So we were able to modulate pretty quickly, which I think enabled a lot of success and new pathway creation for them. And we could have moments where I was like, "As we talk to this presenter, it's going to be most advantageous actually for Katy to go out and actually maintain maybe 60% of the relationship and offer some space. And then Rashaun and Silas can come in later." Or, "In this particular relationship it's actually really great for Rashaun and Silas to go out front and Katy will handle a lot of things in the back." It was not always so back and forth in that way, I think it's also left and right and up and down. But that awareness of space and relationship really animated my understanding of creative administration specific to working with those artists, but is also true of my work with other people like Jennifer Monson or Rebecca Leger and continues to be the way I think about working in institutions now.

Throughout my career I've always worked in parallel or often intersecting in tandem with both supporting and working with choreographers and having a foot in institutions. Much of that is from a personal sustainability perspective, which I'm sure we'll talk about, but I also think there is some productive synergy between working in and amidst both of those places simultaneously. And now for the first time in my career, I only have one job, which I think says a lot about our field, and it's a job that in and of itself has multiple titles. I'm the deputy director and I'm the chief curator. And I think that parallel and intersecting nature is still happening even within my institution now, and I'm really grateful for my long experience with creators and choreographers because that's informed my leadership style.

Christy Bolingbroke:

So many good verbs from both of you. Dance is about action, so of course that resonates with me. I love that you've brought space in because it is also a choreographic idea. I often will speak with artists here at MCC Akron and say, "Are you creating a work with a specific space in mind or are you creating a work and then compromising it to get it wherever you can get it booked?" And they're like, "Oh, I never thought of that." This idea of space as well as the idea of the administrative warm-up, how do you ground yourself or self-reflect, what comes to mind that I think particularly for many of the artists and administrators working, at least in dance on a project basis today, they don't have even a dedicated physical space.

I know it's less poetic, but that idea of do you need a dedicated physical space? Or now with this ongoing dance, for our listening friends who can't see the beautiful choreography that Katy also demonstrated inside of that, I had this picture of you and Rashaun and Silas inside one of those gyrokinesis zero-gravity balls that is never grounded, right? You're like, "Now this is up and down," and that's also what it feels like in this field sometimes too.

Indira Goodwine-Josias:

Indira speaking. And I would add to that, Katy, something that I heard very clearly that I also lean into is that we also want to recognize the times where structured choreography is important and also creating the space for improv. And that also exists within administration when you allow yourself to lean into that, right? And I think that there is space for both to exist and acknowledging especially some of the structures that we already operate in that work and also others that we know don't work and need to change. But I wanted to highlight that because I felt that very deeply when you mentioned it. I was like, oh yeah, there's some things that are like, no, it's one, two, three, and then there's other things that are different languages, different modalities, different colors. You're bringing in everything you've got. And I think that that's also something to acknowledge as part of true creative administration that exists.

Tim Cynova:

I love this frame that you all are playing with here in this space. And it gets to a tension that I always have felt, this disconnect where all these creative people work inside this organization and check their creativity at the door. They're using the same old playbook like the nonprofit playbook from the '80s without recognizing, without I guess questioning, "Why do we do it this way? Can we do it a different way? Why are we creative in the studio but not when we come into this other space?"

And I love this idea of the tensions between when is structured choreography, we should use that, but maybe when is improv something? Like how do you use these tools? What might be a solved problem, like everyone just does it that way because that's the easiest way to do it versus when do we want to reinvent the wheel? How do we reinvent the wheel? What goes into the wheel? What is a wheel? And toggling between these different modalities is what I really enjoy about what you all bring to this work. It's questioning conventional wisdom asking how can we pull these things together and design a current and future state that fits us and our values and what we want?

Christy Bolingbroke:

Well, it sparks so much because we've been focusing on the administrative and the artistic and finding space for what do we each bring to that collaboration, when do we take turns leading? And I don't know, Katy and Indira, if you would agree with this, but then now being the head of a organization that's trying to do things differently, I find myself still trying to question conventional wisdom and being reminded to take that time even when I don't have necessarily artists in the room. I'm talking about training new staff and team members, board members who can get into asking some of the same questions or assumptions that provides, or maybe they bring some baggage because they've had some really negative experiences at other nonprofit organizations on their boards or on their team members. And that also becomes a different kind of check-in that you have to say like, "Oh, wait a minute, maybe we really don't like this word or this idea."

We had a development committee for a year here at NCCAkron and a year in, I won't put anyone on the spot or name names, but they were like, "Oh my god, we failed." And I was like, "Why? I didn't give you a development goal. We just wanted to ask what would development look like?" And it came, we figured out like, "Oh, we're not a typical organization, so why do we have a development committee just because conventional wisdom says you're supposed to?" And so we rebranded and we called it a regional development committee, and that was actually much more interesting if we could move beyond the numeric driven fundraising goals that are required of this language that the field has continued to perpetuate. It's still development, but I think similar to using with artists and how we know language is important, how we continue to perpetuate that in our everyday practices is what I find continuously grounding to be leading an organization and trying not to just build it out in the same vision of the 20th century.

Indira Goodwine-Josias:

Indira speaking. I'll lean into a few things here. One, I want to go back to something that was offered by Tim a little earlier. The great question, what is the wheel, right? Who needs the wheel? Who doesn't have access to a wheel? What path can the wheel take? Suggest even leaning into that I think is actually a great question though you were hesitating about it. And also just leaning into the fact that the reality is creativity is not stagnant. It's a process that is active and changing. And I do believe that often within arts organizations, especially when it comes to administration, there's often a focus on the deliverable, and might I add the perfection of that deliverable, that creates an environment where there is little room to try things or even to honor a moment of failure, as you mentioned, Christy, as a seed that still has time to grow or mature versus a stone that can't be moved, can't be altered.

And I do think that that's something to lean into and to recognize as we're considering the conversation. And especially, Christy, what you were offering around the institutional knowledge doesn't mean that that is Bible. And sometimes I think within our organizations, that is sometimes the path that people tend to stay on a little bit longer than we desire, at least certainly now in these times.

Katy Dammers:

Thanks, Indira. And, this is Katy. I just want to animate for folks that we are all nodding, we are all thumbs up thing. I think there's a lot of dynamic uplifting and agreement in this conversation. It's so fun to talk with y'all about this stuff. I will say I'm resonating with a lot that's coming up here. And Tim, when you first raised your question, there was a part of me that was like, "I think we're doing great." And then there are also moments in the field where I'm like, "Oh man, we got to look at this board policy," and like, "Wow, where is our HR in all of this?"

As someone who's relatively new to REDCAT, I've been there just a couple of months now, one of the things I am often thinking about, which goes back to what Indira was saying of sometimes you really need the five, six, seven, eight, and sometimes you really need the space to improv. But also I think before you can have a improv that feels like lead in with care and thoughtful, you also need to have trusting relationships. And I think sometimes that can come from having a clear structure. I am often balancing between evaluating something and thinking, "Not our best. I think we could see some room for improvement and change," but also not coming in and tearing everything down.

I worked at Jacob's Pillow, the incredible dance festival for many years, and Norton Owen, who's the director of archives and preservation there, was always a great reminder to us, especially as I came on to help the festival come through COVID, and come back and that was a period of such incredible change for the entire field, but especially for the Pillow. All of the previous systems that we had done had to be rewritten because every performance was outside for the first time, with physical distancing, with new commitments to accessibility, with site-specific performance for the first time. It was so exciting and it was also in some moments really unnerving for the staff because they were like, "We don't have anything. What is our grounding amidst this?"

So I think I'm often trying to figure out, okay, I don't think policy is bad. I actually think policy as a broad framework can be really supportive, but we need to make sure that it matches our ethics and our values and that it's clear. I actually think policy that's like this hazy potential scary thing is really unhelpful. So I think a lot of what I do is try to re-articulate and re-evaluate policy and think about having many different decision makers in the room, as it feels appropriate, to ensure that that is something that's informed by a lot of different backgrounds and value sets. And then having that as a framework to lean on in times of crisis that would then give you some grounding to push back from or away from to be differently creative.

Because crazy stuff happens and it's helpful in the midst of that potentially anxiety lead-in moment to be like, "Okay, we don't have to reinvent the whole wheel. We don't have to decide what our COVID policy is in this moment." We can look at, "Okay, this is our COVID policy and we're going to follow it." Or, "Actually we need to depart from it a little bit, but at least we have a landscape that's already drawn." So I think I'm often trying to toggle between the two of those things and to incrementally work on them. Because especially as someone new, I don't want to come in and be like, "Great, we're redoing everything." That can be really nerve wracking, not only to my colleagues and the people that I help supervise and support, but frankly to our artists and our audiences. So we are taking an incremental approach to evaluation and change.

Tim Cynova:

What I appreciate about the past four or five years is they've been incredibly disruptive in a lot of ways and there's a lot of uncertainty. Prior to that, there wasn't a lot of upside in trying new things in nonprofit organizations, right? Consider yourself an executive director, you could try something and if it fails, you could lose your job. If you succeed wildly, you could keep your job at the same salary. The systems and structures don't support the thing that we are here to try and do. What I think happened over the past number of years, certainly with COVID, is that people had to try new things, people had to experiment. A lot of places didn't have systems and structures and policies that supported what was happening during COVID. So I think that was an opportunity to bring that creativity into different places that were incredibly dusty and unquestioned.

What I find so challenging is that the snapback that's occurring right now is real and it's strong. It's snapping organizations back to what they were before COVID where we have to all gather, we have to do it this way, and forgetting or pushing aside that we've proven that we can actually do things in a different way that actually fit us better, fit our values, are more engaging, are more accessible, are more inclusive. And yet there's this pullback that I see a lot of organizations wrestling with. How do we keep the things that we've proven we can do and iterate into what's next rather than go back to what was?

Indira Goodwine-Josias:

Christy, you and I often have these conversations, but I want to highlight something that always sticks with me after we talk and even before we talk. Are we asking the same questions out of fear of finding a new answer or solution? Are we asking the same questions out of fear for finding a new answer or solution? And I think that's something to sit with, especially as we're doing our best to transition from what we've experienced within the pandemic. And some things are going to certainly continue to live with us. We've experienced a lot of trauma, we've experienced a lot of grief. It's important to recognize those things as well as some of what we've been able to move forward with and maybe experiment with that you uplifted, Tim. And I will say that I think a lot of organizations got caught up in the moment, in the now, and if we are honest, what feels like instant gratification. So the immediate response to things. And the reality is moments pass.

Movements, however, can provide the strength needed to push forward, and strategies that support a level of sustainability as well as an extension of reach. And so when given the time, creative administration I think offers the opportunity to intentionally merge one's creative process and practices with curatorial and emergent administration or administrative strategies. So it will ultimately create a lot of different paths. That's the reality, but those are also paths for advancement and/or enhancement. And even with all of those paths, there's still a container that's going to allow you to consistently match your mission, whatever that is with action that is within versus within responding to just the moment. And so that's what I'll offer there. I don't know. Christy, Katy?

Christy Bolingbroke:

Yes ma'am. Absolutely. I'm glad you also brought in the F word, fear. I'm reminded what you said earlier about creativity, something about how it's inherently about changing. And maybe that's the real value about embracing creativity in administrative practices because we know that these moments constantly changes the one thing we can count on. Depending on your operating environment, on the scale of your organization, how far removed you are from the community you work with or from the artists might inform how you feel that change. That's where we need to ask different questions instead of just seeking the same answers.

And then the fear piece that came in, I was reminded of a book by Nina Simon, The Art of Relevance, and this had been a collection of blog essays, I think from Museum 2.0 was its original digital iteration. She was at the Santa Cruz Museum at the time and talks about taking exhibits down to the beach. Because it's Santa Cruz, it's beach culture. Why do they want to go into a stuffy building? They had lock ins and they were inviting people to draw on the walls. And I was fortunate I got to hear her speak at a conference some years ago and I asked, I was like, "How did you get your staff, your people who had been at your organization for years to buy into this way of adapting your board?" And her answer was so simple but also a little scary, she said, "Because it was that or close. We were that far in the brink."

So while there's this, are we afraid to find new ways of doing things that you brought up, Indira, but I'm also reminded that our field has a habit that they're not willing to try new things until it's their last resort because there's that fear of closing. And maybe that's the lasting effect of being a leader through COVID is now we've had a taste of that and how do we use it as a tool instead as a barrier from us evolving?

Indira Goodwine-Josias:

Indira speaking. I just want to drop this here since you uplifted it, Christy and it's on the record now, and for some organizations it might be better to close than to remain open.

Katy Dammers:

Katy speaking, thank you for bringing that into the room. I think that is the elephant that people are so anxious to talk about. And I do think that's where the policy and the bureaucracy, I'm doing this movement with my hands where they're crackling in together like they're squeezing and then you hold, this is also a dance metaphor, but it makes me think of the fascia on the bone where if that is calcifying, you are so stuck. You want that to be juicy and moving. We had to do so much unexpected movement amidst COVID and amidst the push for Black lives and amidst the push for trans lives. Also, I want to hold some space, was pretty scary for people and pretty exhausting for people.

And I think now in this moment where many organizations feel like, "Okay, I can exhale maybe a little bit," as they start to inhale for the first time after maybe two or three years, they're realizing they don't have the same resources, they don't have that emotional roller coaster, which for some people provided some additional buy-in from their communities. They don't have the COVID subsidy from the government or from other granting organizations. And their community has gone in different directions. And so I think as we try to inhale and hope that we can go back to what was, because it was uncomfortable to be moving in so many directions and exploring new things, that seat is no longer behind us in some ways.

So I think it's an exciting time in the field and also one where I'm trying to think about sustainability, not only in terms of a financial sense because, yes, that's difficult and an ongoing question for us, but also in terms of our staff. I think so much of what came up for me while I worked on this piece in the book is that it's very difficult to work in this field as an administrator and it's even more difficult to work in this field as an artist. And so I just want to be thoughtful about that positioning. I have a full-time job, I have health insurance. That is a beautiful thing. And for the artists that we want to support, very few of them have that. So I'm also thinking about how amidst all of this change, we can really look at sustainability across the field rather than just in an administrative capacity. Because if our artists can't make work, then who do we have to work with?

Indira Goodwine-Josias:

Indira speaking. And I just want to add to that, and I'm going to put Christy on the spot slightly, but more in a highlighting, star shining moment because I think about your thesis, Designing a 21st Century Dance Ecology, Questioning Current Practices and Embracing Curatorial Interventions. And I'm saying the full title. So for those of you who have not had an opportunity to read it, well go ahead and do so. Something that came up inside of Christy's thesis that I think is alluding to or amplifying what Katy just said is administrative growth should match artistic evolution, right? There's a discussion about that. And of course, while this is admirable, the reality is that the artistic value may be high, the human administrative capacity is often either low, stretched and overworked, and/or under resourced in some way as we think about actual administrators.

And then even as we think organizationally, again, this would be admirable to have, but there often seems to be a disconnect. And I wonder if we need to start paying a little bit more attention to the art that is being shared or that we're even presenting as they could serve as tools to support administrative growth, accountability policies and structures if we take the time to unpack and explore what those artistic expressions are actually offering. Because there's often a connection that can be found and be supportive in the infrastructure of organizations. But it's about having the opportunity to really dig into that and find those nuggets that I think could propel a lot of organizations into the type of organization that they want to be both internally and externally.

Katy Dammers:

This is Katy. I want to pick up on that, Indira. I think you're so right. And offered to this group and anybody who's listening, that this is a tension as a curator that I am sitting within and moving back and forth with all the time. Because I'm so grateful to artists who have done and who do do that as part and parcel of their practice or as a product of our intersection with their practice. I think Emily Johnson is an incredible example of this and her Decolonization Rider, and others who have access writers, and it doesn't always have to be in the form of a writer, but that's just a good example in this moment that to work with Emily, as I have at the Pillow, we had to have clear conversations about, "Okay, we can't just do a one and done." And the Pillow to their credit doesn't do that, but some organizations in our field do.

So to counteract that, Emily requires that people have a land acknowledgement and have a long-term, deep, considered relationship with Indigenous community and have a long-term, deep commitment to presenting Indigenous artists in the seasons to come. So as a curator, there are moments where I work with artists like that and they can be such incredible propellers for broader institutional change, and there's also a tension I sit with where as a curator, where I think, "Gosh, is that something that I or my institution should do before the artist comes?" What is the push-pull? We were talking about this in terms of our work with artists and our work within institutions. And I don't think one or the other is the right way. I don't think the artists always have to push the institution or that the institution has to prepare itself to then work with the artist. I think it's a lot of both and a lot of in between. But I do think that relationship is the propeller for much of the work that we do.

Christy Bolingbroke:

Christy speaking again. I'm caught, Katy, with your observation and statement of that is also an extension of that, "Who's leading? When do I need to step forward or back?" That you described in your working relationship and experience with Rashaun and Silas. And I think that's the muscle set and skill that where the creative comes in, the listening, the constant improvisation. What I also hear that I want to bring us back to, we talked about when is bureaucracy the one, two, three that we need? But then also what about the unstated unwritten policies that are the norms that we're fighting and trying to grow out of as well? And I'm particularly thinking about martyrdom, the idea of the show must go on and what we have to do to work with artists, to continue to show up for artists, to show up for organizations. That is also part of the self check-in I think administrators are going through in this moment. To be able to continue showing up for artists, how do we not burn ourselves out?

That means we have to be more real with our own limitations and capacity, so we don't perpetuate this idea that, "I'm here for the artist and I..." At the same time it is that opportunity to work with artists that fills me up in doing this work. The artists, I agree with you, Indira, looking to them are a way of how I process this crazy world that defies words sometimes and I need to be able to feel it and experience that. Personally, that's where I find myself trying to manage all of the different things. When am I in service to the artists? When am I in service to the field as a whole? When am I also making sure to check in with myself so that I don't overextend myself? It's both the individual, it's the many organizations or operating environments that they're in, and then how and when those many molecules are bouncing against each other in the field as well, there's no one answer.

And at one time, Katy, you could be working on one thing and then that same day Indira has a different perspective and then I have another perspective. I do feel we're all trying to move in the same direction, but this really has for me revealed the intersectionality and complexity of we're not just putting on a show. It's not as simple as, "This is my to-do list, and I just checked all of that off and so it should be done, right?" I don't think what this sector has ever been about, but now more so than ever, in my opinion.

Tim Cynova:

No surprise that this conversation has been amazing and flown by very fast. As we bring the in plane for landing on the conversation today, where do we each want to land it?

Indira Goodwine-Josias:

Indira speaking. I'm just going to first say thank you again, Tim, Katy, Christy. It has been a pleasure to be in conversation with all of you. I'm going to end it with a quote that I have under my signature for work, as well as personally because I think that it applies, and offer it for this conversation and moving forward, and this quote comes from Titos Sompa, who is a Congolese dancer, choreographer and musician. He once shared with me that, "Life is about listening. When we listen to each other, we tell the right stories." And so I think I want to end in that way. Thank you.

Katy Dammers:

This is Katy. Thanks for offering that, Indira. That's lovely. And I'll echo you and saying thank you. Such a joy as always to be in dialogue with y'all, and I hope we'll keep the conversation going. I think working on this book over the last couple of years and being part of the many experiments that Christy has put into the field has been so exciting. And I do feel like there's a wave rising of new administrators, new systems thinking, new anticipations on the horizon. In a little bit of a gesture towards the book again, one thing that the book’s editor Tonya Lockyer asked us to write at the end of each chapter was a creative experiment or a little bit of a workbook. "Here's a test, take it out on the road."

And so I would encourage people, one thing that I am trying to do for myself as I balance the exciting, the big, the visioning and also the emails and the texts and the quick problem solving that is the reality of our daily lives is that in conversation with Ainsley Vanderbruch, who's a great choreographer and a mentor and an accompanier of me and my journey, is that I'm trying something new, she suggested, where I just take 10 minutes at the top of every day to vision. And usually it's truly five minutes of like, "I'm going to set a timer on my phone. What are the big picture ideas that are floating through my head in the shower, in the drive to work?" And get it down on the page. And then, "What are the next five minutes of the reflections?"

I think that ties in well with what Indira said. We need to listen. But I think we also need a little bit of space to integrate and to dialogue and to get it down on the page and sometimes out of the body so that then there's some more space in the body to be resonant with each other. So I'll offer that if that's supportive to others, that's something new that I'm trying. And I'll pass it to Christy.

Christy Bolingbroke:

I love a good exercise and, also to give credit where credits do, I am the editor for the Series in Dance with the University of Akron Press, but we could not have made this book possible with without engaging in hiring Tonya Lockyer as the editor, who really worked with all of the 30 contributing authors that are included inside of this book. I want to land as a continued nod to the book and push back a little bit against the sustainability as an idea of success. Because I feel in this ever quickly changing, that also might be something that we're growing outdated of because it has a sort of inherently precarious yet static idea of, "Okay, what's sustainable?"

And one of the other contributing authors, Raja Feather Kelly, offers some musings on maybe what we're solving for in this field is longevity and how do we continue to be a part of it if that means that for three or four years we have a core company, and then for five or seven years we're installing solo in museums? And continuing to adapt and evolve to follow that series of ongoing change that you referenced, Indira. What I'm holding while continuing to underline, "What does an administrative warm-up look like?" Following today's discussion and harkening my own dance training, I'm really wondering, "What is my administrative center so that those core muscles are engaged to be able to weather the inevitable changes, sometimes coming at whiplash speed and continue to not be thrown as off balance so that I myself can also find longevity in this field?"

Tim Cynova:

Amazing. Christy, Indira, and Katy, thank you so much for such a joyful start to the day, such a thought-provoking start to the day. So many questions to roll around in in future conversations. And thanks so much for being on the podcast.

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. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Values-Based Coaching (EP.77)

If you’ve ever wondered about the ins-and-outs of executive coaches – how does it work, how do you find out; I’m not an “executive,” is it still for me? – this is an episode for you! Host Tim Cynova is in conversation with Farah Bala, a certified executive coach and founder of Farsight, an agency dedicated to leadership and organizational development with a focus on equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-oppression practices. Their conversation covers a lot of ground, from the philosophical to the practice, with some highlights from the discussion below.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS Feed

Updated

April 23, 2024

If you’ve ever wondered about the ins-and-outs of executive coaches – how does it work, how do you find one; I’m not an “executive,” is it still for me? – this is an episode for you!

Host Tim Cynova is in conversation with Farah Bala, a certified executive coach and founder of Farsight, an agency dedicated to leadership and organizational development with a focus on equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-oppression practices. Their conversation covers a lot of ground, from the philosophical to the practical, with some highlights from the discussion below.

Episode Highlights

  • 04:15 The Essence and Impact of Coaching

  • 08:10 Coaching for Everyone: Breaking Down the Myths

  • 12:09 The Intersection of Coaching and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

  • 18:28 Navigating Privilege and Responsibility in Coaching and Beyond

  • 24:00 The Power of Perspective in Coaching and Creating Change

  • 25:10 Choosing the Right Coach: A Personal Journey

  • 26:16 The Impact of Identity on Coaching Choices

  • 27:26 The Art of Asking the Right Questions

  • 29:55 The Evolution of Coaching in Virtual Workplaces

  • 33:32 Self-Care: The Coach's Perspective

  • 41:02 Leveraging Improv for Coaching Skills

  • 42:36 Understanding Coaching Costs and Arrangements

  • 46:36 Expanding Access to Coaching

Mentioned in the podcast: Farsight Friday EP26: Coaching for Inclusion

 

Bios

Farah Bala is a Leadership EDIA (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Anti-Oppression) Executive Coach, Consultant and Speaker. As Founder & CEO of FARSIGHT, Farah's mission is to support organizations and leaders redefine the concept of leadership by making Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Anti-Oppression a core leadership competency. Her clients include executives in the C-suite, creatives and entrepreneurs, and organizations across wide-ranging sectors and industries. She is also a faculty coach at multiple learning and development institutions. Farah believes equity and inclusion are the foundational pillars for effective leadership and communication.

Farah’s speaking engagements include Yale University, Ford Foundation, Voice America, NY Travel Festival, Travel Unity, Adirondack Diversity Initiative, Asian American Arts Alliance, among others. She is a sought after speaker at national conferences, most recently at SHPE and SASE. Farah is also the creator and host of FARSIGHT FRIDAY, a video podcast started in 2020 in response to the heightened racism and divisiveness of marginalized communities. communities. She is a recipient of the Diversity Award by the World Zoroastrian Organization, recognized for her work in raising awareness towards gender, culture, racial equity and inclusion globally.

Farah holds an MFA in Theater from Sarah Lawrence College, and is a graduate of the Institute of Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC) Program. She is a Professional Certified Executive Coach (PCC) with the International Coach Federation, and is certified in the Energy Leadership Index (ELI), EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360 assessments, and Character Strengths Intervention. She is featured in Umbrage Edition’s national award-winning book Green Card Stories as one of 50 profiles of recent immigrants from around the world.

Having worked as a performing artist and producer for over two decades, Farah has used the tools of the theater in arts education developing social-emotional learning in NYC public schools and international volunteering initiatives, and as of the last decade, in professional environments across multiple industries. If you would like to learn more about Farah’s artistic work, please visit her website.

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Farah Bala:

Organizations have been built with your strategy, your value system, your mission, your budgeting, all of that has been considered and EDIA concepts or systems were not considered. And then, you started building something and a quarter along the way, sometimes halfway along the way, someone said, "Oh, what about diversity? Oh, what about inclusion?" It's like, "Oh yeah, we need that, so let's slap it on." Snap it on something that's already been built and has roots, and so then that becomes a band-aid and the adhesive of that band-aid will wear off if work has not been done to create roots for that new initiative.

And that's why we're still having these conversations. That's why we're still doing this work because the adhesive has worn off over and over and over again.

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck, a podcast about well, that. In this episode, I'm excited to connect with the amazing Farah Bala. Farah is an intercultural leadership and communication specialist, coach and speaker. Her agency Farsight focuses on leadership and organizational development that prioritizes equity, diversity, inclusion and anti-oppression practices. She facilitates and leads individual and group programs globally for Fortune 500 companies to non-profit organizations, with clients that includes C-suites, emerging leaders, creatives and entrepreneurs in wide-ranging sectors from finance to law, technology to media, entertainment and beyond.

Farah is also a faculty coach at multiple learning and development institutions and believes equity and inclusion are foundational pillars for effective leadership and communication. And it's this last piece that I'm particularly excited to explore during our conversation today. Having been asked by countless people over the last several years, if I know any coaches who center equity and inclusion in their practice. You can find more about Farah and the Farsight Agency in our bio linked in the episode description, so let's get going. Farah, welcome to the podcast.

Farah Bala:

Thank you, Tim. Thank you for that introduction and thank you for having me.

Tim Cynova:

I'm very excited about our conversation today. Before, we really dive in, why don't we just start with how do you typically introduce yourself and the work that you do?

Farah Bala:

I like to introduce myself through story and identity. My ancestry is Persian. I grew up in India. I was born in Lagos, Nigeria and now, I live in the United States. And so hyphenated identity, and I think that is complemented by my current existence, which is a hyphenated intersectional trajectory of experience and career passing. I moved to the states to study theater. I have background, a parallel journey as a performer, producer and arts educator using tools of theater and improvisation and learning environments, starting off in the public schools of New York City and then, I'm transferring that to doing the same work through the same techniques in national volunteering initiatives and professional companies literally all over the world.

Where I am today is I use all of that in my work as a leadership and organizational consultant and coach through Farsight. I think where I am now is really connecting all of these dots of how do we connect leadership to creating healthy work cultures through having equitable inclusive lens to how we build communities within our workplaces. For me, I see the intersection of identity with the intersection of everything that I do. I'm also an executive coach, I should say that right? Given the topic at hand, I am a certified executive coach, and yes, my focus is building socially conscious leaders.

Tim Cynova:

And speaking of coaching, as I mentioned in the introduction to this episode and something we've talked about offline, I'm excited about those who center values, especially values of equity, inclusion, justice, anti-racism, anti-oppression in their coaching practice, before I guess we really dig into that, maybe we should pull up from the page first and start with what exactly is coaching and how does a coach differ from a mentor or a manager or even a therapist?

Farah Bala:

Great question, Tim. Yes, that's how I start every potential client call. Let's start with what is coaching. The way I like to put it is the process of coaching is about starting from where you're at and looking ahead, to where you want to be or what the goals are for the future. You're starting as a present and you move to the future. The process is about clearing the path to one's goals, addressing anything that might be getting in the way, learning more about oneself as needed, if needed along the way. The whole process of coaching is let's get you to who you want to be or where you want to be, in terms of whoever is looking for a coach.

The difference, so let's start with therapy. Therapy starts from the present and looks backwards. It goes into the past to understand why, understanding where one has come from or why am I the way I am, what has shaped me, et cetera. The goal is really to reconcile the past to being more conscious in the present. And with coaching, we are starting from the present to look ahead. That does not mean that we don't step into the past. Sometimes we do need to step into the past because of stories that we might have created for ourselves or narratives that have been driving us that we've not necessarily interrogated.

We've not necessarily asked ourselves is this belief, is this thought process or value system truly mine based on who I am today or is it something that occurred decades ago and that I just assumed to be true of me today? Sometimes, it's the case that it is true and sometimes it isn't. So we do step back, but the goal is not to stay in the past. The goal is to reconcile anything about the past to move ahead. You mentioned mentorship, a mentor-mentee relationship is all about the mentor. It's all about their journey, their experiences, their successes, their failures, and the mentee is learning through their stories. In a coaching relationship, it's all about the coachee or the client.

It is not about the coach. I always say, "I am only effective if I am on your journey. My client's journey." That means that I'm not coming in with my stories, I'm not coming in with my successes or failures or what has worked for me because it's not about me. It's about the client, who they are, who they wish to be and where they've been. And so coaching, I call it a thought partnership to achieve the client's goals. I sometimes say it's a brain expansion, two sets of neural pathways. Trying to solve for something can be exponentially more effective and adventurous in a good way than one set of neural pathways.

What are the distinctions were there? Manager. A lot of the work that we do is to develop leaders and managers to be effective coaches to their team members. Let me go to the default role of manager that has been perpetuated to move across industries and organizations that a manager gets work done from their team members, right? It's all about projects, deadlines, deliverables, accountability. There are some developmental goals within that, but it's all very task and work related and managers also come with their agendas. Even if a team member is being developed, it's through the lens of either a manager's divisions or organization's agenda.

While your team member might be growing and developing, they might be growing via a slice or a side role of something much bigger than who they're made up of.

Tim Cynova:

I feel like there's a perception that coaches are only for, "big time executives." It's like the C-suites that get coaches and as someone who's personally benefited and had the privilege of being able to work with a coach in the workplace in particular when our organization was going through a period of change and I needed that outside perspective and lens and mirror and I definitely wasn't a big time executive, I know that that perception is incorrect. You've worked with big time executives and like everyone across the spectrum of sectors and roles, who typically works with a coach. How do they work with a coach and what are some of the things they're working on?

Farah Bala:

So you are saying who is coaching for, right? Is it only for executives? No, I always say, if you can benefit from a coach, get a coach, and I also say every coach should have a coach for multiple reasons. The coaching industry is widespread. You have everything from executive coaching to career coaching to presentation coaching to life coaching, even in the workplace sometimes health and fitness coaching, and there is always a niche, leadership coaching. So if you take career leadership, executive coaching, they have a lot of overlaps, they have a lot of synergies. What can you bring to a coaching process?

It's anything from I need to upskill. I'm looking for a coach specifically to develop my HR lens within an organization because that's one of my aspirations and the feedback that I'm getting currently is that I'm not quite there yet. I want to get some, not training per se, but how can I work with a coach to expand my current perspective, skill set expertise towards getting to that position. Some people come for, "Hey, I am a brand new leader and I have no idea what I'm doing. I was really good at what I did, which is why I got this promotion and now I'm suddenly a people leader. I have never managed people before. How do I do that?"

Sometimes organizations sponsor coaching in terms of this is a really high performer, but their communication skills are lacking. They really just need to work on that. We have high level executives and C-suites come through to say there is a lot going on and I just need a space, I need a thought partner. I need to just work through strategy. So there is so much that you can bring to a coaching relationship and there's really nothing that's off the table. You could be coming to me for a solid executive coaching engagement and we might start the conversation with something that happened at home or the challenge that you're facing with the kids.

And I always say that the personal and the professional are very integrated. They're not separate. We are trained. We are wired to think that they are like, my personal stuff is here, my work self is here, but each informs the other. Because of that, a lot of how we show up in one space is how we show up in another. So there are so many transferable skills in that way. I just had someone come to me saying, I'm over a year in my job. I'm settled in and I know I'm going to be here for a little longer, but I want to start looking ahead in terms of trajectory. So once to get into a coaching engagement to just explore what's next.

A little bit of strategy, a little bit of mapping out how we get there, et cetera. Given the topic of this conversation, sometimes I've had a few White leaders come to me in the last few years to say, "Hey, I need to do better as a leader within the organization. I don't know what I don't know." So, I just need a safe space to unpack. I'm hearing about privilege, I'm hearing about Whiteness. I don't know what that is or the patriarchy and masculinity, and I just need a space to process that, to unpack that and get tools of how we do things differently or how I can be a more effective leader, how I can create more inclusion, belonging, psychological safety for my team, for my organization.

Tim Cynova:

Let's dive in a little bit more into that point you were just talking about, where you're working with white guys in the organization about things that they might not know about. I mentioned in the intro that, well, certainly since the summer of 2020, I've received a lot of inquiries about if I knew coaches that centered equity inclusion, anti-racism in their practice, and this is something that you do and I'm curious how that informs your approach to coaching that might be different than someone who doesn't.

Farah Bala:

I get asked this question a lot, Tim and I didn't learn to integrate it. I am a Persian-Indian, now American, light-skinned woman, living in the United States. In my first three months in the country, I was in the lobby of my graduate school and a very well-meaning person told me, "Farah, you're going to be working twice as hard as everyone else because in this country, you are considered a woman of color." Race was ascribed to me at that time. I was much younger, very naive, bright eye, bushy tail, and I was like, "Okay, I'll do that. I'll work twice as hard as everyone else." So when you live with that, when you are told that, when the ceiling has already been set for you, you're living it.

It's not outside of who I am. A lot of work that we're doing with our clients right now is how do you cultivate an equity lens? How do you cultivate an EDIA lens? Also, I should say for your listeners, we use EDIA equity, diversity, inclusion, anti-oppression. So when I say EDIA, that's what I mean. How do you cultivate that lens across all areas of your work? For me, it's my lived experience that cultivated it. I didn't have to go do a training to understand diversity, to understand what it is like to be excluded because it happened. I'm just talking from a race perspective. You could say the same from a gender perspective, you can say the same from an LGBTQ plus perspective, you can say the same from a neurodiverse or disability perspective.

The groups that have been historically marginalized don't have the opportunity to have that outside of themselves. You just have it because you are living it. I'm not choosing to show up as a woman of color, but that's how I am being perceived and so that the melding starts happening and now, I own it and I lead with it with pride, and that is why I start with identity. My origins, what I call the simple origin, geographical story, because having lived and worked where I have and being treated in different ways, depending where I'm at, you just have it. For me, my interest was how do I integrate that into what I have learned as a facilitator?

How do I integrate that into what I've learned as a coach? So that's what has always been exciting for me and that is why I created Farsight, because for me it was always separate. You talk about unconscious bias, but you're not necessarily connecting it to how biases have created systems of oppression within which there is so much harm and level setting, ceiling-level setting that has been caused that is very limiting to certain populations more than others or doing a communication workshop where my colleagues who might not be women or might not be people of color, might not notice certain nuances or pick up on certain cultural aspects that I would.

I'm not saying that you only have to be a person of color to have a DEI lens, but since you're asking me, it's who I am, it's what I had lived. It's my lived experiences, my observations, my aspirations of who we can be collectively as a humanity that inform the EDIA lens to all of the work, which is why for me, it's a core belief that leadership is not separate from equity, diversity, inclusion, anti-oppression. It's all connected, but we have been wired, we have been taught that it is different. Something else that I tell our clients, especially when we're doing strategy work with them is that historically organizations have been built with your strategy, your value system, your mission, your budgeting.

All of that has been considered and EDIA concepts or systems were not considered. And then, you started building something and a quarter along the way, sometimes halfway along the way, someone said, "Oh, what about diversity? Oh, what about inclusion?" It's like, "Oh yeah, we need that, so let's slap it on." Slap it on something that's already been built and has roots. So then that becomes a band-aid and the adhesive of that band-aid will wear off if work has not been done to create roots for that new initiative. And that's why we're still having these conversations. That's why we're still doing this work because the adhesive has worn off over and over and over again. I'm talking about the organizational space right now.

Let's localize it in a coaching engagement. The value of someone being with a coach who brings in that equity lens, who brings in the inclusion belonging diversity lens, and if they are building themselves up as a leader, if they're looking to be more effective, if they're looking to grow their people leadership skills, that coaching engagement is going to help them build those roots of analysis from the ground up. And that is the value of that one-on-one time that you might be a really effective leader in terms of getting the bottom line, aligning with organizational strategy, community engagement, whatever else that requires you to.

And if this comes across as a gap or if you realize it's a gap and you want to develop it, a coaching relationship can be really, really helpful in building those roots, so that it's not an adhesive, that you can actually grow those competencies moving forward.

Tim Cynova:

In 2013, one of the organization I was with, started our work in earnest around anti-racist and anti-oppression. Well, the very first things the facilitator said was, if you're a White person, don't go to the people of color to answer your questions. Don't further oppress the people who are already oppressed to help you figure it out. Go to other White people, who might further along in the journey where you might be. And as I think about the work that you do as a coach, and also, when I was going through my training as a mediator, they talked about how a mediator as a neutral party, but mediation isn't a neutral impact on the mediator.

I imagine that might be the case in coaching relationships. When I think about care, when I think about wellbeing, when I think about built-in versus band-aid, when I think about how you center these values in your work, how does that play out in your coaching practice?

Farah Bala:

When you talked about the example a few years ago, White folk were told, don't go to people of color for your questions. May I just dig into that a little bit?

Tim Cynova:

Please, yeah. That was a specific thing that our facilitator who came in, specifically, it was focused a year on anti-oppression. We started our work, focused on anti-oppression. That was one of the very first things as it preceded the work that then went into race-based caucusing in the workplace, that these are the places where you should have those conversations.

Farah Bala:

I want to add some context and nuance because I don't consider that statement absolute truth. This might be a controversial thing that I just said and let me say why. In the work that I have done, in my own lived experiences, every identity of privilege has that same level of responsibility, so it's not just White folk, it's cis folk like me, able-bodied folk like me, neurotypical folk like me, Now, US citizen, right? Citizenship being a space of English speakers, et cetera. I think it's really, really important that when we talk about this work, every single person, including people of color have a responsibility because every single person holds levels of privilege accountability to doing something better.

Now, within that, lived experiences, have a spectrum of harm that has caused trauma, that has been embedded and perpetuated and a reversal of that ... and/or I should say a reversal of that. And again, I can only speak for myself as someone who identifies as an immigrant in this country has seen every immigrant status from student to citizen and seen how privilege, autonomy agency just increases. As you get to that ultimate top, in quotes. It's the same thing growing up as a person of color, as an artist who's now a business owner, that's a whole other level of responsibility. That's a whole other level of accountability and privilege that comes with what do I do now, with what I have?

If I could stress because I want to use every opportunity I can to do this, that it's on every single person. It's not just on White folk. Now, I want to address what you said. I had a fascinating experience in 2020 when my black and brown friends, Asian friends were on a spectrum of capability of how much they could give off themselves. There was a percentage that was like, do not come to me. I am just taking care of myself right now because I cannot do ... or my family, I am worried about my safety or I'm just shutting off and I am not plugging into the news.

And then, there were others who were engaging with each other online in big spaces saying, "Hey, if you have questions, me as a Black person, me as a Brown person, me as an Asian person want to help you understand or want to help you get to the bottom of whatever your questions are," so use me as a resource. It goes without saying we, were all hurting in 2020 and there were certain spaces, again, when we are localizing it to specific organizations or specific teams when we know ... a lot of calling out was happening versus calling in, a lot of people were speaking up, and so there is always going to be a spectrum.

I would hate for anyone to assume that me as this identity can never go to this identity, because it's seeing it in such a siloed black and white way, no pun intended to black and white. Rather if we could engage our own curiosity of who can I go to and why and check our own assumptions of, "Oh, I can go to Tim for this, but really can I, have I checked in with him about it? Is he open to having this conversation?" Those moments of co-creation, of a possibility of what else we can talk about is where I think the work is. Everyone talks about the work, do the work. I think it's in these micro moments of how we make choices of who we go to, how we make choices of who we get be vulnerable with and say, "Hey, I messed up or this is very obvious to everyone else around me. I am still not clear about this, or I have resistances to X, Y, Z."

And again, bringing it back to this is where you can bring all of that into a coaching conversation. You can bring all of that into the space.

Tim Cynova:

There's also something here that you raised where part of the magic, if you will, of working with coaches is that they bring different perspectives. It's like if I wanted the same perspective, I would just sit around and think to myself, but that's kind of the beauty where every way diversity, thought, experience, lived experience, everything makes for richer teams and experiences in life and to be able to have those allows us to see things differently and come up with different solutions and co-create them at this time in our lives, we're like the same old, same old is not working and there is no template for what we're trying to do when we're trying to co-create thriving futures. So I think that's, in particular, really important piece of it.

Farah Bala:

How do you pick your coach? There are certain identities that wanted the same identity and that is okay. There's no right way to pick your coach, and there's also no right path to, as a South Asian or a mixed race woman, that's the coach I want, because there's so much else. It's based on what your goals are. It's based on who they are, what their expertise is, and then the most important is the magic that happens when you first connect with them. Anyone who comes to me inquiring, I always say, please interview at least three coaches before you come to your decision, because it's a very, very intimate relationship that you're going to get into.

And you really want to feel a connection there. I'll give you an example. There was someone who came to me, who is I think one level down from CEO right now at his organization. He just did this big job a couple of years ago and as he was interviewing a few people ... I told him this when we spoke and he's a Black man. I said, interview a whole bunch of people, and then he came back and he was like, "I have a little bit of a conundrum," because I loved our conversation. I can see us working together and I met this other coach who has been CEO and I want to be CEO and he can lay down the map for me and I need help choosing, and of course, I cannot help anyone to choose their coach and that person was a White man.

I give you this example as identities play a role, but they are not the only factor. Now conversely, you might have a person of color who is carrying a lot of workplace trauma and they want to heal from that, speaking of care. Because of the trauma that they're holding, they are finding themselves limited and they're not able to get to their full potential. They're not able to see themselves set up for success, and so they want to do some work and the only person they will trust is a coach from that identity and that is okay, so it's very situational. I might be of a certain identity looking to do more community work within the same identity, so then, I will go looking for a coach with that identity.

There's a lot of context. There's no, if I am a Indian person, I only go to an Indian coach. If I am a Black person, I only go to a Black coach. There is an intersection complex spectrum of various criteria that you want to make the most thoughtful decision going into it. I always encourage people, it's not right and wrong, it's about staying intentional, staying thoughtful, and it will likely be the best decision for you if you give it that due diligence.

Tim Cynova:

What kind of questions do you encourage people to ask potential coaches?

Farah Bala:

Everything. Ask them about their experience. Ask them about case studies, clients that they have or training. I'll divest a little bit, when I got certified. People cautioned me around, make sure you get accredited with a credible institution. Now, there is plenty out there. There is a lot more. The coaching industry is at a whole other level. There was a big push for, "Do your due diligence in getting a program that really gives you the training," because you have someone's life and future in your hand. I would ask clients to ask people they're interviewing where they went, do your own research on solid, good accredited institutions.

Some people love assessments. The coaching process can be very assessment heavy for people who like that in terms of getting a snapshot of who they are or a snapshot of a situation or a snapshot of some 360 feedback, that you want someone who brings that to the table. You might be stepping into an executive role and you are family planning. How important is it that your coach be able to hold both of those spaces for you? Ask all of the questions and sometimes that's the beauty of interviewing various coaches because a coach might disclose something that you might want to go back to the other one and say, "Hey, what is your perspective on this? Get curious about the coach in a way that helps you see if they can support you."

Not to test them, not to pull the rug up from under them, none of that. The other thing that I would also encourage is when coming to a call, be ready to really share why you're there because that's when the magic happens with your coach. I always say as a coach, I am led by the client because remember what I said, it's not my agenda. I'm not mapping out your journey for you. You tell me where you want to be and then we map it together. So for a potential coach to be effective with you, the more you share about who you are, what your challenges are, where your growth opportunities are that you see, and also what your resistances are, the more that coach can be effective in how they show up to you, and the ways in which they might be able to support you, that can then help you make your decision.

Tim Cynova:

We focus maybe primarily on individual coaching relationships. One of the things that I've heard increasingly over the past couple of years with hybrid workplaces or entirely virtual workplaces where teams have never met each other, coaches who are working with teams in organizations to help them be better teams together, can you talk a little bit more about that dynamic and for teams who are like, "Oh, actually that sounds like a pretty good idea for our team, we might need one." How do you suggest people go about approaching that aspect?

Farah Bala:

Getting an understanding of what you want out of that? How do you want your coach to help you? I've done work with teams where it's just like we are new to each other, we're in a transitional year and we need to build trust and align on how we communicate with each other. Sometimes it is to pseudo-mediation. We have new leadership and the rest of the leaders have just come out of a very traumatic leadership experience, and so we need some realignment. I'm just giving instances and sometimes it's all connected, sometimes it's all strategy. We need to create an EDIA strategy and we are working with the not just EDIA committee, but also the sponsor leadership who is moving the initiative forward.

It might not just be an EDIA strategy, it can be an organizational strategy, it can be a transition strategy, change management. Change management is another big topic where teams can really leverage a coach. Conflict. Conflict resolution. I think for me it's woven into the building of trust, building of how we communicate with each other. Role clarification, how do we deal with conflict? One of the big things organizationally, I say to create a true space of intention and belonging, you have to have a culture of healthy conflict, and what that means is if you and I are working together, I have to be able to tell you I disagree with you. You and I have to be able to get into a heated conversation and then, check in about the kids or whatever else we know of each other.

The possibility of healthy conflict only comes from a bed of foundation of that trust and relationality. For me, that is foundational to all of the work that comes after. Something else, I was going to say about team effectiveness. You might have individual leaders, but collectively, there is no united leadership voice that can really be detrimental to the perception of leadership within an organization, building that unity, exploring and then refining a collective voice of who do we want to be as influencers in this organization? We might have our own goals, but then what are our goals and how then do we execute them?

How do we activate them? That's where having an executive coach at the table can be really, really helpful. An outside perspective, my goodness, I love being the fly on the wall. I love seeing something in a different way or just seeing something that someone's never heard before. I call that breaking the brain or stretching those neural pathways because that's where the growth opportunity is and so there is so much value to bringing someone from the outside, even just as observers sometimes before the work actually starts of how are meetings run? How is space taken? Who speaks and who doesn't? All of those observations, having that third party come in.

Assess the current dynamics and then, make recommendations after and then work with the team towards those recommendations can be, my gosh, so useful.

Tim Cynova:

And so how do you take care of yourself when you are the person at the nexus point of those conversations?

Farah Bala:

I learned the practice of self-care through my journey as a coach, facilitator and consultant holding space is what we do, whether it's for an individual, whether it's for a room, and pre-pandemic I was traveling all the time living out of this little carry-on airports and I had to create my own practices for replenishing what I call my boundaries. So I would not schedule clients on a travel day. It would be administrative work. I never do back-to-back sessions with clients, whether if we have a client workshop that is three or four hours long, there is no client delivery happening for the rest of the day.

If I have, it's a coaching day. There are significant breaks in between. Then, for my own self, my own personal nourishment, whatever that is, whether it's being with community, whether it's health and fitness, et cetera. I learned that very quickly. The self-care was not something that ... Now, I think people growing up in this time, I'm hearing it a lot more, but I never had that. I was like, "I'm fine, I'm fine," and then my body just didn't keep up and so I was like, oh, if I don't take care of myself, I'm not effective at what I do. Okay. That's reason enough to start taking care of myself, so I always say I learned about the practice of self-care, because we've learned about self-care.

We hear it all the time, but what it takes to practice it and activate it growing in this work and it is essential. Remember when I said every coach needs a coach? That's part of the self-care piece. In that moment, I or you will have had to show up, do what is needed to be effective and have a successful outcome for the client, right? Because remember, it's not about you in that space, but then what are you going to do with everything that came up for you? You might have been triggered, something might have happened, like you're talking about divorce, you might have witnessed something, a dynamic in the room that brought up something about your own early life and if you do not deal, resolve that then starts influencing how we start showing up.

Something that I see to my team as well is that to do this work, we have to have a growth mindset. All of this work is around growth mindset. By the way, our call to action at Farsight is do more, do better, do it differently. So it's just assuming that there is something that we can do more. There's something that we can do differently and there's something that we can do better. So, it's that perpetual curiosity of how do we get there? What could I have done differently next time? And that piece I think sets the foundation for both care for self, but also then, being able to show someone else that perspective and that possibility.

A lot of the times, Tim, the initial part of a coaching process is just slowing someone down because they're in the mode of putting out fires and dealing with emergencies and it's like, "All right, let's just, for lack of a better word, calm things down, slow things down." The other side to this is without self-care, without the care, making decisions that cause harm. In the science of unconscious bias, we already know that when you are stressed, when you are running against a deadline, when lack of sleep, lack of nutrition, all of those moments start the automated neural pathways to kick in. We want to do what we know and when we only decide within the realm of what we know, that's when intuition happens.

Because we are not considering other possibilities. My god, self-care, self-care, self-care, all the way. We talked a lot about a coaching engagement. I've said every coach needs a coach. Everyone can avail of coaching, should avail of coaching. I want to also emphasize that you could have the coaching skills to be an effective leader without necessarily going through a coaching certification and those skills are being a darn good listener, learning to respond versus react and just being effusive about your curiosity, being a really good curious investigator of those open-ended. What, why, how, explain this. Describe this.

Being able to reflect back what you're hearing. Those are core coaching skills, because your audience is likely, organizations and leaders who are wanting to do better, we actually did a podcast episode right now called Coaching for Intuition, Unpacking Why. If you are a leader of people, you need to be honing your coaching because it is as much your job to get the deliverable out of your team as it is to invest in their success, invest in their pathways to who they want to be in the future, whether within the organization or outside of it, and those are separate coaching conversations to have. Yes, the value of a coaching engagement and working with a coach and leaders get real good at asking curious questions, especially questions the answers to which you don't know.

Get really good at just staying silent and letting the other person talk it through and coming back with some key reflections. Get really good at not problem solving all the time. Your role as leaders is to problem solve, but as a coach, it's to help the other person come to their conclusion, on their own. It builds agency, it builds confidence, it builds trust. There is so much ROI to having a handful of coaching skills that you can get really good at that can help your team come together cohesively and you being an effective people leader.

Tim Cynova:

For those who are thinking, that sounds awesome, what are your suggestions for some resources that they should check out? Books, classes, certification programs to get better at maybe the skills of coaching without actually maybe becoming an officially certified coach?

Farah Bala:

Let's start with certification programs. There are a handful that I had heard of then that I still hear of now. There is IPEC. That's where I went. Institution for Professional Excellence in Coaching. There is Coach Training Institute and now they're co-active. Columbia University has an executive coaching program. If none of them, my recommendation is to find a program that is in some form affiliated with ICF, which is at the International Coach Federation. There are other centralized standards for coaching, but I'm personally affiliated with ICF because it has a code of ethics, it has a really solid formal process that every coach of theirs do for your clients. They want to make sure that they're in good hands.

So you want to make sure that you have done the due diligence to have someone feel that way and also, when you go through a program, you're going to work on yourself, friends, it's work. Something that we say is we don't have our clients do anything we're not willing to do ourselves. There is huge value to doing that work, what I call unpacking the baggage, identifying what is where and then repacking it into luggage, organized luggage. Do improv, you're going to meet some incredible humans. You're going to build your own confidence as a speaker and you're going to learn some foundational principles of what it takes to listen, what it takes to build with what someone else has said, what it takes to make the best lemonade out of whatever lemons you've been dealt.

I am the product of arts education, so there is always going to be a plug for that, but seriously, go take improv. The way you listen, the way you communicate will change and shift for the better.

Tim Cynova:

I have a colleague who's a very accomplished fundraiser in New York City and I was asking her, how did you get to do what you do? She's like, the best thing I ever did for my career was I took an improv course. To your point, you're going into a lot of different situations that you're not sure how they're going to respond and that ability to listen and reflect. I love that, that it probably is useful for any career in any profession to take an improv course.

Farah Bala:

My gosh, transferable skills, the best lawyer fighting a case will have benefited from drama school, from being in the school play. These are foundational skills. Improv skills are foundational skills. Go to the Moth, do some storytelling work. You will learn about crafting your message, you will learn about influence. You will learn about communicating in a way that your audience can hear it. In improv, you will hear about getting out of your own head and getting curious about everyone else in the room. All of that is again, foundational for how you show up to your team. How do you show up to your people.

Tim Cynova:

So far, I imagine people who are listening are thinking, who might be new to this? How much does coaching cost? What does a typical relationship look like? Is it four sessions? Is it four months? I can imagine that the spectrum is wide on this one with cost and kind of relationships and frequency. What are maybe some more typical arrangements for people who might be new to coaching relationships?

Farah Bala:

I can only speak for myself, so let me tell you how I've evolved the coaching process. I started doing coaching by the hour. First, it was a set of sessions and then, as I was building my own experience around it, I realized I now had data working with clients of what felt good and for me, an hour just wasn't enough. Then, I started shifting that, that I don't do an hour sessions. Then it went into we are being limited by the number of sessions. And then, I had data around, "Okay, what is the minimum amount of time it takes for shifts to happen based on a client's goals?" So for me, first I landed at three months and now, I'm closer to six months and the minimum I will work with someone and it's a time commitment because of the work that's involved.

Now, I just have these packages in place that are not necessarily per session or by the hour, but it's either three, six or 12-month processes and it's more now six, nine and 12-month processes. For returning clients who have a solid foundation, then it's just brushing up and so that looks different. That can be on a per session basis or a need-based basis of like, "I need to talk through something or I might be up for a different role," and sit through that or something happened at work, et cetera. Pre-pandemic, and I'm sure this is the case now too, there are different frameworks. I'm just sharing mine. There was a framework where you just do a half-day intensive with someone.

Then, that looks different, with teams especially, it could become a half-day off-site or a full-day off-site or a two-day off-site. You're still with a coach, but it has a different feel, it has the intensiveness feel to it. I have peers and colleagues who do it by the hour. It could be weekly, bimonthly, quarterly, again, depending on the relationship, who the coach and client are, how the coach works and level of work that's needed. The other thing is coaches come with certifications, so people might do personality tests like Hogan and, my God, there are so many others. I do the energy leadership assessment, and look through that of what assessments might be good for you based on where you are at.

Do your coaches do 360 feedback. That's another big one as well, especially for creating ... being an intrusive leader and that's something I am always telling clients. At some point, we are going to do a 360, where you are asking your people for feedback and then, we curate that whole process so that the goal start shifting and changing as needed based on what is needed of them from their people. Cost really varies. I love the way you started this conversation, Tim, that only executives need to have coaching engagements. The one thing I find myself saying more and more to leaders is ask your organization what kind of professional development budgeting that you can avail of.

I have had clients say, "My organization is matching this, or they are sponsoring this, or I'll pay for it and they'll reimburse me, or they're doing 50% of it." So definitely ask, and then in the nonprofit sector, there are always grants for professional development, so do some of that due diligence, do some of that research, especially when you're working with a coach with a marginalized identity, just knowing that you want to be fair in how you show up with a coach as well because it is their livelihood. That's something that I will always emphasize. Now, in terms of accessibility for more coaching, I want to share this organization called Coaching for Everyone. One of their founders, Victor McGuire was out on a recent Coaching for Inclusion episode.

Coaching for Everyone is a nonprofit organization that does two things. One, it offers subsidized coaching to BIPOC leaders. And then, they also partner with the likes of CTI, Coach Training Institute and IPEC to offer coaching certification [inaudible 00:47:11] who are interested at, again, a subsidized price. I love everything about this organization. I love that this space exists because I am sending people there. Folk who are looking for coaching. Folk who are interested in pursuing coaching. I just wanted to share more about this organization specifically

Tim Cynova:

As we bring the plane in for a landing on our conversation today. Where do you want to land it?

Farah Bala:

For anyone who wants to do more, learn more, we have Farsight Friday. When you go to our website, you'll see a tab for it and we are constantly bringing in guests to talk about the topics of our time, which is all infused back to our own mission of building conscious leaders. So if you have a curious about a specific issue or a topic or an identity, go check out some of our episodes. We're in our fourth season right now and see if something piques your curiosity and hopefully you learned something along the way.

Tim Cynova:

It's amazing, Farah. Our time has flown by. Thank you so much for your openness, your insights, your advice, your genuineness. It's always wonderful to connect and thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Farah Bala:

My pleasure.

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. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Navigating The In-Between (EP.76)

In this episode, host Tim Cynova interviews Ann Le and Meg Buzzi, authors of the book "The In-Between: A Companion for Uncertain Times." The discussion brings in many of the challenges of work in the current chaotic and uncertain landscape, and offers insights on how individuals, teams, and organizations can stay engaged and motivated. At the heart of the discussion, Ann and Meg invite listeners to rethink their relationship with work and explore new possibilities.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS Feed

Updated

April 9, 2024

In this episode, host Tim Cynova interviews Ann Le and Meg Buzzi, authors of the book "The In-Between: A Companion for Uncertain Times." The discussion brings in many of the challenges of work in the current chaotic and uncertain landscape, and offers insights on how individuals, teams, and organizations can stay engaged and motivated. At the heart of the discussion, Ann and Meg invite listeners to rethink their relationship with work and explore new possibilities.

Episode Highlights

  • 03:18 The Genesis of The In-Between: A Book for Uncertain Times

  • 05:06 Unpacking Work Culture: Insights from The In-Between

  • 08:00 Navigating Work and Life in a Post-Pandemic World

  • 08:43 Redefining Work: From Transactional to Transformational

  • 15:52 The Future of Work: Adapting to Change and Embracing Uncertainty

  • 16:29 Bridging Old Systems and New Realities

  • 19:09 Practical Advice for Organizations in Transition

  • 24:32 Evolving Ideas and Unexplored Themes

Explore the authors’ website. Buy their book.

 

Bios

Ann Le is thinker, leader, and finance/operations pro, working on building strong, sustainable, anti-racist systems and organizations. She's leaning into how we can leverage new technologies, finance and community to combat racial and economic injustice. Ann spent a decade as a VP in investment banking, then spent 5 years at a major film studio. After her MBA, Ann has worked and held leadership roles with over 50+ organizations from large corporations to start-ups, non-profit, government, and has served on numerous boards. She's also written a great, but not best-selling cookbook, and produced an award-winning Sundance independent film. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Economics, with a focus on history and labor, and has an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Business. Ann will ask you if any of this matters as we move out of the In-Between, and we enter a new paradigm of work and community: there's a new way to see and value ourselves. Ann has been described as a great teammate, a caring, intuitive human with a strong Slack game who also writes the "opposite of boring" emails. 

Meg Buzzi is a change artist helping to build imaginative solutions to systemic challenges, especially at work. She is a PCC-certified coach, writer, and co-founder of the Present of Work (presentofwork.com) consulting group and the Starter Cultures (startercultures.us) change community. She helps teams and leaders level-up and reconnect to what truly matters to them. A former Chief Information Officer, Meg has led multi-million-dollar change efforts in K-12, higher education, government, and tech. But her most valuable learning is about building community and practicing trust when we are faced with complexity and challenge. Meg is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, an Art of Hosting facilitator and a contributor to the books Fieldworking (Bedford St. Martin's), The Rhetoric of Inquiry (Macmillan), and Narrative Generation. Send her a note at meg@presentofwork.com.

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Meg Buzzi:

What if solving the problems at work could be fun? Maybe that makes some people roll their eyes, but I really believe it can be a pleasure. It can feel like flow when we drop our old ideas of work and step into what else is possible.

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. In this episode, I have the pleasure of connecting with Ann Le and Meg Buzzi, authors of The In-Between: A Companion for Uncertain Times. In their book, they offer an explore prompts like how can we stay engaged and motivated given the chaotic and uncertain landscape of work? And what can we do right now to prepare for a future we do not know? I can imagine many listeners are saying to themselves right now, "Yeah, how do we do that?" And as we're recording this episode, three plus years into a global pandemic, a racial awakening that still is resonating in various ways across the United States, and companies that are actively designing and redesigning alternate work arrangements, these and more related questions are very much top of mind for many of us. I'm excited to spend this time with Ann and Meg to learn more about how they're thinking about it a year now after their book's publication, and what's resonating for them as we continue to live into futures we do not know. So Ann and Meg, welcome to the podcast.

Meg Buzzi:

Thanks so much.

Ann Le:

Thank you, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

I know you both wear multiple hats, and maybe to really ground us in the conversation today, can I invite you each to introduce yourselves and the work you do?

Meg Buzzi:

Sure. Ann, why don't you go first?

Ann Le:

My byline is short. I am a fractional CFO consultant. Come on board to nonprofits, startups, usually in that finance capacity, short-term projects. I've been doing that for about 12 years, have had the pleasure of working with Meg here. Meg, can you tell us about the work you do?

Meg Buzzi:

I have been working most of my career in tech, not as an engineer, but as a change management professional. I put that in quotes because I feel like change is not something that's easy to do professionally. And I have been working for the past 10 years or so specifically on how to help teams become more trusting, more effective, more impactful, and teams that suck less. So I've been working a lot as a coach, as a learning consultant, as an organizational designer to really help change initiatives or teams inside organizations reconnect to their purpose.

Ann Le:

And in my work, I've worked with dozens of teams now, and even though it's in that operations or finance capacity, inevitably there's more to unpack with an organization. So Meg is my go-to. "Meg, come in, let's dissect this. Let's figure out what this team needs, because it's not about just the bottom line.| So Meg has been really great at just unearthing some other gaps in problem spots in teams that actually can then make us sing. That's where we've intersected with one another.

Tim Cynova:

Well, we're certainly living during a time that has exposed a lot of gaps and different ways that we might go about things that pre-pandemic people didn't give much thought to or most people didn't give much thought to. How we work, what gives you energy, how do we manage change? And so I'm really excited to hear what led you two to think, oh, maybe we should write a book.

Meg Buzzi:

Our origin story is fascinating. I met Ann about 12 years ago when I first moved to Los Angeles, and I showed up to an event that she was hosting at one of her organizations. And over the years, she and I have worked together on a variety of teams and initiatives, and we just started to see these patterns together of when work gets stuck, when there are obstacles to these big initiatives that seem to have lots of momentum or money behind them, but they're still not functioning. And so we kept looking and kept looking and I think we just, through our conversations and work together, identified some pretty specific patterns we saw over and over that inspired us, especially during lockdown, to put them to paper and say, "Oh my gosh, do other people see it the way we see it? Maybe there is an opportunity for us to show our part of the world where we think the ecosystem could be improved and all the changes that could happen with very minimal effort." And a lot of that change starts with the individual. I'll stop there and see if Ann has anything to add.

Ann Le:

We also had all these templates and had talked about all the great work that Meg does in all of her workshops, all of the grounding rituals that she does with teams, all the juicy meeting things that she brings to the team retreats or strategy sessions. And I said, "What if we just compiled it in a book?" So our book is divided into a couple of different parts. One is just our treatise about how we see the direction of work and how individuals exist in it. The second part is our framework around the wheel, which we can get into as well.

And then the last part, which I think is the more fun part, is really, and I want to give credit to Meg for this. It's all of her little gems that she gets paid to do to come into the teams and share out with everyone, but now we've just distilled it into the book. Yes, it's also how do we want to change the world, but also how do we share this and also monetize it in some ways? That was the beginning of the in-between for that.

Meg Buzzi:

Ooh, I have one juicy thing to add if I could, which is building off of something that Ann said. We also wanted to link these big ideas and patterns we were seeing out in the work world down to that grounded root of what can a single person do to make it better? And you don't have to be the CEO or the CFO or the expert to do it. So to Ann's point about the exercise, we wanted to make sure the last part of the book was incredibly practical, and that anybody from anywhere inside the organization could do some things to make work better.

Ann Le:

There is an element of woo to this, Tim, that I'm sure you've read through that isn't just about the four-hour work week or any kind of productivity hacks, and sharing out the information too. I think also we are very clear about we're not reinventing the wheel here. I think that's what's neat about this is some of the rituals that Meg points out, some of the things that we're thinking about, even just meditation as a part of your work life practice. This is ancient stuff that people have been doing, and how do we go back and reconnect to that?

Meg Buzzi:

That's a great point, Ann. There's nothing in this book that is novel. It's really looking at what are things humans have done throughout history to solve problems together and to be in complexity together?

Tim Cynova:

I often find that when working with various companies and groups, it's as though there's a magic wand that you can wave to fix this massive problem. Retention in a competitive location like San Francisco where it's really expensive to live there and talking to nonprofits who are competing with for-profit software development companies that have very different resources. What are those tools that you can use? What are the patterns that you see that sort of transcend sector, organization, that are just human beings coming together to try and accomplish something? And then what can you actually do, rather than just continue to talk about it and talk about it, but to one of the prompts that include what can you do right now to really move toward what you really want in an uncertain future?

Ann Le:

Maybe I can start with this because this is how Meg and I usually interact, which is, "I have this problem that I'm seeing. Meg, what do we do?" And this ties to the book too. I'm sure you both feel this as well. I think what I talk to my founders or my executive teams about is the piece about employees and retention. I think people still view, even after all these years, work as a transaction. "I'm paying you to do this. You should do this." What are we doing incorrectly? And is it the scope? Is it we're not paying people enough? And everyone just used the same thing out of their toolbox. And I think people are not seeing the bigger picture of what is a good job? What is good work? And they're not addressing the agita that's around what people are feeling that work isn't wrapped up in your identity anymore.

And maybe for some people it is too, but it's not in the same way. And I don't know if organizations are really going to their people or to their audience and saying, "What is meaningful work to you? And how does that fit into how you're seeing the world now?" And I'm not even just saying work-life balance, but there's something much broader that everyone's really delving into in their own personal lives. And maybe it's okay also if work has to look at their current workforce and say, "Hey, they're not interested in a bonus. Maybe they want a week off that's paid. Maybe they want someone to celebrate their birthday." Just asking those questions I think is important.

Meg Buzzi:

One that I would add in terms of the patterns that Tim's asking about, one is an abdication of accountability. So one pattern I see is people, whether they're managers, leaders, whether they're just individual contributors, they back out and they say, "Well, it's above my pay grade or I don't want to deal with it," or dah dah. They back out of any responsibility for the collective. They're just going to do what's inside their job. And so I think that that's pervasive everywhere and it creates a decay in the social fabric because everyone's just, like Ann said, it's just transactional. Except that we know it's not really transactional, because people are still bringing their emotional stuff to work. They're still bringing their relationships to work, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, we do better not to deny that we do that.

Gallup's 2023 State of the Workplace talks about the single biggest issue being engagement. And what that means is that people just aren't paying attention. They're not in relationship with each other or with the work, or maybe the leaders are not really in relationship to the people they're employing. All of these dynamics are at play, but there's just this, I would call it a weakening of the social fabric. And because that communication or that relationship isn't happening, the work and the product suffer. The profit suffers. The bottom line suffers. So all the things "Ann the CFO" cares about, all of those things suffer when you don't address the relational stuff that's happening in the organization.

And it doesn't have to be like taking medicine. It doesn't have to be everybody sort of feeling ashamed for how it's been or whatever. It doesn't have to be an unpleasant experience. It's really about what are practices we can bring in to facilitate the growth of that social fabric. Because people change and forget to tell each other. People change in the workplace, the work itself changes, and the communication just doesn't keep up with it. And so the solution is not to have 80 more meetings so that we all communicate. The solution is not six more Slack channels so that we can communicate. The solution is actually creating space and rituals to connect us with each other.

Tim Cynova:

I hear almost more of an increase in understanding, not communicating. We've got countless Slack channels and meetings and whatnot, so we're communicating or we're acting like we're communicating, but we're not actually understanding each other and how we come together as a team. Which to your point, I often think about an organization that might have the exact same people from January 2020. They're not the exact same people now. And I think most of us have gone through what do I really value when I can't have that thing? I used to not give any thought to that, but now that I wasn't able to connect with people for two years, or family care, all these other things have sort of changed the dynamics of how we relate to work. And even from a transactional, I think it is a transaction. I'm giving this company my knowledge, skills and abilities and expertise in exchange for money, and is that the right balance?

And we see with a lot of the employment right now where people are saying, "No, this isn't what I want to get from life and work." I have a friend who wrote an article about work as the new religion. He is a pastor and he was comparing the decline in people who are a part of organized religion, and are people trying to get more from the workplace than maybe they should? So trying to balance all those different things where, as you said, people are bringing a lot with them. Maybe what's the right balance or what's a better balance or how should we even think about balance when the workplace is where we spend the bulk of our waking hours?

Meg Buzzi:

I'm thinking about a crisis of listening. I just think of the swirl of issues around we don't have a lot of attention to give. We don't have a lot of focus to give. Our listening might be compromised because there's a lot of noise, both literal and figurative, around us. And so again, I feel like there's this pervasive, staff and leadership, for example, how are they even listening to each other? I think with the strikes we see across the country right now. One of the fundamental things is, okay, so this writer's strike here in Los Angeles lasted over five months. At the end of the day, they got everything they asked for, but we had to go through this very punishing process where no one was listening to each other. How might we, and I believe this is possible, how might we shrink the time it takes to begin to really hear how we are changing?

Because people are changing, have changed over the last three years, in a very fundamental way. How might be able to hear it so that those folks feel acknowledged? Or else they're still going to be, like Ann said, that agita of no one is hearing what I need. And I think that also connects to feeling like their values aren't heard or recognized or seen.

Ann Le:

I wonder too, and I think this was part of us writing this book, Meg, is pulling out of people, what are their values? With everything shifting as it is, maybe the strike is a little bit more clear. "Let's talk about AI, let's talk about residuals." That's tactical and logistical. But I know sometimes when I've talked to colleagues or people I've worked with, it's also helping them name, "Okay, I'm getting paid for this, I'm being offered this," but they're still figuring out what's important to them. And that also dives into, "Is where I'm at the right place too? And what are the steps I need to do to listen to myself and what do I value in that?" I think we always presume that it's easy to sit down and have a conversation like, Tim, you're my CEO. You're going to tell me X, Y, Z, and then you're going to hear from me, "Well, I know what Ann wants," but what do you do, Tim, if I'm still figuring it out?

Tim Cynova:

Well, and not acknowledging that no one has this figured out. There's people who pretend like they do or who seem like they do, but no one's lived through a global pandemic. And trying to figure out this is the first time in most people's lives when they don't have to live in the same place where they work, so how do you decide where you want to live? What are your criteria for that, if it can be separate from where you need to work? So these all are new questions that we're as human beings trying to wrestle with, because maybe this isn't exactly what we want, but where's the line? And acknowledging that and surfacing it in maybe ways that went unknown or unarticulated pre-pandemic.

Meg Buzzi:

I think you just explained the title of our book, because it is this in-between time when we've got one foot in the world of still have to pay my bills, still have to pay utilities. All these things need to happen in the old physical material world, and yet I have one foot in this new world where I can work anywhere on any time zone. My team is global and hybrid. My job might be amorphous. I might go from project to project rather than having a single title or career for several years. So I think part of the collective angst right now is the ambiguity and the duplicity, having to be in both. Because we're watching the old systems. We're watching it right now in Congress. They're facing obstacles because of their own rules. So something about the structure just doesn't work for us anymore, the way we work, and I would say it's the same at work.

We've been fed this concept that balance is possible, that work-life balance is even a thing that exists, but balance is not a static state either. It's a constant movement. When your body is standing up, there's all these micro movements going on in the bottoms of your feet to keep balance, keep balance, keep balance. You might not even register that. To you, you're just standing still. When you zoom into what balance is, it's all these tiny, tiny, tiny adjustments. And so we look at some of the exercises in these books, these tiny adjustments that you can make to restore some of that balance. And it's not permanent and it's not linear, but there's ways to recapture your footing at certain moments because you are moving between these different worlds.

Tim Cynova:

I love that you start breaking it down to it seems stable, but there's a lot of stuff shifting. And as you talk about, the old systems are tanking. The brilliant choreographer Liz Lerman describes things as the snapback. And I think a lot of people are experienced in that snapback where we're in between and the systems want you to go back to the way they were because they're built to sustain themselves in that or seemingly built to sustain themselves in that. Well, we've just experienced different ways of being and connecting in ways that allow more people to thrive, that it can be equitable, just, inclusive. When you're working with organizations, when you wrote this book, what are some of the things that would be useful right now as people are like, "I feel like my organization is snapping back, and going back is not what's going to be helpful to us. How can we move forward in this ambiguity?" What do you typically advise? What do you think are some things that would resonate with people?

Meg Buzzi:

One of the things that I love is doing a listening tour, convening spaces for people in the organizations to say what they need and to witness their current experience. My consultancy is called The Present of Work because the current zeitgeist is all about the future of work, but I'm like, "Okay, we're never going to get to this mechanical, robotic, AI-assisted future that is going to be both nightmarish and very great for us, apparently. We're never going to reach that spot until we deal with what is present, what's happening right now." I would say most organizations have not actually sat down and asked their employees in the last two years, "What do you need now? What's work like now? What's here now? How are these projects working now?"

To me, it's anything that's going to help self-examination so that you can take a snapshot in time to say what's actually here, and then take a moment to reflect it back to the people in the organization. "Here's what we heard. Does this sound right? Does it feel right? Does it look right? Add or subtract? That first step is just having conversations to develop a collective snapshot of where are we even, because there's all these assumptions and stories about here's who this company is, and we've been around for how many years and dah, dah, dah, dah. But as you said, Tim, the last two or three years are unprecedented. So many different things have happened. How do we know where our workers are? How do we know how our leaders feel? We don't, really.

Ann Le:

I love what you said, Meg. You do such important work with getting teams onto their path of discovery about who they are, and I don't want to sound reductive about it, but once you get your team to that place, then you're teaching them how to adapt because this just goes back to the volatility of the world. It's not even just pandemic, it's climate crisis. It's a war that gets started in Europe and affects the bond markets and then that loan you're about to sign. I've seen so many things happen that, wow, we didn't expect a hurricane in LA. We didn't expect Congress to shut down that now affect X, Y, Z that we were planning on, and even distills to conversations I'm having with my kids where you look at schools in LA. Let's get them into arts, let's get them into STEM. And I'm like, "We don't even know what jobs are going to be out there, and our parents certainly didn't."

And I just want to teach my kids to be adaptable, and social emotional learning. There's research out there that says if you can get your kids at middle school, even late elementary, just to get social emotional learning habits and [inaudible 00:22:32] there, you don't even need academics. If you think about it, it's just like how to interact with people and kindness, and they're on their way. It's very different now. There's no box you get to sit in these days. You don't know what's going to happen, so get your team in order, people.

Tim Cynova:

Well, and how would you recommend that? What have you found is helpful?

Meg Buzzi:

I think one of the biggest things is getting a snapshot. It's a snapshot of the team or the org, whatever you're looking at. Maybe it's a change initiative, maybe it's a single project or program, but you want to take a snapshot, which is what we help with, and then give everyone a chance to look at it together. We're looking at the same picture together and we're describing it together, because typically you're just looking at one tiny piece of the snapshot and you've missed the larger context. That's part of giving everyone the same context so that then you can move forward with things like strategy or other initiatives, getting everyone on the same page. And then creating practices in the team or organization that give people a place to listen to each other and make updates to that collective snapshot.

Maybe this sounds really esoteric. I'll bring it to ground. Some of the basic concepts that we use in agile software development are great patterns to use for teams to stay together in the change. Simple, simple, simple things like meeting a few days a week as a standup. So 10 minutes in the morning you stand in a circle and you tell your coworkers, "Here are the things I'm working on today and here's an obstacle I'm facing." So getting into that practice, back to the beginning of our conversation, about self-accountability, and performing and practicing that self accountability with the other people that you're working with and saying, "I'm going to be transparent about what I'm working on and when I'm having issues." And it's just practicing a muscle so that you're showing up for your team in a consistent way. And that, again, creates better product, better services, more consistent performance on the front end.

Tim Cynova:

I can imagine knowing both of you, the work that you do, writing a book is putting your ideas in a point in time, and as soon as it's done, you're probably like, "Well, that's starting to get out of date." So I'm curious, what has changed in your thinking over the years since you published? And also, what could you not figure out how to get into this book, but you're like, it would be really important, but it was an idea that didn't fit or is a tangential concept that we couldn't include or didn't feel fit in this that is also important to consider in this work?

Meg Buzzi:

In terms of since we've published this, I remember when we wrote it feeling fear that the stuff in this book was very radical. Now it seems tame, to me at least. And I'm not sure if this is helpful to the audience or not, but things that seemed really radical to entertain at the beginning of lockdown, even making the statement, "Work is never going back to the way it was," felt like this big radical thing. Are we sure? And now in retrospect, that was an understatement.

Ann Le:

I echo that. I think that's my only concern. Certain concepts feel dated now. You mentioned things around the fallacy of productivity or the need to work out what your stories are. Sometimes I think people maybe have moved beyond that a little bit. I'm feeling if there's one thing I would like to add more is we have such a small section, Meg, if you recall, around the connection to your body. And I think now what doesn't feel dated and people are talking about more is how much the self-care of your health is. When I'm talking, people are really paying more attention to. Maybe it's our age too, but I think you're starting to see the sickness in their thirties and their forties. And talking to some of my friends, they're like, "Ann, wait until you're in your fifties and sixties. Everyone's going to be talking about their health." But I feel like I'm hearing that more, both mental health and also physical health and how that's manifesting for people.

There's a book too. There's probably more to speak about how work and how you're thinking about things that are unresolved around your values and the purpose of living is translating into unhealthiness.

Meg Buzzi:

What Ann is bringing up about physical body and also spiritual body, if we can be so bold. There's not a lot of work in the US published around work and spirituality, and I want to make the distinction spiritual, not religious, but there's lots of research happening in other parts of the world like India and some parts of Africa where they're looking at the impact that individual spirituality or spiritual practice has on work and performance. So I think there's work there to be done that I'm really interested in. And then from a practice's point of view, from a practical team point of view, somatics, which is using the body to understand things, using the body to solve problems, which might sound crazy in a work context.

But as an example, just this week, I was working with a big nonprofit here in Los Angeles. And during our learning offsite for the team, we did something called Social Presencing Theater, which is from a practitioner called Arawana Hayashi who's affiliated with MIT. And the idea of the team working through their problems even in motion with their bodies, which maybe for your listeners sounds super weird, but it was very illuminating for people. So I think there are a lot of emergent practices that use our physical selves to move through the work.

Tim Cynova:

I love that example, especially as we're thinking about what's best done in person versus what can be done via Zoom, via remote, and using that as an example of there's something that is very difficult to do when you're all in a Zoom rectangle together. You can do it, but the value of doing it in place together probably resonates a lot more for that group. No surprise, our time is flying by. And speaking about flying and landing the planes, as we land the plane on our conversation today, where do you both want to land it?

Meg Buzzi:

I would love to just make an invitation, because our book starts with an invitation to rethink and redefine how you feel about work, your relationship to work, how you might define work. I want to leave this conversation with an ellipsis. That's an invitation to engage with either Ann or I. If you're interested in talking about dynamics on your team, if you're interested in bringing more energy and motivation to an initiative in your organization, or even if you're just looking at wanting to engage or understand your customers or your community differently, we would love to talk.

Ann Le:

In the theme also of work shouldn't suck, agree, it shouldn't. I'd also would like to say it doesn't have to be that hard. I think the hard part is just making time and space for it and looking at some dark spots, but otherwise we would encourage everyone to make that time for that path of discovery, for themselves and for their teams.

Meg Buzzi:

Thank you. And that makes me want to add that it can be a pleasure. I always say, "What if solving the problems at work could be fun?" Maybe that makes some people roll their eyes, but I really believe it can be a pleasure. It can feel like flow when we drop our old ideas of work and step into what else is possible.

Ann Le:

It's beautiful. Purpose. It's fun to find it.

Tim Cynova:

Ann and Meg, thank you so much for your time today, for your offering. For those who want to explore the book, explore more about the work that you're doing, you can find the link in the episode description for this podcast episode. And Ann and Meg, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Ann Le:

Thank you, Tim.

Meg Buzzi:

Tim, thank you so much. It's so good to have HR experts out there who are following the new path.

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 a phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Gen Z in the Workplace (EP.75)

In this episode, Tim Cynova is in conversation with Tammy Dowley-Blackman, an entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience in leadership and organizational development.  A differentiator for Tammy in this work comes in that she’s sat in many of the proverbial seats at the table: serving as a CEO and key decision-maker, a board member, a sought-after consultant, a leadership development content creator, and a key partner to corporations, nonprofits, government entities, and philanthropic institutions.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS Feed

Updated

March 26, 2024

In this episode, Tim Cynova is in conversation with Tammy Dowley-Blackman, an entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience in leadership and organizational development. A differentiator for Tammy in this work comes in that she’s sat in many of the proverbial seats at the table: serving as a CEO and key decision-maker, a board member, a sought-after consultant, a leadership development content creator, and a key partner to corporations, government entities, nonprofits, and philanthropic institutions.

Episode Highlights:

  • The needs and expectations of Gen Z in the workplace,

  • The impact of the pandemic on work and how organizations can adapt to the changing landscape,

  • The importance of rethinking and reimagining performance evaluations and strategic planning,

  • Developing futurist mindsets,

  • And, the need for organizations to invest in professional development and create equitable and inclusive work environments.

Stay tuned for upcoming episodes on executive coaches who center equity and inclusion in their practice, and the authors of "The In-Between: A Companion Book For Uncertain Times.” Plus, catch season two of "White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-Racism" as well as an episode on values-based collective bargaining processes.

 

Bios

Tammy Dowley-Blackman (she/her) collaborates with the corporate, government, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors to build an intergenerational pipeline of leaders equipped to deliver solutions for today’s complex global workplace. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and Harvard University is an author, entrepreneur, leadership expert, nonprofit executive, philanthropic leader and professor.

She is the CEO of Tammy Dowley-Blackman Group, LLC, a certified National Supplier Development Council Minority Business Enterprise (MBE), Small Business Administration (SBA) Woman Owned Small Business (WOSB), and Women’s Business Enterprise Network Council (WBENC) woman-owned company, as well as a graduate of the C200 Champion Program and Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program. The company is comprised of a suite of brands, including TDB Group Strategic Advisory, a management consulting firm specializing in organizational and leadership development for the corporate, government, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors; Looking Forward Lab, a media content company focused on Gen Z, which partners with corporations and higher education systems to offer a full-service learning engagement model that delivers workforce development solutions; and Cooper + Lowe, a company that serves as an incubator offering full back-office management support for women interested in transitioning to entrepreneurship and thought leadership. Each of the companies has a long legacy of embedding diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging (DEIAB) in its values, collaborations, and outcomes.

In addition, Tammy recently completed her six-year term as the president of the TSNE Board of Directors, where she helped lead the $64 million-dollar organization through unprecedented leadership and business model strategic alignment and planning. She also provides leadership as a Board Director for the Proteus Fund and as an Advisory Board member for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the University of North Carolina School of Law Director Diversity Initiative. Find Tammy online at tammydb.com.

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I am Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well that. In this episode I have the honor of chatting with the awesome Tammy Dowley-Blackman. Tammy is an entrepreneur who has spent twenty-plus years building companies focused on delivering innovative approaches to leadership and organizational development. A differentiator for Tammy in this work comes in that she sat in many of the proverbial seats at the table serving as a CEO and key decision maker, a board member, a sought-after consultant, a leadership development content creator, and a key partner to corporations, government entities, nonprofits, and philanthropic institutions. You can find more about Tammy in our bio linked in the episode description, so let's get going. Tammy, welcome to the podcast.

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

So nice to be here. Thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

Before we really dive into the conversation, why don't we just start with how do you typically introduce yourself and the work that you do?

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

Some of it you covered. Thank you for that great introduction. These conversations are always interesting because sometimes it is about, well tell me, you used to be a former CEO and executive director of nonprofits. Some other people know me because I used to be in higher education and then there are others who only know me because of the work I've done for twenty-plus years in philanthropy. So it's always funny in terms of which of those conversations we're going to start with and what I always say is that it always comes back to the same through line that for me it's always been about two things, access and leadership development.

And over time that leadership development extended out to organizational development, but it really is that through line for my entire career and really got defined in this pivotal transformative moment when I was 14 years old, fellow friends and students and kids knew they wanted to be doctors or NBA players or ballerinas or whatever it may have been. And I was talking about nonprofit and foundation and development and looking at me like I was so weird, but I learned about it at 14 and I was intrigued. So just depends on where I meet people or where they've gotten to know me. But I always say that through line is about access and leadership development.

Tim Cynova:

In preparation for our conversation, I was reflecting back on when we first met. I looked back in my calendar and it was January 2020, you were helping facilitate a planning session and then global pandemic and so much about what we factored into our plans changed seemingly overnight, personally, professionally, organizationally, really testing values and shifting priorities from that moment pre-pandemic. As you reflect on the work that you were doing pre-pandemic and into the pandemic and where we are now, what's been the same? What's changed? How are you thinking about work differently? What are some of the themes that maybe have emerged during this unique time in our lives?

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

It's definitely been this unique time in all of our lives, and to your point, personally and professionally, there was no way around that. Somehow someone could just kind of silo this and it only was going to affect their work or only affect their personal lives. It was all of it and continues to be. So prior to the pandemic, I had moved to Baltimore from living in New England, particularly Boston, Cambridge for about 13 years, and I moved to Baltimore, Maryland in 2018 with the intention of really now trying to more center my travel because I traveled 45 weeks a year, trying to center that travel so it wouldn't be as extensive to get to Atlanta or New Orleans, though I love Boston and Cambridge, it could be a little bit longer to get to things. Now I'm based in Baltimore, I could hop on an Acela train, be in Philadelphia in an hour, go to meetings, then go on to New York and end up in Boston by the end of the day. Which people think, well, you could do that from Boston, but the timing is a little bit differently to get all those cities in the same day, unlike when you're coming from the South.

So that mattered. I was traveling and I loved that being in person. I love the kinds of projects that I was able to work on. Everything from the Surdna Foundation, working with Fractured Atlas to work that I was doing with Haley House and with symphonies and other arts organizations, Cambridge Innovation Center, which is a real estate company, they were just varied and I love that we were in place with their teams and asking questions and really trying to think through. But what was difficult is trying to sometimes get those teams to think about, they could have these conversations, they didn't always need to be in place in space and we could do that, but that we could actually get more done if we had the ability to tap into them sometimes quicker, sooner. And if we could do some of that virtually and for many of those teams, they just could not wrap their heads around that.

And of course all that changed in March 2020. I literally was in a board meeting with a client February 24th of 2020 and having a board member say, "Oh no, we could never be remote. That's ridiculous. People would think down on us, we don't have an office." Just going on and on about this wasn't a realistic thing to not have an office and to be in place and space. What I did certainly appreciate was that he was saying that I love the ability to connect with people, to riff off of things, ask questions, put new questions out there and that's right. That was harder over Zoom sometimes when particularly after you've done this for 18 months, two years and on and on, that was harder. So it's been really nice to now be back in person, but that real shift around how we did our work, not how much work, it actually gave us a chance to do even more work deeper and to be really in service of all the people we were working with across corporate, government, nonprofit and philanthropic.

But it also was really odd to have gone an entire year, 18 months, working on a project with a team and have never met them in person. So now as we've come out of the pandemic and resume travel, though many of those companies, organizations still might have full remote or hybrid. I've now been trying to go to those cities to meet clients that we've worked with but didn't get a chance to ever meet in person, to finally meet them in person, do updates, check in on them, and so there are ways in which we've changed our work around those check-ins as well. Those are much more extensive processes or ways in which we offer them the opportunity to reconnect on the project, sort of almost an addendum to that work we were doing, knowing that it just was a little odd to do it that way. But there are other ways in which we got to do the work more deeply and again to give them a lot more time because it wasn't, we've now got to schedule only this meeting on the calendar when we all can be in the same building.

So definitely has changed and it's certainly as you said, not just professionally but also personally as well. In terms of how I get to be in my own city, I lived here in Baltimore, but for literally the first two years I did very little in Baltimore because of being on a plane train or in an on-world deal for eight, five weeks a year. And so literally walking my neighborhood and getting to know my neighbors in a different way, being able to spend more time at things like the Baltimore Museum of Art, which I enjoy. So there've been things that have been pros and there certainly have been things that have been cons and harder, but it has definitely changed.

Tim Cynova:

I feel like we're in a moment where there's such a pull or in the words of Liz Lerman, the Snapback, to what it was before the pandemic and forgetting that we did work and we coordinated in different ways and that work doesn't all have to happen in the same way, but that intentionality as you were talking about what has to be done in person or what benefits from being done in person versus we really don't have to do that in person. And this seems to be this sort of wholesale snapback to, well, we need to be in person because productivity is better or getting better results. And rather than thinking like, okay, so who does that benefit? Still in this moment where people are still pretty exhausted in the uncertainty of life and as you think about organizations that you work with, what seems to work better when you're in person and what seems to work better virtually?

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

We're seeing that in person works better now when we actually come and we can focus over a couple of days. I was working with the Schott Foundation for Public Education and I love that they had offices, but they really did a lot of work remote because the team was on the road making connections, they were at conferences, they were meeting doing site visits. But one of the things they always held true was that they came together every two or so months, the full team came together for two days to work deeply together, be able to have lunch together, be able to just be in community, but really putting all that brain power in one room so they could just power through a lot of work together. And they really thrived off those opportunities to have everyone together there. And they were doing that before the pandemic, of course had to then decide to do that virtually as we moved into the pandemic, but was really happy to see, even though they were a team that decided to give up office space, they didn't give up that tradition and actually that tradition has become even more important to them and it's way of not only how they personally thrive, it feeds them individually as team members, but it feeds the work.

It feeds their ability to be innovative in place and space. So that's healthy respect for both and it's something that we certainly have recommended for other teams that we work with. I was just working with the team on Tuesday and we came together, they've got team members in Massachusetts and in New York and Chicago and other places, and we were all in Philadelphia over the course of an evening for dinner and then a meeting all day. And everyone left just saying it was the first time they had been in person altogether for 18 months and everyone just feeling really rejuvenated and feeling like they can't wait for us to do this again in September. Does that mean that team wasn't effective? Not at all. That team works and the kind of work they take on national work that has national significance for all of us. They have just added more great work and they've been innovating and adding other partners.

It didn't stop them and they were always working remotely, but this way in which being much more intentional and conscientious about how they use time when they come together is really important. So we're seeing many more of our teams doing this more formal gathering, actually formalizing it with the agenda and how we're going to move through that work and how we're connecting it to their strategic plan or some other particular work that they've got coming on deck, how they're preparing for the board meeting, for example. Using it for these really important deep dives but also leaving some visioning time in there as well and not visioning in that it only has to be visioning connected to strategic plan visioning for thinking about actually trying to get ahead of things, trying to be forward-thinking, trying to do that foresight thinking that just if you don't make that intentional can just get away from you and I meant to do that or we just never got a chance, but very difficult to do when you're just in the thick of it.

So we're seeing a lot more of our teams that we work with who are hearing us about that. So another example Tim, I'm getting is, I've got a meeting next week back to back with two co-directors, planning meetings, opportunities for them to connect. They're together, they're doing a ton of work, but they're not getting a ton of time to just be and to really just be able to reflect without putting out the fires, answering questions, working with the board. This is just an opportunity for them and they wanted to facilitate it. So not facilitated in that it's highly formalized but facilitated in that they've given me a list of here are the big things we're challenged with right now. We're working through and asking me to help be a thought partner and how they can then sequence that thinking and how they can come out with a set of decisions. So we're seeing people being much more open to these sort of deep dive times that they can do a lot of work and they don't have to be in an office per se all the time, but they are more conscientious about we've got to still build in these ways in which we connect and build in this planning time that's more precious than ever.

Tim Cynova:

You're someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about differences between generations. In particular, you've done work focusing on Gen Z leaders. One of the other things we've heard a lot over the past couple of years is this is better for young people or they like to do this or their values are not aligned with being in office five days a week, or all these stereotypes that come into play and you're someone who has actually worked on this, thought about it, worked with different groups and think about attitudes and beliefs and values shared between generations and amongst generations. How are you seeing it these days that might differ with what the common narratives are around how people want to and how people do show up in the workplace?

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

So let me answer this by actually giving you a little context. So there are three companies that live under Tammy Dowley-Blackman Group. One is the strategic advisory management consulting, the longest serving company, and that's our TDB group strategic advisory. Then there's Looking Forward Lab, which you were just talking about, which was an idea that began over 10 years ago. I am a mother of a Gen Zer and I really was beginning to think about Gen Z when my daughter was five years old thinking they're going to be really different, they're showing up differently as children, they're going to be really different and I wonder what this is going to look like and I was just intrigued by it, but really doubled down on the idea that this was a company to develop when I was asked to come in and do work with a team in Boston.

The CEO presented is, "We've been doing some diversity, equity, inclusion work, but we had to stop to do some other kind of thinking expansion. I think we may have gotten off track and I'm worried that now team members just might not be connecting as much to the work or feel like disillusioned because we had to take a pause. Can you come in and just help me sort this?" When I get there, I realize what I had to go back to this, the CEO and say is, "Sure, there's always a conversation about diversity, equity, inclusion, and we've extended that to accessibility and belonging, but what you actually have here is about generational issues, how generations are showing up differently in the workplace about different definitions of what it means to understand the work, do the work, professionalism." Certainly not lack of passion, certainly not lack of care, certainly no lack of respect, but just really different in how they were doing the work and that really was the genesis of where it had been a notion, a concept, and I had developed a company but was fairly [inaudible 00:14:03] now it was, "No, you're onto something."

And so I'm so glad that I was already thinking about this, doing the work, asking the questions well before the pandemic because then that added another layer that none of us ever could have imagined. So yes, this generation, what we know are a couple of things. When we talk about Gen Z is that generation roughly between 1995-2012, those who are the older end started entering the workforce in 2018 and really had only just begun and then the pandemic happened. I think about my own goddaughter had been in the workforce only a year there and laid off, there and missing all of those things now that she was loving about being in place and space, asking questions, digging in, mentoring. She was working for a tech company and just really loving it and now she's back home in Philadelphia, loves being with her parents, but this is not what she thought she was going to be doing at 23/24 years old.

And so when I talk to Gen Z and I talk to those who are hiring them and managing and supervising them, I'm trying to find this middle place and say, "Here's the sweet spot. This isn't about right or wrong, good or bad, we're always going to have generational differences, but here's where you all actually overlap." And where they overlap is that people make a lot of assumptions about Gen Z. Gen Z actually, yes, would like the opportunity for there to be more space and to be hybrid, but many Gen Zers report liking being in the workplace because many of them are very acutely conscientiously thinking about the fact that, "If I don't actually see people, will they know me? Will they get to know me? How will I learn?" So much of you and I can point to so many instances where literally you were in the conference room and you just watched the meeting happening.

You just watched those senior leaders, the way they talked about the work, even the word usage or the way in which they teed up conversations, or the ways in which they manage conflict or tension or invited questions. Those things are much harder to do and gauge over Zoom, and so many more Gen Zers are really aware of that. What I do think that we end up having to also manage though is what it looked like in terms of professionalism. Gen Z is the first generation to come with minimal to no work experience, the first generation in 50 years that doesn't come with a lot of work experience. And so there are things that by not being actually in the workplace, they don't get to see.

And so sometimes many of them can show up lacking professionalism to someone who's more established and it's not an intentional, "I want to be disrespectful." Literally, "I just never learned and I would've learned had we been still in the workplace, but now I only see you on a screen and as soon as we finish our conversation, everything's done. I don't get to walk with you back to the kitchen. You don't invite me to go grab lunch or go to Starbucks or I don't get to invite it to just sit in on a meeting and hear."

And so a lot of that's getting lost. So we're trying to really promote the ways in which you can do some of those things earlier to connect Gen Z. So there are differences. I'm always emphasizing this is not a bad or a good. I'm also emphasizing with those who are established in their careers, don't assume it should be like what you had. And literally I've had to say to some supervisors, "They're angry. They're angry." "Well, why isn't it like when I did it and I had to figure it out and I had to take care of myself." And I said, "And how did you like it? You wish that you didn't have to, so why are you now wanting to do it to a next generation?" So there are parts on both sides where it can get a little tough and I invite humility, but there's no right or wrong here, but there are some ways in which Gen Z is being asked to show up and to do big work without the undergirding that many of us got by being actually in the workplace day to day.

Tim Cynova:

That's one of the things, when I was at Fractured Atlas and we were moving to be an entirely virtual organization before the pandemic that-

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

Wow, you all were pioneers.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, I did. Well, I'm so grateful too because then everyone else had to do it overnight, and really was able to leverage that experience to help other organizations like, "Here's how you move money when you can't access your check stock or you don't have the signature stamp with the check stock." I remember though conversations that we had working with our anti-racism commitment around who benefits when you don't show up in the office, or how does it negatively impact different groups if you can't be in the office? And thinking about that now with the articles that are coming out about Z, as you mentioned, I want to be in the office to hear, to get that mentorship that I can't when we just log off and whatever happens when you're not on the screen, trying to think how we, through a values centered way, intentionally design workplaces that are inclusive and at the same time recognize the other commitments that people have in their life and other responsibilities.

So one part of the dynamic is the flexibility that it allows us and also to flip that being in the office, there's so many benefits to your professional growth in your career that you don't get or that are more challenging. And I think this moment of pause as we're really co-creating thriving workplaces, taking what you're talking about and why do we do it this way? Who benefits, who's included, who feels like they belong and who doesn't, and then how can we iterate into something that's better than what this is? It's really exciting, but it's also really messy part about the work these days is there's no playbook for this. As you're working with organizations that are in this messiness, how are you seeing it? What are you advising that might be of interest to other organizations who are wrestling with these same questions?

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

Yeah, we're actually trying to create the playbook. We are actually saying, "Here's some things that we believe are going to be important." So some others have heard me say that, "Look, those things that we used to see for you're more established in your career and they were more status for, I'm more established in my career, think like executive coaching, professional development. We have got to move those things to the front. We have got to offer those things in order to be equitable, in order to be conscientious about our values and in order to actually provide Gen Z with the experiences that we need them to have to become the problem solvers we need them to be." We can't say I want global leaders. I want incredible leaders and then actually never do anything to prepare them to be those leaders. They're not going to get it through osmosis across the screen.

We are going to have to invest in a very different way. We are working with teams to help them re-sync everything from how they might deploy their resources differently, divvy those resources up differently, so that they can have a bigger bucket for professional development and actually making it a part of what they negotiate with in terms of making it a benefit for Gen Z as they come in the door that we are making those really specific kinds of calls to action. We're also saying to Gen Z, "You're also going to really have to understand the performance review process very differently because again, for some people it's only what I see and if I don't see you then I actually just don't know you. Even though you could be doing incredible work, be really thoughtful, really be innovative and smart, be a good person, all these things. But if I never get to see you, I'm not quite sure how to evaluate you and thus I may not put much effort into it all."

And this is really for me, an equity issue here because I worry that the people who be at the greatest disadvantage when it comes to performance review, and I'm thinking about three, four years down the road from now, as particularly as then it's really looking at salary and growth and trajectory, next step opportunities, that it will be people of color, it will be women and it will be non-binary that it will be all of those folks that have tended to be marginalized in some way, those who are differently able. It is going to be much more difficult. And so I am really concerned that we are building out performance review processes that allow everyone to shine, that allow them to show up in the way that really is representative of them and giving them a chance to be at that table, getting great assignments, all of those things.

And so I think that there are some people of all different backgrounds and when we're talking about Gen Z, who hooray about having this flexibility without thinking this all the way out about what does this mean for me three, four years from now, it might feel good here in the moment, but is it in any way going to detract from my ability to be able to move into advance or to be at different tables later? Those are the kinds of things that I'm starting to really and have been advocating for, but really now putting a curriculum around it. For example, we've created a course as one of those other elements to be able to say a residency program for corporations and others who are hiring numbers of Gen Zers saying, "Give them these things up front. Allow for them to have an understanding. What does it mean to create your portfolio? What does it mean to understand the performance review process? What does it mean to manage up?"

And then also wonderfully able to help those who are hiring and managing them as well because so many of them have said, "Well, I just thought I'd do what I did before, and what they're saying is I just thought I'd treat them like millennials and others." And again, it's not because Gen Z is so precious and special. It's a generation that has a lot of firsts that we've never experienced before in the workplace. It's the most diverse generation, it's the most technologically advanced, but as I said, also the first generation in 50 years to come to the workplace with very little work experience, and so people are expecting a lot of them, of things that they just actually don't know and have no experience with.

Tim Cynova:

This piece about performance evaluation is a theme I increasingly am hearing over the past couple of months. I think it has something to do with, let's get back to productivity and performance and outputs and back to what it used to be before and how most performance management systems, processes, structures, are pretty horrible and don't do that at all. It's very punitive. It's not a learning and growth opportunity. I've been spending a lot of time around regenerative cycles, regenerative business, regenerative HR with my colleague Katrina Donald, and think about what might actually be a better way of approaching this piece, this crucial piece. Because without it, we don't grow. We don't know what we need to be working on sometimes, but also feel like most systems don't recognize that. What's some of the stuff that you've been noodling on in this area that you think would be particularly helpful for organizations who are feeling like they need a performance management system but maybe are more stuck in a model that's not as helpful?

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

We've been talking about it in terms of just that what you said, it is not an annual process, but this should be an ongoing conversation. Everything from even trying to help Gen, Zers understand, "The better you prepare for your meetings with the people that you work with, as well as the people who supervise you, you are signaling to them that you want something more that you require, need something more substantive so that you can do your work and really be a contributor. Not I'm high maintenance and I'm super needy. No, I'm trying to really be a contributor and I need to invest in this in a different way and need you to invest in this in a different way." So even there talking to them about the ways in which they actually request to have regularized meetings so that they can get to know the people they're working with, people they're on projects with, even those kinds of assignments that they'd like to be on and are requesting and the ways in which they think they would again best contribute to those assignments.

Not just having something handed to you but being really proactive and asking about what's the array of what's possible here? Where can I be of the best service, but also where can I learn the most? Thinking about, again, even what professional development offers. We're not talking about professional development in the sense of just that skill set that you do, but we're talking about why don't we talk not only organization, but also the people in those organizations actually teaching them the skills of being futurists about forward-thinking, foresight, thinking about where they can innovate. I'm in this particular group and I'm supposed to work on these five things. Then actually give them time to say, "We need you to actually innovate some element of that. That can be anything from creating a new template so that it gives us better information, helping us to pick a new software or really rethinking our whole intake process on some project that we do."

If we don't start tying this to actual real-time work, experiences, opportunities, questions, that the organization is actually trying to solve for, then it doesn't really feel like anything other than just performative. But when I get to really sit down and we've agreed on, these were the kinds of big questions we were trying to solve, and then I can connect with you and say, "Well, here's what I've been thinking. The research I did or the lit review I put together for my team so that we could better understand what New Zealand was doing on this particular issue." We've got something very different. We're giving people, again, a very different way to show up. I think about even with the philanthropic institutions we work with those that have been really thoughtful about changing their reporting process. This and having worked so many years in this field, the reporting process has been one around you get a grant and you're supposed to report back and it has been blah, boring, uninteresting, unproductive.

It's just again, performative. You're filling in a report length, barely anyone reads it, and it's just, it's really unfortunate. I really started thinking about that even many years ago when I was with the director of the Diversity Fellowship in Boston, and I remember that the Bar Foundation in their report asked one question. They said, "Tell us the thing that was the hardest that you don't actually want to tell us." That was a question in reporting, and I just thought here it is, that's a different thing than asking me how many people did you serve and what were the materials you used? Again, I'm not saying those things weren't important, but they were asking something that was far more valuable and was going to actually give us a way to talk openly and honestly to learn, to continue to learn, share learning, and also ask other questions.

And that's what we are really tying to performance review. And I think the organizations that are going to do that better are going to be doing it in that way. It's not punitive. It's really about learning and it's about innovation and about forward-thinking. We're even doing it, Tim, in the other work we do around, for example, one of these things that has always been really tough for nonprofits is strategic planning, the way in which we've revised what strategic planning looks like is similar to this in the way in which we're saying performance review is one of these things that's tired and it has to be changed.

Tim Cynova:

In the words of our colleague Lauren Ruffin, she would say, it's dusty.

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

You got to love Lauren.

Tim Cynova:

She just has a way of putting something-

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

A way with words.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, very much so. Yeah.

There's so much there. I was reminded of something at Fractured Atlas that we were trying to figure out how to highlight the contributions of everyone in the organization to a way that everyone saw what people were working on this. When you sit in the CEO chair, you don't know what everyone's doing on a day-to-day basis, that's contributing to the mission, the vision, the values, the people that you're serving. And the team came up with this idea to do peer-to-peer bonuses based off of our core behavior values, and they put it in Slack and my colleague Nicola Carpenter and Jillian Wright came up with a system for this, and it was this really beautiful moment where every month people got I think like a hundred points to give out for recognizing contributions around the organization and they would highlight things like, "So-and-so just got off a really challenging call. They did a great job, 25 points."

And every one of the organizations saw this. And to your earlier point about when we're doing performance evaluations, oftentimes we don't know what someone's been working on or you might, recency bias, you kind of forget what they did 10 months ago. That actually was hugely beneficial to the organization and I felt like this was a seemingly small thing to do, but really elevated all the contributions from a great phone call, a well-written email to designing a video that people wouldn't have seen otherwise because it was for a grant proposal and it went through the development office. Thinking about different ways that we can have our, I guess, finger on the pulse, if you will, of what an organization is doing. There are so many different tools now that we can use to do this. You mentioned a couple of times, foresight science, and I know this is a topic that we mentioned, Lauren Ruffin, something that she shares as well. Thinking about the future and what's coming together, what's resonating, what's really of interest for you right now? What's piquing your interest, intellectually stimulating in that area right now?

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

This is where I always feel such great humility in that the work that we get to do, you, Lauren, many of the colleagues you mentioned, other colleagues that we share, that we all get to do. And this is where I am so humbled at the fact that I get to be an entrepreneur because I get to work on so many different projects across so many different industries across the country, and I'm just always so humbled by you seeing so many people doing the work. And one of the things that early on in doing this, I've had a company now for almost 20 years, I realized that it was, yep, the big piece was that people were going to need me to be a thought partner, but they certainly were going to need me to help them create a vision and execute on it. But I also early on realized that they needed a conduit to be able to think about things that they just wouldn't get a chance to think about because so much of it is that they have just got to keep moving on what's in front of them, the strategic plan or the mandate from the board of directors, whatever it might be.

But there are just few times they get to sort of lift their heads up and they were looking to people like me to be able to help them or bring things to the table to say, "Hey, have you thought about this? Have you seen this? Or are you aware of this?" And so always, again, just with great humility and glad to be in that space and appreciate it. For me, what I'm seeing and around thinking about foresight, and I saw Lauren recently and we just had such a great time riffing off of this, of the things that we were seeing and asking and was asking me about this most recent project that I was mentioning around rethinking what strategic planning could look like, particularly for small to midsize organizations that need to do this, but they have to make the case and they need to do the work, but tend to have smaller budgets and just don't have a lot of time, more importantly.

And that's one of the reasons in which we were reimagining this. But it's all kinds of things, again, it's the work with Gen Z. we've been reimagining what their workplace experience looks like, reimagining how we think about leadership. You certainly know this and the work that you all did at Fractured Atlas, again, you all were pioneering around thinking about co-directors and co-leadership. Some of the other things that I'm seeing that we are going to have to rethink, I mentioned performance review, we certainly have been paying a lot of attention to what it means for board of directors for nonprofits, what that is going to look like. We have been paying attention to what the actual development of fundraising for nonprofits, what that's looking like and how that's changing. Thinking a lot about what entrepreneurship looks like and for example, also that this is not, "Oh, I've got a great idea and I'm starting a company. And that's what we're going to do."

Even there, one of the things I mentioned there, three companies under Tammy Dowley-Blackman Group, and the last is Cooper + Lowe, and it's named after two of my sheroes and Anna Julia Cooper, who was this amazing educator, and she attended Oberlin College as I did, and went on to become a teacher, but then this woman's amazing and goes, and to get a PhD at the Sorbonne when she's 65 years old. And then Ann Lowe, many people don't know her, but she was one of the first African-American designers and actually designed Jackie Bouvier's dress when she was marrying President Kennedy, then Senator Kennedy. And this woman is not celebrated for all the ways in which she did this work. And so in this, we started thinking about all the women in particular who were coming and women of color who were coming to ask questions about what does it mean to build a business when you really didn't have that as a background and didn't have funds and family wealth and you didn't get incubated and all of that.

So essentially this company has created fiscal sponsorship, back office support for women entrepreneurs, particularly women of color who otherwise don't have a place or space to land. So that's the kind of additional force I'm thinking, what does it mean to be an entrepreneur? They may not go on to build $20 million companies. That's not the point. But giving them a place and space to actually get their legs under them and to be able to think about what's on the horizon for them, particularly in this professional services industry, which continues to change. All of those things have been things that have been on this plate. So whether again, performance review or what does it look like to introduce Gen Z into the workforce? What do they need? But also entrepreneurship and also what it looks like to think about how these big issues affecting all of us will cut across all of those industries.

Everything from climate change, always have embedded diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, belonging in our work. But it's also been thinking about what innovation looks like there. So many people are still doing it. Let's do a training, and that's not what we are and never have been and don't dismiss training, but saying these are much bigger questions. These are much bigger opportunities to think about and have added accessibility and belonging, very intentional, to say, you can have equity, you can have inclusion, you can have diversity. But then I get there and if you actually then have created no way for me to assessably be a part of anything, obtain anything, what does it mean? And if you then shut me out and I never get to feel like I belong, you always let me know I'm an outsider. Then again, what do any of those things mean? So those are some of the things that I've been focusing attention on around foresight, science, thinking forward and love it when I get into being conversations with others who are also doing that work.

Tim Cynova:

We've talked a little bit about being creative, thinking differently, different approaches. We've talked about entrepreneurs building businesses as you've mentioned, as you think about those things being creative, being entrepreneurial, caring for oneself in entrepreneurial efforts where sometimes it feels like a solo endeavor and it's like you're working all the time, what does it mean to you to be creative, to be an entrepreneur, to do those things in a way that cares for yourself so that you can thrive?

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

There are a couple of things there. There are different ways. To be an entrepreneur is the first part of this. And I think that when people come into this, they really have to say, "There are lots of ways to be successful in your work." And that was one of the greatest lessons for me, and I'll give you this quick, what I mean by that. When I first started my consultancy, I moved it from Berkeley, California to Boston, Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I got there, my daughter was ill and was ill for the next 10 years. So I couldn't be a traditional consultant and I couldn't be the traditional consultant who was all over the place and really had to accept that I was going to be in place and space for the next decade while my daughter was being treated at Children's Hospital or just really needed to be there.

My husband was traveling domestically and internationally, so we both couldn't be on the road. And it was easier for my work because I was able to actually grab on to these amazing colleagues and opportunities in Boston. So it wasn't about I was the mom and I needed to have made this choice, but it was really about whose work was actually gravitating to Boston, and it was more for me. And in this case, I decided, you know what? I'm going to just build here. I keep on my desk a quote that I saw when I was a nineteen-year-old intern at a bank that no longer exists in Cleveland, Ohio called Ameritrust. And I walked by this woman's desk and there was this little sticker and it said, "Bloom where you were planted." And I remember she wrote that to me on a card when I left that summer, and I never forgot it.

Fast-forward a few years later, I go to a new job and there's a little magnet on a cabinet and I see it, "Bloom where you were planted." And I asked this woman about it and she said, "Oh, I inherited it. The magnet was on the file case when I came into this office. Do you want it?" And she gave that to me 30 years ago and I still have it. So that's what I did. I bloomed where I was planted in Boston, I had to be there for a reason. My daughter was ill, I wasn't going to be able to fly all over the place and was able to build a business that is very different than this. So this business of Tammy Dowley-Blackman Group is five years old, but I've been in business for 20 years. It took those 13, 14, whatever it was to get to this new business that could grow nationally and do all of these things.

And I just had to hold steady. And what I realized is that I was building the relationships, I was building the understanding, and I was building all the things that were eventually going to launch that next phase. And when I got to that next phase, then it was going to go really, really fast. So it's that idea when people say, "Oh my goodness, you're overnight success." You're like, "No, I was doing this for 15 years prior, but I was just having to plod along and I couldn't do it in a big way because I had another responsibility. But it was seeding it." And it really is. I think that this idea about having to understand why you're doing it, understanding where you are in that moment, and even where it can feel disappointing, you feeling like, "Whoa, I'm losing ground, or I'm not building as fast or quickly."

Instead, what I understood I was building more deeply. And that really was a lesson for me, Tim, and it was one that filled me, and it was one that actually gave me greater license to be more creative. So I got a chance to be a professor. I loved being with my students. I love teaching nonprofit management and leadership and to be a senior fellow at places like Boston University. That's probably something I wouldn't have had a chance to do if I was on the road 45 weeks a year, not even probably I wouldn't have. I got a chance to really be a thought partner in Boston and work with just about every philanthropic institution and got to know almost all of the nonprofits in some way, even if I wasn't working directly with them, trying to send resources their way, trying to answer questions and again, be a thought partner to them just generally.

That was just so important and a huge lesson and as I said, it filled me, it taught me, but it also started giving me the license to be far more creative than I think if I had just started this company and was able to do it in the traditional way. I keep feeding that creativity by the kinds of partners we take on the way in which I keep thinking about entrepreneurship and building the various companies. Each of these three companies were built out of a request for something, instead of me assuming what was needed, they were requests. And that was important to me as well. But that's also gave license to creativity. I try to take really good care of myself in the sense of the people I get to be around. I get to work with taking the time off that I need, which I wasn't always so great, and if I could give a piece of advice to do that.

And so there are times when we close the office where the whole team so that we can get the rest that we need. We do it from mid-December until after the New Year, and we do it again from mid-August until after Labor Day. We work really hard. And having those set times off means that everyone on the team gets to have that time off. And then lastly, I'll say that what has been for me, and everyone has their thing, I was never the most athletic. I was never the one who was the most artistic or any of those things. But I absolutely adore, crave, need, enjoy, cherish art. And so everywhere I go, I make art a part of that experience. So I was not one who was interested in social media, not because I didn't see the value of it just because in this instance, I was shy, which I'm not typically, but just shy.

But I realized actually where I love social media was that if I didn't talk about... It Wasn't about me and I wasn't putting pictures up of me, but it was about talking about art. I loved it. And so that's why a lot of times the things that people will see on social media, for me, certainly about the clients I work with, the talented team leaders I work with, and Gen Z, those are things, but I wanted to have something else. And it was about, and it was about museums and what I'm seeing and what I'm getting to see differently. And so I think people can see that just pure joy in me when I go to a museum. I just went to the Ackland Museum and when I was in Chapel Hill for a meeting, I saw a piece of art that I literally had just seen the recently in my midnight on Instagram. And I learned about this new African-American artist, Rose Piper. And I walk in and there's one of her pieces, the literal, the childhood joy of what I experienced in that moment. So that's the way I'm taking care of myself, and everybody has their thing and this is mine.

Tim Cynova:

That's wonderful. So much richness in that. Tammy, our time has flown by.

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

No.

Tim Cynova:

Thank you so much for making time and sharing your perspectives and your openness, and your genuineness and your awesomeness to be with. And thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Tammy Dowley-Blackman:

Well, Tim, thank you and just really appreciate your work and that you, again, were one of those pioneers who said, "There's some conversations to be had," and just started talking to people and it became this. And so congratulations and thank you for inviting us to these conversations. It's important, it's helpful, and with great humility, I'm glad to be here.

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. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Wage Transparency and Equity, Part 2 (EP.74)

In this episode, Tim Cynova and Katrina Donald delve into the complex world of wage transparency and equitable compensation, and explore how organizations can navigate these challenges to create fair and inclusive workplaces.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

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Updated

February 2, 2024

In this episode, Tim Cynova and Katrina Donald delve into the complex world of wage transparency and equitable compensation, and explore how organizations can navigate these challenges to create fair and inclusive workplaces.

They explore the need for organizations to list salaries for roles, both internally and externally, as well as the implications wage transparency laws are having across the U.S. The conversation delves into the challenges faced by organizations in creating consistency and fairness in their compensation approaches, particularly when considering factors like internal versus external experience and equity. Tim and Katrina also emphasize the significance of engaging in open and honest conversations about compensation within organizations and the benefits of adopting a holistic approach to compensation.

Episode Highlights:

  • The growing urgency for organizations to have transparent salary information

  • The impact of new and expanding wage transparency laws

  • The challenges organizations face in creating consistency and equity in compensation

  • The importance of having open and honest conversations about compensation

  • How to consider compensation in a more holistic way, beyond just base compensation

  • The benefits of adopting a strict, fixed tier compensation model

Stay tuned for upcoming episodes on executive coaches who center equity and inclusion in their practice, the authors of "The In-Between: A Companion Book For Uncertain Times," and Gen Z in the workplace. Plus, catch season two of "White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-Racism" as well as an episode on values-based collective bargaining processes.

 

Bios

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Katrina Donald (she/her) is based in Treaty 7 Territory and the principal consultant at ever-so-curious. She believes that listening and sensemaking practices bring us into community, reveal pathways forward, encourage and embolden us, and allow for greater impact. Her approach is relational and developmental; she works in partnership with people and organizations to co-design inclusive, collaborative and continuously emerging evaluation and HR strategies. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Manitoba and a Masters Certificate in Organization Development and Change from the Canadian Organization Development Institute (CODI) and the Schulich Executive and Education Centre (SEEC) at York University. She is a mother, wife, daughter, sister, systems thinker, developmental evaluator, program designer, and a Registered Professional Recruiter (RPR). She’s committed to showing up for her own ongoing learning and to building workplaces that are actively anti-racist, praxis-centered and humble as they work through the prickly bramble of change. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. The conversation in this episode was largely lost in the shuffle of life back in 2022 and only recently rediscovered as we've been in the midst of editing a number of episodes to drop in the new year.

Katrina Donald took over hosting duties in this one and turned the interviewer's mic in my direction as we reflected on the shifts that were and are taking place with wage transparency and equitable compensation laws and practice. While we recorded it nearly 18 months ago, we still felt the reflections were worth sharing after a recent listen. But before we dive in, curious about some of the other episodes we have planned for the coming weeks and months? You're in luck. We have one about executive coaches who center equity and inclusion in their practice. We chat with the two authors of The In-Between: A Companion Book For Uncertain Times and we dive into Gen Z in the workplace.

At the same time, the tape is still rolling on even more new episodes, including one about values-based collective bargaining processes and season two of White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-Racism. So stay tuned for all of that in 2024, but now wage equity and transparency. And over to you, Katrina.

Katrina Donald:

You and I have been getting some questions around pay equity and pay transparency. Maybe we could just take a little bit of time here and chat about that.

Tim Cynova:

It's really starting to take off and I think there's some real urgency that organizations are being met with in New York City requiring all employers to list salaries for roles, internal and external. California has the Pay Transparency Act requiring all employers in California with 15 or more employees to post salaries internally and externally, and so there's a lot of organizations right now who don't do anything like this.

I should also say there's a lot of job boards that are requiring this now. And if they list a salary, then if this is a role that exists in their organization already, will people be finding out information about like, "I didn't know this was the band that I could be paid, or where do I fall in this band if it's $60,000 to $80,000? Do I fall on the 60 side or do I fall on the 80 side?" And so a number of organizations are starting to really worry about what this is going to mean to just their operations and the conversations that they have to start having with their teams.

And even organizations that over the past couple eight years have really started to do a lot of racial equity, racial justice work, anti-oppression work, who you might say are aligned with these values, they're not doing this, which is one of the examples a lot of times that gets raised when we're talking about ways to live your values, list the salary. And there's a meme that I think showed up in my LinkedIn feed that was like, "If your pay is so competitive, why don't you list it?"

Katrina Donald:

Yeah, offering a competitive salary and competitive benefits package, but yet like-

Tim Cynova:

Just tell me what they are.

Katrina Donald:

We'll tell you later.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, exactly. I think that's one of the big arguments here is like, "Well, who does that favor when we'll tell you later?" Or when you might have to negotiate if you don't like what the initial offer is. I think that's why we think more through an anti-racism, anti-oppression lens, and who's more likely to negotiate or who's more likely to have quote, unquote, "The experience" that an employer might think they're looking for that would put someone to a higher pay band. This is where it starts to get really challenging if you're not ready to have these conversations, especially if you're an organization where effectively every person is paid differently.

You might have paid bands, but there's no consistency sometimes with the five people are in that, maybe two get paid the same, but then you have another person who came in and they're getting paid $10,000 more because they have more experience like, "Well, I've worked this job for 10 years and this person's just coming in, so how do you balance internal versus external experience?" And so there's a lot of challenging stuff that goes into oftentimes one number that expresses how much the organization values you and what you contribute.

Katrina Donald:

You've talked about staying competitive in the market by being able to post compensation information, you've talked about the strong reasons why you should be thinking about this from an anti-racism and anti-oppression perspective. What else are people talking about here? Why is this such a hot button issue? Are there other reasons that we're not thinking of right now?

Tim Cynova:

People are talking about how much they get paid. I think this is one of those misnomers. It's in the same group of if we don't talk to people about when they leave the organization, they'll not think about leaving the organization. No, everyone's thinking about, "Where's my career going? Am I getting what I need from this organization or do I need to look elsewhere?" Same thing's happening with compensation and benefits. And so ignoring it, people are still talking about it. That's one of the reasons why if not, this is the direction things are heading, figure out how to do it sooner rather than later because it's only going to get more complicated.

And so I think those are a couple of things, you have to figure out how you're having those conversations. You have to be honest. This is where we are. We likely don't like where we are, this is why we ended up here, but it is what it is and here's how we're going to now shift into where we want to go. And I think that's the tough conversation for a lot of organizations to have because it is so personal. This is what my value is. I spend the bulk of my waking hours doing this thing and this is what I get paid for it. There's a lot of stuff that's packed into this oftentimes just one number.

And not even thinking about, in HR they call it total benefits or total compensation, and so all the different things that go into this, it's just what's my base compensation? I think that's why it's so challenging, why organizations kind of want to stay away from it because it's going to lead to a lot of really challenging and oftentimes awkward conversations where you're having to explain why I get paid differently than you, and we do the exact same job and we've been in this organization the exact same time?

Katrina Donald:

How do you advise people to think about compensation in a really holistic way?

Tim Cynova:

When I was the chief operating officer and then one of the co-CEOs at Fractured Atlas, we had a strict fixed tier comp model where everyone had a given tier made exactly the same amount regardless of how long they were there. Every person who is at the associate level made, let's just say $40,000. Everyone as a specialist made $50,000, everyone as an assistant director made $60,000. And you could have been there for 10 years in that role or you could be there for 10 days and you still make that same compensation. And that's across the board. That's not just base comp, but people get cost of living adjustments. The whole tier moves together If cost of living adjustment if 2%, it gets applied to all of the tiers and the whole tier moves.

If you do compensation analysis or comp assessments and it shows like, "This is getting paid X under median" and you're like, "All right, we're moving all these tiers to median or to 75% or whatever it might be," they all move at the same place. This was one of the places where I realized no compensation model is perfect. They all have pros and cons, and we had this model before we started our anti-racism, anti-oppression work in 2013. Two of the reasons why Fracture Atlas adopted it even before my tenure was because research shows and people know people in different protected classes get paid different rates and because people talk about their compensation, let's be honest about what it is, and also help to address people who are doing the exact same role who traditionally, and maybe in other organizations would be paid different amounts.

It helps to address. It doesn't solve, but it helps to address. And so every couple of years we take a look at this compensation model to say, "All right, so the positive's that way, the negative's here." Yeah, but we have to think more holistically than just the dollar amount. And so that's where we, all right, can we increase the 401(k) match? Everyone had access to $1,000 annual professional development allowance. During certain times, there were different kinds of bonuses like year-end bonus or revenue-based bonuses. Then people had a member ticket allowance so you could use your ticket allowance to go to performances or events. Then we introduced unlimited paid vacation days. Most people were taking 20 to 30 paid vacation days a year even if it was their first year in the organization.

And then we had hybrid work arrangements even before COVID and then we upped our sick days to be 15 because we need something that addresses people who might have chronic conditions. We went over and above in some places two to three times what the law said that you had to provide because people need to have that flexibility. There's all these different things that you try to create an environment where the whole thing is helpful. At the end of the day though, some of those things don't pay your bills. We've been doing a lot of hiring together and working with organizations on hiring and around this piece of pay, being really a penny that you have to post your salary, especially the work that we're doing, it's values-based.

If you hold values of equity and inclusion, justice, you can't post a job without the salary. And one of the encouragement that we're providing companies is like get it as high as you can because if you're hiring an executive director or something and say, putting 75 in, but we could go to 85 or 90. Well, if you could go to 90, say 90 because then you're going to get different candidates who otherwise they're like, "I'm not going to apply for something that says 75, but actually 90 sort of fits what I need." And then be open about the other benefits. Does dependent care get covered in insurance? Because that also gets brought into this.

There's also that piece where how happy is a new employee going to be when on the second day they find out that they could have been making $5,000 more? All of the work that you did to create a psychologically safe and caring interview process and bringing them into the organization. All the time you spend immediately gets undercut when someone's like, "Oh yeah, you could have made 75 but you're getting paid 70." How immediately do you go from excited and actively engaged to shift down to disengaged or disgruntled in your first week?

Creating a structure that's clear and consistent and transparent so everyone knows, helps avoid some of these things that exist in organizations where you're talking over lunch and you find out all these little things once you're inside of the organization that just sort of undercut one's ability to say, "That cleared what I need and now I can focus on this thing. I can park that because it clears the threshold that I need to meet for this role and my current needs."

Katrina Donald:

From an employee perspective, I can really see how thinking about pay equity and being transparent about pay can be an asset. You can really know where you're at. You can kind of, like you said, leave behind some of the anxiety that comes around finding out that you could have been paid more or you didn't negotiate or others are getting something different than you're getting.

From the organizational perspective, something that we hear is, "Well, that's just expensive." If you assess a role that's new or coming in and it's higher and you have to raise the whole tier up to that and then you have to look at the different tiers and how there's relativity between them. We've got all our passionate reasons why, but how do you start to move towards that kind of a system? I know you've got some stories and experience around this as well.

Tim Cynova:

This is where organizations need to get really clear what has to happen, what has to happen or what do we have to do or what's our special sauce in the work that we're doing versus what are the nice to haves? Or someone else is doing this, we don't necessarily have to do this because we can't do everything, but we try because we're underpaying people. And I think this is one of the things where you see this a lot in the nonprofit sector. The sector tells itself that people are getting the positive benefits of working for nonprofits, which is why they get paid less versus actually you could just pay them better and have them do less because you're trying to do all these things and there's resource scarcity.

You start burning through people because they're trying to do all these things rather than just being clear to be like, "What are the two things that we as an organization or we as a team have to get done and it fits squarely in our wheelhouse?" That's our special sauce. That's what we focus on. And so you might think, "All right, so we add a 10-person team and we actually only need seven, which means we can take that extra three and spread that out." So you raise a tier. Also, you do this over time. I've not worked with an organization or met an organization and there probably aren't many out there who could say, "All right, so we did a comp assessment and we found out that everyone is more or less getting paid 87% of median or whatever it might be, and we want to get everyone to median if median's the goal here. We've done the budgetary analysis and it means we have to add an extra $100,000 to payroll to get people there."

There are very few organizations that could just drop another $100,000. I found it helpful to say, "All right, so being honest with everyone in the organization, here's where we are based off of this and here's how we're going to try and get to here over two to three years." And so everyone moves to 90%. It's from 87%, then 90%, then 95%, then 100% over the next three years. And so I think in being transparent and having the conversations around where you are, where you want to go, and how you want to get there starts to change the dynamic from the secrecy that oftentimes happens around compensation.

There's also that challenge too around internal versus external equity. We had this at Fractured Atlas in a really challenging way where 25% of our staff were software engineers and the external market for software engineers is different than the market for program staff at an arts nonprofit. And so how do you reconcile that you have different external markets all working in the same organization, and that's part of what we had to try and figure out like, "How do we mesh these things together and so we can be consistent?" Because at the end of the day, this organization does not work if all of these roles that we've assessed, we need all these roles to do this work, have people in them that are able to do that work.

So there's a trade-off, and this is one of the challenges that we faced at Fractured Atlas with the strict fixed tier comp where we lost a lot of really great people because they got into a role and they're like, "I need more money." In order to get more money, you either needed to leave and get a different job or get promoted into the next tier. And sometimes a role wasn't available in the next tier, a role wasn't available that fit your knowledge, skills, and abilities or where you wanted to go, or you were at the top of the organization in roles that there was no place to go. And so if you wanted to get more money, you had to go someplace else. And so that was one of the downsides of a strict fixed tier comp.

At the same time, everyone understood coming into the organization, "This is why we have this thing, this is why we value it." And it changed the conversations around, "We're not all here forever." And so it combined those two conversations that organizations oftentimes don't have to say, "We're all here for just a couple of years. Maybe that's two years, maybe that's five years, maybe that's 12 years, whatever. But we're not here for the rest of our lives, so how can we create a structure that invests in people where they get what they need for the next thing so they're ready to move on and that the organization is growing in the ways that it needs for today and tomorrow versus the way it was structured last year or when it was founded.

And so there's this constant iteration and development similar to that cartoon where it's two people talking to each other. It is a CFO and CEO or something. The first person says, "What if we invested in them and they leave?" And the other person says, "What if we don't and they stay?" There's a nugget in there that I think most organizations don't make the time to say, "What message does this send both to the people that are here that want to work here and how does that impact the work that we're trying to do as an organization? And how much richer, more meaningful, better, more joyful fun might this place be if we engage in this type of work versus the traditional, no one has access to information, we're very secretive about these different things?"

When in fact people either have access to the information because people are talking or it's that game of telephone where they have altered what it is because they just don't have access to it. So it's gone passed through four people and by the time it gets to the fourth person, the name someone says on the telephone is no longer Tim Cynova.

Katrina Donald:

It doesn't feel like we're talking about a little bit of transparency just around pay or compensation. You're talking about if we even need to open the door about how to be transparent, about the fact that we don't expect everybody to stay and that maybe that's a good thing, about the idea that what tiers are and what they're making and about what the implications are for maybe thinking about this differently within the organization from an operating budget perspective, what is your advice to organizations who are starting this who maybe don't have a ton of experience in any kind of a transparency in terms of a broader conversation about the financials with their kind of whole broader teams?

How do you start small on this? Is it better to start with a project like pay? Is it better to start with littler things and then sort of move into it? How do you phase thinking about operating differently, being more transparent?

Tim Cynova:

This is one of the places where it's really important to be grounded in what are the values that you hold personally as an organization? And being grounded in these values is what will help you because you're not going to have fewer conversations, you're going to have more conversations around this. And there can be more challenging conversations, especially in this really messy period if you don't operate this way where you get to a place where you operate this way. And being really grounded in why are we doing it, what's the purpose of this will help provide that North Star, if you will, as you're going through some really challenging messy conversations where people leave, people get upset, and it's the work that we need to be doing.

And there's so much that operates beneath the surface here where it's like Adams' equity theory, Vroom's expectancy theory. If I get paid a dollar less or a dollar more than someone else who's doing the exact same job, I have a different relationship to that person. There are relationships and value, and so there's a lot at play here that's not just that number or that package. And so there's a number of different ways that you can go about doing this. You can break it, you can just share everyone's salary. You can try and edge into it slowly, although I'm mindful of those in my community and networks who are talking about creating anti-racist workplaces or anti-oppressive workplaces. And do you want to work for a place that will eventually get to justice in 40 years? We will slowly make that turn to get there, but we're not going to get there while we're still working there.

This is one of those things where I think a number of people decide like, "Maybe I've gotten as far as with this organization as I can. I pushed them, they're working on it, but they're not going to get the entire way." And I think this is for us individually where we need to calibrate how willing are we to be a part of this? And I've known people who get organizations to the place of, "We have to do this thing, we have to publish salaries, we have to be transparent with our information." The organization starts doing it, and they're like, "And now my time is done. I'm moving on. It's someone else's job to take this over from here because it's not going to get to the place where I need it to be, where I want it to be while I'm still employed."

And I think those are really tough conversations because in almost all of those, there are people who I really appreciate the company, what they're doing. I love working with my coworkers and yet, it doesn't give me what I need. And so I think these are conversations where we try to lay the foundation for open, honest conversations that are rooted in care and understanding and humanity, and we can't do everything at the same time. It's just one of those things where I often think about holding multiple competing truths at the same time and still doing something, trying to figure out like, "All right, well, how do we reconcile all these things?"

This is one of those areas where I think everyone, especially as you get more information about how the organization works, there's often sort of this wave where you're just learning for the first time and you have to process it and what does this mean? And oftentimes it's not cool. That's great. There's some really challenging conversations that need to happen from that. So from an organization, how are you building in processes so that people can reflect back their questions?

The Google form that accepts anonymous questions that you take during a staff meeting, you set up a Google form where people don't have to be logged in so they can register a question or a concern and say, "All right, we wanted to move towards pay transparency. What are you concerned about? What do you think we should be thinking about?" And at the next staff meeting, just go down the questions and answer them. And some of them are going to be pretty awkward and pretty challenging, but you start to engage in a process that brings everyone into like, "Here's the complexity that you're sort of trying to balance."

I'm mindful of an organization that I advised that they decided to go with the break it model. It was a relatively small organization, they just circulated the Excel sheet and be like, "Here's everyone's salary." And there are some people who are like, "I didn't want people to know my salary because now it's awkward and people know that I get paid that internally and externally." Sort of at Fractured, we did this we're like, "You're hiring a program associate? We have eight of them at the time maybe." And so every time you post a program associate role, everyone in the world who looked at that salary listing knew that every program associate made $40,000 or $50,000 or whatever it was. And so there's different ways pay transparency impacts individuals here. Trying to be mindful of all of those dynamics is really challenging and really messy and also the work that's necessary.

Katrina Donald:

That feels like a really important piece of this. I think the piece you talked about around having a Google form for anonymous questions and then tackling what's front of mind for the employees. In those kinds of forms, and forms aren't always the answer, but in those kinds of forms, people will tell you whatever they need to tell you. It doesn't matter what the question prompt is or anything else because if it's important enough that they give you the information, they're just going to give it to you. And so that's often like, "What are we seeing pop up in a form like this or on a mural or something else where we can take our cues of how to structure this conversation or our sharing?"

And then the idea is we've asked for this, how do we answer these or address how we are going to make decisions or learn more about the question that you have if we don't have the answer? So you're not just sharing numbers or thinking about the impact on people, but you're also saying, "If we don't know the answers, here's how we're going to so that you can start to build some of that trust as well." There's that unveil and then there's building trust over time so that you can start to appreciate what those questions are in a different way and start to model a new way of holding that transparent space in the organizations.

It's easy to ask for feedback, but it's not always easy to answer the questions or address the issues that come up in an open forum. And so that requires some commitment, I think, to this process.

Tim Cynova:

This is one of those places too where most people aren't going to ask questions in a neutral way without judgment or without opinion. And so when you receive those, that's a challenging place to be like, "What are people asking? How do I answer this?" When you might be like, "I created this thing and so this is getting 80 of these questions that are sort of judgmental questions about how this is run or how it's run and it takes a toll." And so how do you as the receiver to answer these questions, what do you need to be thinking about to show up in a space that can, people genuinely have these questions? They wouldn't be asking them if they didn't have the question.

How do you show up in a space that doesn't make it worse? Because a couple of ways that this can go sideways on you. One, take the questions and don't answer them or take the questions in a way and answer them, people are like, "I'm not answering any more questions." And then it flames what are already challenging feelings that people have or confirms suspicions about how the organization operates. So I think continuing to do that through this comfort is really important and something that a colleague of mine offered a number of years ago, we were talking about challenging conversations and he said, "People will spend a lifetime avoiding an awkward 90-second conversation."

And there's a lot of awkward 90-second conversations here where you're like, "All right, this is going to be really stressful and awkward and afterwards this is going to be done and we're going to get to a new place." I think there's a piece here too where it goes back to the why this is important for organizations around the amount of time and resources you spend. Let's just think about the hiring process and why it's important to put that salary in the job posting. Because I've heard from colleagues of mine who are like, "When we get to the point of negotiating with the salary, we're really open about it. We have it in our mind. This is what it is, regardless of who the candidate is, who gets this point, they're going to be paid $150,000 or whatever it is."

But in not making it public, all of these candidates have opted out of feeling like that job was not worth their time because it could have also paid $75,000 or it could have paid $300,000, but you miss out on all these other candidates. And so yes, you might have that as part of your process where we know the exact salary that we're going to give the candidate. When they get to the third round, we're going to let them know, or when we get to the first round, we're going to let them know. You've missed, I don't know, maybe 100$ or more of candidates who might have applied had they known what that salary is, but they looked and said, "I don't have the time, I don't have the bandwidth to even set aside the time to apply for this if it's not going to meet my needs."

And so this is one of those places where doing it up front, it helps, doesn't level the experience, but it just provides so much more information for people to make a decision about like, "Is this role, is this organization going to fit my needs right now?"

Katrina Donald:

Tim, what are some of the variables that people are thinking about when they're trying to work out what their pay equity scales are, how they're thinking about pay equity? How are they sketching out that whole conversation?

Tim Cynova:

There's a lot of really interesting conversations that are happening right now, especially as organizations are trying to balance this with hybrid workplaces, where do people live and work? And we're seeing a number of organizations who have created high profile news articles around they're going to start paying people differently depending on where they live. We're seeing this in some tech companies where they might be based in the Bay Area in California and now they're entirely virtual, and so maybe you got paid $100,000 living in San Francisco, but if you move to Cincinnati, Ohio, you're only going to get paid $75,000. Same job, and you take this $25,000 pay cut.

You should not do this. You should not balance your budget or try and do this based off of where people live for a number of different reasons. First of all, it's not the right thing to do. If you're going to pay people $100,000 to live in San Francisco, pay people $100,000. The other thing is just from a logistical standpoint, oh my God, so you're going to pay people $75,000 if they move to Cincinnati, what if they live there for three months and they move to Chicago? And then you're going to have to figure out how much you're paying them. And then what if they move to Spokane or what if they want live in France? All these different things.

If you're going to pay people $100,000, just leave it at $100,000 and leave it for the tier and don't try and balance it based off of how people want to live their lives. Let people know, "This is what you have available to you and you' figure out how it meets your needs or doesn't." So I think that's one of the first big variables that we're seeing a lot of right now.

The other thing is around people who are trying to build equitable pay structures that include a number of different variables. There's some really cool organizations that have published how they think about what a role gets paid, including a lot of different variables around they factor in tenure, and disability, and race, and gender, and military service, and various certifications that you might have or the number of people that this person might be caring for. And then that helps figure out what this role gets paid. That's really cool.

And from a logistical standpoint, again, really gets complicated where you're trying to manage this for an organization that might be growing. It was relatively easy when there are six people or 10 people and now you have 40 employees and then you have 40 employees with different values as it relates to anti-racism or anti-oppression. So how do you choose what's on that list of variables? Do you every year put some in, pull them out, or add them? This is one of those things where I keep going back to like God, strict fixed comp was, again, not perfect, but it helped in a way that just clarified what this was and then allowed you to think about some other ways around talking with an organization that was trying to figure out how reparations could be incorporated into comp structures or how you could equitably think about employer contributions for 401(k) or 403(b) in the US.

And so there's some really interesting ways that people are starting to approach it, where oftentimes with a retirement plan with a 401(k) or 403(b), an employer will match contributions. Seldom will an employer just say, "All right, we're going to give everyone 2% regardless if they participate or not." And so thinking about who has the means to participate at various levels, so everyone just gets 2%. And then if you want to contribute to it, then we'll start matching. So that's one way.

I also talked with another organization where they were going to pilot a plan rather than a one-to-one match that still is related to the pay that you get. So 1% for someone who makes $50,000 is a lot different than 1% for someone who gets paid $200,000. So what they did was say, "All right, so in a course of a year we pay out as an employer contribution, let's say $25,000 or $50,000." Rather than doing that on a percentage basis for the comp that it's against, they break that up evenly among the number of employees who are contributing at the time. And so you break $25,000 up 10 ways, that number is going to be a lot more for someone who gets paid $30,000 or $40,000 than it is for someone who gets paid $100,000 or $150,000. And so that's an equitable way of thinking about compensation.

Now, on the other end, the higher end, you have to be an organization that those getting paid 100 or 150, that aligns with their values and aligns with their values in a way that they've opted in or opted out from their organization to say like, "Look, I could get paid X amount if I worked at another organization, but I work for this organization because it aligns with my values. And one of the ways it does is through this atypical, if you will, employer contribution." There are a lot of ways this can show up. There's one more way in mind that I think this can show up when you think about total compensation and benefits crafting is around paid holidays for an organization.

Most organizations don't even give a thought to the holidays that they pay for. In the US, most organizations probably use the standard 12 bank holidays, if you will. It's Christmas day, New Year's Day, New Year's Eve, or July 4th and Columbus Day, and without giving any thought to like, in paying people for this holiday, you're explicitly recognizing this holiday's value in a way that are you paying for Juneteenth or are you paying for religious holidays that are not Western European Christian holidays? This is really interesting work that's happening right now as people are starting to realize this. How do we structure it in a way that, all right, we're going to be closed for these five days because everyone we work with will probably be close for these five days? And so let's just be close for these five days and we'll give you 10 flex holidays.

You set them, but you decide how you want to spend these paid holidays in a way that aligns with your values and your beliefs and not ones that probably are set in the 1950s by some corporation. They're like, "Yeah, these are the holidays we're taking." And so I think when you start to think what if, how might we, how can we retool this, what if we restructure this? There's so many ways organizations can flex if you're willing to start looking outside of that one number. Certainly focus on the one number, but also don't do it at the exclusion of all of these different things that support people during their tenure with your organization.

Katrina Donald:

Those are a really great way to think about all of the variables that are involved, all of the ways that employees and the organization need to be cared for through all of the little actions that come in to making a compensation structure that is fair and equitable, a process that is transparent. There's a lot there, and you've given us lots of examples and things to think about. Thanks so much, 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. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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One More Conversation with Diane Ragsdale (EP.73)

This week, the world lost an amazing light of a human: Diane Ragsdale.

This episode is a previously lost and unreleased conversation that host Tim Cynova recorded with Diane at the Banff Centre in February 2020, a few weeks before the world shut down for the global pandemic... and they promptly forgot they even recorded this conversation together.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS Feed

Updated

January 14, 2024

This week, the world lost an amazing light of a human: Diane Ragsdale.

This episode is a previously lost and unreleased conversation that host Tim Cynova recorded with Diane at the Banff Centre in February 2020, a few weeks before the world shut down for the global pandemic... and they promptly forgot they even recorded this conversation together.

Originally intended to be titled, "Investing in Personal and Professional Growth," the conversation explores Diane's thoughts on the role of the arts and artists in society, the role arts management and leadership programs can and should play, and how we can craft our own learning and development plan. It also includes a few clips they thought would eventually be left on the cutting room floor.

Sending love and strength to Diane's family and friends, students and colleagues who are located all over the world.

Guests: Diane Ragsdale

Host: Tim Cynova

 

Guests

Diane Ragsdale is Director of the MA in Creative Leadership, an online master’s program that welcomed its first cohort in summer 2022 and for which she additionally has an appointment as Faculty and Scholar. After 15 years working years working within and leading cultural institutions and another several years working in philanthropy at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in NYC, she made the shift to academia and along the way became a widely read blogger, frequent speaker and panelist, published author, lecturer, scholar, and advisor to a range of nonprofit institutions, government agencies, and foundations on a wide range of arts and culture topics.

Diane joins MCAD from both Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, where she served as Faculty and Director of the Cultural Leadership Program, and Yale University where she is adjunct faculty and leads an annual four-week workshop on Aesthetic Values in a Changed Cultural Context. She was previously an assistant professor and program director at The New School in New York, where she successfully built an MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship in the School of Performing Arts and launched a new graduate minor in Creative Community Development in collaboration with Parsons School of Design and the Milano School of Policy, Management and Environment. Diane is a doctoral candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam where she was a lecturer in the Cultural Economics MA program from 2011–15. She continues to work on her dissertation as time permits. 

Her essay “Post-Show” was recently published in the Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts (2022); and a teaching case that she developed from her doctoral research on the relationship between the commercial and nonprofit theater in America–currently titled “Margo Jones: bridging divides to craft a new hybrid logic for theater in the US”–will be published in the forthcoming Edward Elgar handbook, Case Studies in Arts Entrepreneurship. 

Diane holds an MFA in Acting & Directing from University of Missouri-Kansas City and a BS in Psychology and BFA in Theater from Tulane University. She was part of Stanford University’s inaugural Executive Program for Nonprofit Arts Leaders, produced in partnership with National Arts Strategies. She holds a certificate in Mediation and Creative Conflict Resolution from the Center for Understanding in Conflict.

Host

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Diane Ragsdale:

Ultimately, you should just go in and this should really not be more than 15 minutes or something. You're just going to get one sentence on each of these things.

Tim Cynova:

Am I?

Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

I don't know. How much editing do you think I'm going to do? It’s just going to be choppy sentences!

Diane Ragsdale:

I know. Especially because I speak in sentences that are three minutes long. I realized at one point, I'm like, "Okay, you've now been speaking for two minutes without breathing. That's not going to be helpful when Tim goes to edit."

Tim Cynova:

This is Tim, and this isn't going to be one of our regular Work Shouldn't Suck episodes. Well, at one point it was going to be, and then multiple things changed in unexpected ways. It happened this week that the world lost an amazing light of a human. Diane Ragsdale was a generous friend, a brilliant colleague, a fun collaborator, and actually, technically, my boss for three of my faculty appointments over the years, the Cultural Leadership program at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity in Canada, the Arts and Entrepreneurship Leadership program at The New School in New York City and most recently, the new Creative Leadership program she helped launch at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

What follows is a conversation Diane and I recorded at the Banff Center in February 2020. Yes, that February 2020, a few weeks before the world shut down for the global pandemic, and then we probably forgot we even recorded this episode together. I only remembered it two days ago and fortunately found the files buried deep in my digital drive before editing it together in this version. It's now a time capsule filled with Diane's reflections and has taken on different meaning for me since her passing.

Editing it together was like getting the chance to have one more conversation with a friend, to hear Diane's excitement, hear how she was wrestling with ideas, hear her brilliant mind work in real time. For those who knew Diane, you know she was passionate, amazing, and kind. She was so energetic and enthusiastic about ideas and learning. On more than a few occasions, as we tossed around ideas and projects, she would shout, "Yes!" And point repeatedly and excitedly like, "Yes, that's the idea we need to explore." Or, "You should totally do that thing" or "You should record a podcast about that, Tim."

The crafting, insights and care Diane brought to every offering she undertook and every person who was involved in them was, and continues to be, truly inspiring. And oh, my gosh, Diane lived at her learning edge. It was next level. And that's actually what this conversation was and is all about. Our original title for it was going to be Investing in Personal and Professional Growth.

Spending the last day listening to her voice after learning of her passing was comforting, and knowing we won't have another spirited chat like this is heartbreaking. To hear her voice again like we are riffing over a glass of wine, to hear about what she found intellectually stimulating at the moment, to hear about her thoughts on the role of the arts and artists in society, the role of arts management and leadership programs can play and should play, and how we can craft our own learning and development plan.

All are cherished moments now. And I'm so glad this recording includes things we thought would be outtakes too. Laughing together about the silliness of me trying to edit this conversation, for instance. It's one of the highlights of my career that I was able to work with Diane in various capacities over the years.

Just last week, we are strategizing fun new things to work on together, which is even more so why her sudden and unexpected departure will take time to process, as I know it will for countless others who knew her as well. Sending love and strength to her family and friends, students and colleagues who are all over the world. Now, one more conversation with Diane Ragsdale. Diane, welcome to the podcast.

Diane Ragsdale:

Thank you, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

All right, Diane, let's start with your professional journey. What did a young Diane Ragsdale want to be when she grew up?

Diane Ragsdale:

Evidently, I had two competing goals. On the one hand, I evidently told my parents from a very young age that I really wanted to be a waitress at Denny's. Was my grand ambition. When I was a little bit older, that shifted to wanting to be a doctor actually. So when I went to college, I was pre-med and realized pretty quickly that maybe it was just that I really liked my biology teacher in high school and I didn't really want to be a doctor.

So I was pursuing a BS in psychology at Tulane where I went to college, and also taking a bunch of theater courses because I'd done theater in high school a bit, and got the bug and ended up with enough credits to get two degrees. So I had a degree in psychology and a degree in theater. And when I got to graduation I thought, "Well, I'll audition for acting programs and if I get in, that's what I'll do. And if I don't, I'll take a year, study for the MCATs and maybe try to become a doctor with the goal of becoming a psychiatrist at that point when I realized I didn't really want to be a brain surgeon or whatever it was that I originally thought I might want to do."

And I got into acting, went to an MFA program, worked briefly as an actor in my 20s. One of my jobs was with an ensemble theater in Boise, Idaho called Idaho Theater for Youth. Really fantastic company. And I came in, I acted with them, I directed a little bit with them, I wrote a little show with them and taught kids how to juggle and all sorts of things. And along the way, they said, "Would you like to be the marketing assistant? We need somebody to write press releases." I was like, "Sure."

And not too long after, they said, "Do you want to be the marketing director?" And I said, "I don't think I can do that because I don't know what marketing really is. That's not my thing." And they were like, "Well, it's either that or we have to lay you off because we don't have enough money for a marketing assistant and a marketing director." So I took on the marketing directing role, and that was really my full two-footed jump into arts administration, I think, at that point.

And from there, I worked on turning around a struggling music festival up in Sandpoint, Idaho. And then I bounced around a bunch of different festivals, film festivals and music festivals: Sundance, Seattle Film Festival, Bumbershoot, which is in Seattle, WOMAD USA, which was Peter Gabriel's World Music Festival at the time, just doing contract work and really expanding my aesthetic and learning about a bunch of different kinds of jobs that exist in relationship to the production and consumption of the arts.

Then had the chance to work with another organization that was struggling at the time called On the Boards, which is a contemporary performing arts center in Seattle. I was the managing director there. And with the artistic director, Lane Czaplinski, we helped that organization through a challenging period following a move into a new facility. And from there, I went to the Mellon Foundation in New York City, and eventually became the program officer for theater and dance. I loved that job. I loved New York. I never wanted to leave.

I met a Dutchman on a vacation in Amsterdam, and I ended up jumping the pond to marry him. And went back to school to pursue a doctorate, which I still have not completed, which is really embarrassing to me. But in the meantime, been teaching quite a bit over the last decade at Erasmus University in Rotterdam where I taught in the cultural economics department, and then in New York at The New School where I've been for the last few years, both as an assistant professor and helping to launch a new program in arts management and entrepreneurship for artists.

I also, a few years ago, started working with the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, first as a facilitator/lecturer. And now I am the director of the Cultural Leadership program, which I co-lead with a colleague named Alexia McKinnon.

Tim Cynova:

I'll point out for our listeners that this might be the most majestic setting for the podcast recording we've ever had because we are, in fact, in the Banff Center recording with the Rocky Mountains covered in snow right behind us.

Diane Ragsdale:

It's pretty amazing. You can't look in any direction without seeing a rocky mountain really when you're up here. So yeah, lucky us.

Tim Cynova:

It is by far the most distracting classroom ever to teach in because you just find yourself staring out the window and then realize people are waiting for you to say something.

Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

Several months ago we had lunch together, and you laid out your plan for the 2019/2020 professional development season, the personal Diane Ragsdale professional development season. Let's pretend we're back at that lunch. Hey, Diane, what do you have in the works for your professional development for this coming season?

Diane Ragsdale:

Oh, my God. Tim, I'm so excited. Here's what I've got going. First, I'm going to do Patti Digh's hard conversations around race course. And then going to head up to Banff and do a course in Truth and Reconciliation Through Right Relations. And then I'm going to do a 40-hour course in mediation and creative conflict resolution, which you turned me onto a year ago.

So that, I think, was the plan that I laid out for you. I remember at the time, I was a little terrified thinking about getting into it. But felt deeply that it was something I had to do if I was going to step into classrooms and meeting rooms of all sorts in the cultural sector and feel like I could really hold space and speak or not speak with some degree of confidence and competency.

Tim Cynova:

And you've completed all of those things. So this is in hindsight?

Diane Ragsdale:

The Patti Digh course. This is a fantastic course. You can take all of it online, and there are a handful of sessions where everyone does a synchronous online conversation with Patti and collaborators that she brings on, but the rest of it you can do at your own pace. It's videos, it's readings, it's exercises, it's conversation with community, and it's also really intense.

She says when she's framing the course, "We make it overwhelming because part of what we feel people need to go through is that experience of being overwhelmed by the truth of what has happened." And I was doing the course in the midst of a really intense period in which I was working about 70 to 80 hours a week between my full-time job at The New School and my job here at Banff.

And at some point, I realized I was doing some of these exercises and videos, trying to squeeze it in at the end of a long day or on weekends cramming a few of them in. And I thought, "This isn't the way I want to do this." So I wrote to her and I said, "Can I go a little bit slower and take more time?" And she said, "Yes, of course."

So she keeps the content up there for about six months afterwards, and I actually have still a few remaining exercises that I need to do. But I'm largely finished with that course. And then I did complete the Intensive and Truth and Reconciliation at Banff, and I also did that terrifying 40-hour course you and I both did in mediation and creative conflict resolution.

Tim Cynova:

Since you said terrifying, we can talk about this one first and then maybe back up a little bit. Because we both, yes, completed the Center for Understanding Conflict's Intensive Mediation Program. For our listeners, this specific program uses a non-caucused approach. It's built around everyone being in the same room and not a mediator that's shuttling back and forth between parties in different rooms.

And one of the things about this particular model is it is taught acknowledging that while a mediator is a neutral party, there's not a neutral impact on the mediator when they're mediating, particularly when they're doing really challenging cases, if you will, around whatever it might be.

We both went through it. And then, when you finished the program, you texted me to say, "It was awesome, terrifying at moments and exhausting and I learned so much." And I read that text and I thought, "Yeah, that's pretty much exactly how I felt when I got to that point too."

Diane Ragsdale:

And the terrifying part is unlike the other two courses, there was active role playing every day. This was one where we're not just going to read this in a book and watch the pros do it. You're going to get in the hot seat in two ways. Sometimes you had to role act a couple in divorce, which required some significant, I thought, chops. And I've studied acting, and I was still a little bit like, "Wow, this is hard." But the more terrifying part, of course, was when you had to step in and be the mediator, learning the process and understanding what it really means.

What they're teaching you is to be genuinely open and empathic with each party, and hear each party, and respond to each party, and guide them through a process in which they shift from holding onto positions to going deeper and deeper into understanding what's underlying those positions, their deeper needs. And eventually making the turn to being able to creatively collaborate to find new solutions that will meet both parties' needs. And it's not an easy process. It's time-consuming and people are really complex, and the skills that it takes to navigate a party in conflict through that process are just really high level.

Tim Cynova:

I had a headache every day, every night I went home. And I stayed right there because it's so intensive, morning till night. And then you have a lot of readings and things you're studying for cases for the next day, and my brain just hurt, especially when you're in that role of the mediator and you're trying to hold these two parties and figure out how it can be useful.

Diane Ragsdale:

I'm so curious because you were the person that turned me on to that training. What led you to take it in the first place?

Tim Cynova:

Previously, I'd done a lot of work researching different crucial or critical conversation models. So I went through the crucial conversation training and then subsequently became trained as a trainer to do that. I went through Fierce Conversations, Susan Scott's model. I went through Difficult Conversations with the Harvard Negotiation Project. And this was all in an exploration to find a model that we could use at Fractured Atlas to use in parallel with our work around anti-racism, anti-oppression.

So I went into an exploration to find out. I'd read the books, but I wanted to see if there was some kind of educational component that we could then use in the organization. And so that's how I got into it. And then I realized every meeting I was in felt like a conflict negotiation or a mediation. With my HR hat on, you're trying to thread this really thin needle or maybe you don't... Threading a thin needle might be the wrong...

Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah, I don't know if that's right.

Tim Cynova:

It's probably not right. I'm like, "I don't even know what that means." I may have used a needle and thread.

Diane Ragsdale:

Just threading any needle I think is...

Tim Cynova:

This is true. Yeah.

Diane Ragsdale:

Is its own...

Tim Cynova:

It's difficult enough. So I felt like I need to figure out how to deepen my skills in this area because I was not going to be able to level up my professional skills and my personal skills if I didn't do some more intensive work. And was tipped off to this program by someone who is a trained mediator, has a background in HR and said, "It's really great." That's all I knew of it. I showed up and there's a room of 25 people, I think 22 of them were attorneys.

Diane Ragsdale:

Same with me.

Tim Cynova:

And then there are three of us, I think two of us worked at nonprofits and I forget what the other person did. And I quickly was like, "I just jumped into a deep end of a pool with people who do this for a living and I used to play trombone."

Diane Ragsdale:

That's great. And at one point, I remember showing up at your office on my birthday one year for a lunch and picking your brain on, "Okay, if I could invest in any professional development in the next year, what do you think I should do? What was the most meaningful thing you've done?" And you mentioned this course. And then I called and they were already sold out or it had passed for the year. So I had to wait an entire year.

And by the time that summer came when I actually began to register for my fall of professional development, it was after having been in just a few too many rooms where I was doubting whether I was doing a good job of really holding space for the conversations that were emerging. Finding myself sitting and thinking, "Oh, I feel like I should say something, or maybe I shouldn't. I'm not sure. If I do speak, I'm not sure I know exactly the right thing to say." It wasn't just race issues, but certainly those were among the kinds of issues that were cropping up more and more in rooms.

But more than anything, I think it was just that profound understanding that we've all grown to have over the last few years that there are growing cultural divides of all sorts. And I believe with others, I'm not alone in this, that cultural institutions are among the places in society that have the capacity to bring people together across those divides on equal terms, but we can't do it if we actually don't know how to hold space for that. And I was really curious in understanding that from the inside out in trying to first just figure out, "Well, how do I even do that in the smallest room, much less on a much bigger scale?"

And in hindsight, I'm glad I did three back-to-back courses. There were great resonances or ways in which these three programs overlapped and spoke to one another. They all each had a spiritual aspect to it, I would say grounded, not necessarily in... Certainly, the mediation course is grounded in what I would call a Buddhist philosophy. Truth and Reconciliation course at Banff is grounded in an Indigenous worldview and philosophy. And Patti Digh's course in racism also has spiritual components to it as well based on the understanding that you have to make these changes from the inside out.

They each have aspects in which you are required to deal with your own trauma, your own historic relationship to conflict before you can really begin to come into a room and think that you have some enlightened perspective, starting with the idea that we each have to recognize where we have been already harmed or traumatized or affected by the way that we were raised and unpack that a bit. And I was really grateful for those deep dives in each of the courses as well.

Tim Cynova:

I didn't know when I signed up for the mediation training that it had roots in Buddhist philosophy tradition, and it coincided with my own really seriousness in a meditative practice where I was getting into actually meditating on a regular basis rather than 15 minutes here and then three months later, maybe do it 10 minutes.

That combination resonated in a really deep way, in a way that you realized when you're in a room and you don't know what to say and you're searching for that, you suddenly miss like, "My body's entirely tense and I'm not sure what's happening and I'm not able to parse the facts and the stories. And what is this telling me about myself?" And it was a really helpful process to go through.

The thing I'm thinking about, as you're going through your own list here, is I need refreshers on these things. Because it's been about a year or two that I've done several of these programs. Now I need to set time aside to do a refresher because even though I use the skills, I'm starting to lose it in a way that would be nice to not have to go back through that 40-hour course. But how can I make sure that these are top of mind when we're getting into challenging situations?

Diane Ragsdale:

This is one thing I actually think about quite a bit. A few years ago when I first came up to Banff, I had designed a course in beauty and aesthetics ostensibly to teach ethics or moral imagination to leaders, business leaders, other leaders. And in designing the course, one of the challenges and differences from when I had done it once before at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was that the first iteration when I taught it to seniors, undergrad business majors, it was a 12 or 13-week course, whatever a typical term is.

And so you had the hope of building a practice. I curated aesthetic experiences every week. I gave them practices to engage in. And my hope was that by the end of the term, after doing this week after week after week, that something might stick and that they might actually continue the practice. And when I came and did it at Banff, it was a one-week intensive. And as we all left at the end of the week, I thought, "Oh, I wonder if anyone will really be able to hold onto this in any meaningful way. Or is it two days from now or two weeks from now when it evaporates out the back of your mind and you stop using it?"

And in general, I think I'm curious about how you can turn these experiences into ongoing practices. The intense experience has value without a doubt. And then, like you, I'm looking for what's the ongoing way to do this, and whether that's staying in a community of some sort where you periodically come together and talk about your experiences using these tools or something else, something much more every day.

Tim Cynova:

One of the questions I wrestle with is how to make it stick. Fractured Atlas, I've taught crucial conversations. It's an intensive two days. A lot of people come in with a personal thing in mind. Maybe there's a conflict that they have with their roommate or a family member not necessarily work-related. And then they're processing that, and then they address that. And then three weeks later, they're back at work trying to coach them and like, "Oh, right, yeah, facts and stories."

And you're like, "Oh, God." It lasts for a little while and then it just quickly falls off even when people are being coached. So I've been trying to figure out how we can make this part of just life because it's in everyone's best interest to communicate better. And I was talking to someone about a year or so back, and they were asking about crucial conversations.

And then I tipped them off to Oren Sofer's book about nonviolent communication combined with a meditative practice, and came to realize that you really need a curriculum everyone in the organization can commit to for a year. Let's just become better communicators for 2020, and every month we'll do something different, but it'll help us in life certainly and hopefully in life at the workplace.

Diane Ragsdale:

I think that's a great idea. In fact, as I think about it, when I showed up asking for your advice on professional development, it was as much from wanting to be a better facilitator in various rooms, but also personally realizing that there were times when I felt I was not communicating as effectively as I wanted to, that I had a self-righteous streak that would rise up once in a while, that I could be really impatient at times. And I've always been, I think, a sensitive person and a person with sometimes strong enthusiasm or passion for things.

And combined, those can also create really fertile conditions for having your emotions right under the surface all the time. And recognizing that walking around in life, I needed also better tools for how can I get better and better at being able to show up as a human but not let the stress of the day, whether that's what's going on in the world or what's going on in the workplace, get to me in a way that I felt it was often getting to me.

And I also took up meditation. Headspace was an app that my husband used and turned me onto, and I find it really valuable. So a couple of points. One, I think that most of these skills are deeply valuable for just day-to-day living and getting on in life in this insane time as well as whatever we're going to do in the workplace and making us more effective communicators. But I love your idea of everyone in a company going through a yearlong journey together. I think you should do that.

Tim Cynova:

When I teach, I have this slide, the second slide when I'm teaching people-centered organizational design or team design that says, "If you're working with humans trying to achieve something, there's something in here for you." And I think the same thing with if you're planning on communicating with anyone in life, and we probably all are, then there's something that we can all get from this and learn from this. And at the same time, there's plenty of opportunity to practice.

Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah, without a doubt. Look at Thanksgiving, all of the articles that come out around that time, "Oh, everybody's getting ready to go home and see their family. Are you ready for the conversations you're going to have in light of the political environment et cetera?" I use these skills all the time. I use them at home, I use them in the workplace, for sure, with students. And I believe that particularly for people who are teaching in universities... I don't have much experience in K through 12 education.

But I believe in the next few years it's going to become a minimum standard requirement to teach in a university or to work with adults in any way to have done these sorts of trainings and to have these sorts of skills. I can't imagine anymore being in a classroom without having had the opportunity to gain the perspectives I've gained from these trainings. Also, from tons of podcasts and books that you've turned me onto, other people have turned me onto, it's just becoming what you have to do. It should be considered core curriculum really.

Tim Cynova:

Well, speaking of curriculum, you currently lead, co-lead and/or teach in multiple leadership programs.

Diane Ragsdale:

I do.

Tim Cynova:

Thinking about this, how do you approach assisting others on their own journey?

Diane Ragsdale:

At The New School, so it's an arts management and entrepreneurship program for performing artists or artists related to the performing arts. So actors, directors, musicians, composers. We have some dancer choreographers, filmmakers. We are recruiting for artists who are talented, entrepreneurial and socially engaged and trying to strengthen their skills in those areas and help them find the ways in which they can really bring those together and do something in the world, not only make a living when they graduate, but also make a difference in the world.

At the orientation this past year, there was this moment when one of the students remarked, "It's extraordinary because we're each so different and it's like you've created a program where we can each go on our own path." And I said, "That's right." And unlike much of the experience of getting a conservatory degree where you're one of X number of musicians that plays that instrument, one of the great things about this program in bringing together artists across a number of disciplines, who each have very different ambitions in terms of what they want to do in the world, is that we had to quite intentionally create a program that would not box them in and turn them into generic arts administrators, but just the opposite: try to take what was distinctive about each of them and encourage them on their own path.

So I think there's a way you do that in the curriculum that's also just a philosophy or a notion that we're trying to avoid pigeonholing them in any way. And I think in general that's got to be part of it, which is encouraging people to look inside to find most of the answers that it's probably... Yeah, there's some skill building, but much of the work is observing and seeing an individual's strengths and helping to cultivate or foster those, asking good questions.

But it's not about this idea that you can march through a certain series of courses and come out the other side a leader. I came up in that era at the point at which you realize, "Oh, yeah, I'm probably not going to have a Broadway acting career, so I'll become an arts administrator." And that notion that you should then stop with the acting or whatever your practice is, your artistic practice and that you'll be entirely satisfied simply by being the development associate at a major cultural institution, that that's going to satisfy all of that need that you had before to act or be otherwise creatively engaged.

Some people do find, I think, that they really love that work and it's as creative to them as anything else. But in this program, we were really trying to say, "We don't want you to stop your art form." So no matter what, this program is for people who know, "I want to continue to be an artist, but I want to gain some additional skills and knowledge." And even at Banff where some people are in arts administration roles, we're trying to encourage them to get back in touch with their creative practice, in a sense, and to remember what that was about and/or to make time for that.

I believe there's a way of being in the world that is an artistic way of being in the world. And you don't have to be spending your days being paid as a professional artist for that to be a meaningful approach to life, to work. And so being able to combine that with skills in business or skills in community organizing or skills in leadership, which you teach, is a great thing because I think we're actually going to have individuals graduating from The New School program who will go out into the world. Some of them will start arts enterprises, some of them may take on existing arts organizations.

And some of them, I think, are just going to go out in the world and create awesome things beyond the arts in every other way that really just respond to their particular values, their beliefs about what's important in society. And we should all be so lucky to have someone encourage us at some point to think about that and to dare to start our own business. I wish when I was much, much, much younger that somebody had encouraged me to think about starting my own thing. It didn't occur to me and it's still something that I've never done. Maybe I will at some point.

I feel really fortunate that I've really deeply enjoyed every job I've had for the last 25, I don't know, plus years that I've been working in the arts. I've jumped all over the place, different cities, different parts of the arts and culture sector, different jobs, a generalist to a great extent. The continued possibility of trying on new things is a great privilege. I try to encourage anyone who comes to me for career advice to say, "There's no straight line, and whatever idea you have in your head of what a career should look like, just try to let go of that and follow your heart, follow the opportunities that come your way, follow the questions that come your way, follow your curiosities."

My income has sometimes gone from something quite decent to the point when I think my annual income was $14,000 or something and I was like, "Oh, my gosh, I really declined from where I was at one point." And yet, I have no regrets about the various jumping off of the shore thing to try something new. That really relates back to this ongoing professional development. It's the notion of wanting to renew and continue to be relevant in the world in a way.

Artists' lives are structured around gigs. We know we're in this gig economy now. I had a pretty sure thing, or what felt like it, when I was at the Mellon Foundation, and likely could have stayed there for quite a long time and had a rather comfortable life. I'm really glad I jumped off and had to hustle. I've really, ever since then, felt like I've been hustling to make my way forward. And I feel like I'm learning a really essential skill that's going to become more important over the next two decades when you think about the jobs that are going to go away and the demands on many of us to look around, see what's missing, see what sorts of skills are needed and make ourselves valuable in some way.

Last summer when I started on this path, it was also just peering ahead and thinking, "I think more and more people are going to need people who just know how to go into rooms with people who can't get along or don't want to talk or who need to get some kind of work done, but who are sitting across the table with one another with fundamentally different values, and yet we've still got to get something done. We've got to fix this community, we've got to fix this company. We've got to fix this neighborhood or school or whatever it is. And what would it be to be able to be one of those people who can sit in that room and help?"

And I don't assume that I'm there yet. I think this is a process of learning over a long period of time and I feel fortunate to get the chance to practice and try to keep getting better at it.

Tim Cynova:

What advice would you have for people who say, "All right, I can't do all of those things at the same time. Where should I start?"

Diane Ragsdale:

When I first started, I went and talked with a few people who I knew were doing their own professional development work. You were one of them. There were a few others. I knew people in my network who tended to care about these sorts of things and got a lot of recommendations. Which courses do you know people have done? Take any particular topic area. Let's say hard conversations around race. There's a whole area of coursework in this.

I talked with several people to say, "What do you know about this program, that program? Do you know anyone who's been through this or that?" And I also had certain constraints in terms of time and all of that. So I think just talk with people who've been through these programs ahead of time, and start with the thing that scares you, start with the thing that you're probably lacking in. I had felt myself sitting and standing in rooms feeling increasingly uncomfortable about how to have conversations around race.

I knew that that was an area where I needed to improve my capacities to be present and not harmful. Then it was a matter of, "Okay, there are various courses out there, some of them are going to really throw you off the deep end potentially, and are you ready for that? Some of them have different approaches. Are you somebody that would rather be at home with a video and a notebook or somebody that would rather be in a room with 10 other people doing a face-to-face exercise of some kind?" And those are going to be two very different experiences, and people learn differently that way.

Tim Cynova:

I'll toss it to you for closing thoughts, unless we want to pick up another topic before we close.

Diane Ragsdale:

Ultimately, you should just go in and this should really not be more than 15 minutes or something. You're just going to get one sentence on each of these things.

Tim Cynova:

Am I?

Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

I don't know. How much editing do you think I'm going to do? Can we just chop each sentence?

Diane Ragsdale:

I know. Especially because I speak in sentences that are three minutes long. I realized at one point, I'm like, "Okay, you've now been speaking for two minutes without breathing. That's not going to be helpful when Tim goes to edit."

Tim Cynova:

Let me toss to you a question about the Truth and Reconciliation program. So Diane, I want to circle back to what was number two on your list, the Truth and Reconciliation program at Banff. They have an amazing Indigenous Leadership program, and every time I look at the booklet, I think there's so many different programs and workshops that I want to take. Tell us about the Truth and Reconciliation program that you went through and what was that like?

Diane Ragsdale:

It was extraordinary, really transformative in many ways. And I felt it was important to take it, large part because I was working on the Cultural Leadership program here and the context of truth and reconciliation and the calls to action are so ever present in Canada at the moment. And cultural institutions in particular, among those who are really being called to respond, that I felt I needed to understand that context in order to really have any integrity in working in the cultural leadership program.

It's essentially a program that brings together both Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals to go through a process over the course of a week of first truth. You get a profound and deep experience of understanding the cultural genocide that happened in Canada. And making a connection between that and your own history and relationship to that story and your own relationship to trauma.

And then over the course of the week, you really move eventually to the point of making your own commitments to what they call the calls to action. And there's a booklet with hundreds of calls to action. Individuals and organizations are being asked to take those seriously and to work side by side. Non-Indigenous people are being asked to work side by side with Indigenous people to try to advance the rights that were lost over time because of the cultural genocide that happened.

It was incredibly moving. It's a dark, dark history. We have, of course, our own history in the United States. It's embarrassing, the extent to which we have not begun to have the kinds of awarenesses in the US about our own history and the fact that here in Canada, land acknowledgements are done everywhere. In the US, maybe once a year or twice a year, I'll be in a room where someone will do a land acknowledgement, much less grappling with these tragedies and histories that are so problematic, and thinking about what it means today to be not a performative ally but a real ally and working to improve rights, conditions et cetera for Indigenous peoples.

And so it's a critically important program. Banff is becoming, I think, the gold standard in this kind of work training. Globally, I know people are coming to study in their programs and they're also exporting them to other places as well. So I felt really fortunate to be able to take the course, and highly recommend certainly to anyone in Canada to take the program. And I'm hopeful that this sort of work is going to start happening in the US as well.

One of the most beautiful things about that program is that philosophically, there's an idea that truth and reconciliation happens when Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples come together to talk. And the generosity and kindness of the Indigenous facilitators and participants on these programs, their strength and capacity to be in the room with non-Indigenous people going through these programs, I find extraordinary. It's a humbling experience to sit in these rooms and learn this way of being present with one another.

And it reminds me a bit when I did the Patti Digh course, there's a section of it in which they talk about the necessity to recognize your incompetence, having conscious incompetence, which they call it. So often when we embark on these journeys of self-improvement, let's say, in the areas of gaining cultural competencies, that there's a tendency to want to get as quickly as possible to the stage of mastery or seeming mastery.

We don't want to sit with the uncomfortable feeling of, "Oh, yeah, before I didn't realize I was actually harming people in the way that I was behaving and certain things I was saying or the ways I was being in certain contexts or rooms." Now, I'm aware of it and that's really uncomfortable. So I want to get as quickly as possible to being able to, in a sense, perform a competent way of being in the room. I know the words to use, I know what not to say.

And people can really quickly gain, I think, the five or six back pocket phrases that they can whip out. And yet, over and over again in these programs, I've encountered this idea of, "Actually, no, you need to stop and sit in that space of conscious incompetence. It's awkward, it's messy. It's where you don't know, it's where you continue to grapple. It's where you have to say a thing and then maybe apologize for it and trust that the people in the room will go, 'Thanks for apologizing. Let's move on.'"

And really do that work over time so that it's not really about, "Do I have the five or six phrases that will make me appear woke in a room et cetera?" But have I learned how to really be humble and stay humble? And recognize that for quite a long time I will need to be quite conscious and conscientious in this arena. It may be years before I have real unconscious competence where you can just be in a room and comfortably be with people and do better, let's say. And do better.

Tim Cynova:

I think this is where my own personal meditation practice has been useful when I'm sitting with the uncomfortable. Or I'm recognizing something is uncomfortable, I'm not sure why. Or this is uncomfortable, I'm not sure why I need to just sit with this for a little bit by myself to start to tease it apart so that I can then figure out what to do with it besides just, "This is uncomfortable. I'm not sure why." And then quickly, get beyond this thing. But actually just sitting with it, and my meditative practice has given me a tool to be able to do that.

Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah, it's a great tool for that. I think the arts also. We are good at ambiguity, we are good at the unresolved. And what's that? Negative capability and things like that, right?

Tim Cynova:

Negative capability.

Diane Ragsdale:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

I have negative capabilities in a lot of areas of life.

Diane Ragsdale:

We're going to go look that up. But I think that there's a way in which the arts can also be a really effective tool for helping people get comfortable with these sorts of things. So yeah, it's good.

Tim Cynova:

So as we start to land the plane, I want to get your closing thoughts on the topic of investing in self personal, professional development.

Diane Ragsdale:

When I first met my husband, he came to visit me in New York and came to my apartment. And I had, I don't know, a couple thousand books or something, and there are a good number of them that might fall into that category of self-help book. And he looked at those shelves and he was like, "Interesting." And I thought, "Oh, my gosh, I've just exposed that I'm a complete neurotic mess to this man."

In a way, I think I have, much of my adult life anyway, been on a quest to be better. It's at the heart of the aesthetics and beauty class that I was trying to teach in ethics: how can we be better? How can we do the right thing, show up as better human beings in relationship to one another? And I think I have continued to work at it because I recognize the many ways in which I'm not great, in which I need to work on myself. We live in times where I think many of us are going to have to show up as better.

We all have different ways of going about those improvements. For some, it's reading a book. For some, it's taking a course. For some, it might be a religious practice, a spiritual practice of some kind, combinations of these. I was excited, I was just reviewing papers for a management conference that's coming up. I was asked to review the abstracts, and there were a couple that were about spirituality in the workplace. And I know this is not a new thing. It's been going on probably the last couple of decades a growing interest in this.

But I'm excited by the possibility that we can show up at work and think about what it means to be a better human being in that context and that there's growing consciousness, that human development requires time and attention and sometimes coursework. And yay for the companies that might actually invest in this sort of thing. I really do hope you'll do that yearlong course with your team at Fractured Atlas. And for those like me who didn't have that opportunity through an institution, find the time to do it for yourself. I'm so grateful I did.

Tim Cynova:

Diane, it's always a pleasure spending time with you, getting to work with you. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Diane Ragsdale:

Thanks, Tim. And sorry for the five-minute sentences.

Tim Cynova:

Well, now that you said that, I've got to leave it in.

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Decolonizing the Bylaws (EP.72)

Why and how do you decolonize an organization's bylaws?

In this episode, host Tim Cynova connects with three leaders from the U.S.-based nonprofit Dance/USA about their recent and ongoing work to decolonize their organization. Joining the discussion are Kellee Edusei, Executive Director of Dance/USA, and Holly Bass and Jim Leija, two members of the Board of Directors who co-lead the process to decolonize their organizational bylaws.

Updated

October 26, 2023

Why and how do you decolonize an organization's bylaws?

In this episode, host Tim Cynova connects with three leaders from the U.S.-based nonprofit Dance/USA about their recent and ongoing work to decolonize their organization. Joining the discussion are Kellee Edusei, Executive Director of Dance/USA, and Holly Bass and Jim Leija, two members of the Board of Directors who co-lead the process to decolonize their organizational bylaws.

We discussed the what, why, and how of the process Dance/USA engaged in over the past couple of years.

Visit Dance/USA online.

Episode Highlights:

  • The importance of decolonizing organizational structures: The conversation highlights the need to critically examine and reimagine organizational structures that are often rooted in racism and oppression. Decolonizing these structures is essential for fostering inclusivity and equity in the workplace.

  • The significance of continuous reflection and learning: The leaders of Dance/USA emphasize the importance of an ongoing process of reflection and learning in the journey of decolonization. This includes acknowledging challenges, celebrating successes, and adapting strategies as necessary.

  • Core values as guiding principles: Dance/USA operates based on core values – creativity, connectivity, equity, and integrity – that serve as guiding principles for their work in decolonizing their bylaws and developing inclusive practices.

  • Collective responsibility in creating change: The conversation underscores the collective responsibility of individuals and organizations in creating an anti-racist, inclusive, and equitable dance field. This necessitates collaboration, sharing of resources, and actively challenging systemic barriers.

Guests: Holly Bass, Kellee Edusei, and Jim Leija

Host: Tim Cynova

 

Guests

Holly Bass is a multidisciplinary performance and visual artist, writer, and director. Her work explores the unspoken and invisible social codes surrounding gender, class, and race. She was a 2020–2022 Live Feed Resident Artist at New York Live Arts and a 2021–22 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. She is the recipient of Dance/USA's Engaging Dance Audiences grant and part of their inaugural class of Dance/USA Fellowships for Artists. She studied modern dance (under Viola Farber) and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College before earning her Master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her work has been presented at spaces such as the National Portrait Gallery, the Seattle Art Museum, Art Basel Miami Beach (Project Miami Fair), and the 2022 Venice Biennale as part of Simone Leigh's Loophole of Retreat. Her visual artwork includes photography, installation, video, and performance. A Cave Canem Fellow, she has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently the National Director for Turnaround Arts at the Kennedy Center, a program which uses the arts strategically to transform public schools facing severe inequities. 

Kellee Edusei (she/her) is the first BIPOC Executive Director of Dance/USA, a forty-one year old, historically and predominately white led organization. After over a decade of serving in multiple capacities (first as the Office Manager and soon after as the Board Liaison and Director of Member Services), Edusei currently has the privilege of sitting at the helm of Dance/USA during this moment of change. Edusei embodies an ethos of “being in humble service to the dance ecosystem.” Through her leadership, she is committed to cultivating a practice of bringing to life the organization’s stated core values of Creativity, Connectivity, Equity and Integrity. Under her leadership, Edusei is leading Dance/USA in building an environment that embodies equity, centers inclusionary practices, and cultivates a profound sense of belonging for all parts of the dance ecosystem.

In the two and half years that she has served as the Executive Director, Edusei has incorporated a shared leadership structure for Dance/USA’s eighteen peer networks (Councils and Affinity Groups) thereby dismantling a singular leadership structure; embedded the organization’s core value of equity in its most foundational document – its Bylaws – ensuring a singular, equitable pathway to Trusteeship; transitioned its Conference to a biennial cycle with a commitment to offering virtual programming throughout the year; and introduced Impact Groups, a more inclusive framework for collaboration and input from members and leaders from the broader dance ecosystem. These initiatives have flourished all the while ensuring the financial stability of the organization during one of the most economically uncertain times in the last decade. As a commitment to bolster the organization’s financial health, Edusei rolled out a 12 month individual giving campaign, 40 x 40, that celebrated the organization’s 40 years of service. The culmination of the 40 x 40 ended with Dance/USA’s inaugural Day of Giving.

With curiosity and intentionality, Edusei will launch a Strategic Reframing process to examine the connections between being a member based association, operational sustainability, and increased influence within the performing arts sector. In her prior role as Director of Member Services and Board Liaison, Edusei designed the Membership Fellowship, for early career arts administrators to deepen their administrative skills and expand their leadership acumen. She implemented the “Special Membership Package,” recruitment campaign that surpassed set goals and engaged the entire Dance/USA Board and team. Edusei created a new revenue stream by maximizing Dance/USA’s monthly Bulletin. Additionally, she was part of the initial design of Dance/USA’s Dance Business Bootcamp, a program for dance artists working with budgets of less than $200,000. Edusei leveraged her Board experience to develop a website portal for Dance/USA’s Board of Trustees giving them access to one another and Board materials on-demand. In addition, she standardized the on-boarding process for new Trustees.

Edusei is an experienced grants panelist, having served on panels for the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County (MD), Alternate Roots (GA), and the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (IL). She currently serves on the Advisory Council for Women of Color in the Arts (WOCA) and on the Board of Directors for the Performing Arts Alliance (both national in scope). She is a former Board member of See Chicago Dance (IL) and Dance Exchange (MD), where she served as the Chair of their Governance Committees. Edusei has connections to Jacob’s Pillow (MA), Bates Dance Festival (ME), and Movement Research’s (NY) dance communities.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Edusei was first introduced to dance when her grandmother took her to The Washington Ballet (TWB) where she auditioned for Mary Day. Being accepted into TWB’s School is where Edusei’s love for dance took root and blossomed. After several years of ballet training, Edusei transitioned to contemporary dance, training at Maryland Youth Ballet, Dance Place, and the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.

As a double-major graduate from The College of Wooster (OH) with degrees in Dance and Black Studies, Edusei studied in New York City and Yaoundé, Cameroon. Though worlds apart, she immersed herself in each city’s eclectic dance and arts communities. As a reflection of these experiences, she devised an evening length performance exclusively of her work – the first of any Dance major at Wooster – as part of her Independent Study thesis, titled Singularly Women/Collectively Woman. The piece focused on the mask dances of the Yoruba, Voltaic, and Mende (three distinct West African ethnic groups).

Edusei considers herself a lifelong learner, and is always seeking opportunities to stretch, grow, learn, reflect and refine. To that end, she is an alumna of Acumen’s 2022 Leadership Accelerator cohort; a 2021 participant of the New Strategies Forum at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, supported by American Express; artEquity’s 2020 BIPOC Leadership Circle; and an alumna of American Express’ 2014 Leadership Academy. Edusei relocated to Chicago, IL in 2014 with her husband and their children.

Jim Leija has served as Deputy Director for Public Experience and Learning at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) since September 2019. He leads the team that builds UMMA's partnerships across the university and community and that designs and implements educational and public programming. During his tenure at UMMA, Jim has launched innovative public programming, like the Vote2020/22/24 Project with the Ann Arbor City Clerk’s Office and the campus-wide "Arts and Resistance" theme semester, in addition to initiating new partnerships with the Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership Program (Canada) and Monument Lab. Before UMMA, Leija served on the senior executive leadership team of the University Musical Society (UMS) as Vice President, Education & Community Engagement for 8 years (former title Director of Education & Community Engagement). He was instrumental in designing and implementing two major educational and performance residencies with the New York Philharmonic; served as project director for UMS’s two “Engaging Dance Audience” grants (through Dance/USA and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation); launched an arts-academic integration program with the U-M College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation); co-curated UMS’s theater series "No Safety Net" focused on contemporary social issues; and produced a "Day of Action" with Yo-Yo Ma in Flint, Michigan, in 2019. In 2022, Jim was publicly elected to his third four-year term as a trustee of the Ann Arbor District Library. Additionally, he is a trustee of Dance/USA (the national service organization for professional dance) and board member of the Detroit-based InsideOut Literary Arts. Jim holds three degrees from the University of Michigan: a master of fine arts in art and design, bachelor of arts in sociology, and a bachelor of fine arts in musical theatre. As a queer Latinx person, Jim draws great inspiration from BIPOC and queer artists who are forging creative pathways in the arts.

Host

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. In this episode, decolonizing organizations. In particular, we're connecting with three of the leaders of the national organization Dance/USA, who have been deeply involved in their work to decolonize their organizational bylaws. I'm joined by Kellee Edusei, Dance/USA's executive director and Holly Bass and Jim Leija, two members of their board of directors who are involved in this work.

If Dance/USA is new to you, it is a terrific organization that's championing an inclusive and equitable dance field by leading, convening, advocating and supporting individuals and organizations. And as frequent listeners of this podcast know, we spend a lot of our time exploring various aspects of the how of creating anti-racist, inclusive, and equitable workplaces.

So I'm excited to be in conversation with another organization that is actively re-imagining organizational structures and systems that are so often rooted in racism and oppression. In this conversation we'll be discussing the what, why, and how have the process Dance/USA engaged in over the past couple of years and inviting reflections from that group on things that might've gone sideways, if you will, along the way, if you want to learn more about DanceUSA, you can find information linked in the episode description. So let's get going. Holly, Jim, and Kellee, welcome to the podcast.

Jim Leija:

Thanks so much.

Kellee Edusei:

Thanks for having us, Tim.

Holly Bass:

Yeah, happy to be here.

Tim Cynova:

As a way of grounding us in the conversation, might I ask you each to introduce yourself and the work you do. And also Kellee maybe invite you to include a sketch of Dance/USA, especially for those who might not have checked in recently about what the organization has been up to.

Kellee Edusei:

This is Kellee Edusei here, executive director of Dance/USA. When you ask for us to describe ourselves, that's what I want to lead with, like my title, executive director of Dance/USA. But I'm also a former dancer. I never danced professionally but I have that dance blood running through my veins very strongly. I've been at Dance/USA for about 15 years now. I have moved through the organization, so I've seen this organization grow from various vantage points. I'm also a wife and a mother and a daughter and a sister and a loyal friend. So I bring all of who I am and my lived experiences to this role, into this organization. I do use she/her pronouns and for access needs, I am a butterscotch skinned woman. I've got some beautiful wire earrings on today. I'm wearing a pink sweater and a green necklace and my hair is pulled up.

Dance/USA, for those who don't know, as Tim just mentioned, we are a member-based organization that is the National Association for the Dance Ecosystem. We do champion an inclusive and equitable dance community that amplifies the power of dance to inform and inspire a nation where creativity in the field thrive. We serve the ecosystem through our core services and those are four of them. It's leadership and learning, research, advocacy, which we do in a bipartisan federal way, and then also archiving and preservation. And we do have a number of special initiatives that support the ecosystem.

So while those special initiatives may connect with and or support a select few, the learnings and the impact of them are field wide. Currently active right now is our dance [inaudible 00:04:01] fellowships to artists program, which is one of our largest regranting programs that we have. It's about $30,000 unrestricted funds that go directly to artists, and actually in this cohort we have 30 artists fellows and we're grateful to the [inaudible 00:04:16] Foundation for supporting that.

We also have our task force and dancer health, which is very important as we use our bodies as instruments to do the work that we do. We have an archiving and preservation fellows which pairs organizations or artists with the archiving fellow who is interested in learning about and honing their skills within the archiving field. Talk about a way to decolonize a field. Our artists fellows are primarily BIPOC and it's just incredible how we truly are changing the archiving field.

And then our Dance/USA Institute for Leadership Training, which is a one-on-one mentorship program with a mentee, so an early career artist or administrator with someone who's more seasoned in the field. We have a vast membership. We host member calls regularly actually, so we're constantly connecting the field. I should also say because it's important in this conversation, that we're an organization that also does its work through core values. And those core values are creativity, connectivity, equity and integrity. And I think that I'm saying that because important to the work that we do just in general, but it's also important to the why of the work around decolonizing our bylaw. I'll pass it to either of my wonderful board of directors members.

Jim Leija:

I'm Jim Leija. I'm the Deputy director for Public Experience and Learning at the University of Michigan of Art where I lead the team that organizes public programs and all the educational activities of the museum. I came into Dance/USA specifically through my previous work at University Musical Society, UMS here in Ann Arbor, which is one of the major university performing arts centers in the US. And there I was vice president for education and engagement. I was there for about 12 years, and I first came into Dance/USA as an engaging dance audiences grantee and then continued on my path to become the chair of the Dance/USA presenters council and then into my pathway here as a trustee for the Dance/USA board of directors. I was leading the trustees committee of Dance/USA when we began this work. The trustees committee is set up to essentially look after governance and bylaws and then also organize a slate for nomination of new board officers.

This work with the bylaws that we're talking about today grew out of that committee into a working group that Holly and I chaired. This has been a process that we began probably back in 2020 as the pandemic was unfolding before us. I've worked in big institutions for most of my career, almost all of it, and it's been interesting to observe and watch the transition of Dance/USA over these past probably 10 years or so that I've been involved and to see how Dance/USA has really sort of re-imagining who gets to participate in the dance ecosystem or who is participating and who isn't included in Dance/USA.

That's been the major transformation. I was thinking today about some work that Christie Bolingbrook did in her research. She's at the University of Akron with the National Choreography Center talking about how 80% of work in the dance ecosystem is project-based work, and what that says about inequality and about a national service organization that's set up initially primarily for administrators and large institutions, which is now really flexing and moving into a different space.

Holly Bass:

I'm Holly Bass. I use she/her pronouns. I am an independent artist. My practice largely focuses on dance, theater and visual art. It's a multidisciplinary practice. I'm also the national director of turnaround arts at the Kennedy Center, which is an education program that works with Title I public schools around the country that have historically lacked access to arts resources, teachers materials, things such as that. I am on the board of trustees for Dance/USA and on the trustees committee that, as Jim was saying, helps select who the next slate of trustees will be. Jim and I were the leads revising the bylaws.

Tim Cynova:

Thank you all for those introductions and starting already to weave into the work and project that we'll discuss today. Can someone explain what this was that you all undertook?

Jim Leija:

Rewinding to the pandemic starting, we're in the midst of our work of electing a new slate of trustees. We're wondering what going to happen in terms of the arts landscape and our work. And ultimately we arrived at this idea that instead of continuing to bring on new trustees, that the committee ought to take a look at our governance structures for the board, especially in light of everything that was happening in the ecosystem in terms of our social and political realities and our 2018 strategic plan. How could we align our own governing structures to lean more into our values and really recognize what was, I think, a kind of change in practice behavior and organizational culture that was already happening within Dance/USA that really needed to be embodied in these governing documents.

And so bylaws of course are first and foremost a legal set of circumstances for how a board and how a nonprofit organization operates. But we also believe in our work, that they are sort of the heart and soul of the way that we act and behave. And they communicate a lot about what we believe is good governance and good structure and good culture within the organization. So we spent a year doing an informal review within the trustees committee, which led us to realize that there was quite a lot more work that would need to be done.

That was when we activated this ad hoc board group that could be pulled together of different board members so there was sort of representation across a spectrum of voices, and I think it's interesting to say that in that group we intentionally had folks that were sort of big organization folks, folks that represented kind of history with the organization and kind of a long view as well as folks that were newer to the organization, individual artists, and that was about trying to really get at what needed to change in the governance that would better reflect our culture. So that's sort of the starting spot was a revision.

Holly Bass:

I think for many people with organizations, particularly if the organizations are smaller, independent, there's this idea that bylaws or Robert's rules of order, that they're just the way things are done. Well, this is just how it's done, so we have to keep doing it that way. And what we have the opportunity to do is say we don't have to do it the way it's been done for decades or perhaps even centuries. We can take a look at this, pull it apart, and really interrogate are these words, most members of Dance/USA are not going to go and read the bylaws. That's not the point of this. The point is understanding that your governance structure, where you put your money, are much more of a reflection of your true values than any sort of mission statement or anti-racism statement that you could put out on Twitter or X or whatever.

Kellee Edusei:

While it started in 2020 with the informal review and then a more codified review, and then recommendations that went to the board and were voted on, the final vote for these bylaws happened in November 2022, we're still in process with implementing and kind of seeing how things function in practice. We've written it down, but now we've got to live it. And I think that that's a really important piece in all of this is that yes, these are static words on a piece of paper and what we did was revise them so that we can actually put them into practice, and now we're in this process of actually living the practice. There's definitely evolution. You have to give it time to let things unfold in the most beautiful ways possible.

Tim Cynova:

Having run organizations, two things are really dry. Employee handbook and organizational bylaws, yet they sort of form the foundation for how that thing is, you pointed out, work. And while most are in a Google doc that's easily changeable. It's not just the language. How do you actually live into these? And when the written word meets reality and the organization and the ecosystem, I'm really curious about those conversations that he had, from the initial ones where he took that year, read the bylaws, reflect on the bylaws. What were some of the things where this really is problematic and needs to change?

Jim Leija:

Going back to something that Holly said earlier, if you're not sort of experienced on being on boards and you don't understand this sort of culture of how motions get passed and needing a second in a quorum and all of this stuff, you really can feel held captive by kind of the rules and regulations. So part of the effort here is to sort of demystify the fact that we are agents of our own destiny as board members, and demystifying sort of how the board works. And how bylaws works is a really important part of any organization's culture. I think as we started to parse through, there were some functional issues that are sort of less controversial. Aligning all of our board year to match up with the fiscal year to match up with the member year, which we're all on different cycles.

So just to bring everything functionally together to make sense of that. But it's like doing bylaws is like pull one thread on a sweater, like the whole sweater unravels. Because then it sort of has this domino effect in a lot of other functions in the bylaws. Another topic of conversation was what does exofficio mean? Exofficio can mean that you have a vote or you don't. It really has to be explicit in the context of your own organizational laws. Exofficio means essentially you're not elected through a sort of normal process. You're appointed by the nature of your role, but whether you do or don't have a vote on the board is often specific to the organization, and that was very specific to Kelly's role. And there was a desire really to make sure that Kelly as an exofficio board member had a voice and a vote within our board because we believe our executive director is our colleague peer and leader.

I think that there were also functional things like how many board committees do you need? And then just a raft of questions about inclusive language around gender, around who is in the field, around how we address accessibility for an ever diversifying board. And then probably the most button cultural issue that we tackled was a singular pathway to the election of board members, which really meant addressing our council groups, which were built into the board bylaws, had been long-standing groups within the context of Dance/USA, and had been automatically assigned a seat on the board just by nature of being a leader of a council, which is actually how I came to the board. That was a long held tradition and practice that was embedded in our bylaws that was really pointing to some deep questions of inequality.

Some people get a pass to the board by nature of a sort of membership affiliation group and other people have to go through a very intensive process of being nominated, elected, interviewed, vetted, and voted upon. It was really important to us that we standardized so that board members, trustees, all came to the board in the same way, that it was an equitable process.

Therein was the sort of Pandora's box of relationships, cultural practice, all of the things that you start to step in when you are dismantling a system that is beloved by many and also really problematic.

Tim Cynova:

Think about the work that I do around people, operations, organizational design, and often joke, it would be far easier if you didn't have people involved. Writing policies. Oh my gosh, this is so easy and fun and creative, and then the people get introduced and you're like, oh, that's so thorny, and you're dealing with the reaction to the change, but not necessarily the thing that's changing and people's relationship to power and all those other things that are at play that I imagine just increases the time that it takes to reimagine this.

Jim Leija:

Oh yes.

Holly Bass:

There is also an element that I would compare to when you pick up a package of food and you look at the label, can you understand what's on it? Is it milk, sugar, eggs or is it carbo poly hexa titrate something or other? And one of the things we also strive to do is make sure we could understand what the bylaws were saying. There's certain technical legal language that we couldn't change, but in every other instance we tried to put it into plain English. What is this saying? What does this mean? What is the impact of this choice or decision? That was also really, really important.

Tim Cynova:

There's a colleague of ours that is an employment attorney HR background, and also talks about how do you decolonize your employee handbook or bylaws without decolonizing yourself into a lawsuit? And I think that's one of those areas where Holly, you were mentioning, there's some things that might need to be legally in there, but also how do you know the things that need to be versus that's just the way people phrase it?

Kellee Edusei:

That's actually a beautiful segue to something I wanted to highlight, was the process. The process was very organic and iterative. What I'll hone in on is what Holly is saying. Can we understand what this language is saying and what it's intending to do and what it means? We had multiple versions of our bylaws and we're going through and reading every single part of it and saying, no, take this out or change this here because what does this actually mean? I mean, the side column or the comments that we three had during the process was enormous. And as we got to a place where we felt really comfortable with the language or it was clear to us, we started involving others into the process. So we did have one or two current board members review the bylaws and ask their own questions and comments throughout the document, and then we did have a lawyer review once everything was in a place that we were like, yep, this is clear.

Yes, this language is aligned. Yes, this is aligned with our values. Now lawyer please review it to ensure that we've not missed anything and or not taken something out that really does from a legal standpoint need to be included. That was an important aspect of the process to have that final filter. As we also talk about decolonizing the document, it's really important to also talk about how decolonization was a part of the actual process. It was very, very intentional to have Holly and Jim be co-leads on this work because it would be impossible for one person and should not be expected that one person could drive this work forward. The way in which we involved other folks from the board and our member community was really vital, and how we engaged them at different points in the process to say, hey, we've had a lot of conversations, small group conversations, this is where we're going.

We're offering it up to you for your comments and your feedback and any additional thoughts. Where are there points of ease in this process or the way in which we're going and where are there points of real tension that we now need to go back into our small group and kind of tussle with and work through? Again, periodic points in bringing the progress and where we were in the process to the full board was not a part of the entire process, but it was critical to have them aware and engaged. And then the full rewrite and then of course engaging the lawyer, and then doing the final vote. And actually again, I'm going to go back to where we are in process around this. We just voted on them this year, so in April 2023.

So again, I'm giving scope of time and intention and care and noting we need to slow this process down, or the three of us are too close to it, let's now give it to someone else, review it and give us feedback. Maybe we're not noticing something that we need to really notice. It's just so important to name as being a part of the process, even how you go about it. You really have to be intentional and think about it.

Jim Leija:

If I can rewind back to this whole transition that we undertook with the presenter's council, manager's, council, agents council, so these are all of our major affinity groups that are written into the bylaws. And they give you kind of a blueprint of how the organization was formed, sort of its history. What we were really trying to work around was this question of these groups are centered in our governance structures, and then there are all these other affinity groups that have formed in the past 10, 15 years that are not in the bylaws that function like these affinity groups that do not have a seat on the board. What we were trying to do is kind of untangle what of these sort of legacy structures are still valuable and meaningful and they have a lot of equity, cultural capital and equity built up in them and which are emerging?

Do they need to be a part of the governance structure? Are they a program of Dance/USA, are they a kind of member project of Dance/USA, or are they a part of how the organization is governed? We ended up taking all the councils out of the governance structure, and I think this is where we get into the nitty gritty, which was really uncomfortable for people because we're also doing this work in the current structure where there's a number of council chairs that are board members that are essentially involved in a conversation about losing their seat on the board. As the work unfolded, there were so many individual and group conversations with current council chairs, past council chairs, individuals who really could read the ecosystem both in a sort of forward-looking and kind of legacy perspective. Where were we going to step in it?

Who was going to be resistant? Because it's not just about like, okay, we make the change in the document. Then we have to live into it. One of the truisms also of board work for most people is that it is episodic. You walk into a meeting four times a year or six times a year or whatever. Maybe you're not paying attention, there's not a whole lot of continuity necessarily in between unless you're doing intensive work like this, that we had to do a lot of intensive communicating outside of the structure of those board meetings. So calling meetings with folks, and even then folks forgetting or not remembering, or having a different recollection of what we discussed and really coming to the realization that, oh yeah, if this moves forward, I'm not on the board anymore. And that's happening in real time.

And so there is sort of no amount of over-communicating when it comes to doing work like this. Memos on our progress, check-ins, all these phone calls, Zoom meetings, really productive, important. And also sometimes they don't land or people don't remember or people just aren't necessarily connected to the idea right in that moment, and that means that there are lots of fits and starts along the way and we make adjustments as we go.

Holly Bass:

There's such a kind of discrepancy between what we as the folks we're leading the process we're experiencing versus some of those board members who might have been invited. We invite you to learn more, but unless it's mandatory, and I understand we're all busy people, so folks wouldn't necessarily show up along the way. And in my mind I'm like, we have explained this over and over. It's so clear in my mind that we've done this, and then you get to the moment where it's time to vote and people are like, this is the very first time I'm hearing this [inaudible 00:25:22]. You're like, what? I was like, Kellee, what? Are we having another call? Another call? Yes, Holly, another call.

Jim Leija:

When that happened and it did, it was another moment of just sort like, okay, if we're living into our values, we're sort of pressing pause to address what's happening, giving people the space to absorb and digest, and then kind of moving on from there.

Tim Cynova:

And that's not unique. It's all theoretical until, oh, it's actually right there and it's going to mean something, and then how do you design into those values and hold those values? And also it's not work in the world stop. It's not like you had two years off to do this. Wondering where the friction existed as you're trying to do this work and realizing the more you get into it, oh, there's some problematic stuff here, and also that's governing the organization. That's what the legal document. Are there any examples that as you reflect on, resonate for you at that intersection? Or maybe where your expectations of this work met with reality.

Holly Bass:

One of the things for me as we stated, bylaws are dry. It was difficult for me to motivate to get in there and like, oh yeah, that's what I want to do. After working eight hours at my regular job, I now want to go dive into these bylaws. But one of the things that really helped was being able to co-work. Jim and I would say, okay, we're going to get on Zoom for 45 minutes or for 90 minutes and we're going to plug away, and then you get a little momentum and you could do your independent work and come back to it.

Jim Leija:

The way that we finished was we had our first in-person board meeting last spring and I went to DC where Holly lives and we sat around her table and just literally went line by line to finish the work together. So it is kind of labor-intensive. I'm a bit of a policy wonk. I'm the board member who's the first question I ask is give me the budget and give me the bylaws so that I understand what's going on. So I kind of love bylaws, and also have a real very more than full-time job. And I think that in the context of the work too, over those years, those pandemic years, you just feel people's overload.

I know you've talked about this before on the podcast. It's sort of that idea of how do you hold on and not sort of retreat from the need for change, but many of us felt very acutely in that pandemic moment or was maybe catalyzed or crystallized in those moments. And to keep going back to the idea that the reason that we needed to do this had to do with justice and had to do with equity. It had to do with our great love of dance just period, and the idea that we want to give people the best circumstances for creating, touring, presenting dance in their communities nationally, internationally, all of them. This is not just hypothetical. These are the building blocks upon which we actually change our sector.

Kellee Edusei:

I'm reflecting because I'm also realizing that yes, it was in April 2023 that the two of you started the body doubling on the finalization of the bylaws, like really go line by line. Which means that we voted on those bylaws in June 2023. So I think for me, I did not realize how important it would be to be honest in the work. And what I mean by that is the three of us had to be really honest in what our capacity was at that time, what our energy level was at that time, what were our needs in order to get to the next stage in the work, and being really attuned, being attuned to each other's needs, but also noting when we needed to say, okay, we're going to set this down for a month because we have other things that we need to tend to, whether in our personal lives or in our work lives. And perhaps we now need to pull in X, Y, Z board member to now offer some feedback and help see whatever we've just worked on in a different way, which I think was really important.

One of the things that I do want to say that as we sort of think about perfectionism, noting that that was also a big piece of this process, we needed to own the fact that every part of it wasn't going to be fully perfect, and yet it was still vital and important to share with the board to have those many calls with them, or individuals from our member community. Jim earlier on talked about as a part of this process, we thought about the functionality of our board committees and what board committees do we actually need in order to run and govern the organization. And so we did remove a number of board committees noting that the work of those former board committees could be done in a different kind of way within the organization. One of those board committees that was removed from the bylaws was our programming committee.

In conversation with folks from the community, one idea that arose was this notion of impact groups, and so these impact groups now have a place to grow and be nourished within our organization. Impact groups are meant to make an impact on Dance/USA's operation. They're meant to be very specific on whatever it is that they need to be impacting in that moment. Again, a co-chair model for these impact groups, at least one Dance/USA trustee needs to be on the impact group, and the impact group really needs to be an inclusive space and representative of the larger, wider dance ecosystem. So an example of that was our conference. While we're doing this bylaws process, we're also planning for our first in-person conference since 2019. Typically the programming committee would do that work, but we launched and we really tested what an impact group could be with our conference programming impact group. And the outcome that, in my opinion, I thought was really beautiful.

It had a co-chair model. It was very inclusive of individuals from the dance ecosystem that maybe would never perhaps if we stuck with the same bylaws ever have a place on the Dance/USA board and being able to have a leadership role. And because of that, it gave us an opportunity to build new relationships with folks in the ecosystem that we didn't have before. And that relationship building was really rooted in trust. We are trusting you to help us and collaborate with us and partner with us on building and curating the conference container for the field.

I continually reflect on how important the impact groups were in that moment for our conference, and how important they will continue to be as we as an organization continue to transform and really create a space and a container that is Dance/USA in the dance ecosystem that really is rooted in inclusive, equitable practices where folks who have historically not had a place within the organization or "a seat at the table" can access that and be fully present. And that the relationship is not one-sided, but it's very reciprocal.

Holly Bass:

Another key element to the process that I think would be helpful for other organizations, is Dance/USA hired an outside facilitator, particularly for those initial small group meetings, which we call tiny task forces. And that's something really important. Oftentimes you need someone who is familiar with your work but isn't enmeshed in the work to help you create that framework to help you set the values, the timeline. And our board chair Anne Wong, have to give her a great shout out. She was really immensely helpful in just keeping everyone calm and keeping us on track. And Anne would be like, where are we with the such and such that has this deadline? I'm like, oh God, okay, Anne, I'm on it.

Jim Leija:

Yeah, there was a bit of a relay race at the end in terms of accountability and getting others involved to get us across the finish line. I will shout out Lisa Mount of Artistic Logistics, who was our facilitator in those early days, just a great facilitator, strategic mind, and we loved working with Lisa. And our board chair at the time was just tremendously supportive and I think also setting a tone for the conversation so that we could hear and listen to concerns, but also move towards the change, which is so important. I think another lesson learned, if I'm synthesizing too, is that sort of help with facilitation takes a little bit of the edge off the burden of staffs in terms of having to drive all of the activity all the time, and then on the other hand, I think where the rubber meets the road is we took a bunch of member activities out of the governance structure, put them firmly back into the program management portfolio for staff.

And definitely that is a conversation you want to be having is how does a process like this impact the operational day-to-day work that the staff has to do while the process is unfolding and then afterwards in terms of it's easy for us to say, okay, we've made this change and we're moving them out of governance, but they still exist and expect a sort of high level of service as member affiliates. And they're important constituents of the organization, so that's a important message, which is to say, you're not over here anymore, but you're over here and you're still important. It's sort of just like opening the center or there's just more in the center, I guess, as we think about where the organization's efforts are focused.

Tim Cynova:

Our time has flown by on the conversation. As we land the plan on our conversation today, where do you each want to land it?

Kellee Edusei:

This is not, I guess, really revolutionary, but I think it's important to acknowledge that change is hard and it's difficult, and yet it's necessary and it's something that we must do in order to evolve and transform, and if you are an organization that is values centered, at some point you made a choice to be value centered, so you either got to make sure that your practices are aligned with it, or reestablish what those values are. I would say change is hard, but you got to stay committed to it and really, really own the practices of those values.

Jim Leija:

It's like even though it's a piece of paper, it's not about the piece of paper, it's about the community and it's about the relationships, and I think that's probably 99% of our work is that sort of interpersonal work, and this process was no different. We're rewriting a document, but we're actually rewriting the community and we're rewriting our patterns and our behaviors. And even though bylaws are dry, we must resist our boredom and remember that we have to lean into these structures to get to where we want to be, ultimately.

Holly Bass:

A really robust community has to be able to hold and contain conflict and disagreement, and sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking we want everyone to be happy to the extent that we're actually not living out our values. It is difficult work to align your values, your actions, your words, your finances, and your bylaws, but it can create so much fertile, generative space for the community to develop and grow.

Tim Cynova:

Holly, Jim and Kelly, thank you so much for your openness and transparency and this ongoing process for sharing the details of this really inspiring work that you've been doing. And thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Jim Leija:

Thanks for having us. It's been great.

Kellee Edusei:

Especially on a topic that's as sexy as bylaws.

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. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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NAS (EP.71)

How do we support leaders in the cultural sector?

In this episode, host Tim Cynova has a fun and fascinating conversation with Gail Crider (President & CEO) and Kristina Newman-Scott (Board Chair) of National Arts Strategies (NAS), an organization dedicated to building and supporting a community of arts and culture leaders who drive inspiring change for the future. We dive into the transformative work they've been doing to create more inclusive and innovative spaces and approaches within the sector through their programs and offerings.

Updated

September 2, 2023

How do we support leaders in the cultural sector?

In this episode, host Tim Cynova has a fun and fascinating conversation with Gail Crider (President & CEO) and Kristina Newman-Scott (Board Chair) of National Arts Strategies (NAS), an organization dedicated to building and supporting a community of arts and culture leaders who drive inspiring change for the future. We dive into the transformative work they've been doing to create more inclusive and innovative spaces and approaches within the sector through their programs and offerings.

Episode Highlights:

  • Introduction to our guests from National Arts Strategies and their roles within and outside of NAS.

  • The history and mission of NAS, and how they are working to strengthen the arts and culture sector.

  • The importance of embracing change and adapting to the ever-evolving landscape of the arts industry.

  • The role of technology in creating new opportunities and challenges for arts organizations.

  • NAS's commitment to its values, and how they're working to create more inclusive spaces within the arts sector.

  • The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts industry and how NAS has adapted its programs to support leaders during these challenging times.

  • The future of NAS and their vision for the arts and culture sector and what exciting things are in store.

Guests: Gail Crider & Kristina Newman-Scott

Host: Tim Cynova

 

Guests

Gail Crider is the granddaughter of Bob and Carrie, farmers who figured things out as they went and nurtured both plants and neighbors; she is the daughter of Carolyn, an educator who built spaces for people of all ages to understand and learn tools to turn learning disabilities into different abilities; she is the sister of Catherine, a psychiatrist who is as dedicated to truth finding as she is to planet nurturing; she is mother to Alex, a recent graduate who plans to run for public office, dismantle harmful and oppressive systems, and link arms with others to heal the world.

Gail is part of a collaborative management team of creative and resourceful individuals at NAS who sit inside a larger and greatly gifted staff and board of agitators and change agents. She facilitates strategy, program design and partnerships, and values alignment. Gail was instrumental in the organization’s transition from the National Arts Stabilization Fund to National Arts Strategies and providing the range of services offered today that support a diverse community of leaders driving inspiring change for the future.

Over the course of her career, Gail has been an entrepreneur, worked with a variety of nonprofit organizations and spent a decade in public and private philanthropy. Prior to NAS, she was as a program officer for a foundation where she worked on inner-city redevelopment and community building in Washington, D.C. Gail has also worked for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Arena Stage, Shakespeare Theatre, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Key Bank. She co-chaired the Community Development Support Collaborative in Washington, D.C., and has served as a senior fellow for the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania, on the audit committee for the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and on grant panels for the Corporation for National Service (AmeriCorps), the National Endowment for the Arts and the Department of Treasury, CDFI Fund. She holds a B.S. in theater from Lewis and Clark College and continues to learn formally and informally through her work at NAS, including continuing education at Stanford University, Harvard Business School, and University of Michigan – Ross School of Business. She is an ICF trained leadership coach.

Kristina Newman-Scott is an award-winning, purpose-driven leader with over 20 years of experience in contemporary visual and performing arts, entertainment, and media. She is the inaugural Executive Director for The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at New York Public Radio/WNYC, the company’s multi-platform and live studio space.

Newman-Scott's awards and recognitions include being named one of the City and State New York’s, Telecommunications Power 50 individuals shaping New York’s digital future, an Observer’s NYC Arts Power 50, and a Next City Urban Vanguard. She is a recipient of the Selina Roberts Ottum award from Americans for the Arts and was conferred an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts by the University of New Haven, Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in 2018.

Her past leadership positions include serving as President of BRIC, an art, and media organization in Brooklyn; the Director of Culture for the State of Connecticut; Director of Programs at the Boston Center for the Arts; and Director of Visual Arts at Real Art Ways.

Kristina was appointed to the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission in 2020 and currently serves on the Boards of Americans for the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council, National Arts Strategies, New Yorkers for Culture and Arts and the New York Arts Education Roundtable.

Kristina was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and worked as a practicing artist and TV/radio host and producer in her home country before moving to the US in 2005. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

Host

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. In this episode I have the honor of chatting with two of the amazing leaders at National Arts Strategies, president and CEO, Gail Crider, and board chair, Kristina Newman-Scott.

If NAS is new to you, it's a terrific organization helping to build and support a diverse community of arts and culture leaders who drive inspiring change for the future. Frequent listeners of this podcast know that we spend a lot of time exploring various aspects of the how of creating anti-racist, inclusive, and equitable workplaces. NAS is one organization that's in the mix as their approach and offerings aim to help leaders thrive as they work to shift unjust systems.

Some of the things I'm particularly interested in learning more about today are their value centered coaching program, their four-day workweek experiment, and how on a scale of awesome to totally awesome, where do you need to land in order to be a part of the NAS team.

If you want to learn more about NAS, Gail, and Kristina, you can find information linked in the episode description. In the interest of time, let's get going. Gail and Kristina, welcome to the podcast.

Gail Crider:

Thanks, Tim.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

Thank you.

Tim Cynova:

You both are no strangers to the Work Shouldn't Suck podcast, or I guess specifically the daily leadership live stream that Lauren Ruffin and I hosted at the very beginning of the pandemic. You both were guests when our lives were thrown into the uncertainty bucket. I'm excited for this opportunity really to dust off our microphones and get the band back together on this one.

So much to talk about, but before we really dive in, why don't we just start with how do you each typically introduce yourselves and the work that you do? Gail, why don't you get us started?

Gail Crider:

Thanks, Tim. My name is Gail Crider. I am a daughter, sister, mom, friend, meditator, baker, and I'm coming to you from my tiny home office that has this inviting purple chair behind me with a weighted blanket. I think that says a lot right there.

I've spent the better part of my life cultivating curiosity in myself and others and creating spaces where we can share, learn, and grow together, which has meant growing my own abilities to walk towards discomfort and even embrace ambiguity. And still, I love to organize people and ideas a little bit too much.

I want to just go a little bit deeper because this is my link to Kristina as well is I've worked in philanthropy and banking and regional theater, community development. I volunteered in schools as my son grew up and organized efforts in my community on sustainable infrastructure. I've had the great good fortune to work for NAS, and this is something that gave me pause for a quarter of a century at this point in different roles.

I have known Kristina for almost 10 years. We first met during our inaugural run of Creative Community Fellows. We sought her out to join the board in 2018, and she's been our close partner as board chair this year. I think Kristina and I are both really drawn to change at local and systemic levels and cultivating inclusive spaces where people can learn and be and test and try. Kristina is really there as a thought partner, a collaborator, a crisis counselor, and a friend.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

Oh wow. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for that, Gail. I'm Kristina Newman-Scott. I am also a mom and a sister and a daughter, missing my parents who live in Jamaica. I was born and raised in Jamaica, but I've lived in the United States since 2005. I've spent 20 odd years working in arts and culture first as an artist and then working as a curator and arts administrator.

Currently, I am the executive director of the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at New York Public Radio. Some might know New York Public Radio is the home of WNYC and WQXR, which are the two popular radio stations. While the company curates for ears, we like to say that we curate onstage and onscreen. So I get to do that every day.

Listen, without NAS, I don't think I would even be in this role in this moment in New York City. I mean, my experience at NAS in 2014 when I was working for the mayor of the City of Hartford as the head of cultural affairs completely changed my career trajectory. I was always going to work in the arts, but it changed how I imagined my place in the arts. I will always be deeply grateful.

Tim Cynova:

I think that might be when we first met, Kristina, because I was invited to-

Kristina Newman-Scott:

Yes, you were a mentor.

Tim Cynova:

Is that when we went to Mass MoCA and sat in darkness for 45 minutes when we listened to that string quartet?

Kristina Newman-Scott:

Yes.

Tim Cynova:

Oh my gosh.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

Oh my gosh. That was a moment. That was like a moment. Thank you, Gail, for that. It was an amazing musical experience, I will say.

Tim Cynova:

Incredible artistry, but also like 45 minutes in a studio that was completely dark.

Gail Crider:

These instructions where you can't move after a certain point.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

Right. No, but it was the first time I could hear sound bounce across and in space. Do you remember that? My awareness of the sound's movement within that space was heightened. It's magical.

Gail Crider:

Which is, y'all, a metaphor or analogy to the work in a way that NAS does, creating those spaces where you have a different context and a different awareness than maybe you had before.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

That's true.

Tim Cynova:

Speaking of a different awareness, in the lead up I'd mentioned how you both were on the leadership live stream that Lauren and I hosted at the very start of the pandemic when we're like, "When's going on?" You're running arts organizations, there's so much uncertainty. So I'm really curious over the past three years, what's changed for each of you personally, professionally, and maybe even philosophically about the work you do, the work we do, and what that time has been like for NAS.

Gail Crider:

Gosh, y'all. Remember going into this, we didn't know what we were going into. Talk about a level of ambiguity and uncertainty, all the things that make humans just feel so comfortable and happy in spaces. As you triage those moments, we're so glad that we kept the salaries intact. We kept the team intact.

We became even closer to all of our friends and family in the NAS friends and family world to our board and decided things like we stepped out of the funding pool. We decided not to do any fundraising. We had assets that we could rely on while others did not. That felt like the right thing to do. With the entire team and the incredible board support, we went to four-day work weeks. We decided just to lop off a day, not to squish an entire 40-hour work week into four days, but just to push it back, push it down, and change it up.

We were so hyper aware and so cognitively overloaded. And so having that extra day, the team had decided to have it a three-day kind of weekend, have that span of time to function differently and to be really present for families. A lot of folks had young kids or older parents, neighbors, a lot of things we were all dealing with.

So I look back on those times thinking, I'm just grateful. I'm so grateful for the group. And then that really blossomed into stepping more into these co-creation spaces. I think we really all co-created that. Kristina, you'll probably remember a lot of conversations around let's try this, let's do this with the team and with the field.

And so that really led us into really embracing that more and working with more and more people on how do we figure out how to continue to adapt and just step a little bit forward while being beside people as they're navigating through really challenging times and into a future that we'd like to create rather than one that may be dictated to us.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

As I hear you bring all those things up, it's interesting, Tim, you were like, "What are some of the shifts since COVID" and how either we've changed our roles or just in thinking. That heightened awareness of that pause that we were forced to take, we had no choice but to take.

The pause was different. It showed up differently for different people. Some people moved, some people slowed down and became aware of how much they were working. Some people actually sped up trying to prove their value. I saw a lot, especially in the BIPOC community, of folks actually working even harder, which had more of an emotional toll on them because their value is labor.

While the world was becoming aware of the ways that we had been moving through our lives in work and in other ways that were maybe not the healthiest, skies in India were clearing up, you saw sea creatures in canals. It was like, what is happening? It's like slow down. Me Too, Black Lives Matter, mental health support, need for co-leadership as Gail was talking about.

But simultaneously power structures within arts and cultural organizations, some of them unlike NAS, actually were reverting back to ways that were oppressive and connected to systems that were in conflict with the moment. So while people were saying, we need space, let's slow down, what are our values and how might we show up differently, there were these other pieces that were like, okay, great, but let's do these 55 things now.

I think in this moment today, we've actually lost a lot of the momentum that we've gained during COVID, and it's actually dizzying when you think about how fast the turnaround has been. I feel like in many ways we are in terms of work culture, not at NAS, but in general, not better off than we were pre-pandemic, where we're going in the wrong direction in many ways.

I say this to say that NAS and the team at NAS and the board supported the organization's unknowing and being like, okay, let's be paced and let's take a moment and let's trust in our leaders at National Arts Strategies. They're telling us this is what they need and let's give them the space to go through this.

And so we learned a lot as a board because most of us are running arts and cultural organizations or work in the arts and cultural sector, so we had a lot of good learning. But I feel like the work that NAS has done and continues to do is just the kind of model that we need to see more of in our nation.

Tim Cynova:

I think it's Liz Lerman who talks about the snapback. I've really been feeling that the past year. You got past the uncertainty and then into whatever that next phase was. And then it's the snapback because we're like, "Well, we need to be doing the same things we were doing before while everyone's still really exhausted and burned out." To your point, Gail, about trying to cram 100% into what used to be 80%, the five-day work week, we'll do five and four, and we're like, "Oh my gosh, we barely can show up for four, let alone try to do it at 100%."

As an organization that works with leaders, actively are working with how to hold onto the stuff that came out of a really challenging period into a new future, a different future, a co-created future, I'm curious what's resonating with you right now. As a lot of organizations are trying to get back to 2019, you all are an organization that's helping rethink what the future can be. What's in the mix for you all right now?

Gail Crider:

We had a sense, like Kristina was saying, of what we wanted to move away from, but not how to move what we wanted to move towards. What was the horizon? And that there's no single path to get there. We often talk about both structures and behaviors. People are people. We do like to sit in comfortable spaces. We don't like discomfort. We don't necessarily change. We want to change. We're not sure how to change.

And so it's how to support people both in their systems and structures and the behaviors. I would say when you mentioned coaching, that was a program that we initiated right before the pandemic started, training coaches. And then we finished it through the pandemic and then initiated it inside the pandemic, because we realized that I think from our own past history and our relearning and unlearning and learning, again, it's such a cycle that we can't just pull forward structures that we're familiar with.

We have to continue to imagine how things could look in the future. And then we also have to recognize there's many paths and that we're all people. So the coaching has really helped support people where they're at and find their power and potential and help them move into a future that they want to be in rather than something somebody else might dictate to them.

And then I think with the other programs that we've worked on, the programs that Kristina, you and I met on, the Creative Community Fellows, even how that's changed to support these amazing people who are working on positive community change, but typically outside of organizational structures, now there's a $10,000 fellowship attached to that. No strings attached. I mean, be in the program, do your work. We are here to support you no single way. Many different ways to a horizon that's a lot more fair and equitable and healthy for everyone.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

I have a core memory of being in that house, that strange big mansion, very strange big mansion in New England. There was an exercise that we had to do in my year. They blindfolded us and took us downstairs. We were holding onto each other's shoulders, and they brought us into a room that had cord or string around. It was like a maze and you had to figure your way out.

This exercise was a life moment. It was a moment for me. They said to you when you got in there, "Everybody get in. Find your way out. Once you get out, we'll let you know. And if you need help, just ask for help. But everybody get in." So we're all hitting into each other, feeling string, hell-bent on finding the way out. And I kept hearing, "This person's out, Becky's out, [inaudible] out." And I'm like, "Why am I not getting out of here?" I kept trying to figure out the God damn way.

Anyway, so at the end, I think it might've been three of us left. I don't remember what the thing was that made us just give up or something, but it dawned on us or somebody said it, "You have to ask for help. That's the way out." Asking for help was the way out. So when people lifted their hand up to say, "I need help," that is how they got out.

For me in the program, I realized that I didn't know how to ask for help. I wasn't raised in a way that made me feel safe enough to ask for help because I felt like that was already, as a biracial woman of color, asking for help means that I'm reinforcing a deficit mindset of myself and that I'm less than. But that moment changed it where I was like, "Oh my God, I got to ask for help. I got to be okay with being like, 'This is what I need help on.'" That was a tool. I mean, I've taken that tool to this day.

But the beauty of these programs that NAS does as well is that it's for sure about the tools that you'll get, the practical tools that will help you be a better leader, make more impact, create more meaning. But it's also about tools that have kind of self-realization, moments where you have awakenings about how you are showing up in the world and how you might need to take a moment with that to make whatever shifts or that you need to make to create more meaning in the work that you're doing.

That's the beauty too. It's not just going to a place where you're like, "I've done my design thinking coursework, yay, I'm going to go change the world." It's also about like, no, this is also going to allow you to have reflective moments and think about who you are as a human in the world.

Tim Cynova:

That's really the beauty of the NAS community and the deep thought in learning and curriculum that goes into setting up those moments, because the next day we did the lux circles.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

We did.

Tim Cynova:

As someone who's really skeptical about this. The concept was you break off into five or six people groups and you ask the group, "Here's something I need," and the group comes together like, how can we help with that? I was deeply skeptical going into this. At the time, we were redoing our employee handbook, and I was looking for the graphic novel employee handbook that Zappos did. And so I'm like, "Hey, I'm just looking for this. I'd like to see it." And someone in the circle is like, "Yeah, my nephew works there. Let me text him." I'm like, "Oh my God."

And then the next person was like, "I'm getting married. We want to go for a beach honeymoon and we're willing to go any place." And someone's like, "Would you go to whatever country?" And they're like, "Yeah, sure." They're like, "Yeah, my cousin has a place. Let me just contact them." I'm like, "Oh my gosh, what has just happened in this circle?"

Kristina Newman-Scott:

Yes, it's so true.

Tim Cynova:

But it takes that, well, you can ask for help. We have a community here. And took that into practice. For some things like no way someone's going to find a beach honeymoon for free. It was that magical moment. And every time I've done that with NAS, I'm like, "No way anyone's going to have anything to help with that one." It's kind of the more outrageous things, the more you're like, "Oh yeah, we can totally figure that thing out."

I think as we're living in this moment, no one has all the answers right now. We're living into a future that is being invented as we live it. And so how do you build that network? I mean, I know the two of you because I'm at NAS and other people that are like, "All right, so how do we actually create this thing?" It's such a beautiful moment and happened in that weird house in New England.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

That is true, that weird house in New England. I wonder what's come of that place. But yes.

Tim Cynova:

Gail, as you think about the work that NAS is doing, and we're talking about something that happened a decade ago that still resonates with both of us. Every single person who's been a part of NAS has these stories, I know. How does that inform how you approach the work that you've been doing for a quarter of a decade?

Gail Crider:

We're all so curious, curious about how things were curious about why people do things, curious about what the possibilities are for the future. We've talked about how every time we build something new, it's on the shoulders of those who've gone before you.

But there is this entire interconnected community, and it is because of that force in a way. It helps us move into the future. And every time now we build something new or we think, oh, now what? We go to our community and we try to find spaces that are, again, those walking into discomfort and walking with others because it makes so many things more possible because together we're so interdependent.

But we sometimes live in a society that falsely says, no, you're independent. You can pull yourself up by your bootstrap. You can do this. Yes, everybody has a level of power and authenticity and you want to be yourselves, but it's such a crushing pressure. And to take that pressure off to make these reflective spaces to try and test new ideas is really how we've moved into the future.

And so I think it's incredibly iterative. Over and over we've done this again and again. And now again with the projects we build, we now bring in the community as co-designers and we pay them for their time and we recognize them and we link arms to continue to build towards a future that we'd all like to see.

Tim Cynova:

It's a rarity to have a CEO and a board chair in a conversation that's public. It's a rarity to have the people in these roles know each other, like each other, want to talk about the work that they do. I'm curious if you can share a little bit about how the two of you work together in these roles and what that's like and maybe what's unique to that because you both have worked with other people in these roles or been in other roles in that configuration.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

I've had many chairs in my job, so I'm very accustomed to working with chairs. The first time I accepted the role of a chair is with NAS because it just felt so special to me. I was vice chair under our past chair, and I know I'm not a perfect chair, but what I try to do in my role is to be able to be responsive to what Gail and the team need and try to not offer too many things that are not asked for.

I try to work from a place of support and being responsive in ways that they are asking for versus injecting a lot of the things that I think they need that they didn't ask for. I think that that's a really easy, solid formula for any board chair. Just show up in ways that start out with, how might I support you in this moment? Because that's the work. I hope that that's what I'm doing. But listen, Gail will tell you. This board is such a cool board. It's so full of joy and purpose. Gail, what's your perspective on this? No pressure.

Gail Crider:

I'm thinking about the conversation we had about liberatory practices. We were trying to encourage the board to speak more publicly about its own spaces and spaces with us. They said, "Yeah, but we're just such an unusual beast in a way because all the other boards we serve on in our organizational boards, they're just so radically different." And then we've had this long discussion about why they have to be and what is it about structures that make it so.

I guess to go back into our world, I think we've set up this space where our board is thought partners for us. They are there to support but also to push. So it's confirming and disconfirming information and to try to build a level of trust where everybody feels like they can offer what they have in the moments it's going through their minds, so in our meetings. Board members are amazing for us in that we pick up the phone, we send a text or an email and they're there for us with some specific request or some time or anything that we're asking for or needing.

I think with Kristina and I, we met through some really high bonding moments. It really is, I trust you so deeply, Kristina, to know that you're also not going to tell me what I want to hear. You're going to tell me what's real and what you see, and that's a beautiful thing.

Plus it's great fun to work with Kristina, your energy and your humor. You bring out the best in people. When we recruit new board members, they typically will talk to Kristina. I almost, within I would say seconds, get an email or text back from the potential board members saying, "I love Kristina. That was a great conversation."

Kristina Newman-Scott:

That's nice to hear. I think a key point too though, Tim, is that our board members, while we all give to the organization time, treasure, talent, we're not the traditional fundraising board that you'd see at maybe major museums or other types of institutions that have boards that really their world and their focus is to bring in and to make large substantial donations.

It doesn't mean that there aren't people on our board who don't give if they have the ability to, but the point is that I think that that shifts the dynamic quite a bit because I think with a focus on the monetary value as the highest value, the ability to build relationships that are equitable and based on respect and trust and understanding is uncommon, because if the purse string is the thing, if it's the money that is the number one priority, then the person holding that money assumes that they and what they think and what they bring is the number one priority.

Not all the time, I'm not saying in every instance, but I think that it's a very delicate balance with that type of board because it can shift and cause tension in ways that might not be as visible in the beginning, where our board is all about the content and to Gail's point, the thought leadership to be partnered to push, pull, to hold all of us accountable, to affect systemic change and to be of service to NAS.

Tim Cynova:

Gail, speaking about being a part of the NAS team, I hear you're in the process of searching for a brand new director of community partnerships. What's the role? How are you thinking about it? And what qualities and characteristics would help someone really thrive in this role at NAS right now?

Gail Crider:

This is a new role for us, and it is born out of a collaboration that we've had now I think two years running with the LACNA Foundation, but is to, in essence take the lead on their fellowship program, the name of which specifically is the LACNA BIPOC Executive Leadership in Arts program.

This is an exciting time of change, and it's an exciting time of development of that particular program where the board really wanted to solidify its potential growth. It was a good time. It moved from kind of volunteer and some of us including NAS who were contractors working on it to now being housed inside of NAS and having a champion, if you will, a staff person that is primarily devoted to the stewardship and the future of this program.

It's an incredibly exciting time for someone coming into this really new role who loves to work with complex and fascinating partners who have a lot of amazing ideas and energy towards change that needs channeling and supporting. This particular role we anticipate working on other community partnerships that we continue to be part of and to grow. And so we're excited about the complementarity with the LACNA program and other things that we've been doing, and then having a new person housed inside of NAS because every new person changes kind of who we are and the direction we're going.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

I know it's in the name, National Arts Strategies, but I do think an attractive thing about working within the NAS community is its connectivity across the nation and the world really, intentional relationships that have been formed across the United States and across the world.

I think that somebody that is interested in work that's happening the way that NAS is focused, it was an attractive point to have proximity to this work. It's not just about being in Alexandria, thinking about arts and culture in this small space. It's really a global organization. Having proximity to research and thinkers and thought leaders that are global and that are moving the needle on this would be exciting to a candidate who finds that exciting.

Tim Cynova:

Per usual, our time has flown by. Anytime we all get together to chat, we always run out of time. The clock is not on our side for this conversation. As we bring the plane in for landing on our conversation today, where do you two want to land it?

Kristina Newman-Scott:

NAS is an incredible institution. I am biased, yes. I am biased, but I'm biased because it is truly a space where we're not afraid to be vulnerable, to challenge the status quo, to think about moving systems, to make mistakes, to be connected globally and nationally.

I just think that NAS is the type of institution that is a model for arts and cultural organizations that really want to do this kind of work everywhere in the world. I just feel super honored to be a part of this community. I think that we're also lots of fun. So anybody that wants and likes any of those things, I think they'd like me and NAS quite a bit.

Gail Crider:

Yeah, what she said. It really is joy and hope, and we're here to stand beside people who are really making positive change in the world. We're here.

Tim Cynova:

Gail and Kristina, thank you so much for sharing your time, your perspectives, your openness, your genuineness. Thanks for being friends for a decade plus on this one, and thanks for being on the podcast.

Kristina Newman-Scott:

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Gail Crider:

Thanks, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

To learn more about National Arts Strategies, visit them online at artsstrategies.org or on the socials @ArtsStrategies. If you or someone you know might be interested in applying for their new director of community partnerships role, find out more about the opportunity, including staff videos talking about why this role is an important addition to the NAS team over on workshouldntsuck.co/NAS.

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 a phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Unlimited Paid Time Off (EP.70)

In this episode, we explore unlimited paid time off policies: what they are, what they aren't, and items to consider when implementing this type of approach to PTO.

Updated

May 16, 2023

In this episode, we explore unlimited paid time off policies: what they are, what they aren't, and items to consider when implementing this type of approach to PTO.

Katrina Donald takes over hosting duties and turns the interviewee's microphone unusually in Tim Cynova's direction as they discuss Paid Time Off and his experience transitioning an organization to an Unlimited Paid vacation day policy.

Guest: Tim Cynova

Guest Host: Katrina Donald

 

Guest

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Guest Host

Based in Treaty 7 Territory, Katrina Donald (she/her) is the principal consultant at ever-so-curious. She believes that listening and sensemaking practices bring us into community, reveal pathways forward, encourage and embolden us, and allow for greater impact. Her approach is relational and developmental; she works in partnership with people and organizations to co-design inclusive, collaborative and continuously emerging evaluation and HR strategies.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Manitoba and a Masters Certificate in Organization Development and Change from the Canadian Organization Development Institute (CODI) and the Schulich Executive and Education Centre (SEEC) at York University. She is a mother, wife, daughter, sister, systems thinker, developmental evaluator, program designer, and a Registered Professional Recruiter (RPR). She’s committed to showing up for her own ongoing learning and to building workplaces that are actively anti-racist, praxis-centered and humble as they work through the prickly bramble of change. Learn more on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. In this our 70th podcast episode, we're changing things up a bit. My brilliant colleague, Katrina Donald, is taking over hosting this episode and turning the interviewee's microphone unusually in my direction as we discuss paid time off and my experience transitioning an organization to an unlimited paid vacation day policy. Let the adventure begin. Over to you, Katrina.

Katrina Donald:

Hey, Tim, how's it going?

Tim Cynova:

Living the dream, Katrina. Living the dream. How are you?

Katrina Donald:

Cool. I'm super glad that we have a chance to chat today because one of the things that we keep touching on in some of the other conversations we've recorded and things we've been talking about, but haven't had a chance to really chat about yet is this idea of unlimited paid time off. I'm really hoping that we can take the next 30 minutes or so and just pick your brain for some of the things that people should be thinking about or to help people understand what this is all about

Tim Cynova:

I've found it really fascinating recently as we're in this period of the pandemic where a lot of people have given thought to what's the balance between their work and their life or... I don't really like the balance between work and life because I view the work that I do as part of my life, but how do you balance different aspects of your life, I guess? What do you use time for this thing or for that thing? Especially with organizations and roles that have had more flexibility with hybrid workplace arrangements or remote workplace arrangements, and then being on lockdown for a lot of roles for two years maybe, where people are like, "I could have 400 vacation days, but I can't go anywhere. What am I going to use the vacation days, sit here and do something else while I'm sitting at my computer?"

I think there's been a lot of thought for a lot of people in different roles going into, what is a vacation day? What should it be used for? Where do I do my best work? How do I recharge? How do I make time to be with family? I think it's been really interesting to hear more of these conversations happening. Because for many years, I've been curious about why most organizations start with 10 days. There's these templates that many organizations use where it's like, all right, your first year you get 10 days. Your second year you get 11 days. You just add a day per year, but where did that come from? Or bereavement leave.

I was really fascinated around this when both my parents passed away. I was really fortunate to be on an organization that was like, "Just take the time you need," but thinking that's a really privileged space for a lot of people. Why do most organizations have three days bereavement leave, where you just copy and paste it from one to the next? I was talking to an appointment attorney and I asked her, I'm like, "Where did this thing come from? You can draw back to Henry Ford and the 40-hour work week and the five-day work week and stuff like that, but where did these three days come from?"

She was positing a couple ideas, "Well, maybe back in the day, it was a day to travel to the funeral, a day for the funeral, a day to come back from the funeral," or she was thinking about various faiths and how long you have to bury the body. It was really just fascinating. Most people don't think about what goes into that thing. We just copy and paste from one organization to the next. I think all of this work that people have been doing or all the staff people have been doing were like, what's a vacation day? And maybe how can we align time off, and in particular paid time off, with our values around maybe trusting people to get the work that they need to get done?

We're all adults. Why do we treat this the hall pass that you had to have in school if you need to go to use the restroom? It's like, why is there such rigidity around this? I say that also understanding why some organizations have just gone for this rigidity around being consistent and the lowest common denominator thinking, who's going to abuse this policy? But to think about how might you change this thing around? Several years ago, when I was at Fractured Atlas, we had a very traditional the 10 days plus one for every year that you were there. We had vacation day bucket, sick day bucket, personal day bucket.

Managing this, it was one of the things where I felt like every day I was always in the tracker. Someone was always asking me a question and usually work in the angles, if you will, around like, well, this isn't really a vacation day. It's more of a personal day, or it's a sick day, because vacation days rolled over and then you could cash out vacation days at the end of your tenure, sick days and personal days didn't. I'm like, oh my God, the amount of time people are trying to spin this one into it's not a vacation day and the amount of time I'm taking tracking it, there's got to be a better way of doing this. We started to hear about unlimited paid vacation days.

I will say the employment attorney that I mentioned around bereavement days hates this idea, and the reason they hate the idea is because there's no upper end. As we'll talk about, it gets me a little complicated if you're not really consistent about the application, but we had heard about it, let's just do unlimited paid vacation days. Take as many as you need. We'll make sure we have a performance management process in place so people know that they're getting the right work done to the level that we need.

But if you're doing that, take any reasonable number of vacation days during the year, which for us, most people were taking between 20 and 30 days during the course of the year, including some people who were like this was their very first job maybe ever and they had this benefit where it was very tough to find this kind of thing where you take 30 vacation days in your first job ever. We said, "All right, let's do unlimited paid vacation days." Our fiscal year started September 1. We said, "Okay, when we do this, people will no longer be able to roll over vacation days." This was the week before Memorial Day or something.

We're like, all right, so we're moving toward this new structure. We had been talking about it for a while, and so people knew it was in the mix. We were like, all right, we're really doing this thing. With the new fiscal year, everyone's ticker is usually reset, so we're taking that opportunity to say, "We're moving over to this thing." If you've banked 11 days, 15 days, whatever it is, it goes to unlimited as of September 1. What we're going to do this summer is we're going to make a concerted effort so everyone runs it down to zero, because we want you to take advantage of this time off.

Katrina Donald:

It's the time you're owed.

Tim Cynova:

I mean, it was a horrible summer for coverage. We were trying to figure out what's a bare minimum for coverage because everyone was doing this and we're encouraging people to do it, but it's like, all right, we have to have two people in this department in order to make sure it still works. I don't think we ever said no to requests, but we're like, "Can you shift it a little bit, or can you work this one day from wherever you might be because we need this coverage?" We made it work. It was a really interesting process to do that. We were really honest about having done our research.

A couple of points that people raise around unlimited time off or unlimited pay vacation days were research shows that people take fewer days because they don't have to ticker. When you have 10, I got to run this down to zero or I lose them in the next year, or I need to run it down to whatever will roll over. We were honest. We said, "Look, this is not the reason we're doing this, and you should know that this is just what happens." Part of the responsibility that supervisors are taking on with this is we're going to pay attention to who's not taking vacation. Not who is, but who's not, because that usually means you need to take a vacation.

Why have you not taken any time off in nine months here? That was one data point. And then the other data point that we stressed was research shows that you only get the psychic benefits of time off if you've chunked it in two week increments. Don't take off every Friday because you might have the same number of days off, but you're not going to get the ability to unplug. As we know, it's usually the first week where your body is just getting used to not being in that routine. The second week is when you really start to see those benefits. We're really honest about both of those.

This is what you need to know, this is how we should approach it, and it's an experiment. We will try this. If it doesn't work, we'll see what doesn't work and then we'll iterate again. But this feels like it fits more of our values than the paternalistic 10 plus one vacation policy.

Katrina Donald:

I'm really curious, you've helped us to think about what actually it is. I just want to clarify, when you're talking about this unlimited paid time, are you including in their sick days and the bereavement days and some of those other personal mental health days as well? Is that all included in what you're referring to here?

Tim Cynova:

Some organizations do. I would encourage people not to because it gets really complicated when the edge cases start to happen. This is one of the reasons, going back to the employment attorney I was mentioning, they got really antsy about it because there are certain legally in the US, certain legally allowed required mandated leaves that employees could have. If it starts to get squishy with... Let's take, for instance, someone who goes on parental leave. In the US. If you're a certain size organization, there's certain types of parental leave frames that can be made available to you. Maybe it's eight weeks paid and then four weeks that are unpaid, but you can take 12 weeks during a period.

Where it's really challenging then to be like, and then you have these unlimited paid vacation days or unlimited days off that you might tack onto that and then that becomes really blurry. You have to say, "No, these are different things. You're optioning for parental leave here and then the vacation days are separate," or you end up with if you're not really firmly structured around sick days, this is another way that something can slide into something else without you even realizing. For instance, say I might not be feeling good for a day and then that turns into a week. And then I go to the doctor and find out that I have a condition that's going to require that I have surgery and it's going to turn into a month off.

It goes from what might be sick days into what might be short-term disability, long-term disability, other employment laws that come into play here. If you're not being really, really consistent about what this thing is and what bucket it fits in, this is the messy place that you can find yourself in that that can also lead to this person is not being treated the same way as this person. And then you open yourself up for some really challenging dynamics there. Certainly discrimination could be claimed if you have someone asking for the same thing, for the same whatever it might be, but you're getting two different things.

That's why really structuring it as this is unlimited paid vacation days. This is what a vacation day is. This is the lead time that you need to request it. For instance, you need to request it twice as long as the time that you want. If you're requesting a week off, you have to request at least two weeks in advance or something like that. Come up with some frame, which is different than a sick day, which is you wake up, you're sick, you take the day off, or you have doctor's appointments, things that fall into that bucket.

This is one of those things up front that's really important to get clear yourself as an organization and with everyone in the organization, what is this thing, what falls into it, and what doesn't so that you don't get into these really messy situations. You might miss that someone needs access to something else sooner than if they're just requesting vacation days or whatever it's for, and actually you missed the point at which you could have requested that thing.

When you think about insurance, when you think about timeframes in order to file or apply for exemptions or accommodations, this is another reason why it's important to be really clear about it because you might miss the 15 days that you have to report that or the 30 days or the 180. Really stressing that up front before you get to the point where it's great. There's a lot of flexibility and autonomy and agency. Make sure that you're structuring it so that's really, really clear what falls into what bucket.

Katrina Donald:

Thanks, that's so helpful. You talked to us a little bit about those two pieces of research. The first one is you're paying attention to who doesn't take the time. I think my assumption would be that the general assumption out in the world is that these kinds of policies can be abused really easily. I'm really surprised to hear that that's what studies were finding was that people actually were using less vacation days on average or were accessing them, thinking about them differently. And then I also hear you talking about, well, this isn't actually something that we're putting in place so that you're not spending time in the tracker.

You still need to have that little bit of balance between you do have to be in the tracker because there are good reasons why you can file things into certain codes or whatever you're using in your system, but you're also really trying to say, what do you need and how do you get what you need? Because I think some of the advantages that I'm hearing you talk about here are like there are health and wellness reasons that you might put in something like this for people. There are passion projects that people might have that they want to be able to focus on from given points of the time year or month or whatever it is.

But there's also increased feelings of motivation or rejuvenation that come from being able to take regular time off whenever you need it as opposed to when you might be automatically closed or those kinds of things. Lots of benefits I think we can think about. You've started to allude to some of the challenges. Are there any other challenges maybe? I want to get to tips and insights and things like that as well, but maybe just where else do people get stuck in thinking about what a policy this might mean for their organization?

Tim Cynova:

When we were getting ready to introduce this, in one of those conversations I was talking about it like, this is what summer's going to be. This is what fall's going to bring about. We were doing this in the context of an organization that had strict fixed tier comp where everyone at a given tier made exactly the same amount. Every associate made 40,000, every specialist made 50, regardless of if you were in that role for 10 years or 10 days. The tier moved together, but it wasn't tied to an individual. There were costs of living adjustments applied to the tier that if you were in that role for 10 years, you saw because the tier moved, but everyone in the tier moved together.

Within this context whereas we're talking in staff meetings and various convenings, anyone have questions? All right, here's how this is going to work versus here's how it works now and the types of changes. This is one of these moments where I was in a meeting and someone asked a question, I'm like, well, I did not expect that, but I should have. Someone raised a question to say, "Now that we have unlimited pay vacation days and we have strict fixed tier comp. In the old structure, in the old model, if you were here X number of years longer, we had so many more vacation days than people who started earlier, but now we all have the same thing."

It was this moment that I realized, right, when some of those things that maybe in another organization flex differently where comp structures are different and they evolve based on tenure or whatever it might be differently than a strict fixed tier comp, people start to attach meaning and value to other data points in their experience in the organization. It was this really surprising aha moment for me that it showed up in that way. Like I said, I should have expected it, but I didn't.

It was like, right, you have 13 days, people have 10, and there's something about those three days. Even though everyone has a lot more days together, it was really that three days meant a lot because that was what differentiated people from the person who started yesterday.

Katrina Donald:

It sounds like you're talking about some kind of status trigger maybe to go from I've accrued this or I've been here long enough and so I'm entitled to a bigger leave than. As you think about values aligned and equity lenses in the work, this is real places people have been triggered that you've witnessed.

Tim Cynova:

Exactly. We explored this when we talked about compensation and that old saying around a rich person is someone who has a dollar more than their brother, or whatever it might be. It's the differential. You might make a dollar more or a dollar less. On the whole, you're still making essentially the same, but not. That just creates a lot of friction intention around it. That's where you looked at the three days, it was that dollar instance where things like Adams' Equity Theory comes into play there and Vroom's Expectancy Theory where, "I've been here three years. Someone just started yesterday. We now have the same thing, again, on top of comp that we have the same."

This is one of the fun, challenging, unexpected things about people-centric org design where your office spending a lot of time in meetings talking about something that's not necessarily the thing you're trying to change, but people's reaction to the change. Trying to be transparent and open, why are we doing this? What are the downsides? How is this going to work? And stressing, this is an experiment. We will iterate into something new if this doesn't work, and here's the period in which we're going to assess this experiment.

Here's how we're going to get the data, but we feel like this is more values aligned then this structure that was just given to us that doesn't make a lot of sense for how we want to structure the way we work and live.

Katrina Donald:

There's a piece here for me, you're talking about the experiment of doing this. I think about the story that, oh, well, if we resist it or if we ignore it, it will go away. If you're thinking about bringing in a policy like this, I assume that putting some parameters around the experiment makes sense. What kinds of parameters do you think, we try it for a year or we try it for six months, or actually it needs to have an iterative process over three years? Do you have any experience with how long it takes you to understand if it's working, what the issues are, how you might need to adapt?

Tim Cynova:

With something like this, it's really at least a year, because you need to see the full cycle. You need to see a full year in order to tell a number of things, one of which is how it compares to what people did before. I think that's one of the things to keep in mind as you're approaching it. Also, with this, this is one of the things where vacation days don't exist in a silo. For organizations that roll them over from year to year, they're oftentimes carrying those as a liability on their books because they might have to pay those out at a certain point. You're changing your accounting system and how you do this thing.

It's not an easy change in certain areas. I think there's that point too around wellness and people taking the time that they need, which I think this goes back to why vacation days. Vacation days or paid time off isn't for a future cash out. It's like, how do you think holistically about what people need, how you structure your life when you're living it in a way that is not this future payout? I've done it, but also at what cost did that have for me and how many years might you be in a role and not taking time off? And then the flip sides is we hear about people who are like, I've got 100 vacation days that I'm never going to take because I can't take them because I'm in a role that won't let me take them, or I'm too busy, or whatever it is.

I think this is one of the really important parts where leadership modeling this is important. That was one of the things too, when we were moving toward that rundown of days, everyone in the organization took time off. It wasn't executive leadership didn't, but said that everyone else should. It was really modeling how this is supposed to be used. We had active conversations in that first year certainly around supervisors and managers and executive leadership, "When are you taking time off?" Put it on your calendar so people know, this is when so-and-so is going to be gone. Because again, you don't want this to be like you have this benefit, wink wink, but you only get 10 days a year.

How do we actually make sure that this becomes part of the routine, which is going back to your question, you have to see it over a year. You have to see how this flexes, and then going back to be like, all right, so not from a surveillance tracking standpoint, from just a comparison, on average, how many vacation days did people take this year under this system versus last year were the comparators before? How does this slice and dice? Everyone across the organization or certain teams or certain roles? This relates to one of the big concerns people always ask when he was talking about unlimited pay vacation days.

He's like, "Well, what if people just take a lot?" It's never like, what if people take too few, but it's like, what if people abuse it, which is one of the reasons why so much of HR is that least common denominators, who's going to abuse it, how will they abuse it, and then let's design for that, not let's design for the 99% of people who will operate the way that you hope and then be prepared to have those hard conversations with people who don't, or realize, well, actually we didn't structure that in the right way because that's how people used it. They got creative in how they used it. I find it's oftentimes though when you're like, wow, someone seems to be taking a lot of time off, that it's actually a leading indicator of something else.

It's not the time off that they're taking that's the problem. Over the years, I found out it's maybe because they're just disengaged in their job. They've been doing an entry level role for four years and it's no longer providing the same engagement and intellectual stimulation and fun that it did for the first couple years. And oh, now they feel stuck in this role because they're in a place where... Certainly a Fractured Atlas where we had unlimited pay vacation days. You can work anywhere in the country, and this was before COVID. You were given a brand new MacBook when you started, which for a number of nonprofits it's like, here's this dusty Dell that people have been using for 10 years.

It was tough to find the next thing. People were getting stuck, and then they were just taking days off because they didn't really enjoy that in the same way. I think that was a leading indicator to be like, oh, we need to have different conversations about the work and the engagement. You're like, "Is this really the role you want anymore, and not, "So I see you've taken 30 days off in the past year."

Katrina Donald:

There's the theory around well-being and engagement and trying it out. There's also this piece here around you said how you slice the data. I think that's where this gets really interesting, because this isn't something that you do to save money. This isn't something that you do to, oh, hopefully people use less of it and then we have more reserves or something. This is a wellness and engagement experiment. On the other side of that, it's what are the implications for people who are actually using a policy like this for the overlap of holidays that people want?

Because we know when you book a vacation, you may be going with somebody else whose time you're supposed to be syncing up with your own, or you might use it because you have a specific family or friend gathering that you want. But then if it doesn't line up with because there's other people, you've got overlap in people requesting certain times, or you have busy times in the organization, how do you handle that? But also on the really purely logistical side, it's like, how do you be responsive as an organization to knowing that you might have two weeks notice that somebody will be away for a week if you use your previous double time?

How do you continue to make the people that are there feel like, A, it's okay and people can adapt, you can take time you need too, but also we're not going to let you drop while others are accessing this benefit

Tim Cynova:

There are a couple of things over the years that we started to realize. I was at Fractured Atlas for 12 years, and I'm going to say one time, maybe one time or two, someone's vacation request was outright denied. It was more like, can you slide it because this is a really busy period, or can you work this one day offsite so you can take it? But more from like, all right, if people are getting the work done that they need to get done in the way that they need to do it and we have the support we need, yeah, let's be flexible with how people want to use this benefit.

We did start to institute over the years carve out periods where we're like, okay, every year we're really busy during the last week of the year because donations are coming in for contributions for projects, or during this two week or three week period in March, there's a really big grand deadline that a lot of our projects apply for. It takes a lot of work. That might be one team. And then another team's like, all right, around the audit in September, we know it's going to be really busy. We started to create these carve out periods to say, whenever possible, try to avoid requesting time off during these periods. I think that's the other important part here too.

Time still has to be approved. You can request it, but it still has to be approved. I think this is where it goes back to being really consistent around how you're approving time so that one person isn't like, "This person just got it approved. Why am I getting denied for the exact same thing? Why can't I get the same two weeks as that person?" Being really consistent at one aspect and also saying, all right, what are the really busy times? Don't throw a blanket on the entire year. But if you have a season or if you're doing sales and it's like, all right, we know around this holiday it's going to be really busy, to say, here are the couple of times where we're really try not to take it.

But otherwise, flex. I think that was really helpful. One of the data points that we didn't start with, but we realized we needed a little more structure. This was also on the flip side a really interesting thing that, again, I was fascinated by it. It was where you talk about shared purpose culture and shared identity culture, where shared identity is us and our connection to each other where a lot of organizations aim. I think when people think about great company culture, it's the 5K fun runs and the book clubs and stuff. It's us. It's very internal versus shared purpose. That's like those we serve, those who are here for why do we exist outside of internal.

There was really, on some teams in particular, a really focused shared identity culture to the point that people didn't want to take time off because they knew that their work was going to shift to other people on the team. It was like if we had eight people on our team, I know if one person has taken time off, so we're already shifting their work. And then if another person, we're shifting their work. I don't want to be the burden on our team, even though on the flip side it was like, but you should take your time off. There's this really weird disconnect to try and get people to the point where, yes, let's figure out how this aligns with busy and slow periods and what's the minimum number of people that we need to have on.

Let's make sure it's not the same people every time. If we can run the department with three, let's make sure it's not the same three people every year that this comes around. But let's just recognize and set up structures so that people know how the work's going to slide around because it was a really strange thing to be like, so you're not taking time off. You're burning burning out or whatever it might be. You're really stressed. Take time off, but I can't take time off because then it's going to stress the other members of our team.

There's this really unhealthy cycle, but the side effect that seem to exist more with an unlimited vacation days than the former structure of these are my 10 days, I'll spend my 10 days or I'll spend my 15 days, and then that'll be the end of it.

Katrina Donald:

Did you find or have you found in your experience that actually the need for more communication to actually get people talking about when they'll be away and what has to happen and where they're going to get their files to for this particular time, that also creates positive impacts for the team culture itself? Because it shifts the conversation from I'm entitled to these 10 days and I can use them as hall passes or whatever, the example you gave earlier, to creating more space around thinking about when people are away and how they can be away.

And that it's something that you want to promote that people can use for their own time management and their own benefit or periods of rest or whatever it is, but you're encouraging each other a little bit more like, if I think about what it takes to actually look at busyness and look at covering people and looking at making sure you're where you need to be, it strikes me that there'll be some other benefits to that as well.

Tim Cynova:

This, again, is one of those places where when you start to pull back from the page of just vacation days and really think more holistically about how does the organization work and connect, one, it gets really complicated when you're trying to hold all these different things at the same time. But two, it's the work to do. It's the better work to do. This is where you look at traditional HR departments, it's like there's really no value in trying to figure out this messiness. It's like just be grateful that you have days off type of thing versus, no, let's figure out how this works for us. And also, let's talk about when you say work, what do you mean by that?

Providing some clarity for it I think is helpful because the lack of it, you start to fill in the gaps that aren't necessarily great. But if you start to even just pull apart someone's role and say, "What are the tasks? What are the relationships? What's the cognitive connection to those things? And then how does that work with the team," and then you could... This is the classic job crafting or team crafting where you're like, when this role gets pulled out or this person gets pulled out, what shifts around to what places? Importantly, what work is intentionally not going to get done?

I think this is something where a lot of organizations always forget this piece or for whatever reason, they don't address this piece where it's like, if you have eight people doing 100% of the work, or let's make math easy, you have 10 people doing 100% of work and you pull one person out, it drops to 90%. You pull out the 10% of the work. They still think, all right, let's use these nine people to do 100% of the work versus saying, no, what's the 10% in this structure that we can just not do while this role isn't occupied if they're on vacation or on leave or whatever it might be?

Doing the work of pulling apart roles and responsibilities and relationships and tasks make it so much more helpful than, "Oh my God, we're going to be down a person, or we're going to be down three people. We're already stressed. We have more work that we could possibly get done," especially for longer leaves and coming into this if you have longer lead times to say like, "All right, what can we just punt and no one's going to care that we haven't done it for two weeks or four weeks or whatever it might be in order to be realistic about what's possible for X minus one people to accomplish during a given period?"

Katrina Donald:

Are there any tips that you'd offer organizations who want to take this on? Any real Tim's top five tips for thinking about paid time differently?

Tim Cynova:

Oh my God, you said five and I'm like, can I come up with two?

Katrina Donald:

Three is perfect.

Tim Cynova:

It's always X minus one that I can come up with. I mean, I think the first thing is to... There are a lot of ideas that people hear about, four-day work week, unlimited vacation days. It's like, all right, that's cool, let's do that, rather than are we an organization that that aligns with our values, or are we in the right place, or what needs to happen before we do that thing? For instance, many organizations found this out in very quick time at the start of the pandemic where you're like, all right, we were in an organization that worked entirely on site, and now we're an organization whose work is done entirely virtual. All right, well, you need computers, you need phones, you need all these different ways of communicating.

Let's recognize most people are pretty stressed, especially at this point in the pandemic. We're like, we're all exhausted and this is a change. What needs to happen to get people to the place where, all right, this is the thing that we're doing. That said, I'm not saying you need to get 100% of the people there, but let's be kind in understanding like, all right, this is a change to how most people operate. I was working 15, 20 years in organizations with traditional vacation days, sick day policies before I worked in organization that had this. It changed the way you even think about this time. First of all, what needs to happen before you get here?

Second, how can you be transparent and communicative about this in multi-directional? It's not just I'm communicating or we're communicating what this thing is, but how are you putting in those feedback loops to people's initial concerns? Let's talk about that. All right, well, how far are we getting into this experiment before we do another check-in or a survey or whatever it might be? I think that's another piece so people don't feel like, all right, we're doing this forever. If it's not working or whatever it might be, let's add that in. I think three is spending some time individually around, how do I structure my time?

How do I get into a vacation, if we're talking about vacations? How do I make the most of that time off in a way that's useful? How much time do I need, and where does it fall in the year? You see this where most people just coming hot to a vacation, it is like they're working full on one day, they're on vacation the next, and they're full on when they come back.

Katrina Donald:

I need a vacation from my vacation.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, we hear that a lot, right? It's like, how might you benefit from this? And then for those who are like, "I can't take any time off," really spending some time to think about why, why do you say that? I've said to myself, "I can't take any time off for four years," or whatever it might be. But why? I probably can. There's that classic saying, cemeteries are full of people who thought they were indispensable. I think this is another one of the things to think.

In the US, I think it's the SEC requires certain roles in certain financial institutions to have a mandated two-week period where they can't work, where they're completely off the grid as far as the organization's concerned, so that you have the ability to see, does everything run smoothly? Or is there any fraud that's taking place? Or do we have the backups that we need? Often I think about, what if you couldn't do anything? How would you structure your time away as an organization and as a person where you're like, yeah, I'm on vacation, but I'm checking my email every day, or I'm on Slack if you need me. It's the classic, I'm on vacation, but text me if something's urgent.

We're like, okay, let's take some time to unpack what that means. I think this past two years, past three years, people have given a lot of thought to what that means and that constant psychic burden that people are having when they work at home, live at home, are working at their kitchen table. And then what do you do when you're done with work and how do you bifurcate those things? I would say that's maybe three, four, five, I don't know. There you go. Voila!

Katrina Donald:

Thanks, Tim. This has been very useful. I hope others are finding it useful as well.

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 a phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform of choice offers. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Wage Transparency and Equity (EP.69)

Tim Cynova and Lauren Ruffin dive into recent pay transparency laws and their potential to shift power and information sharing in workplaces.

Updated

April 20, 2023

In this episode, podcast co-hosts Tim Cynova and Lauren Ruffin discuss recent pay transparency law changes that require companies to disclose pay ranges, as well as the laws’ potential to shift power and information sharing in workplaces. They explore the importance of clearly defining job requirements and the benefits of fixed-tier compensation to ensure equal – if not entirely *equitable* – pay. Lauren addresses the issues of location-based pay adjustments and speculates that increased transparency may lead to more organizations unionizing. Tim highlights the ongoing reevaluation of work's value and the need for businesses to adapt to Long COVID by creating more inclusive and equitable environments. They end the episode with a cliffhanger and agree to revisit this topic as the laws’ effects become clearer.

Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin

 

Co-Hosts


LAUREN RUFFIN (she/her) is a thinker, designer, & leader interested in building strong, sustainable, anti-racist systems & organizations. She's into exploring how we can leverage new technologies to combat racial and economic injustice. She frequently participates in conversations on circular economies, social impact financing, solidarity movements, and innovative, non-extractive financing mechanisms. Lauren is an Associate Professor of Worldbuilding and Visualizing Futures at Arizona State University and a co-founder of CRUX, an immersive storytelling cooperative that collaborates with Black artists as they create content in virtual reality and augmented reality (XR). Lauren was co-CEO of Fractured Atlas, the largest association of independent artists in the United States. In 2017, she started Artist Campaign School, a new educational program that has trained 74 artists to run for political office to date. Lauren has served on the governing boards of Black Innovation Alliance, Black Girls Code, and Main Street Phoenix Cooperative, and on the advisory boards of ArtUp and Black Girl Ventures. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science and obtained a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law. Learn more on LinkedIn.

TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi everyone, Tim here. A quick preamble to this episode. Lauren and I recorded this in fall of 2022, as you'll soon hear, when we settled into the conversation by means of a fun chat about New England's fall foliage. The episode then sat in the can for several months as we worked on a few projects, including planning for Work. Shouldn't. Suck. upcoming, and podcast topic related, Wage Equity Summit. Now onto the episode.

Lauren Ruffin:

Exactly, and I mean that really at the beginning of the pandemic made me pretty furious, that whole thing where it was like, "If you leave the Bay Area and we know about it, we're going to dock your pay." Come on, you have the money. You have the money, you know you have the money, so pay the people regardless of how they live their lives. That bit leads me to, we are in the middle of the... I think actually we're the beginning of the biggest labor movement that's happened in our lifetimes, Tim.

And so, I wonder if this data coming out is actually going to have more organizations unionize. Because the organizations that are probably not going to have any issues, are ones that already have unions, because those workers know. Those workers have negotiated their rates and they know what everybody's making. And there's a standard for what the employer/employee relationship looks like, and what equitable compensation looks like, regardless of what you think about unions, period. But those are the ones that are likely to be fine.

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck., a podcast about, well, that. On today's episode, are we in store for a treat. Podcasting's favorite co-host, Lauren Ruffin, has a brand new microphone and is using it to discuss wage transparency and equity.

With New York's wage transparency law having gone into effect on November 1st and California's own version going live on January 1st, 2023, we thought it might be interesting to discuss what this means for employers and employees. In particular, what it means for those employers who feel like their starting place is a compensation approach without much, or any, consistency, transparency, or equity.

Lauren is someone who needs no introduction on this podcast, but if you want to read about the cool thing she's been up to, including her new faculty role in the world building in Visualizing Futures program at Arizona State University, her updated bio is in the episode description. So, in the interest of time, let's get going. Hey, Lauren, how's it going?

Lauren Ruffin:

It's good, it's good. How are you? Vermont, is it leaf peeping season up there yet?

Tim Cynova:

It is. It is peak leaf peeping season, as determined by both the leaves and the amount of people at the coffee shop in the morning.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, yeah, people who are peeping.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. I asked the barista and she's like, "Yeah, we did 200 lattes yesterday."

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh my goodness.

Tim Cynova:

Which I don't know, seems like a lot to me, but I don't know what their baseline is, so I thought maybe they should have a tote board with their daily latte velocity.

Lauren Ruffin:

What's the population of Stowe?

Tim Cynova:

I don't know. Three, a couple hundred, probably

Lauren Ruffin:

Like three thousand? A couple hundred people, or a couple thousand people?

Tim Cynova:

Who knows. But there's only one road in and out, and so it's packed. People are doing that thing where they see a bright tree, and then they just pull over suddenly and hop out with their camera and there's no shoulder. It's a two lane road. So everyone backs up and then everyone else feels like, "Oh, that's a good picture." So there's like ten cars now parked to take a picture of this tree.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Oh, man. So it's like rubber necking, but for trees?

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, very much so. And having grown up in southern Indiana, there really wasn't the same vibrancy in... We thought there was, but just because you had no comparator. I'd never been to New England before, but yeah, drove around this morning and the mountains are just covered in all the colors right now. So it's in that period before that it turns to stick season, which is a new thing that I learned about last year.

Lauren Ruffin:

Hold on. What is stick season? I haven't heard about this?

Tim Cynova:

Stick season is after the leaves fall, it becomes stick season before ski season, and restaurants close, people close up shop for a couple of weeks, to give the teams time to relax between all the people coming for apple cider and hay rides, and then before the ski crowd, or the winter sports crowd comes into town.

Lauren Ruffin:

That makes sense.

Tim Cynova:

It does, but it also creates some weirdness when you go to the restaurant. "Wait, why is it closed the next two weeks?" But it is great for the workers and stuff to be able to have that time off and you're like, "Let's go to another place."

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, I think people do that here in August because it's 115 degrees. Phoenix, you're like, "Oh, this coffee shop has given up for a while. This restaurant..." They're out of here.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. So that's the height of the fall foliage leaf peeping season.

Lauren Ruffin:

I miss it. I do miss that part of the world. Cider donuts, man. Cider donuts.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, cider donuts. People are out in their plaid. They're getting ready for an art and craft fair down the street here this weekend. So everyone's bringing their north country crafts, kettle corn, everything.

Lauren Ruffin:

Speaking of crunchy things that white people do, I ordered some Birkenstocks for the first time. They arrive last night.

Tim Cynova:

Nice.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

That's great.

Lauren Ruffin:

I have plantar fasciitis, been working out and it's flared up, so that firm soul's working for me, but they are the ugliest things I've ever seen. They're just hideous. Once again, Birkenstocks will not be sponsoring this podcast.

Tim Cynova:

That's true. Yeah. Yeah. We're slowly whittling down to actually who might be less offended by our podcasts, in order to sponsor it.

Lauren Ruffin:

Which potential sponsors have I turned off by disliking their products? The product, it's great, but they could be a little bit more aesthetically pleasing.

Tim Cynova:

I saw an article where Birkenstocks are having another day. I guess they always had their diehard fans, but now it's a fashion thing where people are bringing out the Birks again. So it was originally, it was a hundred plus year old company, I think. And it was originally just the foot beds in shoes. And then they decided, "Well, why don't we just make our own sandals based off of these foot beds?"

Lauren Ruffin:

It's like Vibram. Kind of similar.

Tim Cynova:

Exactly, right?

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

The souls of shoes. But then they made those toe shoes for a little while. They're all hot.

Lauren Ruffin:

I had a pair of those.

Tim Cynova:

Good.

Lauren Ruffin:

Maybe I actually have a history of buying shoes that are just ugly.

Tim Cynova:

You can create your own exhibit.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. So what are we talking about today? What's our thing? What's on the docket?

Tim Cynova:

You know what we're going to talk about today? Wage transparency in 90 days. At this point, it's the 90 days minus four or five, because we're recording this at the very beginning of October. And last week the governor of California signed the bill, I think it's 1162, that as of January one will require employers in California with 15 or more employees, so that's around a 200,000 employers, to include in their all over job postings, the salary range that the employer, and this is the word I love, reasonably expects to pay for the position.

And just to start with, they felt the need to put in reasonably, because I can imagine someone's $1 to 80,000 is the range that we can expect. So they had to spell out the reasonable range. So yeah, this is something that I can imagine employers that don't have wage transparency already, that haven't been talking about set policies and practices, for compensating and evaluating roles, and consistency across the organization, are going to have a very challenging time come January one when they list that first salary, and that people start to say, "Wait, that role pays that? Really? I do the same thing, and I don't get paid that." So, I can imagine there's a little stress.

Lauren Ruffin:

Well, I guess we should start by talking about the distinction between wage equity and wage transparency.

Tim Cynova:

Go.

Lauren Ruffin:

Right? Because, what you're talking about is people, there are organizations that haven't thought about compensation equitably, and therefore them rolling out transparency is going to be particularly difficult.

Tim Cynova:

Yes. It's going to lead to a lot of really awkward, really challenging conversations. Even if you have bans, wage bans, people can land all over the place in a wage ban, and then you effectively have, everyone in your organization might make a different salary, and how do you determine those things?

And for those listening, Lauren and I have spirited conversations for at least two items. One is around, strict fixed tier comp, and the other one is around which pay cycle should an organization use, every two weeks, or on the 15th in the last day of the month, or the first and the 15th? And so we've talked a lot about wage transparency, wage equity, should it be bands, should you do an over and under by 5% ,or should it just be everyone at a given tier, makes exactly the same amount? And if that might fit your values better or be more aligned with your values, even though no compensation system is perfect, what the disadvantages when you can't get a raise unless the tier moves or you get promoted.

And if there's nothing available to get promoted into, especially at the upper levels of the organization, you likely will lose really, really good people. You can't comp them any higher without breaking the bands, at your own risk. For thus having been co-CEOs of an organization that is strict fixed to your comp, which made things a little bit easier in one respect, I can imagine for organizations that have nothing like that, it's going to be a steep learning curve.

Lauren Ruffin:

And I think in particular organizations... I know having worked for some organizations where comp was essentially how close you were to the hiring manager. Or how close you were to the founder. It's going to be really interesting. So just for my own clarification, Tim, is this transparency for new hires or are they requiring transparency throughout the organization?

Tim Cynova:

So, the California law also requires covered employers, employers with 15 or more employees, to provide employees with the pay scale for their current positions upon request. So, it's like all over.

Lauren Ruffin:

Upon request?

Tim Cynova:

Upon request, but as soon as you get the request... So, I think employers should assume, or reasonably assume, that they need to have this for every single role in their organization, or else it's going to be even more awkward when they don't. Come January one, people can start requesting, "What's the pay scale for this role?"

Lauren Ruffin:

So second question, is this for folks who are advertising positions? So, let's say that you're hiring a role and you want to recruit nationally, what does that mean? Are you also impacted by this role, or do you just have to advertise the salary, but you don't have to do anything else internally for your work?

Tim Cynova:

So, I was looking at this actually this morning because in Colorado, the law requires any employer with at least one employee in Colorado, to include pay disclosure in any job posting, for a position that will, or may, be performed in Colorado, including remote positions. Which is why when that first passed, we saw a number of organizations being like, "No one in Colorado." They were carve out, so no one could apply from Colorado.

So the California one, what I've been able to find is that, that's ambiguous. Someone actually said the law's silent as to whether a pay disclosure requirements would relate in the same way for California. And so, that's one of the areas where one or two of the law firms that I was looking at, who provided guidance on that, said that there might need to be additional guidance in that area.

Because, like Colorado where if you post a national role, or post for a remote role, that can happen anywhere in say the US, if you have people applying in California that might be able to perform the role, then you've got a list of salary, even if you might be located in Chicago or Scranton, which then picks up as way more than the 200,000 employers in California.

But there's also a law pending in New York state that would pick up an employer with four plus employees. So, this is one that New York City had something that working on, it was supposed to go into effect, I think April of 2022, but then the mayor slid it, or city council in New York City slid it to November, and they were trying to tweak it a little bit. But now, New York state has something that's waiting to be signed by the governor that would pick up four plus employees. And so, New York state and California in particular, are two of those states that really often lead the employment law changes from a state level, that start to impact other states.

And so, it'll be interesting to see if that gets picked up because as of right now, there's only about, I don't know, five states, five states and a random selection of cities that have wage transparency laws. But clearly, California brings a lot of employers to the mix here.

Lauren Ruffin:

And once you get to New York and California, it seems like that's just the way the world's going to have to go. I'm curious about demographic shifts. Once people start to see that, do they begin to think about relocating differently back to these places?

If you're making $80,000 in Mississippi, you could in theory, know that you could make a lot more money in New York state, and have a decent quality of life. So let's say that you're in a role in an organization, you're the CEO, or you're the chief people person, the CPP, what are you thinking about? Are you sweating or are you prepared right now? You're an organization that doesn't have any sort of wage equity. Let's just go right there, let alone transparency, we've spend fairly ad hoc what people get paid. People are negotiating their salaries left and right, you know there are people in the organization who are making more than they should, or less than they should. Where do you start? How do you get going on this?

Tim Cynova:

I think there might be two buckets here. And the work that we do is focused on organizations who have active commitments to anti-racism, justice, equity, and often aren't working with organizations that have no connection to that. It's if they're not even in the ecosystem of, "We need to be working on this," I imagine if you take those different buckets or those two buckets, organizations that have no understanding of equity, justice, anti-racism, anti-oppression, they're going to approach it in a completely different way than organizations who understand at least a little bit why this is important.

And then from rolling it out, it is what it is. Wherever your organization is right now, is where it is. You can't go back and fix it. And if you find out you have 40 employees, and 40 people are making 40 different things, than it's your balance sheet, you might not your cash position, but the balance sheet is the balance sheet. And then it allows you to figure out, "All right, what do we do to improve that?"

And so, I think for most organizations who might be in this position, it's like, "Okay, how can we get clear about where we are, and how we're going to get to something that's different, that's better, that's more transparent, and equitable, so people know?" Because I think the question that we get a lot of times is, "How do I get a raise? How do I get a promotion? Who do I talk to? What do I have to say? What time of year does that need to happen?"

And so as an organization, really getting clear on what those things are, and what you're going to do about roles that might be drastically different. Two people working in the same role that get paid $20,000 difference, and it's not because someone's been there for 30 years. So how are you going to handle those differences?

I've seen a number of organizations who saw this coming in different ways, are starting to get external comp assessments. "We need an external firm to tell us where these roles should be comped so at least we have internal equity." Even if it's not external equity, we know that, so on the whole, maybe every role is if you look at median, or you look at the 90th percentile, or 75th percentile, we want to get everyone to the same place, and then we can go from there. But that might be a two year process.

We know this as well. We are doing this at Fractured Atlas, and we're like, "That's a chunk of change to move everyone in the same year to where you need to be, so maybe it's a three year process, and then what happens going forward?"

And so I think right now, you can't fix what happened yesterday or in the past, but you can get ready for how you're going to do this in a consistent and fair way in the organization. So I think organizations that are tuned into this from a values place... Talked to a number of organizations who are like, "How do we infuse 15 different components to make sure it's equitable?" I'm like, "That's going to get break on you at some point." Because, who chooses those? Do you reevaluate those every year? So I think right now, it's deciding, maybe take a couple weeks, to decide what do we need to do? And then, I can imagine external analysis firms are in getting inundated, or will be shortly.

Lauren Ruffin:

Feels like that might be an area of work we should get into, right? As if we're not doing enough. But-

Tim Cynova:

That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Lauren Ruffin:

... I got time.

Lauren Ruffin:

What you just said brought up a couple of things for me in particular around harm, because you said you can't fix it. And, knowing what we know about the data for women, people of color, people with disabilities, we know that they're paid less over time, and that this has such a huge impact on just their lifetime. How do you repair that harm? I have to say, having workplaces where I learned that I was making less than folks who were less talented than I was, most certainly, and less experienced.

There's an actual emotional thing that happens when you're like, "Wow, they don't value me at the same level they value this person." And then there's the real thing, knowing that maybe for the last three or five years, I've made ten or twenty thousand dollars less, it could have a thirty to sixty thousand dollar impact on what I'm taking home to my family. How do organizations navigate harm? Do we think people are going to be having those conversations? Do folks have the skill and emotional intelligence to be able to have those? Because, this could be really hurtful to folks.

Tim Cynova:

And when I talk about fix it, you can't change the decisions that were made. You can't go back and change that decision. You can certainly from this day forward, think about how this is impacting people right now. Yeah, I think there's a lot here. And I imagine, if you look at the Venn diagram of organizations who are approaching this from an equity and justice lens, even fewer have the skills internally, to be able to navigate those conversations.

So I can also imagine there's a lot of organizations who are trying to figure out restorative justice facilitators, and how do you actually talk about this work? Because someone I know said, they might even be on this podcast, said, "Everyone's for equity until it comes to their own salary."

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, it's so true. That person's a genius.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah, that's right. They may not be the podcasting's favorite co-host. Going back to that number means so much. People put so much into that number, that compensation number, and it's not just what you get paid in your check, it's your-

Lauren Ruffin:

It's your value.

Tim Cynova:

That's my value, my worth. I'm spending most of my waking hours doing this thing. It's things like Adams' Equity Theory and Broom's Expectancy Theory comes into play. And looking at the lifetime earning potential of someone in a role, it's like the compounding interest. If you're not making the same 10,000 that the person you work with makes, over the lifetime of your role, or your lifetime of your career, that's going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars that you would have earned.

And so we saw things around many states and cities prohibit asking people what they made in a role, which for us is like, "Just pay them what you're going to pay them." What does it matter what they used to get paid? So, I think when it comes to harm, I think that's part of what organizations need to do right now, is figure out how that fits into it. Where is it going to show up?

We've talked before about how excited would he be about a role if you get into the organization and find out you could have been making $5,000 more? What does that do? You can have an amazing hiring process that's building trust, and psychological safety, and then on day two, the person's like, "Yeah, they could have paid you $5,000 more," and all of that goodwill disappears.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Yeah. You and I have talked so much about hiring people who make you happy and you're excited to work with and really being committed to treating them well while they're working with you. And I just think nickel and dimming someone, not paying them as much as she possibly could, not being transparent about that is actually a pretty awful thing to do, because it does have that cascade.

And in particular, if you're an organization that is actively trying to hire, because so many of them are trying to hire people of color and women of color, in particular, queer women of color in particular, particular. To me, it's just exploiting a community that has historically just been so undervalued. So, thinking about it from a harm restoration and repair piece, and if staff are holding employees accountable in that way, I think it's going to be a really hard time for some folks.

Tim Cynova:

Because there will be some things, I think, that get picked up now, as people start to know what everyone else makes officially. Because we know people talk about their salary already. So, now the company's officially saying, "This is the range for this role." And then how do you decide who gets paid the lower end of it, and the upper end?

Lauren Ruffin:

That's where I'm like, "If your reason for not paying someone is because they're single..." It's just all of these are... They have kids and you assume they're going to have more sick days. So, there's just all this weird, awful stuff that people do, above and beyond the covered pregnancy, gender, all that stuff. It's an interesting, interesting can of worms to open.

Tim Cynova:

This is where I find it's really important to go back when you're hiring for the role, to clarify the knowledge, skills, and abilities, that people in this role have to be able to perform. Because, I find it can be an antidote to, "Well, this person, we have to pay them more because they've been doing this job more, or they have to an MBA." Versus, this other person's going to do just as good a job, and maybe they've been only doing the work for two years. What's the output? What are they bringing to this role?

And so, getting really clear what those knowledge, skills and abilities are, does this person clear the bar? Great, then pay them the way you're going to pay anyone who clears that bar, and don't try and noodle on, "Well, they need an extra this or that." And this is where I found fixed tier comp was really helpful. "Is this person clearing the bar? Great. Pay them this."

Because the other thing we've seen is organizations who are like, "Well, we'll pay you this if you live in San Francisco, but we'll pay you this minus 25,000 if you live in Benton, Arkansas." So now you're trying to balance your budget based on where people are living. And rather than saying, 'Pay them what you're going to pay them, if they lived in San Francisco and let them decide how they want to structure their lives."

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that really at the beginning of the pandemic made me pretty furious, that whole thing where it was like, "If you leave the Bay Area and we know about it, we're going to dock your pay." Come on. You have the money. You have the money. You know you have the money, so pay the people regardless of how they live their lives.

That bit leads me to, we are in the middle of, I think actually we're the beginning of the biggest labor movement that's happened in our lifetimes, Tim. And so, I wonder if this data coming out, is actually going to have more organizations unionize. Because the organizations that are probably not going to have any issues, are ones that already have unions, because those workers know. Those workers have negotiated their rates, and they know what everybody's making. And there's a standard for what the employer/employee relationship looks like, and what equitable compensation looks like, regardless of what you think about unions, period. But those are the ones that are likely to be fine.

Tim Cynova:

This is a moment in our lifetime, in particular, where people are questioning what is work, and what is the value to work, and what is my value in work, and my value to this organization? And I think of Sarah Jaffe's book, Work Won't Love You Back, and all of the research that she includes, is how and why stuff works the way it works, where power exists. And all of this is operating in a capitalist society, how do you reconcile this? And so yeah, I think there's some really interesting stuff that's happening right now.

It's going to be two years, three years, to look back on all of this, will be really interesting. In the course that I'm teaching at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, this past week was spent really studying disability justice and ableism. And one of the articles that I shared with the students was around on long COVID, and the impacts of long COVID on the workplace. And the article, and I think this was probably in August, it was using data from July or August of 2022, saying that there are 4 million people who are unable to work, because of long COVID symptoms.

And that doesn't include people who are able to work, but have to change up how they work and accommodations based off of this. And there are many articles that are calling this, "The largest mass disabling event in our times." And so as we think about inclusion and equity and justice and workplace design, and how you might have the same 40 people who worked with you in February of 2020, now working... But it changes on how you approach the work.

And all of this stuff is intertwined in a way that for organizations that aren't spending time with their teams talking about this, how are they designing? How are allowing people to show up in the way that they need? People are going to vote with where they decide to spend their time.

Lauren Ruffin:

I have a feeling that you and I are going to be talking about this again in six months.

Tim Cynova:

Probably. Right? We're going to see what happens after January one, and if many organizations do anything before January one, who are the organizations that might be doing something? Our colleagues at Common Future just posted about two weeks ago around their arc to get to wage transparency, and the firm that they used, and the process that they used, which I think is helpful, because so many organizations are trying to figure out how do you actually even approach this, because they haven't given much thought to it. So, it's going to be a mess.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, man. Well, I don't know. As someone who was prone to saying, "I told you so..."

Tim Cynova:

You are prone to saying, "I told you so."

Lauren Ruffin:

We have been telling people that maybe they should pay folks equitably for their work. So I lumped you in. I said, "I," and then, "We," so if you decide not to say, "I told you so," on this one, in six months, after everything goes to hell in a hand basket, I'm happy to do it for you. It'll make me feel doubly good.

Tim Cynova:

Great. Well, we will do a recap of this one in six months to find out how it's playing out and good, bad, and not so great.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Good, bad, not so great. That's a good way of putting it.

Tim Cynova:

Yeah. Also that could be a t-shirt slogan, so let's put that one on the list.

Lauren Ruffin:

Yeah. Okay, good. It's on the list.

Tim Cynova:

Cool. Lauren, always a pleasure, my friend, to spend time with you unpacking these conversations, and hope you have a great rest of the week. And thanks as always, for being Podcasting's favorite co-host.

Lauren Ruffin:

Oh, thanks for being the best host in podcasting.

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 a five stars, or a phone or friend, whatever your podcasting platform or choice offers. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Sunsetting Organizations (EP.68)

How do you intentionally guide a company through the final phase of the organizational life cycle? In this episode, we connect with guests who were tasked with leading companies through that very process. We’ll hear how the decision came to be, how they’re approaching the work, and what resonates for them as they reflect on it all.

Updated

February 15, 2023

Whether you refer to it as "sunsetting" or "supernova’ing," what’s true is that there are few resources to guide those seeking to intentionally shutdown an organization’s operations. While a multitude of resources exist dedicated to starting and scaling ventures, the same can’t be said when one finds themself on the other end of the organizational life cycle.

In this episode, host Tim Cynova connects with guests who were tasked with leading companies through this final phase. We’ll hear how they came to the decision, how they approached the work, and what resonates for them as they reflect on it all.

This episode include two conversations. The first is with Michelle Preston and Megan Carter who helped lead the transition at SITI Company. The second is with Jamie Bennett who helped lead the transition at ArtPlace America. In all of this, we consider how centering values when closing a company can help us even when we’re not.

Host: Tim Cynova

 

Guests

MEGAN E. CARTER is a creative producer, strategy consultant, and dramaturg with a track record of sustained success in theatre, interdisciplinary performing arts and live events. Most recently, she led SITI Company, an award-winning theater ensemble, through a comprehensive legacy plan, archive process, and finale season. She is currently a creative consultant with A TODO DAR Productions on rasgos asiaticos, a performance installation by Virginia Grise and Tanya Orellana exploring migration, borders, and family. Megan has developed and produced new and classic works Off-Broadway, as well as internationally at theatres, venues, and festivals like The Fisher Center at Bard, BAM, City Theatre in Pittsburgh, Singapore International Festival of the Arts (SIFA), REDCAT (LA), Teatr Studio (Warsaw), Wuzhen Theatre Festival (Wuzhen, China), Under the Radar Festival, the Huntington Gardens (LA, site-specific), International Divine Comedy Theatre Festival at Małopolska Garden of Arts in (Krakow), the Walt Disney Modular Theater (LA), Classic Stage Company, Cherry Lane Theatre, WP Theater, the World Financial Center (site-specific). At WP Theater, she led the Lab for Directors, Playwrights, and Producers and managed new play development and commissions. Megan served as dramaturg on the American Premiere of Jackie by Elfriede Jelinek and has edited the English translations of a number of Jelinek’s plays, including Rechnitz and The Charges (The Supplicants). She has also edited the SITI Company anthology – SITI COMPANY: THIS IS NOT A HANDBOOK, coming out in 2023. Megan has been on faculty at the Brooklyn College, SITI Company Conservatory and California Institute of the Arts. She is currently on faculty at Primary Stages’ Einhorn School for the Performing Arts (ESPA). Education: MFA in Dramaturgy, Brooklyn College/CUNY; BA in Theatre, Centenary College of Louisiana.

MICHELLE PRESTON began her career in arts administration at the Columbus Symphony Orchestra before coming to New York City where she has worked with Urban Bush Women, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and the School of American Ballet. She began at SITI Company in 2012 as the Deputy Director and served as Executive Director from 2014-2022.  While at SITI, Michelle produced 9 world premieres, 17 domestic and international tours, and 5 New York City seasons. She also led the multi-year strategic planning process that resulted in the SITI Legacy Plan, a comprehensive set of activities meant to celebrate the accomplishments and preserve the legacy of the ensemble before the organized and intentional sunset at the end of 2022.  She is currently the Executive Director of the José Limón Dance Foundation. She holds an M.F.A. in Performing Arts Management from Brooklyn College and a B.F.A. in Dance Performance from Northern Illinois University. Michelle spent six years as an adjunct faculty member for the Brooklyn College Performing Arts Management MFA program teaching fundraising and 18-months serving as the Interim Program Head.  Additionally, she has guest lectured at Bard College, Columbia University, Columbia University Teachers College, Marymount Manhattan, NYU, Playwrights Horizons Theater School, and St. Lawrence University. She has also served as a panelist for the Brooklyn Arts Council Regrant Program, the TCG Global Connections Grant, the ART/NY Nancy Quinn Fund, and the NAMT Innovation & Exploration Fund.

JAMIE BENNETT [he/him] works at the intersections of nonprofits, philanthropy, and the public sector with arts, culture, and comprehensive community development. Jamie has held leadership roles at ArtPlace America, United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Columbia University, and the Agnes Gund Foundation. He worked in fundraising at the New York Philharmonic and Columbia University; and serves in volunteer capacities with the David Rockefeller Fund, the HERE Arts Center, the Make Music Alliance, and The Heritage Center (Itówapi Owápazo) of the Red Cloud Indian School. Jamie has been sober since 2009.

Host

TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hey all, Tim here for a quick preamble to this episode. Due to, well, 2022 seeming like it was about a week long, the two interviews in this episode were recorded about a year ago. So, while the content is still awesome and relevant, you might get a bit turned around when we talk about what’s coming up in the year ahead – 2022 – especially since we just entered 2023. Also, while we always invite you to check out the bios linked in the episode description, in this particular case, I encourage you to check out what our guests have been up to since we recorded. OK, now, back to the past and into the future. Hope you enjoy the episode!

Jamie Bennett:

There's a fascinating friend and colleague called Sanjit Sethi, who's the president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. And Sanjit is very interested in sailing, in boating. And there's a concept in sailing called the righting arm, R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G. And it's essentially how much turbulence, how much back and forth can a vessel take on before it capsizes. And there's an actual physics definition of it, center of gravity over velocity, something... Yeah, I don't know all of it. But Sanjit has actually rewritten the physics formula to think about nonprofits and particularly nonprofits that need to change direction. And so you can be very broad and very slow moving and you can take on a lot of turbulence and survive it, but it's also very difficult then to change direction.

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well that. On today's episode, we're exploring organizations that have intentionally sunset their operations. A few months ago I started thinking about all of the conferences, webinars, classes, boot camps, et cetera that I've attended during my career. So many of them were about how to get started launching your initiative, how to scale, how to handle change as you grow and add new services. I can't remember a single conference that offered a session about how to intentionally close up shop. So by extension, none approach sunset in conversations through people-centric or design perspectives.

As we enter year three of a global pandemic, when so many companies have been focused for the past few years, I'm figuring out how to survive in a quote, unquote, new normal. People have had to question so much about how they approach the work that they do.

What if you hosted an annual convening as a significant revenue generator each year and now you can't do that in person? What do you do? Or how do you move money if you can't access your check stock? Or how do you design an office built around physical safety of a virus that's transmitted through the air? There were so many times in the past few years when I've been a part of groups that said, "How do we hold onto this different and often better way of being when the world starts to open up again?"

For years, the disability justice community has been asking organizations to offer online options for convenings. And many organizations said, "That's too complicated, that's too expensive. It will miss what's the value of being together in person." But all of a sudden the world has a lot of online and alternative offerings to the once only in person options.

But what about when things go back to in person? Will the gravitational pull be too much for us to remember that there's a different, more thoughtful, more inclusive, more intentional way of being? And as so many people have wrestled with during the pandemic, how might I align the work that I do with the values that I hold? With that in mind, what's the quote, unquote, right work that I want or need to be doing or not doing. And it's in that not doing where we'll spend our conversation today.

This episode includes two conversations. In the first I'm joined by Michelle Preston and Megan Carter. Michelle is currently the executive director of SITI Company and Megan is its producing director. SITI Company is an organization that recently decided to shift what it does, necessitating the sunsetting of some longtime work. And later in the episode I'll be joined by Jamie Bennett, a wearer of many hats, and formerly the executive director of ArtPlace America, an organization that wrapped up operations in December of 2020. So that's what's on deck. Bios and company descriptions are available in the episode description. So let's get going. Michelle and Megan, welcome to the podcast.

Michelle Preston:

Hi, thanks so much, Tim. Michelle Preston, I use she/her pronouns. I appreciate being here today.

Tim Cynova:

So let's just start, Michelle, since you jumped in first and then Megan, how do you both typically introduce yourself, and if someone wants to pick up how you also introduce SITI Company?

Michelle Preston:

Yeah, so I'm the executive director of SITI Company. I started with SITI in 2012 where I got to work with Megan Wanlass, their previous executive director. And in 2014 after her departure, I became the executive director. I'm originally a Midwesterner that found her way to New York City. I came here to go to Brooklyn College performing arts management MFA program. And my focus at that point was really working with dance organizations. So I've worked with Urban Bush Women, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and the School of American Ballet before finding my way to SITI Company almost 10 years ago.

Megan Carter:

Megan. I also use she/her pronouns. So I'm SITI's producing director. I was introduced to the company 20, almost 20 years ago when I saw a production of Death and the Ploughman at Classic Stage Company and was completely blown away. And then I had the great fortune of producing a show of theirs when I was at Women's Project, now WP Theater, Virginia Woolf's only play. So I met them and worked with them in 2008, 2009, and then just continued to have a relationship. I taught with their conservatory. I did some of the summer workshops. And I was introduced to them primarily as a dramaturg and then as a producer. So I've been on the edge of the company for quite a while, and I took this position in 2019. I'm originally from the south and made my way to New York City, also to go to Brooklyn College to get my MFA in dramaturgy.

Tim Cynova:

Nice. I'm glad we have the geography sketched out. That's a good way to start. Also a Midwesterner who made my way to New York City but did not go to Brooklyn College, I guess one of two there.

Michelle Preston:

Yeah, you'll find all the Midwesterners the longer you stay in New York.

Tim Cynova:

That's right, all of them. So our conversation is going to be about sunsetting, broadly speaking. Before we dive in, what is SITI Company? Can you even sketch us? What do the company operations look like? Where are you based? How many team members do you have? Budget, size, surf, the lay of the land there?

Michelle Preston:

So SITI Company is an ensemble theater company. We were founded in 1992 by Anne Bogart, Tadashi Suzuki, and a group of like-minded artists to redefine and revitalize contemporary theater in the US through an emphasis on international cultural exchange and collaboration. We started our work in Saratoga Springs, New York, and SITI stands for Saratoga International Theater Institute. But we quickly expanded and established ourselves in New York City.

We now have a year round season where we create new work. We tour and we cultivate the next generation of independent theater artists through our training programs. SITI is well known nationally and internationally for highly innovative physical productions that have ranged from new plays to original devised pieces to reinventions of classics. We are also recognized as the preeminent US institution for training young artists in the Suzuki method of actor training and the Viewpoints technique.

So the Suzuki method was developed by theater director Tadashi Suzuki in Japan, who many SITI company members have studied and worked with for over 30 years. The Viewpoints were first articulated by choreographer Mary Overlie, and over time Anne and SITI have continued to research and expand Mary's original work, exploring the relationship between time and space and movement. Together, the Suzuki training and the Viewpoints from the creative vocabulary of SITI's productions, and passing these tools onto future generations of theater makers, is essential to our mission.

Currently the ensemble has 17 members, which includes actors, designers, Chuck Mee as a playwright, Anne Bogart as our director and also a stage manager. We have a shared artistic leadership structure with three co-artistic directors. So Anne Bogart working with Ellen Lauren and Leon Ingulsrud are our three co-artistic directors. We have a administrative staff of about three full-time folks and one part-time archivist. And our annual budget is just above the million dollar level.

Tim Cynova:

Can you talk a little bit about how the shared leadership model came to be?

Michelle Preston:

Yeah, I would say they really started to articulate it in like 2010, 2011. And SITI Company is very committed to non-hierarchical structures. It's actually how they build plays in the rehearsal room where everybody's input is as valuable as the next person's. And they really wanted to find a way to take that sort of old hierarchical, top down artistic leadership structure on the admin side or on the decision making side and really turn that on its head a little bit in the same way that they do in the rehearsal room.

Tim Cynova:

Nice. So how has that been working?

Michelle Preston:

It's really useful at times and really complicated at other times. I will say that the greatest benefit of it is the number of viewpoints coming into a conversation to make a decision. And there's certainly, like there are decisions in my day-to-day world that don't necessarily need to go through the artistic leadership or go through the full company. And also there are decisions that do. And so we as a group have figured out how to layer those or test what kind of decisions really need full company buy-in, or what decisions really could be made at the sort of three artistic director level and myself and Megan and then come out to the company and say, "This is what we're doing. Any concerns?" It takes a lot of time.

Megan Carter:

There is a lot of consensus building, not just with artistic leadership but with the entire company.

Tim Cynova:

Is that something that was articulated to begin with or did that evolve?

Megan Carter:

I think that's actually a good question that I'm not sure that Michelle or I can answer since we were not there at the very beginning. But I do know that consensus has been a very important part of the company for at least 20 years. They have to talk through things. The discourse is really important, and it's important that there's buy-in so that everybody's facing the same direction.

Michelle Preston:

Yeah, we're really known for our collaboration. We've collaborated with dance companies, we've collaborated with Bang on a Can, which is a music ensemble. We've collaborated with visual artists. And we love to talk about how collaboration is not the absence of conflict, but it's in fact the ability to move through the conflict to make a decision and move forward and to do that with respect and with integrity. And so I think that is the key component of that shared leadership model.

Tim Cynova:

Well, in speaking of decisions, we're recording this at the very beginning of 2022, so we're two years into a global pandemic, and SITI Company made a pretty significant decision before the pandemic. You want to unpack what that was, what that process was like? Actually, let me end that with the punctuation. Do you want to pack what that decision was and what that process was like?

Michelle Preston:

Absolutely. So SITI Company has given the American theater and the world 30 years of powerful ensemble driven art. And we've done this by investing deeply in each other and in the ensemble company itself. So starting in 2017, we began a very intensive strategic planning process to explore who we were as an ensemble and how the organization might evolve in the current artistic ecosystem.

So we discussed and researched a wide range of scenarios including growth models, partnerships and mergers, acquiring a physical space in order to build a center for our training. I mean there was a lot of financial modeling, there was a lot of research on fundraising, there was a lot of looking at different structures for the organization as part of this process. And what became clear as we worked with the ensemble members and the board and the staff, is that the identity and the purpose of SITI Company is inherently tied and tethered to the artists who make up the ensemble.

And so the ensemble articulated throughout that process that they weren't interested in real estate or more infrastructure, and ultimately they weren't interested in immortality. And we believe that the ephemerality of theater is what makes it so compelling as an art form. And SITI's legacy exists in the fragments of our work that have taken root in our collaborators, in the thousands of artists who have trained with us and have made their own companies, and in the people who have seen our work and then looked at the world differently than before.

So once we got to that point of understanding, which took a couple of years, the company and the board decided in early 2019 that SITI in its current iteration as a touring, teaching, performing ensemble with an administrative staff and a studio and a million dollar budget, would conclude at the end of 2022, which was our 30th anniversary year. And after that point, the artists that comprised the company could become a more flexible collective.

So in many ways it was our way of continuing to innovate how an ensemble theater functions in the US, and we are creating one example for the field of what the lifespan of an ensemble can be and can do. And in many ways we are responding to the realities of our situation with the same courageous, innovative spirit that we always have and that we imbue in our work. And we want to continue to forge a path for those who come after us by leaving a clear trail of documentation to learn from. And so it was at this point in 2019 that our strategic planning activities really shifted to be what we are now calling our legacy plan. And Megan, do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Megan Carter:

So I was aware of all of the strategic planning that was happening. I was aware of the conversations that the company was having about sunsetting. I was aware that the conversations were very complex and difficult and I was actually brought on to take the company to sunset. They voted to sunset right before I started. And I had had individual conversations with every single company member, conversations with artistic leadership, conversations with Michelle. So I knew what I was coming into, which was that the company was going to end in three years and that my mission was to create a celebratory finale season, to build an archive, and just to help Michelle think through all of the pieces that would allow us to leave something behind for people to understand how an ensemble company in the United States works or could work.

Tim Cynova:

So it sounds like it's not a complete dissolution.

Megan Carter:

It is not a complete dissolution. We are not dissolving the 501(c)(3). So at the end of 2022, it's going to shrink a lot, from a million dollar organization to under 20,000. It's going to be really small. And the purpose of the organization, the entity that remains, will actually be much more about learning and sharing.

So for instance, there will be a portal to the digital archive through the SITI Company website, which will continue to exist. There will be a place for SITI alumni to network, a portal for that as well. There will be training opportunities that continue with the members of SITI Company and this entity will be a way for folks to find SITI Company members. So if somebody has a research question or somebody wants Leon Ingulsrud and Akiko Aizawato to conduct a training in Oslo, this will be a place for them to go. But it'll be one part-time staff, a very small board, it won't have the operations that we have right now.

Tim Cynova:

What's going to be part of the digital archive? What's that going to look like?

Megan Carter:

So we're actually building it right now, literally building the backend of it. So it will be quite seamless from the website to the archive. So if you go to the SITI Company website and you want to learn about bobrauschenbergamerica, the show, you go to the productions page, you click on bobrauschenbergamerica, there will be all sorts of information on that initial page. And then as you click deeper, without you even knowing it, you will end up in collective access, which is the database that we're using for the digital archive.

So through that database, you'll be able to access things like programs, production photos, press quotes, all sorts of details, video clips. You will not be able to access full videos because the unions will not let us do that. However, part of the deal with the archive is if you have the right credentials as a scholar or researcher, there will be ways for you to access full video. And that's one of the things we're figuring out right now with how those sort of gateways work inside of the database.

It'll also be a place, if you want to see every show that Ellen Lauren did with SITI Company, you'll be able to click around and it's all connected. Collective access, the database that we're using is the same one that BAM uses for their archive and Martin Rose uses for their archive. So there's quite a few examples for us to look at.

Michelle Preston:

Yeah, and we're calling it the SITI Living Archive, is one of the four big pieces of the legacy plan and we want to make sure that the digital side of it is retained on siti.org and that can be accessed outside of the archival partner, but there will also be an archival partner that we're working with where all of the hard copy physical things will get shipped off to and taken care of. And we're not ready to announce that partner yet, but it will be coming this year. It's very exciting. So that everything is really taken care of in a way that is beyond our staff's capacity to create and take care of right now, because it is really a big piece of preserving SITI's legacy.

And also putting together almost a transparent blueprint for the ensemble field or the theater field to see how did this company who started in 1992, who ended in 2022, how did they build work? How did they grow as an organization, how did they come to this decision? Like allowing intersection points for the field on everything that we've learned and everything that we've done well and maybe some of the things that we didn't do well, is really important to us.

Megan Carter:

One of the models that we've looked at on that end, and it's not an archive as such, but the 13P website, which is fantastic, and as an organization that knew when it started that it was going to have an end, and the way they documented how they made things, and it's like a user's guide or a toolkit that people can use. We're hoping that there's some aspects of that in the siti.org website as well.

Tim Cynova:

Megan, for people who aren't familiar with 13P, can you give a quick description of what it is, what it was?

Megan Carter:

Yeah, of course. So I can't remember what year it started, but it was in the early 2000s that 13 playwrights got together and decided that rather than waiting for people to produce their work, they would produce their own work. And they did one show a year. I think they may have done two at one point. But they did one show a year and the playwright who was being produced was also the artistic director of 13P for the year.

Sheila Callahan was part of that. If I start listing them, I'm going to get their names wrong, but some really important playwrights were part of that and it was hugely successful. And Maria Goyanes, who's now the artistic director at Woolly Mammoth in DC, was the producer. But they figured out how to raise money to get spaces. It was this very DIY thing and it was incredibly successful.

But they also knew when they got through the 13 playwrights, they were done. And so they built, they left this website, I think it's still there, and you can go and you can look at early grants that they wrote and strategic plans. And it's super, super smart.

Tim Cynova:

So we've glimpsed a bit of the future. I'd like to go back to that decision in the conversation that you all had, that interestingly happened before the pandemic. I think a lot of organizations right now are wrestling with a very uncertain future, and what the future might look like with touring having changed and live performance having changed. And so what was that like making that decision as a group? How did it feel? And let's start with that.

Michelle Preston:

It took a long time, it took years, it took really years of conversation, company meetings with just the company, company meetings with the company and the board, board committee meetings, artistic leadership and me meeting. It really took a lot of time and it really ran a course of feelings and of emotions and of frustration and excitement. I think we got excited for a moment about every potential scenario that we looked at. There was a moment that we dreamed about mergers and got very excited about it, and there was a moment where we dreamed about real estate and got very excited about it.

And then once I was able to put some budget numbers and some planning in place for each of those scenarios and really had to outline how we as an organization would change and maybe how our priorities would need to shift to incorporate each one of those, you could just see the excitement deflate. And we really in those conversations got to hear how committed the company were to each other and to this process that we created and this idea that this group of people doesn't get to live forever. So at some point we were either going to have to really drastically change or we were going to have to accept that the organization also couldn't live forever.

Megan Carter:

So Michelle did an enormous amount of heavy emotional lifting prior to 2019. As I said, I came in when the decision was made. However, the emotional process after the decision was made, is still happening. It is still very complicated. It is bittersweet. We were just in Pittsburgh. Actually, the company is still in Pittsburgh, remounting The Medium at SITI Theater. The Medium is the company's first device show, first seen in 1993 and then prior to this year, last seen in 1996 or 97.

And the process of rebuilding this very early SITI work was an extraordinary thing to watch because you saw 30 years of relationships and collaboration and how these people work together and how they build things together. And it's so emotional. And also I think the company doesn't stop very often to be proud of themselves. And I think maybe in the remounting of the medium, they remembered or realized how much they've done and how much they've contributed to the American theater, the international theater.

And bittersweet, because Michelle and I have been beating the drum of, we will have a celebratory finale season. And there have been moments where the company just look at us and they're like, "What are we celebrating?" We're like, "We're celebrating you. This is what we're celebrating." So we've had to overcome some of that self-effacement.

And obviously the pandemic put a bit of a wrench in things. We were planning for the finale season to last for two years. We were going to do eight shows, so there were going to be revivals and new stuff. And that's had to shrink, because we actually still get to have a finale season. And the fact that we opened the show in Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago, the fact that we did a hybrid show in the Singapore International Festival of the Arts last year, last spring. We were supposed to go to Singapore in 2020, postponed because of the pandemic, rescheduled for 2021. Really worked to get to Singapore.

Ultimately we're not allowed to go to Singapore. So we made our part of it on film and our Singaporean collaborators did their work in Singapore, and we sent them the film and sent our sound designer who was also co-directing it, and we made a hybrid production, and that was the kickoff of our 30th anniversary. So things are happening and it is actually celebratory.

I think the grief process is not linear, and I think we will continue to have difficult conversations. And this is a company that they veer toward the philosophical anyway. Nothing has an easy answer. So it's going to be quite a year.

Michelle Preston:

And I think too, in some ways, I won't speak for you Megan, but certainly I have been delaying the emotional work that I need to do around this decision because I keep thinking, okay, what's the next step? What's the next press release? What's the next booking? What's the next fundraising proposal? I just keep moving us forward because there's no other option. We have, the stakes feel so high to create a season and a year and final training programs and to get so much work done on the archive so that at the end of 2022 they can all look back and be really proud of this celebratory thing that we've created for them, that I can't even imagine how I'm going to emotionally process in 2023.

Megan Carter:

Oh no, no, no. Yeah, I'm not thinking about that. I did almost burst into tears opening night of The Medium in Pittsburgh, but yes, I'm kicking that can down the road.

Tim Cynova:

I think it's interesting that the sort of journey to get to the session you mentioned took years. It feels similar to when I was at Fractured Atlas and we made the decision to become an entirely virtual organization. For years we had, at least half of our staff who worked in 12 states, six countries, and we're like, we're maintaining multiple organizational cultures. This is not sustainable, it's stressful for everyone. And we made the decision probably about 12 months, maybe 18 months before December, 2019 of when we officially went entirely virtual, which was great.

And then February, March, April happened of 2020, the COVID pandemic arrived and then everyone did what we did over a course of 12 to 18 months in like a day. Overnight they went entirely virtual. And then there's something nice about the intentionality around having those conversations, rolling around all those different options, the merger, the physical space, whatever it might be.

And then there's also when the hits the fan, you're like, someone grab the check stock, we're going to use Zoom. And you don't have that time. You're sort of all going through it in the same process. And it's interesting to think about those stages of grief that through any change initiative we face, and if people aren't going through them at the same time, we have to circle back to that person who's going through that stage. And then what does that conversation look like as you very much have an end date? This is all going to end at a certain time. And trying to be human and understanding at the same time. It sounds like you all are balancing a lot of different balls right here. It's not balancing a lot of balls. You have a lot of-

Megan Carter:

Juggling.

Tim Cynova:

Juggling a lot of balls, yeah. Balancing a lot of something. Plates? I don't know plate.

Michelle Preston:

Yeah, it's interesting this, outside of myself, the administrative staff who were working with us in 2017 when we were trying to start making these plans and to figure out a new strategic direction, and the staff who were there by the time we made the decision in 2019, is a largely different group of people because it really takes a lot as a staff member to hold on for that many years of conversation about where to go.

Tim Cynova:

The uncertainty too of holding, like what's happening. And this leads me to another question around, I always am interested in how organizations retain staff until the very end when you're, everyone knows it's going to end and human nature would be like, "I got to start looking for what's next here." What have those conversations looked like for all of you?

Michelle Preston:

One of the things that I've closely studied over the course of this is the Merce Cunningham legacy plan document, which is on the Merce Cunningham Trust website and it outlines their process. And one of the key things that they did really, really well is to sort of monetarily incentivize staff members to stay through the end once they made that decision. We absolutely have a transition grant portion of the legacy plan that is really much more focused on stabilizing income for the company members as they transition onto the next thing, and is a big piece of what we're fundraising for.

I think that for me, having spent 10 years with this company now almost, and having taken us from the strategic planning process to making this decision to hitting the pandemic, to rolling out the decision, it's really important for me to see that this comes to the nice tied up conclusion that it can be, because I want the best for this organization and these artists.

That being said, you can't expect the same thing from younger or lower level staff members. And so certainly who we have on staff now, were brought on with a contract that extended through the end date. They knew that this transition was in process, or for Claire Mantle, who's our special projects manager, was hired after it was announced. And they sort of know that there's a deadline. And I believe know that both SITI Company members and myself, Megan, will really do everything in our power to make sure that they're, can transition onto the next thing that they want to.

Megan Carter:

And I've known the company for so long, these are some of the most extraordinary artists in the American theater. I'm really, really committed to what the next thing for them is as individuals. And who knows, there'll be other things that some of these folks make together. So I'm definitely in it for the long haul. I think it would feel, I think like I would feel like I was missing something if I were to leave early. So it's very, the staff we have right now as opposed to the staff we had two years ago, is very mission driven around this particular sunset mission.

Michelle Preston:

And also the thing to remember is, everything doesn't end all at once either. We are producing through December, so there's a lot of producing activity, but fundraising activity tapers off in a different way. And so there's the ability in some ways to be flexible. Maybe as a fundraiser your work is done in October and then we find a way to transition you out a little bit sooner, or that you're super production heavy and so you're going to be in it through December. It's unreasonable to think that everybody's job phases out at the same time or everybody's responsibilities phase out at the same time.

Tim Cynova:

One of the most disappointing things that I find is organizations that don't live, people are not here forever. And we find this in the nonprofits. I mean you find it everywhere, but having worked in the nonprofit space for two plus decades, you see it where there's this belief that if we just don't talk about it, people won't leave or people won't think about what's next. And even people who say, "We're not here forever, everyone's going to leave." You might not think that.

It's interesting to me that you have an end date. And I think that sort of finality of it causes people to show up in a different way than if it's just like years will go on and "Oh shit, I've been here for 15 years and I didn't realize time was passing like that." But when your time is done, I mean research has shown too that people approach their work in different ways and I'm wondering if you've seen that in practice.

Megan Carter:

I mean I feel like I've certainly seen it with myself to lecture each other on self-care and not taking on too much, and then we ignore each other. But I think part of that is that there is this end date. We have a finite period of time in which to do all of the things that we want to do. And we probably will not get to do all of the things, but right now it feels like we have to try to hit the marks because this is it. Which then it gives the work an urgency that is both important I think, to do the work and also exhausting, especially with the pandemic on top of it.

We've been super lucky. SITI has been well managed for a very long time, but because of the size of the organization, we've been able to be incredibly nimble during this last couple of years, which means that we also, I feel like Michelle and I have a sense of agency as well in the work that we're doing that we go, "Oh, okay, here's a hurdle. How do we figure out a way around it, because we know we have to do X, Y, and Z." And it's just that constant kind of reshuffling and problem solving and moving things around the board to figure out what is going to work and what is going to accomplish the most in this finite period of time to uplift these artists, this company, this legacy.

Michelle Preston:

To add to that, I think we have a really good sort of internal guiding star when ideas for new projects or new initiatives come out of the company, they come out of the board, they come out of the various task forces that we have with board and non-board members. Megan and I, I think at this point have a great shorthand to be like, "Can we do that? Can we do it well? Can we do it well with the other priorities that we have? Yes or no?" So that we are not trying to take on more projects in this year than we can do well and to make sure that the projects that we are taking on really have value to the legacy and the 30th anniversary season and these artists.

Tim Cynova:

One of the things that we talk about a lot at Work Shouldn't Suck is how do we reimagine HR and organizational design while centering values like anti-racism and anti-oppression? And I know that SITI holds these values as well. If you visit the website, details your commitment to anti-racism. I'm curious how those values have shown up practically in the transition conversations that you're engaged in.

Megan Carter:

It's interesting. SITI's EDI work began, before my time at SITI Company there were certain initiatives that Michelle spearheaded. But along with many other predominantly white organizations in the wake of George Floyd and all of the conversations coming out of that, we really started talking about anti-racism and what that meant. And for SITI, it had to be about what it meant in the time we had left.

And I will say the company was all in. I feel like they could have said we're ending, it doesn't matter. But we worked with two different consultants to do planning as well as anti-racism training. And we really focused on what it means to our community. That seemed like the thing that made the most sense. So looking at the folks who have done the training for the years and how we're serving them and specifically looking at our Black, indigenous, Asian, Latinx community members and asking them what they needed and what was missing.

And so we focused on that for the last couple of years and we decided that was where we wanted to put that. The energy of being an anti-racist organization was how can we serve our community and how do we build bridges for this work moving forward, a more expansive group of people. And to that end, we have partners at Skidmore College who really stepped up to and got us more scholarships for our Skidmore program last year, which we had to do virtually. But looking at scholarships for our other programs, looking at our recruitment, creating an alumni committee in which we are working with a diversity of alumni to talk about how these things should work.

Tim Cynova:

One of the questions that I meditate on frequently is simple, but it's how do I, fill in the blank, in an anti-racist way? So it might be like, how do I walk my dog in an anti-racist way? Or how do I move to a new community in an anti-racist way? And I'm fascinated by how do I sunset an organization in an anti-racist way? And how you answer those questions. That conventional wisdom, you know, you pull the book off the shelf, you're like, "Here's how you do it." And you're like, "Shit." I mean it's like this all white supremacy culture of urgency and everything else that goes into that. And how might you question everything about the quote unquote best practice of sunsetting an organization while centering race, anti-racism and anti-oppression? And I think it's a really interesting exploration that could yield some important learning to go in the digital archive. What worked, what didn't, what you would definitely not try again.

Megan Carter:

Yeah, I think so. And I also think, I had some conversations with other folks who were on staff with ensemble companies and we're this sort of closed group. Decisions were made early on, or rather, decisions weren't made, intentionality versus just sort of things come together the way they come together. But suddenly what you have is a predominantly white company, and what do you do with that and still be authentic and still actually be true to yourselves? Because it wouldn't make sense to suddenly, after a whole strategic plan saying SITI Company is this group of people, what do you do with that? And I think the alumni community has always been very important to SITI. During the pandemic, it became closer. The company did what they called SITI socials, just hang out with whoever showed up, started training online. It allowed access to the international community in a way that we hadn't really had before.

And obviously we could have done this before the pandemic. It just, like many theater companies, it didn't really occur to us that we could be online. So it opened up a whole new world and I think it really brought the community together. And I think that one of the things that's going to come out of all of this, the pandemic, the anti-racism work, the sunsetting of the company, I think what's going to come out of it is these communities that spring forth from this SITI alumni. And it's around the training and it's around a certain kind of engagement with theater and engagement with art. There's a depth to it. And we're really, we're super excited about how that's going to grow. And that can grow post the existence of SITI Company. So that's really where we're thinking right now.

Tim Cynova:

As we start to come up on time, I'd be curious what you each have learned about yourselves during this process, or what you're learning and what you might take with you from this that influences your careers besides maybe figure out how to get better at self-care.

Michelle Preston:

One of the things that I learned early on in the pandemic in a couple of different ways is, we're all going to look back on this moment and either we're going to be proud of ourselves because we made decisions that are in line with our values, or we're not. And so far, I really think that I can look back on the decisions that we made and be actually quite proud of them. And one of the reasons is we really forefronted taking care of people. As an executive director of an artistic ensemble, there's a lot of people to take care of and there are a lot of people with voices who let me know how they want to be taken care of. And when I first started here, that was quite shocking. It took a lot to get used to. And now this far into it, in some ways I prioritize that more than anything else I do.

I want to believe that I'm a very artist driven administrator at this point. And having made this decision to sunset allowed us to have real clarity in how we were going to spend our funds in the pandemic when we didn't know what the next income source was going to be, and how to talk to funders about what we needed, because I no longer needed to try to take care of a company for 10 years. I needed to take care of a company for two more years and do some really exciting things. And so there was never a conversation of, "Oh, let's lay off half the staff or let's furlough everybody for two months and not do anything." All of the work and the decisions that were made focused on how to pay people, how to keep people safe and how to keep people connected. So I really hope that I will be able to continue using those values as a touchstone in every opportunity that I find myself in.

Megan Carter:

In the middle of it, it's hard for me to say what my takeaways are right now, but I do think being able to... I'm going to quote Laura Penn, who's the executive director of SDC, who I've known for a very long time. But she talks about going fast and deep, and I feel like that has been my experience of the last two years is that we can't slow down, but we also can't just skate along the surface of things. So we have to go very deep, very fast. And I feel like I've gotten to practice that skill of going very deep, very fast, of surfacing things that need to be surfaced and constantly reminding myself to be honest and kind at the same time. Knowing that I'm going to fail at that a lot. But I feel like I've gotten to practice some things that I'm going to carry forward.

Michelle Preston:

Megan and I also got this really unique opportunity when we brought her in, and I learned so much from this, is that in a small organization, in that million dollar non-profit budget size, you really don't get a lot of peer partners when you're at the level of leading the organization. Yes, you have your artistic director, your executive director model of the two of you working together to move everything forward. And in my case, I have three artistic directors. But really having somebody who had a varying level of experience who complemented me really well, and who was really a peer. I could tell Megan things that I was worried about or things that I was afraid of in a way that I would not tell people who were my staff, who reported to me. To be able to find that kind of partnership in this moment has been so invaluable. And I want to know how to recreate it in every job I go to, because it really nourished me in the difficult moments and it helped me celebrate every win to have Megan by my side.

Megan Carter:

Aw, thank you.

Tim Cynova:

Well, Megan and Michelle, we're at time. How do you want to land the plane?

Michelle Preston:

I will say that there are a couple of really great opportunities to come see SITI Company in the finale season, especially if you're in the New York City area. We will be at BAM in March 15th through 20th with The Medium. We are coming back to New York City this fall for an extended run at La Mama of Chuck Mee's Still Under Construction. And if you can go just a little bit north of the city, we're going to end the year with SITI's radio Christmas Carol up at the Bard Fisher Center just north of the city.

Megan Carter:

And this is a Christmas carol that you want to see, I promise.

Tim Cynova:

That's awesome. Thank you both for taking time out of your busy schedule where you are landing a plane and taking time to land a podcast plane. It's been really fascinating and interesting and wonderful to learn more about this journey that you all are on. And I wish you all the best in the last couple of months that you all are together on this. And thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Michelle Preston:

Thank you, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

And now I'm joined by Jamie Bennett, a wearer of many hats and formerly the executive director of ArtPlace America, an organization that wrapped up operations in December of 2020. Jamie, welcome to the podcast.

Jamie Bennett:

Thanks, Tim. It's great to be with you.

Tim Cynova:

So we met many years ago, and you're someone who has worn multiple hats, so how do you typically introduce yourself these days?

Jamie Bennett:

Well, in terms of day job, I'm currently the interim resident and CEO of United States artists. But during the pandemic we, like everyone else in the world, seemingly became dog owners. So I also introduce myself as one of Buddy's humans, is probably how I end up introducing myself more often these days.

Tim Cynova:

Unpack for everyone, just sort of a little bit of your career trajectory, that led you to this ArtPlace America role and then now to interim as a USA artist.

Jamie Bennett:

Yeah, so I, like many people moved to New York City when I was young because I was really interested in working in the theater, and pretty quickly figured out that that didn't pay so well and often didn't come with that many benefits. So I accidentally became a fundraiser. And along the way I sort of have developed myself as a kind of utility outfielder for nonprofit arts and culture having worked in policy, philanthropy and in nonprofit.

So I've done fundraising for places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philharmonic. I've worked with grant makers, extraordinary individual called Agnes Gund. I've worked as part of local and federal cultural policy jobs. My last two gigs, ArtPlace and the current post at United States Artists are what are lovingly called philanthropic intermediaries, which means we take big chunks of money from major foundations and funders and redistribute them in smaller amounts in ways that are closer to the ground. So in general, if you have a sort of 101 question about a nonprofit arts and culture in the US, I can probably help you out with it.

Tim Cynova:

So this is a conversation about intentionally sunsetting organizations, and it's not a topic I've heard a lot about or had an opportunity to hear a lot about it. It's not like you go to conferences and it's a packed schedule of, "Let's figure out how to shut down our organizations." It's usually like, all right, how do you market them? And more about how do you spin up organizations and what support do organizations need. So I'm curious from an organizational standpoint, from a people standpoint, sort of what this whole process looks like. What questions do organizations need to wrestle with and how do you center your values in all of this work to craft a kind, caring and humane organization right to the very end? Can you sketch out what those conversations were like for ArtPlace America that from the very beginning knew that it was going to end, right?

Jamie Bennett:

Yeah. And let me start by digging into a couple of things that were in your framing of the question that I think are interesting. I think it is true that maybe too often in nonprofits and in philanthropy there's an assumption that everything has to last forever. So that if you stop doing something, it's seen as a failure.

But if we actually pause for a moment and think about why philanthropy and nonprofits were set up in the United States, they actually weren't originally meant to last forever. They were set up to address gaps in government services or in the marketplace, because the assumption was that either the market or government would take care of all our needs. Sometimes there were gaps, like not enough people could get enough food. So you create something like a soup kitchen that's meant to be a stop gap measure until we can fix the government and market systems, get people enough food.

So that's sort of thing one. Thing two, so I would say that we conceived of ArtPlace as a project, not as an institution. And one of the reasons we conceived it as a project is that meant that we had a timeline involved. And in general, knowing human beings, if you ask someone to do something and tell them they have forever to get it done, they usually take that long. And this way we could actually use the project management 101 skills to say, "Okay, we have 10 years. We have about 150 million. Here are the things that we want to get done. Now let's figure out how we're going to use 150 million dollars over those 10 years to do those things and we could actually get that done."

And so we were very different than something like a museum, which is a collecting institution, which could make a case about why it should last forever. There's care of physical objects, that's an important part of what they do. So you can't stop doing that. Zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens have living collections and you sort of can't stop doing that.

So we sort of saw our work as a project, and as I mentioned to you as we were prepping for this, one of our colleagues, Eric Takeshita actually gave us the gift and said, "Sunset is entirely the wrong sort of metaphor to use. This isn't the end of something." He suggested instead we think of ArtPlace as supernova ing, so we would actually go out with such a bang, we would seed new galaxies throughout the universe. And so in many ways we really did see our work much more like a supernova or Johnny Appleseed. You know, you've got a bag of seeds, you'll go out and distribute them to get new things started. And when you're out of seeds, your work is done, and it's much more of a relay. We ran our leg and at the end of that we handed off our baton.

So then when it comes to the care of people, one of the things that I think was really helpful with that is that I had actually come to ArtPlace out of two government jobs, out of having been a political appointee in the local government and in federal government. And political administrations are also things that come for an end, that also think of themselves as a relay. Mayor Giuliani handed off the baton to Mayor Bloomberg who handed off the baton to Mayor de Blasio who handed off the baton to Mayor Adams. And we hired a couple of folks that had also worked in government. So one of the things that was helpful to us in terms of setting up an organization and caring for each other and caring for the work is the fact that a lot of us came into the job not carrying an assumption of perpetuity with us.

And everyone who was hired was hired with a date certain that we would have culminated our work and be done with it. So there was no one who had any expectation that they would be working with us after December, 2020. So I think the fact that that wasn't a change, that was the job that they were hired to, the fact that everyone was then able to build out seven years of work, five years of work, whatever each person's tenure was, was really helpful. And thinking of ourselves as much more of a relay race than a sprint or a marathon or any of the other metaphors you use, that we have a certain job to get done, we're going to do it as best as we can, and then someone else is going to pick up the baton and run forward with it. Those are some of the things that I think sort of helped us do that with intention and care.

Tim Cynova:

I think this assumption of perpetuity is really interesting. I was thinking earlier in the pandemic about what if there was this amnesty period to just for organizations declare, "Oh yeah, we're going to close in, we always meant to close in two years or a year." Because what happens is when you don't, it's sort of a failure. It's like, "Oh, you didn't last forever," but it all kind of negates the incredibly impactful work that you might have been doing for 30 years. But like, "Oh, it's because you didn't last forever because you didn't keep going because now you're struggling."

So what if you could reframe it to be like, "No, it feels like two years from now is a good time to end this and let's figure out how we can go out with a bang and seed new things and be of community and support the people and do it in a kind caring way that people know where they're going to go next." But when you don't, it's a disappointment. Which is not at all the case when you look at organizations that have just said, "Yeah, we're going to close." That that becomes the final thing that you see about them rather than whether the organization changed the community.

Jamie Bennett:

I was going to say, and where you ended is where I would even push the conversation further, which is what if we actually conceived of ourselves of having succeeded? What if we actually did the thing we were trying to do and we were no longer necessary so that it's actually a culmination or a success or a completion. And yet oftentimes when I'm talking with philanthropy or consultants or stuff like that, you end up with sort of death with dignity. What if we allowed people to go gently into the night?

But there's some things, I was in a long conversation, particularly around single choreographer dance companies. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company decided that it didn't make any sense after Mr. Cunningham passed away. So they sort of had conceived of their organization as existing as long as Mr. Cunningham was out there. They did one year of posthumous touring and then they set up a trust that licensed his dances if other folks wanted to do it. But they realized that you didn't need a Merce Cunningham dance company after you no longer had a Merce Cunningham. So sometimes things are no longer needed. Sometimes things have succeeded. We actually did the thing we set out to do, and we can move forward. And then sometimes there are organizations that have just stayed too long at the party and need to gently be escorted to the door.

Tim Cynova:

I think this is one of the really, really great things about fiscally sponsored projects. A lot of them are time delimited or project based. And you also have that dopamine hit, like we did the thing we meant to do, rather than what oftentimes feels like in organizations where you just go from one thing to the next. You don't have milestones, you just keep working hard and you don't have this celebratory moment that you can say, we did the thing now.

And I think that's really great about a lot of the fiscally sponsored projects I saw over my 12 years at Fractured Atlas where you have the film, you have the production, you have whatever it is. People come together, they do the thing, then they disband and they come back together in a different configuration and do a different thing. And I think that's one of the challenging things when you look at people inside of organizations, and especially amid this global pandemic where we're exhausted, we're stretched thin, and you don't have that arrival point a lot of times.

And then how do you care for people when they're just like, "I'm burned out, I'm stretched." And part of that is around, burnout is workplace depression. And psychologists have filed as a workplace depression. One of those things is you see, like this isn't going to change, is pessimism around the future. And when that just becomes part of it, when there is no finish line and it's day after day, really starts to impact the way people are able to show up.

And that's really a shame into organizations that we work with where you're like, these organizations were created to make the world a better, more beautiful understanding place and does it most of the time, many times, by burning through the people who have dedicated their lives to the work. And so having these moments, I think is a really interesting way if we could build that into the organizations who are meant to operate in perpetuity. And so I'm curious what you learned about the process of working in an organization that was structured as a project but also was an organization that might be helpful for other people to take a look at different frames and different ways of showing up, and in particular as you as leader who's guiding the organization through that period.

Jamie Bennett:

Yeah, absolutely. Two very different things that sort of kicks up for me. One is, have you ever run across a person called Bryan Doerries who runs something called Theater of War? So it's a fascinating organization that's actually set up as a for-profit. And so a future exit of work shouldn't suck. You might actually want to sit down with Bryan. But he essentially takes ancient Greek texts and performs them for modern day audiences as a way to discuss issues that are very present to us. And it's called Theater of War because he started doing that work with the Department of Defense and was using, I think it was largely a story of Odysseus returning from being gone for 12 years and walking into his house and no one recognized him except the dog, until he took his mask off and then his wife and his child recognized him, as a way for modern day military audiences to talk about PT, traumatic brain injury, returning, for all of that.

Anyway, too long of preamble. One of the pieces he did, he and I have stayed in close touch and he told me he was developing a new piece that was going to either take the story of Sisyphus, who endlessly pushes a thing up the hill and then falls down and pushes a thing up and falls down, or the story of whoever the person is who stole fire and gave it to humans and had his liver eaten out every day. Anyway, it was one of those two things, and he told me he was going to perform it in prisons.

And I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting to work with the prisoners and it's way for the prisoners to talk about this and blah, blah blah." And he said, "No, no, no. We're actually going to perform it for the guards. Because if you're a prison guard, even if you do your job to the best of your abilities, the best that was conceived, the best that was designed, you're still showing up the next day and incarcerating a set of human beings."

So thinking about the sort of, at the moment, and this is a hugely controversial thing, at the moment, prisons are set up in our country to exist forever. So how do you build in the care and the support for someone whose job is to tend to a truly awful thing that is never going to go away? So I think that sort of workplace depression thing is really important, and something we don't spend enough time doing because I think it's also present for us who have much less emotionally draining jobs than prison guard or correction officer or whatever it is.

The other direction, go back to nonprofit policy wonk land. You and I have a colleague, Andrew Taylor, who blogs as the Artful Manager, who talks about organizations just being ways to organize people money and stuff to get something done. I mean, Andrew's talked a lot about this and it's a very common sense framework and yet it's one that lots of us don't think about.

But what was interesting when we were setting up ArtPlace for its final seven years, we went with a slightly different model of fiscal sponsorship than the one that you all tended to use at Fractured Atlas. We were actually a single member LLC. And the LLC, the Limited Liability Corporation, is the corporate structure that actually exists for partnerships. When a group of people come together to get a thing done, you often create an LLC around that thing. So every Broadway production, for instance, is an LLC because the director, the designer, everyone has shared work but only shared work around that project. Similarly for film production and other kinds of things as well.

So we were a partnership of 15 foundations who wanted a group of people to do some work with them and for them and on their behalf out in communities. So we actually used the single member LLC as a structure to come together and that allowed us to have these 15 foundations in partnership around this work, so they actually formally had a shared project, which was this LLC. The LLC allowed us to do things like amass assets, amass liabilities, enter into contracts, hold intellectual property, give copyright. It allowed us to hire people, it allowed us to pay them, it allowed us to do all the things that a typical organization does.

And because we were a single member LLC, the IRS treats the LLC as a disregarded entity, which essentially means you've got an LLC which is around the project if it has a single member. In this case, our single member was Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. They're a 501(c)(3). When the IRS looks at an LLC that's owned by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the LLC is disregarded and we're treated as a 501(c)(3), which means foundations could write us checks directly and not have to do additional expenditure justification, which means we sort of got all the benefits of being a 501(c)(3).

The other thing, which is the thing that's perhaps most relevant to this conversation, is that an LLC can also be set up and shut down with about an hour of a paralegal's time. It's not actually that heavy or that difficult to set up or take down an LLC. So when we decided to move forward, or we called up our outside counsel, said we want to do this, and I think they dispatched a paralegal to create a Delaware based LLC that existed as long as we needed it to.

So the other thing that particularly if you're talking with formal 501(c)(3) organizations in this sort of sunsetting conversation, it's actually difficult. It's technically difficult, bureaucratically difficult to shut down a 501(c)(3) because of all the requirements, because IRS law and Attorneys General have taken on this assumption of perpetuity. And so they've spent much more time thinking about the setting up and the creation of 501(c)(3)s and a lot less in thinking about the culmination, the completion, the standing down of 501(c)(3)s.

Tim Cynova:

A podcast episode that will never get recorded is the two of us talking about disregarded entities. Because we had conversations back in the day when Fractured Atlas was spinning up disregarded entities. There are other people who can have that conversation. It's like far more interesting.

Jamie Bennett:

Andrew Taylor actually titled his blog Harry Potter and The Disregarded Entity as a way to pull people in, and I still think it got about 12 hits on the blog series.

Tim Cynova:

And if Andrew Taylor can't do it, yeah, I'm not taking a pass at that. I'm curious, as someone who has helped an organization shut down, working with a lot of organizations who don't intend to, who are structured to operate in perpetuity that do have those legal complications that you just can't say tomorrow, yeah, let's just call it a good run. As you reflect on your experience, what might those organizations take away from that? What might be helpful to organizations who are structured in perpetuity that you learned, that you discovered throughout the process of running one that wasn't?

Jamie Bennett:

There's a fascinating friend and colleague called Sanjit Sethi, who's the president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. And Sanjit is very interested in sailing, in boating. And there's a concept in sailing called the righting arm, R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G. And it's essentially how much turbulence, how much back and forth can a vessel take on before it capsizes. And there's an actual physics definition of it, center of gravity over velocity, something... Yeah, I don't know all of it. But Sanjit has actually rewritten the physics formula to think about nonprofits and particularly nonprofits that need to change direction.

And so you can be very broad and very slow moving and you can take on a lot of turbulence and survive it, but it's also very difficult then to change direction. Think of a barge. A garbage barge is kind of that kind of thing. It will sail on, it won't be capsized by a storm and if it needs to change port, it'll take years before it's able to change direction forward. And you compare that with something like a kayak, which is fleet, which is swift, which can try lots of different directions, but can turn over instantly.

And I think that's to me a really interesting metaphor to think about organizations, the vessel that's meant to last forever, and have we reached a destination? Do we need to pick a new destination? Are we still there? How are we doing with taking on risk and experimentation on the way there? Are we able to do that? Do we need to just keep trying to do the thing that we're doing?

And I'm a little mad at myself for having used the metaphor of garbage barge because in other parts of nonprofit nonsense, there's actually the metaphor I think of the hedgehog and the hare, and the hedgehog does one thing, it does it perfectly. It does it nonstop, and it manages to burrow exactly as it needs to burrow because it is perfectly living out its purpose. And the hare similarly is perfectly living out its purpose, but does it in a very different way. So I don't mean to put a finger on the scale and say slow and steady is necessarily bad as long as you explicitly understand what it is you are doing.

So there's another colleague, Diane Ragsdale, who talks about frameworks needed for boards to understand their work. And she uses a much more of a pedestrian metaphor, the street. And she says, if you think of two curves that are sketched out by ethics, by our values and by aesthetics, by the artistic things we care about, then within those two curves you can make a set of economic decisions. But if you go outside your values, if you go outside the ethics curve, you're no longer social goods, you're no longer nonprofit. And if you go outside your aesthetics values, you've lost your cultural mission.

So I think that's a really, another really interesting framework for boards to use and say, okay, how do we hold our values? How do we hold our aesthetic sense? How do we hold our cultural traditions? And then how do we navigate between those two things to keep going on our journey? And in many ways, I don't think organizations' values have ever been more apparent than during the pandemic.

So for instance, the Museum of Modern Art where I worked for a decade, so that's family to me. When the pandemic started, they have an endowment that's larger than many private foundations. So I think their endowment's roughly the same size as the McKnight Foundation in Minnesota. And they chose to respond to the pandemic by laying off all of their education staff who were contract workers. Done and dusted.

And you compare that with someone like Theater of the Oppressed NYC, which has a budget that's not even a rounding error in the Museum of Modern Arts budget. And they launched a $50,000 relief fund for their own community to make sure that their actors, to make sure that their spec actors, all of the folks who make up the Theater of the Oppressed troupe. So I think that's a similar sort of case study in organizations making economic values and making economic decisions and it being really clear what the ethical boundaries of MoMA's decision were and what the ethical boundaries of Theater of the Oppressed NYC's were.

So I think asking ourselves where is it we're heading and what are the things that we want to keep checking in on? What are the instrument panels that are going to tell us, are we on the right track? Are we getting to where we're going, or do we need to change direction? Or are there things that we need to begin building in, particularly at the board level where we tend to only talk about economics because it's so easy to give a finance report, because they're a set of numbers, they add up, they don't add up, they're either red or they're black and folks sort of understand. But what would it look like if we started doing an ethical report and an aesthetic report at our board meetings in addition to the economic report?

Tim Cynova:

One of the things I've heard a lot from fellow CEOs over the past two years is an increasing disconnect with their boards or how their boards get it and they're like, just bet on it. Like understanding we're living in a moment in history, maybe once in a lifetime for us, where you could just bet big on your values and saying, yeah, why do we have all this money and endowment if now is the moment to do the thing that we're here to do? And then you flip over to the staff and CEOs who are like, I can't get my board to understand this.

In the wake of George Floyd's murder, they're not willing to engage in conversations about racism and oppression. We're an arts organization. So as someone who knows a lot of board members, sits on boards, works with boards, what's your advice for organizations who are like, this is what we need to be doing, and yet we're in a structure that is paternalistic, outdated, set up, steeped with white supremacy culture, created by and four old white guys and just perpetuated carries it forward. What's... I feel like six things that right at you...

Jamie Bennett:

No, that's fine because you're actually teeing up another perfect podcast episode that no one's going to listen to, which is Jamie Bennett's soapbox on nonprofit board structures. I think that one of the things that many nonprofits have forgotten is that nonprofit structures, the board in a nonprofit, is actually meant to be representative democracy. The nonprofit is set up and there are a set of governors of that organization whose job is to ensure that that organization is meeting its public good mandate.

But if you stop for a moment and think about your generic official at the State Department and think about a generic person coming to them from a different country and saying, "We've just established a form of representative democracy in our country." And the State Department says, "Oh, that's fabulous. What is the form?" And you say, "A founder of our country picks three of their favorite people to do it with them, and those people in perpetuity will pick their descendants."

That's not representative democracy. That's monarchy, that's oligarchy. So I think many of our boards have forgotten that they're meant to broadly represent our organization's publics. And we tend to think of them only as our nicest donors. We tend to put our nicest donors onto our boards, and then we don't give them job descriptions. We say, you're a highly intelligent, highly successful person who likes getting things done. Why don't you come and just generally give us money and do good?

And so I think that we need to fundamentally rethink how folks are selected and elected to nonprofit boards. And so that we're actually thinking about which publics are represented in the board structures. And I think we need to start giving job descriptions to our board members, because if it's not clear to the person why they're on the board, they're going to pick their own reason. They're going to pick their own kind of work they want to do. And shockingly, it's oftentimes not the thing that the CEO most wants that person to do.

So I think many... A colleague of mine runs the Museum Trustees Association, which I think I've mentioned to you, and she's a museum professional, and she sort of came up the ranks of museums as a curator and as a director. And she often talks about how odd she finds it, how many folks in the museum world are scared of their boards. Their goal is to talk to their board as little as possible. And then folks are dumbfounded by the fact that the board hasn't magically come along on the journey that the staff has taken over six months, when no one has talked to that board.

So I think there's a huge need to reengage boards, a huge need to involve them in our work in the way that we want them to. I think there are huge bright lines that are the difference between governance and management. I'm not suggesting that boards get involved in the management organizations, but that we're much more active and thoughtful how we bring them into their governance role and how we bring them along on those journeys that staff members are talking about all day every day. And that we tend to check in with the boards about once every four months.

Tim Cynova:

And speaking about journeys, what did the last few months, what were they like for you all as you supernovaed ArtPlace America? I mean tactically too, or practically, what was it like? Did people have sort of a stub period where they'd get paid afterwards or did you start losing people the year before, or what was that process like for all of you?

Jamie Bennett:

So we spent a lot of time about three years before our completion date talking about how do we care for folks over the last three years. And so I was really interested in figuring out, how do you set up a retention bonus that doesn't feel like golden handcuffs? And so what we ended up doing was saying that we would set aside a significant chunk of, an amount equal to a significant chunk of employee salary. I think it was 15%, 20%, for each of the last three years of ArtPlace's existence. So then at the end of ArtPlace, anyone who was employed with us on December 31st, 2020 would get the equivalent of about six months' salary.

And the reason we structured it that way and what we talked with our colleagues about was, if you want to leave sooner, awesome. You're a hundred percent, feel free to do that, but I'll probably need to job in a very expensive, highly specialized consultant to finish your work because we don't have the time to bring someone up to speed and manage them through it. So if you choose to make that decision, we the organization can tap that reserve fund and have the money needed to job in the team of highly expensive consultants to do it.

And if you don't do that, if you choose to stay to the end, then you've got about half a year's runway to figure out what's the next thing you want to do, right? You'll have that money sitting in your bank account and hopefully that'll give you a little cushion on top of unused vacation and all of the other things we did.

And so we actually didn't lose anyone that last year of ArtPlace, which is something you do see with political administrations, right? The last year, the eighth year of a two-term president is, I don't know what the metaphor is, somewhere between Ghost Town and B-Team running things because folks have left, they've gone on to their next thing.

So I felt good about that. That to me felt like a really good thing. Culturally, the other thing that was really interesting is there was none of the secrecy, anxiety kind of stuff around looking for a next job because it was very clear that we were all going to be on the market at the same time. So you were able to have much more comfortable conversations about, "Hey, I'd really love to connect with this headhunter. Can you introduce me?" Or, "Hey, I've heard this organization is going to be looking for something in the next little bit. Can we be in conversation with them?" So that was much more comfortable.

The one thing I'll say that that was hard emotionally is, when we'd originally conceived of our last year of work... I certainly don't want to be quoted talking about having thought about it as a victory lap, but in many ways it was, I guess much more like Cher at Elton John's Farewell tour where we thought that we had significantly ramped up our travel budget for that final year. Because we were a national organization, we wanted folks to be able to go all around the country, visit with the folks they've been working, say goodbye to places as well as people, and say how much we're looking forward to connecting with them in new roles, in new ways.

And because COVID happened, that didn't happen. And so I think that was hard because we didn't have the ability to be with people in space and congratulate each other on the work we had done so far and say how much we look forward to working together in new ways going forward. So that was a really difficult thing about not being able to travel during that last year of the pandemic. And like so many other people in the world, we settled for Zoom and we settled for other ways of connecting and checking in with folks and saying, see you in the next iteration.

Tim Cynova:

Jamie, as we're coming up on time and preparing to land the plane, where do you want to land it?

Jamie Bennett:

If anything, the last two years have given me a chance to take those ArtPlace lessons because everything in life feels a little bit temporary these days. Everything sort of feels like a decision you're making for now or for long as needed or until something changes. And so I think for the first time ever, my nonprofit management experience has helped inform my lived experience, which has been interesting. I don't even want to talk about it this way as sort of being displaced, but I ended up on the Canadian side of the US Canada border on March 13th, 2020, and have unexpectedly spent the last two years up here. And so there's something about, it's nice to be reminded that not everything has to last forever.

Tim Cynova:

On that note, Jamie it's always wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and your insights into this and many other things that I look forward to recording more podcasts about niche topics that will have both listeners very excited about that.

Jamie Bennett:

That's true. And I look forward to being your partner in helping drive those twos of people to all of your resources.

Tim Cynova:

Awesome. Thanks, Jamie.

Jamie Bennett:

Thanks, 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 that 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 or choice offers. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Into the future with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (EP.67)

In conversation with Board Chair Renuka Kher and CEO Sara Fenske Bahat, we explore how uncertainty, transitions, and moving forward in ambiguity shows up in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Updated

December 22, 2022

In this episode, we’re exploring uncertainty, transitions, and moving forward in ambiguity – something most of us probably feel like we’re getting pretty used to having lived the past several years amid a global pandemic.

We’ll be exploring how these things show up in organizations, and in one organization in particular – San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. And we’ll discuss how they’re approaching this in their evolving work.

To learn more about their Head of External Relations search, visit: https://www.workshouldntsuck.co/ybca-er.

Host: Tim Cynova

 

Guests

SARA FENSKE BAHAT is a connector, most at-home when bridging the creative arts, economics, and equitable design to shape our social and political landscape. As Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) CEO, Sara works collaboratively with the YBCA team to advance the organization as a dynamic home for artists, arts and culture, and social justice movement building. Prior to becoming interim CEO, Sara served as YBCA’s Board Chair. Under her leadership, YBCA navigated COVID-19 pandemic challenges (which resulted in the longest mass closure of cultural venues since World War II), received support from leading innovators for groundbreaking work at the intersection of arts and movement building, and launched the nation’s first dedicated guaranteed income program for artists.

Most recently, Sara served as chair of the California College of the Arts (CCA) MBA in Design Strategy, a groundbreaking, multidisciplinary degree rooted in systems theory, foresight, and innovation.

Sara has a community finance and economic development background. Before becoming an educator, she worked for New York City’s economic development agency and in banking, where she championed local government support for community banks, improved banking and savings products for immigrant households, and multi-state consumer protection settlements.

Raised in a Milwaukee family steeped in advocacy for human, civil, and LGBTQ+ rights, Sara quickly developed a commitment to activism and social justice. A dedicated political fundraiser and mobilizer, she is passionate about driving civic engagement and hosted the Democratic National Committee’s first-ever Zoom fundraiser at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sara is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the London School of Economics. She is a 2022 Presidential Leadership Scholar, exploring the meaning of culture and cohesion in a country increasingly divided across wealth, ideology, and acknowledgment of historic and present inequity.

Sara lives in San Francisco and loves a good dance party.

RENUKA KHER has supported entrepreneurial efforts in under-resourced communities for her entire career. She has spent 16 years in various roles in philanthropy and managed and directed over $150M. Her professional experience spans the public, private, philanthropic and non-profit sectors. She has served on the board of and as an advisor to many of the nation’s leading social change organizations including, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Beyond 12, Year Up, Global Citizen Year and Revolution Foods.

Most recently, she served on the executive team of Tipping Point Community a nonprofit grant-making organization that fights poverty in the Bay Area. During her six year tenure at Tipping Point she helped lead the growth of the organization as its Chief Operating Officer and also founded T Lab, Tipping Point's R+D engine.

Before joining Tipping Point, Renuka served as a Principal at NewSchools Venture Fund whose work is focused on education and prior to that she was a Senior Program Officer at the Robin Hood Foundation where her work included developing and implementing a strategy for a $65 million relief fund, one of the nation's largest, created to respond to the terrorist attacks of September 11th.

Her work has been featured in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, OZY, and Social Startup Success. Renuka received her bachelor's degree in Biology from the University of Michigan, and completed her graduate work at Emory University, where she received a master's in public health from the Rollins School of Public Health. She is an alumnus of the Coro Leadership Program and also holds a certificate in Innovation Leadership from California College of the Arts. She currently lives in Oakland with her husband and two young children.

Host

TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. In this episode we're exploring, uncertainty, transitions and moving forward in ambiguity. Something I imagine most of us feel like we're getting pretty used to having lived the past several years amid a global pandemic. Maybe to put a finer point on the topic though, we'll be exploring how these things show up in organizations and in one organization in particular, San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and we'll discuss how they're approaching this in their evolving work. For the conversation, I'm joined by YBCA's board chair Renuka Kher, and it's CEO, Sara Fenske Bahat. Both of their bios are linked in the episode description, so let's get going. Renuka and Sara, welcome to the podcast.

Renuka Kher:

Thanks, Tim, for having us.

Tim Cynova:

Why don't we get started with how you typically introduce yourselves and the work you do, and Renuka, would you like to get this thing rolling for us?

Renuka Kher:

So my name is Renuka Kher, and I am a South Asian woman. I have black hair. I am here in Oakland and I have a mural in the background that is my happy place, which is the mountains with the fogs in the midst, or the fog in the midst, I should say, and I am wearing a teal green shirt and a black vest today. I come from background in the nonprofit sector. I've spent over 17 years in philanthropy and been lucky enough to work on all of the issues that kind of cut across poverty alleviation, touch upon social justice, and the thing that makes me tick is all of the ways in which we can use all the tools in our toolbox to live well with one another and to contribute in ways that leave things better than we have found it.

Tim Cynova:

Sara, how about you?

Sara Fenske Bahat:

I am a white woman with blonde hair, glasses. I am sitting in front of a painting that has a woman holding an empty vessel and a bunch of checkerboard print on her dress. I'm wearing a very loud shirt next to that print, which is maroon with light blue and a bunch of ruching. There's a plant grounding the background and I'm sitting in light from my window. I introduce myself and my work as being grounded in community and it's typically been at the intersection of economics and policy. And so I began my career working in New York City government in the years post 9/11, I worked on the recovery of Lower Manhattan and saving jobs for New York. I then went to go work as a financial regulator. I've been a banker. I moved to San Francisco 15 years ago and decided I wanted to try to have some fun again. I found economics as sort of a typical first generation in my family, going to college, needing to study something that would pay off my student loans.

By the time I had done that, I was moving here and decided to go to design school, and so I added a layer of creative practice to the work that I had done. Ultimately, ending up teaching and then running the program that I had learned in. Apropos actually for this conversation, it's called the Design MBA, which we call the Masters in Business Ambiguity, actually. I joined the YBCA fold first as a fellow when I was teaching in that program, looking at economic wellbeing of families and how to talk about that creatively. I ended up joining the board, becoming the board chair, and then stepping into this seat over the last year as we've begun this transition. So I'd like to think of my practice as one that marries creative practice and a deep background in community work, specifically focused on economic wellbeing.

Tim Cynova:

Before we get to much more into the varying levels of ambiguity and uncertainty and transition, I want to spend a little bit of time on the two of you because you both have a close and supportive working relationship, and that's something that can't be said for every board chair and CEO. I'm curious, what do you attribute that to and what do you do to continue to invest in that working relationship?

Renuka Kher:

So Sara and I have known each other since 2004. We met in a public leadership program that was oriented around service called Coro. Over the years have just developed such a deep friendship and a deep admiration and respect for one another both personally and professionally. I think that that is really served as the foundation for us coming together to work with one another in this way. So I would say it's a really huge foundation of trust, but then also steeped in a couple values that we care a lot about, which is I think both of us are drawn to service and to think of ourselves as contributors, again, small contributors to kind of the big thing that we're all swimming in, whatever that might be at the moment, and also that we care a lot about our efficacy in terms of getting things right.

And I think this is important because she and I in our space with one another, whether it's public or private, what we aim to do is to be as authentic sort of behind the scenes as we are in any other space that we occupy, but also make sure that we are providing 100% kind of transparency and candor in what's happening. And so what's interesting is as I'm reflecting on just even the year of work that we've done in this context, it's really fluid the way in which we kind of can critique the work, we can offer feedback to one another. There really isn't even a mode that we go into. Sometimes relationships are structured, we're like, "Okay, let's give each other feedback." It's not like that. It's kind of whatever the day is presenting or whatever we're talking about, there's this really deep comfort in interrogating how we can be our best selves in service of the work and to make sure that we are holding ourselves to a pretty high standard and also the work as well.

Sara Fenske Bahat:

The only things that I want to add to this are that we didn't go into relationship in 2004 when we first met aspiring to do this kind of thing. We were both very grounded in being willing to tackle difficult questions and looking to build our toolboxes, and to Renuka's point, how effective we were in the work that we were doing, aspiring to leadership, aspiring to be of service, and I think what I would just offer is that when you've known someone for this length of time, literally decades almost at this point, you not only see the ways they show up as the world changes, as circumstance change, but personally as they grow, and from my point of view, when I think about us as women in our late twenties, I see a hunger in us and a desire to do work that's really aligned with what we think matters.

When I look at us now, I just see us continuing to grow in ourselves while doing the same. We started in Coro and then Renuka actually joined me in the design program that I just mentioned. I was like, "Hey, I think we need to go learn this thing over here," And then the same was true at YBCA like, "Hey, I think there's this really interesting thing going on over here. Can we do that thing together?" I would say we're not very outcome-oriented. In some ways I think we're discovery-oriented and collaborative and that shows up differently than I think some professional collaborations do in that I think we are very, very fortunate.

Tim Cynova:

In my own work, people ask me about what nonprofits or what arts organizations are doing really great people operations work and I often say I grew up in arts organizations, and so I'm looking outside of this sector for things that are examples that can be then maybe applied or retrofitted. Both of you are coming from outside, quote, unquote, the traditional art spaces and I'm wondering how that framing informs the way you work. Both if that is an accurate statement that you both consider yourself coming from outside the traditional art spaces, but how does that show up in the work that you're doing and inform the work that you're doing in ways that are helpful and then maybe ways that might be more challenging?

Sara Fenske Bahat:

For me, it's a question of whether you consider an MBA program at an art school an art space, and that is totally debatable. I don't think it falls into the category of other MBA programs and we're definitely the strangest thing that CCA did, California College of the Arts. I think of the missing piece, like the rolling Pac-Man trying to find his missing piece. The MBA program does not fit in necessarily to our school either. And so for me, I can't really speak to traditional art environments. That feels very true. Those feel inaccessible even to me. I have a whole set of judgments that I think about when I imagine what those might look like and I think some of the ways that shows up for me are the ways that the American Association of Museums talks about decolonizing collections and things like that.

When I think about the purpose of the work that we do at YBCA, I am here because our purpose feels like it's a community purpose sitting in a different place than just being a traditional arts organization. We don't collect, we are intentionally trying to share with this community a bounty of creative practice that really is about engagement. When I think about my practice over the last 20 or whatever years, having a grounding in community work I think is critical to the work that we do at YBCA. It gives me a much wider variety of tools to pull from, whether those be financial, whether those be design, whether those be collaborative. It's a different bias in terms of how we manage the work that we do here than one of a traditional institution, and I hope that that means in a similar way to I think an MBA program at an art school is really interesting, I hope that that becomes something here that offers an interesting lens and take on the ways that an arts organization can show up for a community.

Renuka Kher:

I've spent the majority of my career in philanthropy supporting social entrepreneurs who really are artists that are in service of change through using their creative practices and capital have created solutions to some of the most pressing challenges that we're faced with as a society, and in order for them to become efficacious, they've had to build organizations and scale organizations and be steeped in a few of the tools that Sara named, right? So you have to design your program, you have to make sure that you are proximate with the community that you seek to serve, that you have representation and lived experiences at all sort of levels in your organization and that you are able to measure your impact, you are able to tell your story, and you're able to raise incredible amounts of capital in order to ensure that the work is sustainable and outlives its genesis, if you will.

When I think of that spine, I think it absolutely marries or mirrors what YBCA is about in terms of our mission, our vision, and the community piece that Sara talked about, and it's in service of using art in all of its different forms to allow all of us, again, to kind of have an experience that leaves us potentially changed, but also has much wider impact in society.

Tim Cynova:

You both have worked in a lot of different places and with a lot of different people, and I'm thinking about this from the perspective of where we are right now in just history, where a lot of people have been questioning, "How do I want my life to be?" when it might not be the way it was in January 2020, where people are questioning their connection to work, their connection to place, their connection to meaning and purpose. I'm wondering for both of you, how do you answer that question for yourself and for people who might be like, "This isn't the work that I want to do. I want to be doing something else, maybe it's a different sector, maybe it's a different role."? What advice would you have for people who are wrestling with that question right now?

Sara Fenske Bahat:

That's a really big question. I mean, I spent the pandemic as an educator, the closed parts of the pandemic primarily as an educator, and so the existence I have at YBCA is very different, which is a public resource-type institution that's very much open. I've gone from having my whole life on Zoom in a classroom to being a part of an organization that's being looked to reconnect people in this community, which it's pretty drastic shift in terms of my experience. For me, my favorite job was definitely working for New York City post 9/11. That's counterintuitive for a lot of people. I think a lot of people view that to be really hard and sad and draining. For me, it was in hindsight, really formative to be able to see that I individually could work on something that allowed a community to recover and that I could find myself playing a positive role in a very difficult time in a way that aligned with my values and my skillsets.

To me, the work that we're doing here now is a real echo of that work. I see a lot of similarities. For those of you who might be listening and not know, San Francisco was closed, especially cultural institutions much longer than many parts of the country during COVID. As you might also know, there are a lot of layoffs going on in the tech community which changes the composition of the downtown neighborhood that we find ourselves in, and so we... Sure, we're an art center, we work with artists, we're always looking to represent what feels like the current set of questions that we are grappling with and we are doing so in a community that is also trying to figure out how people come together again. What does downtown look like? What are the hours of service where we find the most people coming into our spaces? And so we have a very local set of questions in addition to these more interesting, what is the role of an arts institution in a community set of questions.

To me, I love the opportunity to find yourself in a position where the work you are doing every day feels connected to the things you value. That's the holy grail. I think there's a lot of really good work to be done if we can find ourselves in that sort of alignment. My values reside in what is the contribution I can make in this community? Can I make it better? Can I make it more stable? And do I find enjoyment in that, which I do.

Renuka Kher:

And I don't know that I have advice that I can necessarily offer, but I can sort of share that pre-pandemic the place I was in my career. Again, fortunate just like Sara to have had a series of experiences where I was steeped in values alignment with doing work that actually mattered and knowing that it had lasting kind of contribution and impact. I also, ironically before Sara and I met, was also part of a relief fund in the post 9/11 recovery efforts.

And that's where I started my career in philanthropy and it was incredibly impactful, very community-centered, sort of intense in a very palpable way because you're in the middle of this incredible city that literally now has this physical gaping hole and everything that went into kind of making sense of that, figuring out what needs to happen in the short-term, what needs to happen in the long-term, and that all of us to this day have a story and a very palpable sense of something changed that day for us as a country, I would say even probably us as a world, and figuring out how to navigate your way through that situation and doing it in community and with other people, that wayfinding and sense making I think is an incredibly powerful thing if you can also have that actually integrated as part of your professional journey.

So in a lot of ways what Sara is saying about YBCA and the moment we find ourselves in and the mission that we have, again this very beautiful place and platform to explore, like what does healing look like for us, what does the way forward look like for us. Even this question, Tim, that you're asking, I don't know that I have a point of view right now. I just think it's interesting that before the pandemic I had made a decision to really lean into family life and had decided to stop working and in the middle of me asking myself this question of, "What would I like to do going forward? What does my next chapter look like?"

The pandemic was in the middle of that question for me. My son had just started kindergarten in the middle of the pandemic and when he started kindergarten I said, "Look, I'm going to try and figure out what my next steps are," and now the labor market and just how work is structured is completely being changed as we speak and things like flex time, whereas a mom, you would think about that and you'd have to figure out how to negotiate that and you'd have to be like, "Okay, will these people give me what I need?" It's not even a question anymore. It's very much so now normed that you can demand, that we should demand that and that these tools, things like Zoom and other things, that were held skeptically, working remotely, not coming into the office all of the time, having asynchronous work and synchronous work, I mean, all of this, even in the vernacular, these were not the things that I was conversing with my friends about as I was thinking, "Okay, how do I explore what I might do next?"

I was actually very much tethered to the old structures because that's how I've been conditioned to navigate, and so actually what I'm most excited about is to embrace the fact that some of these rules are no longer going to stick. I don't know what's going to happen or emerge in their place, but I have a lot of faith in the fact that there's so many more people in this conversation together and that there's so many more, both employers and employees, trying to navigate the way forward. And it's a very uncertain time, but at the same time a very promising time because I think some of the solutions we end up playing with and coming up with, I do believe will serve our wellbeing more effectively in the long run.

Sara Fenske Bahat:

There's something that Renuka's saying that I really appreciate having moved to the West Coast from California. It's almost like there's a couple adaptations in her storyline. One, moving to California from the East Coast, which we both did within a couple years of each other. In New York and I think in many other places, your life is your work and here your work is more of a portfolio of activities. I think of this as sort of being a place that's much more forgiving for people doing projects or project-based work. I think about films, I think about startups. California is a very different work environment. I remember moving here, my friends from New York were like, "Aren't you worried that you don't know what you're going to do yet?" And I'm like, "No, that is not the vibe that is happening here."

And I think there's this additional adaptation of the last couple of years of the modes of work, the modes of how you structure the different types of activities that you might have in your portfolio, and what I really like about what Renuka is saying is this additional layer of noticing a person's full life and experience, not just your work activities but really all of the parts of your day-to-day, month-to-month life that are meaningful for you and how they add up together, the flexibility around that. And there's a tone thing in there which feels like a reluctance to feeling things are daunting, like a resistance to feeling controlled, and maybe an openness to figuring it out, an openness to feeling supported as you figure it out that I really just want to underscore. Those are not conversations we were having 20 years ago when we started on this journey together. Those are conversations that have matured in the course of our work lifetimes, if you will.

Tim Cynova:

Also as someone who lived in New York for quite a while, one of the very first times I went to California someone asked me what I did for recreation as a way of introduction, and it was like that moment where, "Oh, my God. I know I do stuff, but what do I answer for this question?" Because usually in New York he's like, "Yeah, what do you do?" Meaning what do you do for work, and that recreation really threw me for a loop where I'm like, "I do things. I'm sure I do things. I own a bike. I'll say I have a bike." That probably was 20 years ago, and to your point, people are talking about work and life in different ways now, especially, Renuka, to your point, some of the things that seemed very rare have been baked into the way a number of people are able to work.

And there's that site where you can track words as they show up in literature and I imagine you'd see a massive spike if you search for asynchronous over the past three years because how many times do we talk about asynchronous work before the pandemic? I'm curious, you both have touched on this a little bit, but thinking more specifically to the work at YBCA that you do in this place that has a physical location, a mandate that's baked into the charter to do work that's located in space, having come through the pandemic when you mentioned that San Francisco was closed for cultural institutions for the most part, and this past year in particular as San Francisco, the world has started to open up, things have been presented in maybe new but also familiar ways. What's that been like for both of you and for the organization?

Sara Fenske Bahat:

YBCA is a really interesting case of... I think of the work we did before the pandemic as being grounded in our building, in our physical presence, and really being a special place where I witnessed and felt like I was a part of many different types of people and communities coming together. That's why I kept coming back. To me, it was the most interesting room of people I could find in this town. And then during the pandemic we learned how to do all these other things that did not require a physical presence, and when I look at those things now, I think about the ways we sort of built the depth of our practice. We built digital tools to connect artists to opportunities, we ran a guaranteed income pilot, we distributed grant money from the state. We did much deeper work than just what shows up in the building because what shows up in the building can be different day-to-day, depends on who's here, depending what's on the walls, who's on the stage.

This other what I think of as more ecosystem-level work, it's invisible in terms of showing up in the building, but it's not invisible about what is showing up in terms of goodwill in our community and the ways in which we're taken seriously by the creative community in particular. So for me, the last year of reopening has been really about how do we find the best parts of our practice when we are open and in what is invisible. And truly, I mean, we have a team that's also very different than before the pandemic because we've added all of these areas. How do we create a culture that allows for both, both the important work that goes on in the building that is visible and the work that is less visible to perhaps visitors coming from the convention center across the street, and how do we balance the resources of an institution and the storytelling around how we make our choices to reflect that combined practice?

It's been a lot, but I can't think that it ever is going to hurt us to have done work that is valuable to the artists in this community, that broadened our practice and the depth of our practice. And so I would say it's still a work in progress. Like many organizations, we are thinking about technology and the use to make us more efficient. We are talking about the ways we invest in our team and composition of our team, but fundamentally, I feel very good about the things that this organization decided to resource during the pandemic and how they then can come together with a reopened environment.

Renuka Kher:

This period has really positioned us to be in a both and moment. In a lot of ways, the same answer to the question that you asked about just making sense of work and how you navigate that, in the same vein now as an organization are trying to reconcile the bets that we made during the pandemic, reconcile that with our deep purpose and mission and who we're obligated to serve and try and figure out, just like a lot of arts and culture organizations, the brass tacks of it is how to keep the lights on and how to keep the doors open and how to make sure that we are a place that more and more people are gravitating towards at a time when people are sort of limited in what they're choosing to do.

We're open, and I say the world, we're open, but now we're also dealing with the fact that people are very selective because of the pandemic in terms of what they do at their time, where they go, who they interact with, and at the same time we have this tremendous opportunity, again, to be a cultural resource for the entire community as they're making sense of what has gone on for the past few years and trying to figure out where do they want to spend time that really gives them a rich, deep experience and one that we obviously have really started to pride ourselves on, which is that's one that's participatory, that you come through the doors of YBCA and there's something different that happens in your experience because you become a part of it. And for us to sustain those kinds of experiences for the future is both an incredibly exciting question for us to wrestle with and an opportunity for our community to sort of solidify that that is how people identify with YBCA.

Sara Fenske Bahat:

And just very practically, I mean, I think of it as I go to some institutions to go see a show, I want to go see something specific, whether it's theater, whether it's dance, whether it's art on the walls if you will, but I'm very purpose-driven in why I might go to see something. I have to book a ticket in advance, I have to think about it. I go on a whole journey to arrange to be there for a thing. I think about YBCA very differently actually in where I hope we get, and I hope that we get to a point where you can know that you reliably show up at YBCA whenever and something really interesting is going to be going on.

You don't actually have to plan or arrange as meticulously as you might to go to some other things. You can just know that there's going to be cool stuff happening here that's going to change the way you look at the world, the community, your role in it, et cetera, and I'll feel successful when we have arranged to get to that place, where that same feeling of showing up in a room and feeling like the most exciting people in town, we're all here together, can be something that happens without a lot of prearrangement. You don't have to necessarily jump through all the hoops, you can just roll in off the street and something here will be on offer, and ideally, something that feels engaging for you to Renuka's point.

Tim Cynova:

We talked about regional difference in how people might think about life and work. I'm curious more specifically about arts organizations or nonprofits maybe more in general. Do you notice any differences in how arts organizations and maybe nonprofits approach the work that they do in the Bay Area than maybe, say, New York City or from the Midwest where we all find some of our roots as well?

Renuka Kher:

I think with the Bay Area, what I'll say is first of all that the amount of capital required to operate in this ecosystem is just has to be underscored. The sheer real estate that we occupy, the city blocks that we are located amongst in San Francisco, it's a very well-trafficked area, and so just to situate ourselves in the physical and kind of economic context. Beyond that, I would say that one of the things in the Bay that I've appreciated so much and that has been very opening for me and I think a lot of other people in the social entrepreneurship space is this appetite for risk-taking and that it's very much baked into the kind of Silicon Valley innovation spine, if you will, that has again, sort of pluses and minuses just like everything else.

But I do think that in general, the propensity for people having an appetite for trying things differently, for consuming things differently, for interacting in different ways, it's very much so laid into the cultural fabric and ethos of this region, and I think that that again strengthens our position as a cultural institution because it allows us to also ensure that we are giving ourselves the maximum permission within that same context and frame to do things differently, to try new things, to support artists in different ways, which feels really true to what we've done during the pandemic and what we hope to invest in to align ourselves and position ourselves for the future.

Sara Fenske Bahat:

This is a different type of ecosystem in terms of who joins boards, how much people meet about what's going on in town. New York, when I look at what those years looked like for me, there was an endless stream of cranes, New York breakfasts, benefits with people who were on one board honoring somebody on another board. There's this heavily regimented institutional showing up thing that happens in terms of business leadership, nonprofit leadership, civic leadership. It's like every day of the week you could go do stuff like that. And this town is a little bit less like that. You have to work a little harder to find your alliances, to find common ground with people.

I don't think you can make the same set of assumptions about everyone's intentions to show up civically. I mean, Renuka's point is so right on in terms of rejecting convention, willingness to try new things, et cetera. Part of what we don't have, because we are that place, is this through line of participation, and so a lot of what we have to do on our own individually as institutions is develop those networks of participation, which I think some places can take for granted as institutions that are sort of passed generation to generation.

Tim Cynova:

Well, in the spirit of trying new things, trying different things, right now YBCA is in the process of hiring for a brand-new role, head of external relations, and I'll offer full disclosure here, I know this because YBCA has contracted Work Shouldn't Suck to be involved in a really exciting value centering process. The organization has had leadership roles focused on fundraising and focused on marketing and communication spaces in the past, but combining them into this head of external relations role is a new approach for YBCA. So I'm wondering why create this role and what opportunities does this new role signal for YBCA?

Sara Fenske Bahat:

I'm excited about this search because what I see is the opportunity to really combine our storytelling and cultivation efforts. We have incredible stories to tell about the impact that this organization has had, not only on the lives of individual artists, but on this community. Great example: We currently have a show that features Brett Cook. Brett is a local artist. He also calls himself an educator and a healer. This is a culminating show that includes decades of his work. He's in this show with Liz Lerman, who is also showcasing decades of her work. Brett first showed his work at YBCA when it was under construction. He spray painted the outside perimeter of the building. There are pieces of that work here in this show.

When I think about the impact that YBCA, we turn 30 next year, has had on this community and the lives of individual artists, I'm not sure that we're telling that story or inviting people to be a part of it as effectively as we might, and so this role really is front and center in connecting those dots so that the public, artists that we work with and funders are all getting the benefit of the same story in terms of the impact that this organization has. And to me that's super exciting. It's like you hear about these donor tables where they separate out the people funding the work and the people receiving the funds. We're pulling it all together. We want to tell really, really strong stories about our work and equip somebody in this role to do so really consistently across the audiences that we serve so that our funders are really invited into the full story and really called to the table of the work that we're doing as a community institution.

And so for me, this is a boundary lowering role with a really delicious challenge of how to portray the work that we're doing in a city that I think would benefit from a little TLC and a little love in terms of the ways in which we can come together and the benefit that that can have for this community, and if I might, the ways in which San Franciscans in particular view that work in the context of a country. It is very much the case here that we are proud of our COVID response. It is very much the case here that we are proud of the former mayor, now governor, putting gay marriage into place. There is a thing about this town that is willing to lean in and be really progressive as a beacon for other places. And so to me, this role is a huge opportunity for the right person to do that with us.

Renuka Kher:

What this signals really for us as an institution is that we are integrating and sort of removing silos the way that we've sort of worked in the past and trying to really allow this person to assume that leadership mantle and become kind of a very strong voice inward and outward, I would say. And just as Sara said, there is a treasure trove of stories to share about YBCA's impact over the past 30 years, so it's just such an incredibly ripe moment for us to have somebody who comes in and really does what Sara and I have talked about. This is really foundational work for YBCA's next decade.

It's not even about just a short period of time, but it's sort of you get to have the opportunity to look back on 30 years of incredible work and weave that together to then form the foundation for what happens for the next decade and how YBCA is now sort of perceived and received externally, which we have not been in the position to do over the past few years because we've been responding to the pandemic, before the pandemic we were talking about and trying to position ourselves to try some new things, try things differently. And again, this moment is really for this person to help us synthesize a lot of what's happened, make sense of it, and showcase truly from one voice, one story for all of us to then be ambassadors of. So it's really groundbreaking and defining work for us.

Sara Fenske Bahat:

To me, the gauntlet to throw down is this job is made for somebody who wants to explore this delicious question of what is the role of an art center in a community, what is the fullest potential of a center-like YBCA in a community, in a community that is fractured in some ways, is progressive in other ways, in a country where the same is the case? We are a model for a lot of things. We are relied upon to experiment. So what is the full extent of that experimentation as it applies to our storytelling efforts and the ways in which that shows up in the engagement, in cohesion and exposure of a community.

Tim Cynova:

So recently, YBCA began in earnest it's work to understand how racism and oppression are woven into the DNA of the organization, and it's a frequent topic on the Work Shouldn't Suck podcast where we discuss how this shows up in systems, structures, policies, practices, programs, and workplaces, who's included, who's not, how do we shift power differentials and with this knowledge, how do we co-create workplaces where everyone can thrive. I'd love for both of you to share a bit about why YBCA has begun engaging in this learning and work and why this commitment to anti-racism is critical to it achieving its mission.

Sara Fenske Bahat:

I think one of the observations of having been closed and specifically having started guaranteed income work is that we've learned in some ways that are insides don't match our outside ambitions. We say that we're doing work in community and the ways that we've designed that work has not always been satisfactory to the communities that we're working with, if I'm going to be really honest. We have a big accountability statement on our website that can elaborate on that if you're interested, but I think that there's an observation born out of a lot of that for me and also just born out of switching from the board chair role to the internal role where I have a lot more information that we have a real ambition to show up in a way that does feel anti-racist and anti-oppression, and we do not have the systems to support that, and so we need to do this work internally ourselves in order to show up the way that we aspire to for ourselves, but also for our community, and until we do, we will keep finding things that don't work for us or for others.

And so really for our staff, for ourselves, for our partners, for the artists we work with, I have a strong opinion that we need to look in the mirror and make sure that the ways in which we're turning up every day honor the experiences of our team, of our partners, of the artists that we work with and we have work to do. I made a reference earlier to just using technology, to pick a simple example, and I would offer we're an arts organization that hasn't embraced systems or process.

And at first coming into this role, I found that really frustrating, it was hard to understand how things worked, if you will. I've now come around to the point of view that we can build systems that are equitable from the jump if we take this work very seriously, and to me, that's doing it right. To begin to peel that onion to know what systems we need to build we have to start asking ourselves the questions, and so for me, for this team to be successful, for this organization to be successful, that work starts from within each of us, each team and the whole organization and the ways in which we work.

Renuka Kher:

From the board's perspective, plus one to everything Sara said, and that we from a governance perspective, have a fiduciary responsibility, and I think that this is what I hope we can add value around in sort of the arts ecosystem is that boards start to hold themselves accountable to ensuring that systems and policies and procedures are continually assessed on an annual basis so that what we are offering, whatever we design, whatever the sort of internal examination is of making sure that we have equitable practices. So there's a phase of the work of understanding where we are, where we need to improve, and then once we're on that journey that we really want to make sure in order for this to have staying power, it's independent of any leadership team and independent of the board composition because it is baked into the set of responsibilities that on an annual basis, for example, we are examining pay parity and we are talking and in conversation with the management team about those kinds of policies and procedures at a systemic level so that no one individual has to endure or bear the brunt of a systemic issue.

And teasing that apart is the work that we're in right now, and calling the board into showing up for making sure that we have an eye on the systemic structure is how we hope to make it a practice that outlives any one of us and that allows any individual walking into YBCA, whether you're a new employee or a longtime employee, knowing that those systemic factors are taken care of and are addressed on an annual basis. Because as we all know, this work is dynamic and ongoing, and so there's first kind of taking that slice of what can we design intentionally, equitably, and then there's the maintenance of that and ensuring that any one individual does not have to navigate that on their own.

Tim Cynova:

No surprise here, our time has flown by. As we bring the conversation in for a landing today, where do you want to land it?

Sara Fenske Bahat:

I mean, Tim, I want to thank you. You've been such a huge part of our time here and I think it's important in these moments of challenge to find optimism. I don't know that any of us have gotten through our hardest moments without it. One of the things that I find a lot of optimism around is that I think our community wants us to succeed. I feel great that I have a partner like Renuka in the work that we're doing here. I feel really great about a team that's motivated by the work that we're doing, and if anything, I think we're just looking to recruit to the team. And if this kind of work, whether you're on the receiving end or the construction end, is appealing, I mean, join the party. There's plenty of room in this tent. God knows we have enough work to do. Please follow YBCA. We are grateful for all of the engagement.

Renuka Kher:

I would echo everything Sara said and just truly underscore the exciting moment that we're in. We are in a building moment, a build and design, and so it's really kind of a really beautiful opportunity for somebody, anybody actually, to join our team and to help us design things in a way that, again, you will look back 10 years from now and say, "Wow. I was a part of making that happen. I was a part of laying some of the groundwork for this to continually be a way in which YBCA continues to manifest itself," and I really can't think of a better opportunity to do that while also being fed truly by being able to interrogate and to excavate the best parts of our impact over the last 30 years as we turn 30.

It's just, I love reflection and introspection and what that offers and especially amidst a challenging time because it really is grounding, and that is where so much of the hope and optimism lives is in the art and in the impact, and this is an opportunity for somebody to come in, hit the ground running, really shape things, really become a voice for us as an institution, and allow all of us to show up as incredible ambassadors as a result.

Tim Cynova:

So awesome. Renuka, Sara, thank you so much for sharing your perspectives, for your vulnerability, for your openness, for your genuineness, and thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Renuka Kher:

Thank you, Tim, for having us.

Tim Cynova:

To learn more about Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, visit them online at YBCA.org or on the socials, @YBCA. If you or someone might be interested in applying for their new head of external relations role, find out more about the opportunity, including staff videos talking about why this role is an important addition to the YBCA team over on workshouldntsuck.co/ybca-er. 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 a phone a friend, whatever your podcasting platform choice offers. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Journey Towards Anti-Racism Ep13: Conversation with a Peer Support Circle (EP.66)

In this special bonus episode of "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim talks with Noah Becker, Kevin Eppler, Colin Lacey, and Shannon Mudd, four members of a peer support circle that's part of the larger racial affinity group White Men for Racial Justice (WMRJ). This group of guys meet regularly to support, challenge, and hold each other accountable as they seek to live into their values and desire to help co-create an anti-racist, equitable, and just world.

This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”

Updated

September 13, 2022

In this special bonus episode of "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim talks with Noah Becker, Kevin Eppler, Colin Lacey, and Shannon Mudd, four members of a peer support circle that's part of the larger racial affinity group White Men for Racial Justice (WMRJ). This group of guys meet regularly to support, challenge, and hold each other accountable as they seek to live into their values and desire to help co-create an anti-racist, equitable, and just world.

After nearly two years of meeting weekly on Zoom, they finally had the opportunity to meet in 3D in Richmond, Virginia for a weekend of immersive learning and community building with 40 other members of WMRJ. This discussion occurs the week after that gathering.

This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”

Are you new to the series? Check out episode 54 where podcast co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova introduce and frame the conversations. Download the accompanying study guide. And explore the other episodes in this series with guests:

  • Raphael Bemporad (Founding Partner) & Bryan Miller (Chief Financial Officer), BBMG

  • Ted Castle (Founder & President) & Rooney Castle (Vice President), Rhino Foods

  • Ron Carucci, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Navalent

  • David Devan, General Director & President, Opera Philadelphia

  • Jared Fishman, Founding Executive Director, Justice Innovation Lab

  • Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-Founder, B Lab; CEO, Imperative21

  • Kit Hughes, Co-Founder and CEO of Look Listen

  • Marc Mannella, Independent Consultant, Former CEO KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools

  • John Orr, Executive Director, Art-Reach

  • David Reuter, Partner, LLR

  • Sydney Skybetter, Founder, CRCI; Associate Chair & Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts & Performance Studies Department, Brown University

Want to explore resources mentioned in and related to this episode?

Want to explore related resources primarily *not* by white guys? Check out our compilation of 30 books, podcasts, and films.

Host: Tim Cynova

 

Guests

NOAH BECKER With more than 20 years of experience in the corporate financial and public accounting sectors, Noah is responsible for financial reporting and oversight of all administrative financial matters at LLR. During his career, Noah has helped several companies establish the financial and operational tools to facilitate growth and expansion. He has held senior financial positions at early stage as well as established entities such as ICG Commerce, Five Below and The Franklin Mint. Prior to joining LLR, he served as CFO of Finite Carbon. Previously, he spent eight years in public accounting at Arthur Andersen, most recently as a Senior Manager.

KEVIN EPPLER (he/him), MTS, is a curriculum designer, facilitator, and content creator with Jubilee Partners (Jubilee Justice and Jubilee Gift). Kevin recently became a certified Program Leader with the Groundwater Institute. He is also a Learning Partner at The Opt-In. Prior to his work with Jubilee, Groundwater, and The Opt-In, Kevin spent 20 years in education, as a classroom teacher, dean, department chair, and varsity coach. He has designed and taught courses that examine race, justice, social business, social movements, and religion in both university and secondary school settings. Since 2013, Kevin has been dedicated to designing antiracism curriculum, leading antiracist caucus spaces, and JEDI/ABAR (Anti-bias, antiracism) consulting, after having committed himself to his own learning/unlearning as well as building his racial and cultural competence. Kevin believes he and other white men particularly have an important role to play in dismantling systems of oppression that begins with transformational learning and intentional inner work. Kevin has co-designed and founded a number of white, antiracist, caucus spaces including WMRJ (White Men for Racial Justice) and AWARE, both which were designed to call white folk into community and accountability, to develop our racial awareness, our stamina, literacy, and communication skills, as well as to commit to dismantling racism in ourselves and our spheres of influence. He has helped develop antiracism curriculum and programs in high schools, church communities, non-profit organizations, and for profit businesses. Kevin particularly enjoys designing and leading intensive justice and equity based immersion experiences and has done for both secondary schools and adult communities. 

COLIN LACEY, Chief Product Officer at a Machine Learning technology startup, has a passion for bringing great products and services to market and has done so in IT, clean energy and software domains. From growing up in Ireland, to working in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, he liked to think that he had a pretty good handle on the state of the world but that was completely dispelled following Charlottesville, and the death of George Floyd, driving him to reassess his perspectives on life and race in America. He lives in Austin, TX with his Afro-Latina wife, their two dogs, and (occasionally) their two college-aged kids. 

SHANNON MUDD is an economist who has worked both in and out of academics and has previously lived in Slovakia, Russia and the UK. He currently is in the department of economics and director of Haverford MI3, the Microfinance and Impact Investing Initiative at Haverford College. Mi3 is a member of Investors’ Circle (SVC) and its national network of impact investors and Shannon is an active participant in the Philadelphia Chapter. He and his students manage a small impact investing portfolio of equity investment in early stage social enterprises in partnership with a foundation in HK. He has been living in Phoenixville, PA for 18 years where he and his wife raised two terrific kids and where they are now happily empty nesters. He enjoys cycling, gardening, reading, cooking, training in martial arts, playing guitar and is active in his church leading small group studies and participating in worship music. He participates in POWER Interfaith, an organizing group of largely faith-based congregations actively working toward racial justice, social justice and environmental justice in Pennsylvania.

Host

TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press.

Transcript

Kevin Eppler:

It was really powerful. It speaks to this reality that I believe it was Jim Wallace in the book, America's Original Sin points out that 75% of white Americans do not have an authentic relationship with a Black, Indigenous, or other person of color, 75%. Not like, "Oh yeah, we're colleagues at work and we talk and we're associates that way." But have you been to each other's house? Have you been to the barbecue? Have you been to the birthday party? Have you gone to church together? And do you hang out in other spaces other than your work environment? Whatever. That's the question. And by that criteria, 75% of white Americans say no.

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work shouldn't Suck a podcast about well that. On today's episode, white Guys, anti-racism and mutual support and accountability. I'm joined in this conversation by four amazing guys, Colin Lacey, Kevin Eppler, Noah Becker and Shannon Mudd. Together we form a five person Avengers team of sorts. The five of us are members of a pure support circle, as part of the larger racial equity affinity group called White Men for Racial Justice, or WMRJ for short. As we'll unpack over the course of this conversation, our group of guys meets regularly to support, challenge and hold each other accountable as we seek to live into our values and desire to help co-create an anti-racist, equitable, and just world.

WMRJ has been mentioned a number of times in recent episodes as I've had one on one conversations with several of our WMRJ colleagues for the mini series White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-racism. After nearly two years meeting weekly on Zoom, I had the pleasure of finally meeting these guys for the first time in 3D, as we gathered with nearly 40 other white men in Richmond, Virginia for a weekend of immersive learning and community building. I'm so excited to be in community and conversation with these guys today. So let's get going. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast.

Kevin Eppler:

Thanks for having me Tim.

Colin Lacey:

Thank you.

Tim Cynova:

recording this at the end of June 2022, amid some significant airline scheduling challenges and those challenges resulted in the cancellation of Colin's flights. That meant while he was with us in spirit, he was unable to join us in 3D in Richmond. So part of this conversation is having an opportunity for our group to actually all connect in, unpack with Colin the events of this past weekend. Maybe to get things started, to give listers a sense for who's in the room. Let's go around and answer how do we typically introduce ourselves in the work we do? And maybe let's go an alphabetical order. So Colin, you want to get started?

Colin Lacey:

Sure. Hi guys, this is Colin Lacey. I'm originally from Ireland, but have been living in the US for 25 plus years. In my day job, I work in product management and marketing and I'm excited to be part of this peer support circle, a really fantastic community for us to gather our thoughts and review the work that we've been doing within our racial community.

Kevin Eppler:

And I'm Kevin Eppler. My pronouns are he and him. I think I would describe the work I do as a community organizer. I'm a content developer, learning partner and program leader for a variety of organizations that are dedicated to racial equity. I'm also a co-founder and steward of WMRJ.

Tim Cynova:

Cool. And we'll dig into that in just a little bit. Noah, you're the CFO of the private equity firm. What else do you want to share by way of introduction?

Noah Becker:

Noah Becker, been part of this group for a couple years and really enjoyed this peer group and the support circle, which has been really a good way of connecting. It's a small group of four or five people meeting every few weeks, in context of a larger group of 40 to 50 meeting every few weeks. So it's a really intimate way of getting the discussion and moving things forward.

Tim Cynova:

And Shannon, bring us home with the intros.

Shannon Mudd:

Hi, my name is Shannon Mudd. I'm an economist. I teach economics at a small liberal arts college that has Quaker roots and a long history of emphasis on social justice. I actually grew up with parents in a church whose members were also very focused on social justice and mission from the civil rights to mental health issues to teen pregnancies and human sexuality, to even the hospice movement.

Tim Cynova:

Shannon, before we dive a bit more into the Richmond weekend and what happened, I wonder if you might want to share a bit about why you got involved with White Men for Racial Justice and what value you find in being a part of a peer support circle.

Shannon Mudd:

What's the value being part of a peer support circle? So basically being able to share some struggles I've encountered in some different spaces as well as share the range of thoughts and emotions that arise with the pretty challenging material we are reading. It's been just a boon and a blessing. And when I say share thoughts and emotions, I mean all the emotions, which is not always allowed in other spaces. It's also been great to have a space just to process things out loud. And these guys have been a huge help for me moving toward really thinking more strategically about situations I have found myself in. Basically now I have a community of good people who are also struggling with various situations and I've come to find they often have some pretty hard earned wisdom to share, often born of failure, which is a pretty good teacher.

I should say that while these conversations mostly happen in our small groups and breakout rooms in the larger group meetings, the way such conversations and personal revolutions are supported in the larger group is part of what makes it possible. I came to White Men for Racial Justice for a deeper dive into anti-racism issues. I had participated in some readings both in a faculty reading group and a small group study at church. But more than that, I was primed by my relationship with my son's best friend in high school. He is Black and we engaged in some difficult and challenging conversations during college breaks when my son was home in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and too many others, I realized I was more worried about Bruce and what might happen to him in the outside world than I was ever worried about my own son.

I knew that was just wrong. It pointed to some real issues and serious problems in our society. And I was also prime because I had become aware of what institutional racism might mean in a very practical sense. It had to do with the distribution of our state's educational funding. Now basically where our state had recently instituted a formula that would help correct inequities. It had done so with a hold harmless clause, meaning it would only be applied to newly allocated educational funds. While I understand the sort of the political expediency of a program that meant no district would have its state funds reduced, the existing funding was biased toward the wealthiest school districts and toward the whitest school districts. So while this new formula would eventually lead to less inequities, it was first going to lock in the current inequities for several more generations of students. And that was sort of the first understanding I had of what was meant by systemic racism. And I wanted to see what could be done about it.

Tim Cynova:

So Kevin, you mentioned being one of the stewards. You're one of the community stewards for WMRJ and specifically help design WMRJ in Richmond weekend. Can you sketch out for the listers the purpose of that weekend and how the activities unfolded?

Kevin Eppler:

I will certainly give it my best shot. It was simply the recognition that we learned best in community and in proximity to one another and to the communities in with which we want to be greater connected and to the work that we do as White Men for Racial Justice. I've many times in my life have participated in incredible immersion experiences and know the value. As a trained educator, I spent 20 years in education of experiential learning and we knew that we already have a pretty tight knit, well bonded, well glued community, but we knew that coming to Richmond for an in person immersion experience would only strengthen those bonds.

And we knew that we could do things in person that we simply aren't able to do in the two dimensional world of virtual platforms and Zoom screens and things like that. So I think that drawing on some experiences that others in the community and I have had in person, including a previous retreat of other folks of a multiracial multigender community of practice, confronting issues of race, equity, justice and truth telling, including an experience that several of us had four years ago, we knew that these weekends are essential. They add tremendous depth to the work that we do in community.

And so I wanted to speak for my own personal experience. I wanted to witness and to create the opportunity for others to experience what I had experienced and knew that I would also get much out of it doing it with this community particularly, who over the last two years I've grown so much tighter, so much more connected to and whom as I spoke to during on the weekend, feel a great deal of responsibility and kinship with. So I hope that speaks a little bit into that question. Yeah, so thank you.

Tim Cynova:

One of the things that was interesting was there weren't a lot of details about the Richmond weekend before we actually got to the Richmond weekend. So everyone said yes to this thing without really knowing what was going to happen. We were all together like, "All right, let's get to Richmond." Why did you say yes to this experience?

Kevin Eppler:

Yeah, I want to know that too. Why did you say yes? Because we purposely didn't send out a whole lot, you're absolutely right Tim.

Colin Lacey:

I was certainly sure that I was thinking about this and thinking about what were my expectations coming into the weekend before I couldn't make it and realizing that I really had no idea what was going to happen there. But I was still so excited to A, just be in community with this group of people that we've had such a phenomenal experience with over the past two years virtually. And with the equity advisors kind of being in the same space as them, just getting the opportunity to have that personal connection during the weekend is really what I was looking forward to. Any additional learning development, whatever it was, was going to be icing on the cake.

Noah Becker:

It's a group that we've been meeting on Zooms or other things for two years, and every once in a while, maybe like three or four of us from the peer group met physically once. And I'm sure Kevin and some of the other stewards and folks have been together a lot more. But for us, there's a bunch of people I've seen in two dimensions for two years and actually get to meet them, hang out, have a drink with, break bread with and that's a totally different experience. Is sort of we've been in this long enough and kind of rely on the organizers that there hasn't been a topic yet for, I think, even really any single meeting where it was like, "Well that was not a good use of my time." So if they've delivered for two years, I think it was pretty comfortable to say that it was going to be an enjoyable weekend and educational.

Shannon Mudd:

It was interesting because basically I decided to go because I just have developed a great sense of trust in the leadership team over basically two years that we've been meeting. Every session has included some pretty thought provoking materials and some challenging reflection prompts to chew on. It's been just incredibly helpful to have a group of people who are also trying to figure out what to do with these things, to hash out thoughts, think out loud and to be held accountable. The break out groups really lend themselves to this.

So I figured the retreat would be just that, a retreat. Some time away, away from distractions and not just an hour and a half, but a serious swath of time set aside to really sit with some material, to sit with myself and my own thoughts and history, and to sit with others also trying to navigate through this issue. And ultimately, think how to bring these issues into the other spaces we inhabit.

Kevin Eppler:

Tim, if I can, I want to build on what was said. Which was one, they nailed it, which was the purpose of coming to Richmond was to strengthen the bonds in the community. No question. Full stop with what it meant to be simply together in that space. The second reason we went to Richmond was because it's the home of our pair of equity advisors and therefore, we had connection and community essentially awaiting us there. And we knew that they had opportunities for us to engage, to manifest the work to what they say, get off the porch in Richmond, why we were there for that weekend. So that was reason number two.

And number three is because of the historic significance of Richmond. As the capital of the Confederacy at one time, one of the largest ports of the trafficking of enslaved human beings historically. And also home to Jackson Ward, one of the thriving Black Wall Streets in America and incredible modern day, current day creativity, justice work, communities of practice that are on the ground in Richmond with which we were hoping to connect and engage in some incredible work that's being done there for healing and racial justice. So those are the three real, if you will, somewhat polished motivations or reasons for being in Richmond.

Tim Cynova:

Colin, I'll tell you, it was surreal to the last hug seeing people in 3D that, I mean, it kind of felt like, let me hold up a Zoom square in front of everyone because you're like, "Oh, that's... Mark Mannella is much taller than I thought he was." Like you keep turning around, you'd be like, "People in 3D is kind of surreal." Kevin and I were leaving like... I mean, it's like how do we hold on to that? But it just added such a strange and beautiful dimension after years of not really being in a space together. And certainly for myself, I've not been in a space discussing this topic, wrestling with this topic for three years in 3D. So it was really special to come together with all the people and be like, "Oh god, you're like these real people here."

And then as we mentioned, I sent you that photo, there was an art exhibit in the main hallway that we walked down every single day to go into the main room, and right by the door was Colin's. So we're able to reflect on your reflections of your whiteness being a white guy. So there was that special connection that sort of knitted us together, even though we were states apart. So really, really special and also sort of really surreal.

Colin, I'm curious what questions you have, having had so little information going into say yes. Sadly, you weren't able to be with us in person. What's on your mind as we think about this weekend and what happened? And then how do we reconnect the group? As we've had some people who were in Richmond, some people who were unable to be with us but we're continuing the work two nights ago, and this continues to be something that we do every Tuesday night.

Colin Lacey:

For me, I guess one of the questions I had, absolutely, and one of the things I feel like I just viscerally missed out on as I'm fortunate enough to have met Kevin, Shannon, Noah, in person at least, was to be in shared space with Taylor and Zoe, our equity advisors. And so that's one of the things I wanted to kind of ask the group here was how did it feel to be there with them in person and how did that change your experience?

Noah Becker:

To me, it was just first, the same thing we've been talking about, it's people you've seen on a screen for years but haven't actually met in person. And just seeing somebody live, it's a lot different getting that connection and being in the same room and really hearing their voice unadulterated by your slow internet or any other connection issue, and just being able to catch up, say hello, shake hands, give a hug. It makes you feel a lot closer and more together and I think that will help just something that carries on long run.

Tim Cynova:

There was a lot of variety in our three days together. I mean there is deep reflection in journaling and lecture, if you will, but not really lecture in the way you think. And then a basketball championship and then a group dinner at a Mexican restaurant and the Richmond Slave Trail and all these different things sort of wove together. And we had an opportunity to be in different spaces with each other and connect. So it wasn't just what typically happens on a Tuesday night where we meet on Zoom, we've read some materials, we've watched some things, we talk in sort of breakout groups come back together, or if it's a fireside chat when our equity advisors sort of talk about what's on their mind, what's pressing in their community, how we can get off the porch. But having those moments to just have those side conversations and I also haven't been at a basketball game for three years, so it was kind of this surreal moment as well. Which really made me think about what's the thing that you can't replicate in racial equity work online? What really has to be done in person?

And there were some moments that there's no way you can do that thing online because it's like unscripted, unplanned, unexpected, and it just sort of happens. And it, for me, just took the work so much deeper in a way that I can read things, I can watch, I can discuss, but being there on the Richmond Slave Trail, being there, smelling things. Kevin, I had in my pocket my phone on the up river portion of the Slave Trail and I had a recording because I wanted to record the sounds of these 40 guys walking the Slave Trail. And I was walking right behind Kevin and Kevin had a metal water bottle that had ice in it, and it sort of was rattling in a way that we had just passed this sign that showed the enslaved people in shackles. And there was this sound like that was rattling and then Jay was coughing and then there's just birds chirping.

And there's this juxtaposition of these beautiful scenery and sounds. And also the flip side that are like, well there's some really challenging stuff that's happening right here. And those things are like that'd be tough to do. You can listen to those sounds, you can have people tell you, but to be there with stumbling over sticks and smelling the air and hearing it, and then you've got the boat that was playing like U2 or something on the river. But I've really been trying to think about that. What's the thing that's different? And so for me that was one of those that really created what ultimately is something that I will not forget for the rest of my life. I mean that for me, just deepened my understanding of myself as a white guy in this work and what's required of me. And so I feel like that was just one of the moments that happened during the weekend.

Kevin Eppler:

Yeah, thanks for that. You put me right back in that spot and feeling your hands on my shoulder because we walked hands upon the shoulders of the person in front of you obviously to invoke this sense of being shackled, yoked together and stumbling along a path that we didn't really know well. And with hills and rocks and roots of trees exposed and maybe you see it coming and maybe you don't and you stumble, and it was very much a visceral experience in that regard. To talk about Zoe and Taylor. Luckily I've been in shared space with them multiple times, more Taylor than Zoe, but that was probably my fourth or fifth time meeting Zoe in person, that is of course. And I could still feel Zoe's hug that she has this way of hugging you that just warms your soul. You just feel her fully enveloping you and you can feel this transference of love. That's invaluable, that irreplicable via a Zoom screen, of course.

And so I think about all the other texture and the feeling, the physical feeling of walking foot fall after foot fall on the trail of, to Tim's point, the sounds, the birds chirping while we're in this really solemn, empathic experience. And you are juxtaposed to the party boat jamming out on Miley Cyrus and U2 going right down the river next to you as you're walking. And I actually had the instinct like, "Wait, we should stop and let that boat pass because it seems so disjointed to what we're experiencing now." And then it hit me as I walked and I kind of surrendered to the moment and realized, wait a minute, this is exactly what was going on in 1850s, in Richmond where there was the gentry and the social lights partying in the heart of the city and that noise, of course carried across the waters of the James River where enslaved people were on the other bank being disembarked from boats and darkness, because their sight and their smell was too offensive to the women of Richmond. So it had to be done in darkness.

Of course that was what's happening. Of course, conversations and backyard parties and things like that were always happening. And it was so fitting to have that as the backdrop and just to speak to the, I mean, I don't have any other word, but the insanity of that institution of slavery. And as much of the weekend and the value of the weekend was being able to shake hands and look each other in the eye and I could see the tear drop swelling or I could see the joy, I could feel it in the warmth of the handshake and I've lost count of the amount of hugs. So that was pretty incredible.

Shannon Mudd:

So I've also been reflecting on our experience at the Slave Trail and there's a lot to unpack there. But one of the things that I realized in trying to talk to somebody about it is the reaction was were just trying to feel guilty or were the leaders trying to make you feel guilty? And I really wanted to make clear that we had put in a lot of work and preparation to get to the point where we could be open to this experience of going along the slave trail and the various of physical, visceral experiences that we had there. And what I've really been thinking a lot about again is Jay's question, Jay Coen Gilbert's question to think not only and become empathic, not only of the enslaved people, but also to think what was going on with the white families.

And I think that Kevin is right in terms of yeah, it was just woven throughout the whole society. But also I think about just the kind of middle gymnastics that white families had to go through to deal with this cognitive dissonance of having values of caring about family, of caring about relationships and caring about justice and living in the midst of this. I mean, just think about how screwed up family life was. Our guided experience of the slave trail with our equity partners and Reverend T. It was not about bringing up guilt, it was about recognizing the experiences of the people at the time and recognizing that such trauma on all sides doesn't just disappear and doesn't just go away with time. I think that Reverend T noted that well.

I started thinking about this when we were at the first monument site before the Slave Trail experience, and we visited a monument for Confederate soldiers and sailors. And it was wasn't about a particular individual this time. And Reverend T talked about the erection of the statue and the others and the power of the Southern women who put these up. And pointed to these women were really reeling from what had happened after the war when 75% of all fighting age men went to war and 35% of them were maimed or killed, right? It completely upended their society. And he uttered the phrase in relationship to this statue about the South is going to rise again.

And that is something I heard growing up in Jacksonville. And I couldn't help but wonder like, "What did that mean to people in Richmond and in Jacksonville over the years? What did they see in their mind's eye? And how did they had to romanticize life pre-Civil War?" Because they had to somehow deal with this cognitive dissonance, this holding these things that are in complete tension. And I think that that tension, those mental gymnastics that we put ourselves through, we're still feeling it today. We're still feeling it today and I think that's really important. There's still healing that needs to happen.

Tim Cynova:

Noah, what's on your mind as you reflect about that weekend?

Noah Becker:

Couple things with respect to the physical being there. For me, one of the things was when we started the tour and the reverend had grown up in the area, was really not drastically older than us. And just being there, seeing him and seeing just we're on the highest spot in the area and looking at where the statue was and this was over me for almost my entire life that was really just being in that space. And then the same thing, having somebody really not that 10 or 15 years older than most of us saying, "Yeah, I couldn't go into these places until I was a teenager." And how close that brought to you hear these things and you think about these things and you're thinking about them, so much of them being so far in the past, but then there's somebody standing in front who's dealt with all of this. And maybe it says something about my life that I'm not often that connected with people who are telling the experience they've had. But that was really a visceral part of it for me.

Tim Cynova:

One of the interesting things for me was we can role play online. We can talk about like all right, when we go for Thanksgiving, we're with our family members, how might we approach this differently? Or how might we approach a conversation with someone that we truly disagree with? Or when someone says something racist, how do we respond? This was real life and being able to see how people responded In the moment. Kevin's wearing the White Men for Racial Justice T-shirt, which every day a group of people were wearing this and then walking into the Mexican restaurant with a group of 40 white guys where a third of them are wearing White Men for Racial Justice. You had real moments where people are responding to this group of people coming in. And that created this moment at the Mexican restaurant where someone's walking in and they're like, "Hey, I like your shirt."

And you're like, "Well, what do you like about it?" And then that created this conversation and like half an hour later where like, "Wait, they're still here." It was one of those unscripted, unplanned, unexpected moments that wouldn't have happened. You couldn't have really planned that moment out. That was a genuine exchange by something that happened. Really, it was the T-shirt. So I think those were the kind of moments where there was the planned learning, but also the unplanned learning and the unplanned experience and being in the basketball championship was a Black space. And on the first night, Zoe had asked people list seven Black spaces that you've been in your life. And there are a number of conversations where some people had family, but if I don't have family, we're like, I'm trying to get to three. Then having those moments during the weekend, having it reflected on the very few Black spaces where many of us have been in our lives and then being in them.

Kevin Eppler:

Yeah, it was really powerful. It speaks to this reality that I believe it was Jim Wallace in the book, America's Original Sin points out that 75% of white Americans do not have an authentic relationship with a Black, Indigenous or other person of color, 75%. Not like, "Oh yeah, we're colleagues at work and we talk and we're associates that way." But have you been to each other's house? Have you been to the barbecue? Have you been to the birthday party? Have you gone to church together? And do you hang out in other spaces other than your work environment? Whatever. That's the question. And by that criteria, 75% of white Americans say no.

So that's an interesting dynamic and then the experience with the T-shirt expand upon that Colin, what Tim was saying is we transitioned from this incredible community basketball game, this championship of the RVA League for Safer Streets, which Paul Taylor, we affectionate called P or Taylor has organized for years around these workshops for conflict resolution. And you can't compete in the basketball games if you don't complete the workshops first.

So we went to the championship game and saw an incredible celebration there and then transitioned to this Mexican restaurant. And we're arriving in a variety of cars and in waves, and some of us got there early and some were a little bit later and whatnot. And most of us were in the restaurant when one of our fellow members arrived and got out of the car and caught the eye of these three women eating out on the patio extension of the restaurant. And one Black woman says, "I love your shirt." And he says, "Well thank you. What do you like about it?" And to which she responds, essentially she says, "It means you see me. It means my story. It means our history." Something along those lines. Mic drop moment. And Zoe watching this unfold essentially is from what I understand, builds upon that momentum and says, "Well come on in. Come meet these men. When you all finish up your dinner, do us the favor, please stop by. Come say hello. We'd love to introduce the community to you."

So 20 minutes go by, we're ordering drinks, we're ordering food, and sure enough, these three women turn the corner to the corner of the restaurant in which we are. And Zoe says, "Here they are." And people start clapping and hey. She said, "All right, come on. Come on ladies, come on. Come on." She calls them queens, of course. She says, "Queens, come on, introduce yourself to these men and say to them whatever you need to say." And one after the other, they stand forward, they say their name and burst into tears. The only sentence that any one of them was able to get out was one woman stepped forward and said, "My name is... and I'm raising a Black son." And then she burst into tears. And the last one, she couldn't even, she was just waving because she's crying so much, because they're so moved to see not just one or two but 40 white men rocking White Men for Racial Justice.

They were so moved to know that there's a community out there working on our own racial journey, our own journey towards equity and justice, our own awakening that they couldn't speak. They were rendered speechless. And so a bunch of us pop up and start hugging and start talking and they just say, "You have no idea what this means to us." And I shared this with Tim and some others, I think that the sad thing about that for me, was that that's how low the bar is. Meaning all we did was wear T-shirts and that shattered them. That's how little hope they have otherwise, right? At least in their community and their lived experience from what I heard them say. And I'll never forget that. That's transformative.

Colin Lacey:

That's amazing. It was going to be one of the questions I wanted to ask you guys was like was there a pivotal moment for you in the weekend? And Kevin, that absolutely sounds like one of them, but it seems like there were so many.

Kevin Eppler:

It might not even the top one or two for others because there's another one that I can think of that was pretty pivotal, but that certainly was perhaps it for me, but I'll let the other guys speak, Of course. Love to hear what other candidates you guys could uplift.

Noah Becker:

I think following on with Kevin, to me that was in a lot of ways the most pivotal because I came from the perspective and I still have this perspective, and I was thinking earlier in the day and doing that tour that even if back in the day there were 40 men who were in favor of making changes or doing whatever, it just wouldn't have happened because the system was so set and oppressive that it would've needed far more than that to make any difference. At the end of the day, the only thing that changed back then was a massive war of incredible scale, especially relative to the number of people in the country. That took something so huge to change it that it got me thinking about, well the only thing you could do, the best thing you do is not get into a system like that.

Because once you get so far, maybe there's only a war or something they can get out of it. I was so, in a lot of ways, depressed or thinking about that there's not hope for things and that even that what we're doing is just not... it might soothe us, but it might not be as helpful, but then that moment, what, 2, 4, 6 hours later to at least get that look even what we're doing. And [inaudible 00:33:39] it's a little of it. All I did was show up, but we didn't do anything but that it did make a difference and forget about how it impacts us, the fact that we made a difference was pretty profound. We made a difference for just doing so little. So it at least balanced, for me, a little bit the fact that is there still hope? Are there things that can still be done to make the world a little bit better?

Tim Cynova:

There's this moment, really honored that I had a chance to talk with Zoe about this and that Ned recorded it after the weekend, because there was a moment that happened on the slave trail that was like someone shoved defib paddles into my soul and shocked it. I can't explain exactly what I felt, but I'm like, "That just changes the way I relate to this work." And it was in response and I'll let listeners... we'll tell you about it later, Colin, but I'll let listeners sort of hear Zoe talk about it. But it was in response to prompt from Jay Coen Gilbert, as we're all reflecting, we had just walked the Slave Trail and we were sort of unpacking it with the Reverend T and how we felt about it, and people were empathizing with the enslaved people. If I had lost my child and I was next to a child or I had just come 90 days, 120 days off of a ship in the middle of the night and talking about it.

And Jay reflected back, it's wonderful that we're feeling empathy for the enslaved people, but no one's mentioning what about the ship's captain or the guards or the financiers or the merchants or the bankers or our ancestors who were in these roles. And that was a moment where we're like, "Right, totally missing that." And then this led to this really pivotal moment for me. On the plane back, someone was mentioning Brooks Brothers made clothes for enslaved people and we're like, "Interesting." So that led to more learning about Brooks Brothers and the whole network of complicity in this institution of slavery. And it just sort of made you see how it was all tied together. It didn't matter where you were, relative to the Mason Dixon Line. It was whether you lived in New York or whether worked for a bank, whatever it might be, it was sort of a reframing of that.

And I think we probably in sort of a virtual sense, could unpack that a little bit. But again, sort of standing there in moment you're like, "People were standing right here in 1860 or in 1850 and they'd gotten off the boat right there." Just sort of made it resonate in a different way for me.

Kevin Eppler:

That's another candidate. Colin, I'd imagine one of us would bring that up because I'm glad that Tim, you had the opportunity to unpack that some more with Zoe because that was an incredible and courageous act and a gift to all of us. Yeah, so I think that I didn't think I could leave with more respect and appreciation for our equity advisors, but somehow I did for both of them, because seeing Taylor in his element in the RVA League just took what I thought was already peaked appreciation for him and his brilliance, that took it to a whole other level. That offering from Zoe, as well as her post slave master syndrome talk the night before just reminded me of how lucky we are to have them and their gifts and their offerings to us and to be in relationship with them in the way that we are.

Tim Cynova:

Colin, now that we're like, "Hey, should have been there, it was great." Which is always like "Cool. I wasn't, thanks." I've been wondering as a peer support circle and knowing that one of our five weren't able to be with us, what our responsibility is and how we sort of bridge the gap, if you will. And I'm curious as you think Colin, about what happened, us talking about what happened, but also this work, there's a much longer arc. What might come to mind or what might resonate or this would be helpful or please don't tell me how cool it was, I wasn't there.

Colin Lacey:

It's a great question. I think that even your enthusiasm and excitement about the experience is so visceral, it transfers even virtually. I got that same sense when recently a group got together in Philadelphia, as well on the next WMRJ call, there's just so much excitement and energy in the group. And so yes, I think for me, it just reinforces that I need to book my flight to arrive way earlier than the schedule so I can make sure that even in case of disaster, I can get there. But absolutely committed to figuring out how to make it next time. I'm so not disheartened at all, it just makes me want it more. So I'm thrilled that was so reaffirming for everyone.

Tim Cynova:

As we prepared to land the plan on our conversation today, I'm wondering what we each might want to offer into the space or as we think about the work as white men supporting each other, holding each other accountable.

Kevin Eppler:

I kind of find myself naturally going in that direction of thinking about the role we have as white men to play in the lives of other white men. I hope everybody who went on that community weekend will come away from that weekend feeling invigorated, recommitted, will walk away with a tangible sense of the value and the impact of the work that we're doing. Will walk away knowing how important and needed the work is. And will feel inspired, perhaps to take a piece of the courage that Zoe demonstrated for us to engage other white men and to get them into the community or other anti-racist spaces.

If you're listening to Tim's podcast and series and you're listening to these conversations and the reflections on that weekend, I hope you're hearing from them a testimony to the men in this community and the joy that we find being together, even though the work can be at times quite difficult. But the sense of connection and community and seeing each other and being seen by other is healing for so much of what ails us, and we need more spaces like these were white folks, were white men are particularly are showing up to their learning and unlearning, to be challenged, to be held accountable. So I'm asking all of your listeners to grow curious, to find more about WMRJ and again, other white anti-racist caucus spaces. If you're already in the community and you're listening, I challenge you to reach out, to invite others into this community, because hopefully it means to you what it means to me.

And to everybody I find myself regularly asking for this, because when the community does it, it means so much to me. Which is to hold me accountable, just keep raising the bar. That's what I appreciated about Jay's prompt on the Slave Trails that it made me shift my thinking. Even if I had some resistance to it at first, so much wisdom from this community calls me, as I said in our closing circle, to be a better man. And I think that's invaluable, I think being called by other men to be better, in ways that is done with love and without judgment. Too few spaces that I've been in do that. And so that's my final message is come on in, come on in. It's hard, but you're not alone and we'll walk it arm in arm and there's room. We all have something to learn. We all have something to contribute.

Colin Lacey:

Yeah, that's amazing. Kevin. I constantly kind of come back to the realization that there's never a point at which we're done here. This is lifelong and beyond work. It's very easy to think that we can do a six week or 12 week or whatever program and suddenly we've checked a box and we kind of like to get the cookie and move on and that's just not how this works. There's no certificate that we're going to get at some point to say we've mastered something here. I think we have to embrace the approach of just lifelong learning and engagement and we have, I think, all realized how much we have to deal with our own shame and re-embrace our humanity to actually engage in this work. And so that's where a group like this is just phenomenal to be able to provide the support to engage in those conversations because it's very hard to just simply be the good white person kind of in isolation. There's just so much to unpack, if you will. And so that's where I come away from all of this.

Noah Becker:

Yeah, I mean I appreciate what everybody said and I really hear what Colin says, just thinking through about this, it's never going to end and it's ongoing and just keeping the hope and keeping the faith. And that's why somebody, like I said, was so powerful for me the event of the Mexican restaurant sort of help keep the one side of my mind that maybe there is hope and opportunity and things that we can do better and improvements we can make, but just knowing that it's permanent in the work is never going to end.

Shannon Mudd:

I am really trying to seek proximity with other communities and to be curious and to show up and just be present. So not to take the lead or try to solve problems. Cause there's a lot of learning that still needs to happen. So it's important to sort of be aware that this is a process we need to play the long game. I'm also really trying to purposely show up to spaces that are working to address racial inequities as we are learning, white men seem to be sparse in these places for some reason, perhaps because we are the most at risk. I've also learned to recognize the value of having spaces outside of work where you are just another person, not someone in power. To use those opportunities to be aware of power dynamics in that space. I'm finding it allows me to better recognize those dynamics, those dynamics of power and recognize unfolding situations, and it gives me some practice in responding a little more slower and more intentionally, rather than just reacting and just trying to fix things all the time.

Tim Cynova:

There's something that resonated for me as we were wrapping up on Sunday, and it's a comment that a friend of mine made several years ago and he said, "People will spend a lifetime avoiding an awkward 90 second conversation." And as I think about this work, how many just it's going to be awkward, that 90 seconds will be awkward. We'll make it through it, but how much richer and deeper and meaningful it will be because you've done that thing or you've had that conversation. And I think about this work, the lifelong work, we're going to have a lot of these 90 seconds that let's just take them as they come. And to be a part of a community like this where you can get that support. Where you can be held accountable, you can have that awkward 90 second conversation and be like, "Tim, come on." But that's grounded in caring and love and support.

It was incredibly meaningful to me and I just want to say, gentlemen, many thanks both for today, for sharing so honestly and vulnerably but thank you so much for being part of my own journey. My own personal journey in this work, for challenging me, for holding me accountable, for your support. And thanks for being on podcast.

Kevin Eppler:

Likewise, I echo that appreciation for all of you and for holding me accountable and calling me to my best self. So I share that gratitude. Tim, thank you for hosting us. Thank you for this incredible space and I look forward to talking again soon.

Colin Lacey:

Absolutely. Thanks so much, Tim. This was awesome.

Noah Becker:

Yeah, thanks Tim. This is great.

Tim Cynova:

If you've enjoyed the conversation or are just feeling generous today, please consider writing a review on iTunes so that others might be interested in the topic. Can join the fun too. Give it a thumbs up, or a five stars, or a phone of friend, whatever your podcasting platform or choice offers. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Journey Towards Anti-Racism Ep12: Conversation with Jared Fishman (EP.65)

In episode twelve of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews Jared Fishman, a civil right lawyer and Founding Executive Director of Justice Innovation Lab, a company building data-driven solutions for a more equitable, effective & fair justice system.

This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”

Updated

September 9, 2022

In episode twelve of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews Jared Fishman, a civil right lawyer and Founding Executive Director of Justice Innovation Lab, a company building data-driven solutions for a more equitable, effective & fair justice system.

This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”

Are you new to the series? Check out episode 54 where podcast co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova introduce and frame the conversations. Download the accompanying study guide. And explore the other episodes in this series with guests:

  • Raphael Bemporad (Founding Partner) & Bryan Miller (Chief Financial Officer), BBMG

  • Ted Castle (Founder & President) & Rooney Castle (Vice President), Rhino Foods

  • Ron Carucci, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Navalent

  • David Devan, General Director & President, Opera Philadelphia

  • Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-Founder, B Lab; CEO, Imperative21

  • Kit Hughes, Co-Founder and CEO of Look Listen

  • Marc Mannella, Independent Consultant, Former CEO KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools

  • John Orr, Executive Director, Art-Reach

  • David Reuter, Partner, LLR

  • Sydney Skybetter, Founder, CRCI; Associate Chair & Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts & Performance Studies Department, Brown University

Want to explore resources related to this episode? Jared suggests:

Want to explore related resources primarily *not* by white guys? Check out our compilation of 30 books, podcasts, and films.

Host: Tim Cynova

 

Guest

JARED FISHMAN is a former federal prosecutor and the founder and executive director of Justice Innovation Lab, an organization that designs data-informed solutions for a more equitable, effective, and fair justice system.  Justice Innovation Lab uses a collaborative approach to identify and fix inequities in jurisdictions across the United States. Prior to founding Justice Innovation Lab, Jared served for 14 years as a senior civil rights prosecutor at the US Department of Justice, where he led some of the most complex civil rights prosecutions in the country, securing convictions in high-profile cases involving police misconduct, hate crimes and human trafficking.   He began his career as a line prosecutor at the Washington, DC US Attorney’s Office, where he handled domestic violence and sex offense cases. Jared regularly speaks on issues of data-driven criminal justice reform, police accountability, hate crimes, and human trafficking, and has trained international and local police, prosecutors, and judges. His work and analysis have been featured on CNN, CBS, CBC, and in the New York Times and the Washington Post., and he serves as adjunct faculty at Georgetown University and at the George Washington University Law School.

Host

TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press.

Transcript

Jared Fishman:

A lot of lives hang in the balance. We have an obligation for those of us, with power, with strength, with connections, with money, to try to undo some of these harms. One of the examples we often use is if you can, as a thought experience, imagine a building where the person who built that building hated people with disability, and they went out of their way to make it the least accessible building possible. Now fast forward a hundred years that person's gone. You're now the owner of that property. What is your responsibility to deal with it? Even if you don't have that intent, it is still a building that's creating adverse effects for people with disabilities. There are folks who say the only solution is to tear it down.

I spent my early career working in war zones where people were tearing things down. My takeaway is that is not the solution. We're not going to wind up with something better, but we have to figure out where are the levers to make the system better now. There is so much low-hanging fruit and it is far harder than it should be, but there are real places where we can make a difference right now if we take action and if we don't then that's on us.

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova, and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. A podcast about, well that. We've paused our regular podcast episodes to produce this 10-part mini-series called White Men and The Journey Towards Anti-racism. While you can listen to the episodes in any order, if you're joining us in the midst of this adventure, I invite you to check out episode 54 of our podcast, where my co-host Lauren Ruffin and I introduce the series and frame these conversations. All of the episodes, as well as a whole host of amazing resources on the topic, not by white guys, can be found on workshouldntsuck.co. In this series, we're talking with a variety of white guys who are personally and professionally engaged in anti-racism work. When asked they each define the work in slightly different ways. Some articulate it as anti-racism or anti-oppression work. Others say they approach it more through a justice lens, others inclusion, and belonging, still others equity and impact. Through these conversations will explore the moments that led each of them to do this work, including their initial realizations that this was work for white guys to be doing.

We'll discuss what's been most impactful and resonant to them in the journey, what's been most challenging, and since this is a podcast about the workplace, we'll discuss how this work shows up in the organizations they lead and the ones they work with. On today's conversation, I'm joined by Jared Fishman, the founding executive director of Justice Innovation Lab, a company building data-driven solutions for a more equitable, effective, and fair justice system. You can find Jared's bio linked in the description for this episode. In the interest of time, let's get going. Jared, welcome to the podcast.

Jared Fishman:

Thanks for having me.

Tim Cynova:

How do you typically introduce yourself and the work that you do?

Jared Fishman:

I'm a civil rights lawyer and a former federal prosecutor and now the founder and executive director of Justice Innovation Lab. The work that we do at Justice Innovation Lab helps law enforcement decision makers, typically prosecutors and police, use their data to make their system less racist, to understand how they are making decisions that impact the lives of the people within their jurisdictions, and how they could do it better.

Tim Cynova:

What does that look like in practice then?

Jared Fishman:

In practice, we partner with jurisdictions, usually district attorneys or the chief prosecutor of a jurisdiction, and we get the data of all of the decisions that they make throughout the criminal justice process. That includes how they set bond, how they choose to charge or dismiss cases, and what recommendations they have at sentencing. Ultimately, what are the results of those decisions, who is incarcerated for how long, what are the impacts of those decisions? Within that data set, we're helping them understand, are they making decisions equitably. Can they be making decisions better? Where are the problems and opportunities in their jurisdiction in order to have more fair, more effective justice?

Tim Cynova:

How long has the organization been in existence and doing the work?

Jared Fishman:

We launched about a year and a half ago. For many years, I was a federal prosecutor and this project got underway because I had worked a murder case, the murder of Walter Scott, a black man who was murdered by a police officer in Charleston, South Carolina, and through the course of the prosecution and investigation in that case discussions with people in the community and particularly with the lead prosecutor there about systemic issues facing that community. The question was, are we being fair? What can we do to be more fair? The chief prosecutor collected years of data but didn't have the internal capacity to be able to understand that data and to be able to use that data to make better decisions.

After being a prosecutor for a really long time and spending my career looking at individual accountability and holding individual people responsible for civil rights violations, what bothered me over and over were the systemic problems that were not being addressed. So often when we see a police shooting or we see police violence, we look at the individual who committed that crime or committed that action and try to see, can we hold that person responsible.

What I've seen over the course of my whole career is that these people are operating within a context that is much broader than any given individual. What can we do as law enforcement, as prosecutors, as members of the community, to ensure that people are set to make better decisions? We take that data and we look to see, all right, how long is it taking you to handle a case for a black versus a white defendant? What are the penalties associated for that for someone in terms of who's being incarcerated and for how long, and do we see differences based on race? If we are, what are causing those decisions so that your prosecutors can make better, fair decisions? For many years, when I started off as a prosecutor, I had hundreds of cases and I was making hundreds of decision every single day. Though I wanted fair decision and I wanted to do the right thing in any individual case, the reality is, I didn't know whether or not, in the end, I made a fair or just decision because there was no way to evaluate those decisions in any concrete way.

What we're hoping to do is to give prosecutors those tools, give prosecutors those answers so that they can make better, more fair decisions. A lot of times what that means is prosecuting fewer cases. What we've seen in recent years is that most offices are dealing with low-level non-violent crimes that disproportionately affect people of color and people in lower-income communities side. It's a result of the way those communities are policed and prosecutors are in a situation where they have the greatest ability to affect change if only they use those levers of power in a more effective, more thoughtful, and more equitable manner.

Tim Cynova:

Really fascinating work that you're doing. I guess maybe let's go a little bit deeper and back up and say, what led you to be on a podcast with two white guys talking about race and racism?

Jared Fishman:

Yeah. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and I grew up in an environment where my schools both sent me to Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolence and Stone Mountain State Park with the Confederate generals and formally the headquarters of the KKK without any irony. This was a part of my upbringing that we would go to both of these places. I remember growing up and being very enamored by the civil rights movement, but thinking that I had missed, I had missed the moment that it had come, that I wish that I could go integrate restaurant counters, go down and help advance voting rights and all of these things. That time had come. What came to realize over many, many years is that many of the most egregious and most obvious forms of racism had disappeared, yet the systems and structures incorporated many of those same racist ideologies.

Now they're just harder to see. As I became a civil rights lawyer, it started off by wanting to advocate on behalf of victims. I wanted to get justice for victims of crimes, but once I was in the system in my first week as a prosecutor in DC Superior Court, you can't help but notice that almost every single person in there is black. You can't help but notice that the impacts of our system is disproportionately affecting people of color, most of whom are lower income. That to me was really shocking so I didn't want to prosecute people for low-level drug offenses. I didn't want to use the prosecutorial power for that. I wanted to use it to speak on behalf of people who were victimized by the system.

For 14 years, I was a prosecutor at the justice department, traveling all around the United States, including as far off as us territories in the South Pacific. What became clear over and over again was that the problems that I had seen in DC Superior Court were not unique to Washington DC. They existed in South Carolina. They existed in Georgia and Louisiana and Kansas and California. These are baked into the system themselves and more often than not people don't realize what is happening. As a white guy, number one, I've had access to seeing what is happening in court across the country over and over again. I also have access to levers of power. I have access to prosecutors who are making those decisions. I have access to police officers. I have the ability to convene. To me, I see that as a responsibility of having that access to number one, raise attention to people who may not have that same access. Then number two, to use the levers of power that we have to actually do something to fix the problem.

Tim Cynova:

I've felt over the past two years, along with the global pandemic and also George Floyd's murder that white people, in particular, have started to see systems that they've not noticed before. We've seen supply chains and unemployment and all of these things that maybe white people through white privilege and white advantage have been protected from seeing. People are starting to see the systems behind the curtain if you will. When looking at the work you're doing, what are some of the things that white people still might not understand about the system in which you're operating and trying to change?

Jared Fishman:

Well, I'll take one example from some of the work that we've done. We looked at prosecutorial decision to see whether or not black and white people are being treated equally in the system, but you don't just look at black and white in the aggregate. You want to be comparing similarly situated people so people who are charged with the same types of crime, people who are coming from similar situations. What we found was quite interestingly on the whole, at least for some of the decision points that we were looking at black and white people were being treated equally when they're similarly situated. Yet what we were seeing on the back end were massive disproportionalities in incarceration. How is that possible?

How is it possible that you can treat people equally and still have massively different results? The answer is that if you put racist information systems, racially oriented arrests, to start off the system, then no matter how equal and fair you are, once it's in there, you're still going to have those disparate results on the back end. Explaining that to people has been, I think really enlightening because a lot of times, most of the people that I deal with, they want to do the right thing. They want their communities to be safer. They want to be fair. They don't always realize how decisions that get made before them can then mean that the results of their own work are unfair or unjust. Then once coming to that realization, the question is, okay, well now what can I do about it, and what is my responsibility to do about it?

Tim Cynova:

What are some of the things that people are actually able to do because I see this as a question like, all right, so I get it, but what do I do as a single person here, as a single white person?

Jared Fishman:

Well, we're working with the decision-makers so a lot of it is looking at your data and asking better questions. I think a lot of times, at least when I started off, I thought we would be using data to show problems. That we would be using the data to show where the differences and the disparities are and that's true. We do that, but even more interesting than that is asking questions about the data. How do you define whether or not you're being fair? What are the factors that go into your decision-making? To people who are not in the law enforcement system, it's different.

The work that we're doing is looking at who is the decision maker. I think one of my big realizations about everything is that someone is ultimately the decider. Someone is the decision maker. What we try to do is make sure that that person is informed so that they can make better decisions. Whether or not you're an executive or you're just a regular person, we make countless decisions every day, and having access to the information that helps enlighten us as to what are impacting and affecting our decisions is the first step in making better decisions.

Tim Cynova:

What does the Justice Innovation Lab structure look like? Who's a part of it? How does it work? Have you sort inwardly taken the data to make data-driven decisions in how you've structured the organization in the group and your policies, practices, and procedures?

Jared Fishman:

Who are we? We're a collection of prosecutors and data scientists and economists and visualizers and leadership coaches, each of whom bring very different, unique skill sets and perspectives to trying to address this problem. One of the things I realize that if we're going to take on something as big as mass incarceration or racial disparities in the criminal justice system, it requires a lot more skill sets than typically get brought together. What I think is most exciting about this work is that talking to a prosecutor versus talking to an economist versus talking to a designer, have very different thoughts about how to tackle these problems. Collectively, we come up with better questions and better answers as a result of that. We are our own team that then gets supplemented by people who want to work on these issues.

We've worked with an ethical coach who's a consortium of leadership coaching who's provided services and leadership training to prosecutors. We've worked with academics who either have an engineering capacity or an analysis capacity to help bring that to the table and we work with impacted communities and people who have had this experience themselves to help shape our analysis. Sometimes when you become very data-driven, you forget that the numbers are actually real humans so it's important to remember those stories and those experiences of the people who are most impacted at. We use a design thinking human-centered design approach in how we tackle problems.

We try to meet people where they're at. We try to understand the problem that they're trying to solve. Then we help them think about that problem in a different way, partly by looking at their data, partly by thinking about what questions would you want to ask, and then looking at the impact. At the end of the day, our real goal is to affect outcomes that... We're looking to change what is happening in systems. Sometimes those solutions are easier than we think. It just takes people coming together to ask those questions in a way that allows us to explore solutions.

Tim Cynova:

Describing your team as reminiscent of IDEO, where you're bringing together a lot of different people with a lot of different backgrounds to reimagine what might be. At the same time, you're bringing together people with diversity of thought and perspective, and life experience. What does that dynamic look like on your team when you're in the room with all of that difference and trying to work on a project together?

Jared Fishman:

It's been really enlightening. We have one guy on our team who designs our curriculums and he has a very different approach to best practices in adult learning and what do adults need to learn and thinking about objectives of sessions and it's transformed not only the way we build curriculums, but now it's, every time I have a meeting, I start by walking myself through this process. What am I hoping to accomplish? It's so simple in so many ways, but yet we don't do it. When I listen to economists talk about incentives and incentive structures. Now I see incentive structures everywhere I go. So often as a lawyer and I know as a young lawyer, part of the reason I got into the law was this idea, well, if we had rules and we had effective rules, we could build a better society.

Well, that's part of it. We need rules, but we have to understand how people's behaviors are affected so to have an economist and a curriculum developer and my comms person talking about how do you tell a better story, it just means that you're able to be more thoughtful in your analysis and more effective in your implementation. None of us have the skill to do this by ourselves. We have to partner and collaborate. Finding people with the dedication to tackle these complicated problems, who both understand that they are hard and we will not always win and we will often fail, but also are open to broader possibilities. It's kind of cheesy to say that it's magical, but it can be really magical sometimes.

Tim Cynova:

A lot of people talk about diversity of teams and what happens. When you get to sit in a team like that, you're like, right, this is what everyone was talking about. When you actually see it at play and realize how that informs just the way you work yourself, it's such a fun thing too. You might be trying to tackle some really serious meaty things, but the fun in energizing an intellectually stimulating environment that creates oftentimes is magical.

Jared Fishman:

Yeah. It just enables you to think about problems differently. A lot of people talk about innovation. We need more innovation. We need more creativity. What I've come to realize innovation really means is taking someone else's good idea and bringing it to a new context. That's all innovation is so if we can expand who we're hanging out with so that the advances in cognitive psychology or the advances in data processing, or the advances in economics, and we can learn what they have learned and say, all right, well now can we apply that to this new context of race, of justice, of what that means? It enables us to do things in different ways that are inherently going to have better effects.

Tim Cynova:

I found that often talking about reframing anti-racism work as innovation sort of clicks with some people. When you realize there's no playbook for this. There might be wise practices or things you should do versus things maybe you shouldn't do, but what's exciting and also challenging is we're learning together. We're making this up as we go along oftentimes, and oftentimes it's bespoke to our organizations and what we're trying to do in our resources, and whether we define it as equity or justice or anti-racism or anti-oppression or belonging and inclusion, it's also one of the really exciting things about this work in that we are struggling to change systems that have been around for oftentimes hundreds of years but doing it in a way that is bringing together all these different perspectives, but anti-racism work often isn't framed as innovation.

Equity justice work often isn't framed as that. I think in reframing, it might help people unlock some of that risk tolerance too. We're not going to have the right answer always, but how else do you approach innovation and using that frame I feel, especially for white people in general sort of lets them settle into, oh right, this is unknown and we're sort of learning as we go along.

Jared Fishman:

One of the things is, if you think about America's mass incarceration problem, we've got 2.3 million people who are incarcerated. The problem is even bigger than that. We have 10.6 million people who are arrested and wind up in jail every single year. It's a lot of people. It's an overwhelming question. Part of the way the American legal system is set up is incredibly local. These are decisions that are being made at the county level so fixing that problem actually means getting down to the county level and trying to help those people make better decisions, make more fair decisions, recognizing the places where their values and their goals are out of alignment with what their actual practice is. That takes a step of slowing down and really starting to take it step by step. If you start with one problem that people can wrap their heads around, for example, time to disposition of a case, which is not remotely sexy to anyone who's not in this field, but it's about how fast and how fairly and how efficiently can a case move through the system.

Everyone in the system can wrap their head around that problem. Then you take it step by step. All right, well, what do we think are some of these causes, what do we think are leading to these results? You brainstorm and you wind up saying, all right, well, there's like 25 things that people think may be affecting these decisions. Can we measure it? Yes. Okay. Which one of those things had the biggest effect? Let's work on addressing one of these. One of the things that I found most exciting about our work is it's those little successes that then lead to bigger successes that we continually iterate and build off what we learn.

If you think of this path, not as linear, that you have to have the answers before you start off that you have to have the change in mind, but really you have a problem. We're going to tackle this problem. We're going to recognize that we're not going to solve a hundred percent of the problem right off the bat, but maybe we can solve 20%. Maybe we can solve 50% and with each new step forward, we come closer to tackling that problem. That's what people need to stay motivated. It's what we need to keep moving forward in progress and recognizing, yeah, we get stuff wrong. We have theories that turn out not to be true, but the fact that we're asking the questions, trying to measure it, developing hypotheses, testing those hypotheses, that's how we're going to develop the evidence base for broader, smarter change.

Tim Cynova:

Several years ago, I watched the documentary Slavery by Another Name and there was a quote. I'll get the quote paraphrased, but not exact that has resonated with me since I watched that. It was essentially someone was remarking did they really think they would let 4 million free laborers just up and walk away? This was in context of the peonage system and sort of what happened after the emancipation proclamation. As I think about your work and I think about resilience and I think about you and your team tackling this massive challenge, systemic issue, where do you find your strength and resilience in this work personally, and as a team and leading a team that's tackling such a huge problem?

Jared Fishman:

I'm constantly grateful for the opportunities that I've had in life. I think when you can see the worst excess of punishment when you see people who are stuck in a cage because they don't have enough money to make bail. When you see how mental health and lower-income communities is treated, it's like that is not a problem that I have to live with. I have been fortunate not to have to do that as I've had plenty of problems and challenges in my life, but I've been fortunate to have resources to be able to respond to that. What continues to make me able to do this work is knowing that that is not true for a lot of people. A lot of lives hang in the balance and we have an obligation for those of us, with power, with strength, with connections, with money, to try to undo some of these harms.

One of the examples we often use is if you can, as a thought experience, imagine a building where the person who built that building hated people with disability, and they went out of their way to make it the least accessible building possible. Now fast forward a hundred years that person's gone. You're now the owner of that property. What is your responsibility to deal with it? Even if you don't have that intent, it is still a building that's creating adverse effects for people with disabilities. There are folks who say the only solution is to tear it down. I spent my early career working in war zones where people were tearing things down. My takeaway is that is not the solution. We're not going to wind up with something better, but we have to figure out where are the levers to make the system better now. There is so much low-hanging fruit and it is far harder than it should be, but there are real places where we can make a difference right now, if we take action and if we don't, then that's on us.

Tim Cynova:

Your comment about not tearing it down resonated with me. Why do you say we shouldn't tear it down?

Jared Fishman:

What happens when we tear down institutions? We see this happening in the United States right now is people are weakening institutions that have, I mean, America has plenty of problems, but we also have institutions that have protected rights for people for hundreds of years in ways that don't exist in other countries. We have to have systems in place to protect the rights of people and if we tear those down, what's going to fill the gaps? It's going to be wealthy-powered interests that are going to just recreate new systems of power that are going to benefit those. We have to be working inside that system to empower people. Part of the challenge is not everyone in positions of power want to do this so we can throw our hands up and say, well, people in positions of power don't want to do this.

I don't think that's true. I think there are a lot of people in positions of power who do want to do something different but don't have the tools or the ideas or the know-how or the team behind them to help answer these questions. That's what we have to be doing. We have to be having the conversations about the need for these things. Then we have to be giving people the tools, the resources, the partners, to be able to make that a reality. Thinking about it, talking about it is the easy part. It's the building and the change that is far harder. It takes longer and it takes more resources and more ideas.

Tim Cynova:

How would you respond to a prosecutor saying, I'm game, I'm ready to do this, but I can't because those above me aren't interested in doing this work? What am I supposed to do?

Jared Fishman:

We work in places where at the very least leadership is interested in taking a closer look. They don't necessarily recognize there's a problem. They don't necessarily know what the answers are, but they're willing to be reflective and to at least ask questions. That's what we require to work with. I think there are a lot of people out there who are not there yet. We could worry about trying to convince those people. That's not our sweet spot. I think the majority of the country says like, all right, something's not right. I want to do something about it, but I don't know what. If you're willing to be self-reflective, if you're willing to ask hard questions, and then when you find out the answers do things differently, then that's all I need to work with you. That's the mindset that we need for change. There are enough people out there that we can start there.

One of the things that I've come to realize about prosecutors and part of the reasons we work with prosecutors is that prosecutors are the most powerful people in the system. They're more powerful than police. They're more powerful than judges in terms of how their individual decisions impact the lives of the people in the system. What has surprised me about this work is how prosecutors don't recognize that. There's almost this lack of understanding sometimes that the most powerful people have the power so part of what I say to anyone is understand where you are the decision maker, understand where you do have that power because every step of the way you have the ability to make better decisions, you have the ability to be more fair. If that's all you can influence is the things that you touch and have direct power over. Then we're still going to be a lot better off than if we do nothing.

Tim Cynova:

A year or two ago I did a session with another colleague of mine, another white guy around anti-racism and how it shows up in organizations and what you can do. At the very end of the session, someone said "that was all really great stuff, but could you give us some tangible examples of that", which I thought, the entire hour is all tangible examples. I was remarking about this to one of my colleagues and she said, "I think people confuse tangible with impactful and impactful with visible." Adding pronouns to an email is tangible. Ending gender discrimination is impactful. Increasing gender diversity at an organization is visible. As you think about the work that you're doing and the approach the Justice Innovation Lab is taking, what resonates for you in those different distinctions?

Jared Fishman:

Obviously, everything we want to do to be real. We want it to be tangible and we wanted to be impactful and we want to affect people's lives for the better. One way you could look at it and if you're looking at reform, we could be looking at people who are incarcerated for 20 or 30 years, massive massively punitive punishments that affect a single person. Then we also have the problem of hundreds of thousands of people having really small sentences, but that are incredibly disruptive and punitive. Which problem is more important to address that really long sentence for someone who is wrongfully convicted or who is just receiving the punitive excess of the system, or is it the person who gets brought in on shoplifting and gets 15 days, but now has their total life upended? To me, they're both really important and some of them are going to be easier to fix, some are going to be harder to fix.

There's so much stuff that is easy to fix, but the putting together the coalition, the collaboration, the building momentum it's harder than it should be so we strive to be impactful. We strive for it to be visible. We strive for all of these things to take place. So much of what's happening in the criminal justice system is behind the scenes and is unseen, but yet has huge impacts on people's lives. At the end of the day, that's what we're looking at first, can we impact people's lives for the better? Can they get resources to deal with addiction and homelessness and poverty that they can't currently get because that's what we want? We want to be not just not punishing people. The absence of punishment and the reduction of the harm is important, but at the end of the day, we want to build something better.

Tim Cynova:

As you think about things you've read or watched, what resources would you suggest for people to take a look at if they want to understand more about the dynamics that you're exploring and operating in and the systems that are at play?

Jared Fishman:

There is a lot of great resources out there. Specifically, on the criminal justice system, I think Danielle Sered's book Until We Reckon is a great way to think about what is the purpose of punishment. What is the purpose of accountability and are we doing it right? I think understanding the historic racism and the system, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is great. Douglas Blackman book that you referenced the documentary of Slavery by Another Name. Thirteenth, the documentary, is a great explanation of the link from slavery to the modern-day criminal justice system. These are I think really important books. I think there's a lot of great work in moral psychology and behavioral psychology that I think to me has been really influential because we're talking about systems and we're talking about laws, but really at the end of the day, we're talking about human behavior and we want to encourage human behavior to be more pro-social and result in better outcomes collectively.

Books like Nudge the Behavioral Code, Jonathan Haidt's writing on morality and psychology, I find very enlightening. Then I read a lot about data science and probability and understanding algorithms and understanding what we can learn from these other fields. I read Moneyball back in the day. It was my first experience with data science. When my comms person said, "I think when you explain this as Moneyball for the criminal justice system, people can understand it better." So, that's what we're doing. We're Moneyball for the criminal justice system. If we can be using data to make companies more profitable and baseball teams win more games, certainly, we can use data in a similar way to make it more fair, more just, less punitive, and result in better outcomes for our communities because everyone wants safer communities.

Tim Cynova:

I find that one of the also really exciting things too, applying something from a different field, my background is in the cultural sector and I find the most intellectually stimulating things come from outside of the cultural sector and then get applied to how can I learn from Moneyball or how can I learn from IDEO? Then take that learning to be a part of creating something new and different within the sector or organization, which I work, and going back to this work is bespoke and there's no roadmap for it. Being open to where you can learn and how you can apply things differently in different ways I think is one of the really exciting things about the work and being part of this. What would you say to people who feel like they're outside of the criminal justice system saying, I hear you? I want to do something about this. What do I do as a citizen?

Jared Fishman:

I always say to people, all right, don't worry about the criminal justice system. If you don't have contact or connections to the criminal justice, that shouldn't be the problem that you're solving, but what are your strengths? What are your skillsets and thinking about how can I use that strength and that skillset to advance the cause of racial justice? Everyone has people they are connected to whether it be their employers or their friends, or their community groups. I think the mistake often is people who don't know anything about a particular field but realizing it's a problem now trying to go and work in this field that they don't know anything about, but you do know a lot about something and you do have skillset and it's about how can we apply that skill set to this problem?

A lot of the leadership coaches we work with have never worked in the criminal justice system, but they know to how to help leaders think through these problems so we brought leadership coaching in not really to talk about race, not to talk about criminal justice system, but just even thinking about best practices in leadership because prosecutors are leaders too. They have to lead their offices. They have to make these decisions for their cases.

Same goes with the designers. We've brought in designers who don't know anything about the justice system, but they have a process with which they can help us design better things and think about how do we build these things differently. I always tell people "get good at something and then once you're good at it, figuring out who needs that skillset" because half the people I've hired wasn't because I knew that I needed that thing. I met someone who had a strength and said, "oh yeah, oh, I can use curriculum development." I don't know anything about curriculum development, but we're teaching people things. I want to teach people how to do those things better so that's how my team grows.

I feel like I build my team and my organization differently than many people and organizations often build and I think it's the problem with the funding space that I'm in is that oftentimes people want to know what you're building in the end. The answer is, I don't know yet because I haven't put together that team. Part of what is great is if you go in and you try to solve a problem and you get people talking and you bring in the skillsets, you're going to come up with far better solutions than anything I ever could have come up with at the beginning, giving yourself the space to allow that to happen. Then when you see things that work and when you see things that are innovative, when you see things that are being effective, that's when you want to scale it. That's when you want to take it to more places.

Tim Cynova:

That's awesome. We're coming up on time. Where do you want to land the plane?

Jared Fishman:

One of the things that I think has been inspiring for me is that we're operating in a time where there is so much pessimism. We see so much dysfunction in our government. We see so much division between the left, the right in America, that it's easy to get hopeless sometimes. One of the things that's been really inspiring about our approach and taking it a little bit differently is that we bring together people on the right and the left, people who are impacted by these decisions and the people who are making them. What has been very hopeful to me is that I think people still can solve problems. I think the ability to solve our problems is there. We just need to do it with a little bit more empathy. We need to do it with a little bit more thoughtfulness. We need to give the time and the space to try to work out some of these solutions.

It is not easy. You can't solve these problems with a soundbite. It requires sitting down, having hard conversations, being open-minded. One of the things that I worry about the most is that we're losing our ability to be open-minded everyone across the country, right and left together and we do that to our own detriment. I think the work that we try to do is to reopen people's mind as to possibilities, to give them tools to solve problems again, and to come together. There's a lot of demand for this so more and more prosecutors, police departments are coming to us asking for help and saying, how can we help? The answer is we just need more money. There are a lot of good people out there that want to do this work. We're just trying to continue to raise money to make this possible because the best ideas we haven't developed yet. We're going to develop that in the communities that we work with that serve as incubators and hubs of ideas and innovation. They're going to find the solutions to solve the problems that are translatable across the country.

Tim Cynova:

Jared, I'll say you were the first incredibly seasoned prosecutor that I've ever interviewed. I will say I was slightly nervous throughout the prep and this entire conversation, knowing that I'm interviewing someone, went through your skills, but...

Jared Fishman:

I didn't go cross-examine on you. If I turned it on you and started asking the questions that's when maybe you should be scared.

Tim Cynova:

That's true. Right? Good thing I am the one who can click stop on the interview here. Thank you so much for the time today. Thank you so much for your perspective, your vulnerability, your sharing your experience. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Jared Fishman:

My pleasure. Thanks for bringing attention to these really important issues.

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 or choice offers. Until next time, thanks for listening.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

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Journey Towards Anti-Racism Ep11: Conversation with Ted & Rooney Castle (EP.64)

In episode eleven of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews Ted Castle (Founder & President) and Rooney Castle (Vice President) of Rhino Foods, the birthplace of the iconic cookie dough that goes into Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough Ice Cream.

This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”

Updated

September 3, 2022

In episode eleven of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews Ted Castle (Founder & President) and Rooney Castle (Vice President) of Rhino Foods, the birthplace of the iconic cookie dough that goes into Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough Ice Cream.

This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”

Are you new to the series? Check out episode 54 where podcast co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova introduce and frame the conversations. Download the accompanying study guide. And explore the other episodes in this series with guests:

  • Raphael Bemporad (Founding Partner) & Bryan Miller (Chief Financial Officer), BBMG

  • Ron Carucci, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Navalent

  • David Devan, General Director & President, Opera Philadelphia

  • Jared Fishman, Founding Executive Director, Justice Innovation Lab

  • Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-Founder, B Lab; CEO, Imperative21

  • Kit Hughes, Co-Founder and CEO of Look Listen

  • Marc Mannella, Independent Consultant, Former CEO KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools

  • John Orr, Executive Director, Art-Reach

  • David Reuter, Partner, LLR

  • Sydney Skybetter, Founder, CRCI; Associate Chair & Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts & Performance Studies Department, Brown University

Want to explore related resources primarily *not* by white guys? Check out our compilation of 30 books, podcasts, and films.

Host: Tim Cynova

 

Guests

TED CASTLE is the owner and President of Rhino Foods, a certified B Corporation located in Burlington VT. Rhino employs 250+ employees and manufactures bakery style inclusions for ice cream manufacturers, and a variety of frozen desserts and snacks that are distributed in North America and Europe. Rhino Food’s Purpose is to “Impact the Manner in Which Business is Done” through its Financial, Customer and Supplier, Employee, and Community Principles. Rhino Foods and Ted have been recognized for their efforts with the Hal Taussig B the Change Award from B Lab, Beta Gamma Sigma Entrepreneurial Award. Vermont Small Businessperson of the Year, by the SBA, the Terry Ahrich Award for Socially Responsible Business by Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, Forbes Magazine’s List of Small Giants. Optimas award for vision in the workplace (past winners include UPS, Coors and 3M), Inc Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and Special Recognition Award from the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. In 2018 the Rhino Foods Foundation was formed with the mission to "Spread Innovative Workplace Practices that Champion Employee Financial Stability and Make Good Business Sense" with an initial focus is to spread the Income Advance Program Rhino nationwide. Ted lives in Charlotte, Vermont with his wife Anne. Their two sons Ned and Rooney are presently living in Vermont.

ROONEY CASTLE Growing up, Rooney was continuously asked if he ever planned to join the family business. Time and time again, he would answer with a definitive “no”, as it would have impeded his plans to become the next Wayne Gretzky. However, as time went by and his hopes of becoming the next “Great One” slipped away, he began to learn more about Rhino Foods. As a child, Rooney only knew it was the home of the locally famous Chessters ice cream sandwich and the birthplace of the iconic cookie dough that goes into Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough Ice Cream. As he began to invest both time and interest in the business his parents had created, Rooney discovered there was more to Rhino Foods than just delicious treats. His father’s passion for doing things the right way and understanding how a conscientious employer can impact employees’ lives outside of work is something to admire and emulate. It is this “do right” mentality, spread across all aspects of the business that attracted his to becoming a full-time rhino. In 2011, he started working at Rhino Foods on the production floor as a batter maker. The most important byproduct of his 8 months batter making was undoubtedly the relationships he developed with other rhinos and the knowledge he gained about what it takes to make their products. Rooney moved on to other roles giving him broad experience in other aspects of the business. This flexibility and exposure to a variety of learning opportunities is what makes him an engaged, versatile and happy rhino. Now the question he’s most frequently asked has become “when do you plan on taking over the reins of the family business?” to which he most politely responds, “I’m in no hurry.”

Host

TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press.

Transcript

Rooney Castle:

What I'm learning is, to get into this work really requires a system change. And these things don't happen overnight. It isn't a quick fix here, a quick this here, a training there. It really is looking at how you do things from a structural standpoint. And I think that we actually do have a lot of progress in some of these areas, and we just really need to sort of double down and look at them with this new lens that we're learning through and figure out how do we continue to drive progress in these areas.

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck. A podcast about, well, that. We've paused our regular podcast episodes to produce this 10-part mini series called White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-racism. While you can listen to the episodes in any order, if you're joining us in the midst of this adventure, I invite you to check out episode 54 of our podcast where my co-host, Lauren Ruffin and I, introduce the series and frame these conversations.

All of the episodes, as well as a whole host of amazing resources on the topic not by white guys can be found on workshouldntsuck.co. In this series, we're talking with a variety of white guys who are personally and professionally engaged in anti-racism work. When asked, they each define the work in slightly different ways. Some articulate it as anti-racism or anti oppression work. Others say they approach it more through a justice lens. Others, inclusion and belonging. Still others, equity and impact.

Through these conversations, we'll explore the moments that led each of them to do this work, including their initial realizations that this was work for white guys to be doing. We'll discuss what's been most impactful and resonant to them in the journey, what's been most challenging. And since this is a podcast about the workplace, we'll discuss how this work shows up in the organizations they lead and the ones they work with.

On today's conversation, I'm joined by Ted and Rooney Castle. Ted is the founder and president of Rhino Foods. And Rooney is his vice president. Rhino is based in Northwestern, Vermont, along Lake Champlain. And while you might not recognize the company by name, I'll wager that one of their products. Rhino Foods is the birthplace of the iconic cookie dough that goes into Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream. You can read more about Ted and Rooney in their bios included in the episode description. So in the interest of time, let's get going.

Ted and Rooney, welcome to the podcast.

Ted Castle:

Thank you.

Rooney Castle:

Thank you very much for having us.

Tim Cynova:

So let's just start with, how do you both introduce yourselves and the work that you do?

Ted Castle:

Well, this is Ted. I'll go first. I would probably introduce myself as the founder. So I started the business with my wife, Anne. I'm the president right now. A lot of people call me The Big Cheese. Our company, we often say, is Rhino Foods. We're a B corporation. And yes, we make a lot of business to business ingredients for cookie dough ice cream. We also do some co-packing for some national brands also.

Tim Cynova:

That's awesome. Rooney?

Rooney Castle:

Yeah. So Rooney Castle. I've been with Rhino for just over 10 years now. And so obviously as a family business, I grew up in the business, but I'm working about 10 years in full-time capacity. So currently as the vice president, but I started actually, I was planning just to work for a few months and make some money to go back to continue the traveling I was doing internationally and one thing led to another and I'm still here. So I started out actually in production. Worked for about a year, eight months to a year as a batter maker, making our product on the floor. And then transitioned through a variety of different roles to where I am today.

Tim Cynova:

So let's go with you both share the same last name. Are you related?

Ted Castle:

Yes, I'm the dad. He's the son. I think it's important to note that we're transitioning the business as far as the presidency. So Rooney's vice president now and I'm going to be stepping back a little bit, lot less day to day. And so he's going to be the president of the company and I'll be trying to figure out how to support him in a different leadership role than be here as much as I am right now.

Rooney Castle:

Yeah. So I'm one of Ted and my mom and two sons. I have a brother who's three years older than me and he doesn't actively in the business, but does do a lot of work for us and with us in terms of some of our media making and sort of storytelling. So he does a lot of video production. And so any videos that we have or stories we want to tell through our website or other media channels, he comes in and collaborates with us on those. So although he's not in the business day to day, we get to work together fairly often.

Tim Cynova:

I've been excited for this episode, for this interview because, one, I admire company, two, I admire your product. I enjoy your product. But three, I've never talked to two people who are related. I've never talked to a father-son, as it relates to the topic that we sort have met around white guys talking about race and racism in the United States. I find that to be a really interesting dynamic to explore, that you both are related. So you're exploring racism, anti-racism, anti-oppression, both as family members and also through business. How has that felt like in practice?

Ted Castle:

We are part of a group called White Men for Racial Justice. We call it WMRJ. We've been doing that for about two years. And so quite frankly, I would say I'd be a classic example of a white male with privilege in many ways who hasn't had a lot of exposure to what I'm learning now. So most of my experience over the last two years is unlearning and learning. I've considered it one of the most valuable things I've done in the last two years, because I know that both Ned and Rooney are involved in the WMRJ. There's no way that I had the understanding background insights that I've learned and we're learning now and the journey we're on. So in many ways, I'm 69 years old and I wish I had started doing this years and years and years ago.

Rooney Castle:

Just for those who don't know, Ned is my brother. So he referenced the two of us. To sort of answer your question, it's a unique experience to do, I think, as an individual. For me personally, it's been a really interesting experience and it is unique, I think, to have both your really two family members. So not just my dad, but also Ned is also in the group. So to have them in the group and sort of have that opportunity to continue to have those discussions outside of our weekly calls and other work that we do, because it's hard not to have these conversations and these topics come up in whatever we're doing.

If it's at dinner together, if we're down on the pond skating, whatever it is, we find ourselves referencing the work and some of the conversations that we have in WMRJ. So I find that it's a unique opportunity to continue to practice having that as part of the conversation and the way that we're now starting to, at least I'll speak for myself, the way that I'm starting to view the world and the way I interact in the world. And so to have more partnership in that and support only helps me on that journey.

Tim Cynova:

I'll say I'm envious, because before my dad passed away, anytime race came up it was not an easy conversation. And so I've admired the work that you all are doing together and how this is really impacting or maybe changing the frame for how you work and both together with the organization. And maybe can we unpack that a little bit? What's it been like to be in WMRJ doing the work personally. And then professionally, what does it look like at Rhino Foods?

Rooney Castle:

I think of this work as very much a journey. I think that's what we all sort of talk about. And for me as well, I feel like I'm very much at the beginning stages of that journey, now recognizing that this is lifelong work and it goes beyond that. So as we sort of say in the group, "Prepare for a lack of closure. This isn't something we do for a month or two and then we've sort of got it figured out." That said, where I'm really starting is really, as Ted said, it's unlearning and relearning. So I find that a lot of the focus over the last year and a half, two years for me has been on me and my sort of the way I think about race and racism and white supremacy and how I fit into that as a piece into that puzzle. And I feel like the best thing I can do is really put that foundational work into unpacking and understanding my role in all of this and really educate myself and learn before I start to go out and try to take action.

I think as a white male we tend to have action biases. And I'll speak for myself again that I tend to had have action biases and sort of to, like, "Okay, here's a problem. I'm going to go solve it." And this process has really taught me that sometimes that's not the best thing, and particularly in this case when there's a lot of harm that you can do or I can do not knowing the impact of some of my actions. Even if they're well intended, impact of course is a lot different than intention.

So again, to answer your question, it's still very much in the development stage for me of how this impacts how I do my day to day work. It certainly impacts how I feel like I show up in the things that I notice. And I would like to say that over the next six to 12 months and beyond, we're really now getting into, "Okay, how does that start to shape the actual work that I do and the way I show up differently?" Of course, I think that has changed a little bit, but I'm trying pretty hard not to rush into solution and change more into observing, learning, noticing. And when I do notice something, try to unpack that a little bit more before I start jumping to conclusions about how I think it might be done differently or could be done differently.

Tim Cynova:

There must be attention from a business perspective where often if that thing's not working the way we need it to, let's fix it. Or if we know something's wrong, let's do something about it. But sitting with that before doing something might feel counterintuitive.

Rooney Castle:

Yeah. And I think it's important to recognize we've been operating this way again, or I've been operating this way for, I'm 34, so for 34 years. Until you start to do this work, you don't see that something is wrong. The whole system, white supremacy, is so powerful because I can continue to live within the system and not notice that there is a problem or the advantages that I'm getting through this system. I don't see massive problems in front of me. Again, for myself within the business case, I'm starting to see areas where there's opportunities for improvement or where, "Hey, this might be an area where I need to dig in to really understand is there a problem here. And then as we discover those, now let's be smart and intentional about how do we address them."

So it's a little bit more nuanced to me than... Or I think I'm used to sort of like with businesses it's like, "Here's the problem or here's the situation. Let's go in and fix that." This is much more of a discovery uncovering mission. And then what we do with that is think it's still the part that I don't have answers to. And that's sort of where the rubber meets the road and the work that I'm sort of excited to try to figure out how do we actually start making some tangible impact.

Ted Castle:

So I would just put it in context a little bit. So Rhino is a manufacturer. We started hiring new Americans 25 years ago. And what did that look like? It was refugees from Bosnia. So Burlington, Vermont is a refugee resettlement area. So we have been, as a business, trying to understand what that looks like for 25 years. And now over the 25 years, we now have lots of new Americans from the Bosnia, all over Africa, Nepal, Iraq, now Afghanistan. So in a way, our cultural diversity here at Rhino is something we've been exploring and working with for a long time. We decided to try to be the best in the state of Vermont for a place to come as a new American. So what does that look like? It takes a lot of practice. And so this idea of diversity and inclusion for us is very much a part of who we are in the programs and policies that we have at Rhino.

What WMRJ has done for me is have a little bit different lens towards a systemic and structural racism. But as a company in our programs, especially around our people and culture practices, we've been dealing with a lot of people that most people would consider the most vulnerable people in our society. So we're dealing with homelessness, addiction, all kinds of economic situations. So we've been dealing with economic inclusion and diversity and also cultural. So we're trying to... I believe Rooney and I are trying to get our arms around more of the structural and systemic to make sure the things that we're doing are helpful.

Rooney Castle:

Yeah. And I think the work that we've done with the WMRJ has given me a different lens in which to sort of look at how we're doing things. So I would certainly have said two years ago I think very good at the work we do around diversity and inclusion. Now, I still think we're doing the right things, but I think it gives us an opportunity to look at it in a different light and see are there things that we may not have seen before that aren't big blaring acts of racism, but are policies and practices truly anti-racist. I think that's a shift that I'm seeing for myself personally, is not seeing these intentional sort of blaring issues, but saying, "Okay, where are these areas where we could be more anti-racist and what does that really look like and what would that really mean for us at Rhino?" So that to me is the big shift that the WMRJ group has helped me discover.

Tim Cynova:

You guys are doing some really cool things around people and culture, inclusive hiring, the Income Advance Program, things that are really at the forefront of how you can work with people in sort of their whole selves, and also unbiased certain parts of the workplace in a way that sort are really entrenched in. Rooney, you're talking about sort the exciting to really think about how we can do this differently so that we can really center other values that... Or de-center white guys and center other values in and how we structure our organization. So I'm wonder if you could talk a little bit about both of those programs, and really your focus overarching of belonging. And that's, as my understanding, the window through which you start to see the work manifest itself at Rhino.

Ted Castle:

We have a day called Rhino Day where we take the whole company off site and to spend a day together. We have 250 employees, three shifts. So it's a really exciting valuable day. I think it was four years ago, the whole theme was belonging. So our director of people and culture came up with that instead of it called Diversity, Inclusion Day or something. And it really brought home what was important to everyone from belonging. And Ned actually did a video and just spontaneously asked people what does it mean. It's some of the most basic things about respect and showing up and having a voice and feeling like you're part of something. We work really hard at that at Rhino. That's part of our DNA and who we are.

Some of the programs you mentioned, Tim, around inclusive hiring, we started that probably more intentionally three years ago, four years ago. And that really means everyone is allowed an opportunity to come and work at Rhino. We don't do any background checks. The only exclusion would be third degree sexual offenders. So for our frontline workers, basically, if they show up and they treat people with respect or willing to learn, they have a job here.

We also do what we call a resource coordinator. We have someone from the United Way here, 40 hours a week. All she does is connect people to services. We're trying to help people have the best life they can outside of work so they come in the best shape to work. We're trying to have things happen at work to send them back home. So we call it sort of the inside out approach. We believe it is to try to help people bring their best selves to work. So our programs and our ability to no questions asked, borrow up to a thousand dollars in 24 hours, not from Rhino for [inaudible 00:15:33].

Financial institution is another example. We learned that there were a lot of people whose lives would spiral out of control because they don't have $500 in savings. They have a flat tire, they can't get to work, they can't get their kids to work and they lose their job. Again, all these programs started from a business perspective. They all make good business sense. They're also helping people. I think the new thing that WMRJ, as we've alluded to here, is we didn't necessarily have that lens of late supremacy on it, which I think we can do better in all these programs with that lens.

Tim Cynova:

For those listening who hear about really great initiatives, well-established initiatives, how did those start? How did inclusive hiring or the Income Advance Program start or anything else that you're sort of working where you're centering the people here? What did that look like at the very beginning?

Rooney Castle:

We were running a business here so these do come out of business needs. So when we talked about the Income Advance Program, the idea there was, we had some of our people and culture team and supervisors saying, "We're losing a lot of our workforce not because they're not good workers, not because they don't want to be here, but because they have these situational emergencies that come up."

And what we really realized was that a lot of folks that work here are coming out of generational poverty. And so we attended some trainings and learned a lot about how folks who are in those situations, the list I had just said, from these situational emergencies that come up, typically that require some sort of financial support or backing to sort get yourself out of it. We're finding that a lot of people when those situations fall through or daycare closes or you don't have childcare and you don't have a place to turn, a family member to go to, when put into the choice of support the family or show up on time to work, they make the choice of supporting the family, which of course nobody can blame them for.

As a manufacturer, we can only be so understanding in those situations because we still have to run the business. So again, people were losing their jobs not because they weren't good workers, but because of situations that came up. And so it really came out of that need that we said, "Let's try to fill this gap around financial insecurity that we're seeing." And therefore, that's how the Income Advance Program was born. Inclusive hiring, as we sort of call it open hiring. We had heard a lot about it from different B Corp partners, specifically Greyston Bakery. It was something we were more informally doing here, but really formalized over the last few years as Ted mentioned. And again, that came out of the business need of we need access to people in a fairly competitive market. And so why are we excluding all these people who potentially are great workers just because of something they may have done in the past and we're judging them, prejudging them without even knowing them or their context or their history.

So by opening that door, there's a business reason. There's also, we believe is just sort of the right thing to do because we are recognized that a lot of the systems in place are biased. And I can speak for myself, I know a lot more now about the criminal justice system and some of the biases and injustices that exist within there and the structural systems that are putting people behind bars. And therefore, when they come out, having an opportunity for them to have access to work is a really, really important step in theirs getting back on track. Removing any potential bias from our systems was a really important step in sort of the work that we're trying to do now around becoming more of an anti-racist organization.

Tim Cynova:

What did the challenges look like for you? You mentioned sort of manufacturing, we should also mention for those listing in the future, we're recording this two years into a global pandemic. What if some of the challenges been like as you're living these values and trying to create systems and structures and processes and language around this work at Rhino?

Ted Castle:

I think it's hard to remember life before COVID. We're now into two years and we are an example of a business that our demand for our product went up. People were eating more cookie dough ice cream. We had 25% of our workforce not here for very legitimate reasons. We also were experiencing a lot of the office people could work from home, get a paycheck. They could still do their job. And the undesk workers, meaning shipping, receiving, maintenance, production, sanitation, to get paid they got to be here. They got to be putting themselves quite frankly at the beginning of the pandemic and even today in maybe as a more unsafe condition. So I think that brought up a lot of emotions at Rhino, but we worked through that. I think it's an attitude.

We want to impact the manner which business has done. So to me, one of the best examples we had is we knew that that was "unfair" for some people to work from home and unfair for people to have to come here. So every way we supported the people who were coming here. We made sure social distancing, mask wearing. We did everything we could do based on CDC recommendations. We also did things like we did a resiliency supply. If you came in, we went around to local restaurants. Once a week had people, it was almost like a little grocery store here where we'd hand out and thank people for coming to work. So again, these aren't necessarily brilliant ideas or the perfect thing for anyone, but it is the intentional effort to try to figure out what's the right thing to do. And in those situations, we were really struggling to figure out what's right, so we put time and effort into it.

Tim Cynova:

I think that's one of the really interesting things because some of the work that you've done, some of what you've built at Rhino was not built centering anti-racism. However, when you look at it through an anti-racism lens, you realize, "Oh, actually that is helpful." Inclusive hiring is so futuristic, I think, when you think about hiring in general. And as companies are trying to retrofit current hiring processes while centering inclusion and equity, I think Rhino, a great example is to be able to look at "This is something that can help inform how we might want to continue to iterate on it." But it certainly wasn't created from that way. The Income Advance Program is another thing. It wasn't created that way, but some of what you're detailing as sort of the business case for that who's most impacted by all of those things on the list that were reasons to start the Income Advance Program.

And so I think that's really inspirational, I think, to other white guys, other white leaders in particular who are listening, who will be listening to it and thinking like, "How can I think through the things that I have? Or what things do I have right now, the language, the policies, the practices that support this work? And which do I have right now that I need to actually work on immediately because it's actively harming people?" And so I love that there are things that you have here, but at the same time that you point out Rooney, it's like we're constantly learning.

Ted Castle:

I think that's what I'm trying to think about in this WMRJ at work. And that's why I got stuck the other day. It's like we're doing all these things now. We're doing them and we do need to do more. We do have to have that lens, but all these things are helping. Because when we're really talking about the structural systemic racism, the people that sort are the most vulnerable or the most challenged due to their situation is because a lot of these things, well, these are some of the programs that help them stay at work and get a job and have an opportunity and move forward.

Rooney Castle:

Again, to your point, I think, is well said, that we've done a lot of this work without thinking this is about breaking down or dismantling white supremacy or addressing racism in the workplace. What I think a lot of the programs and policies that have been in place is... What's in Rhino's DNA and has been forever is this concept of supporting your people. And a lot of that comes with, we talk a lot about mutual trust and respect here. So everything we do goes through sort of that filter of what we almost call like our do right filter. Do right because it's the right thing to do.

Now, again, I think as a white guy with a bunch of privilege, the right thing to do for me might be very different and that's what I need the work to examine. But fundamentally across the business, when we are putting something into place, everybody, and typically it's not just Ted and I, it's more sort of grassroots and from other people who are actually living and experiencing this work. They're looking at it like, "How do we do this so that it includes everybody and then it's built off mutual trust and respect?" And I think that's what's helped us get to where we are today.

The opportunity now, as I started to try to say earlier, is how do we now look back at what we've done, where we've come from, what do we have with that anti-racist lens and say, "Okay, great. We're actually doing pretty darn well at this without having done this intentionally. But where are opportunities for improvement? How do we really call some of this stuff out and examine it and make sure that what we think is happening is the lived experiences of those that are really impacted by these programs? Specifically the BIPOC people that we have working for us."

So I think that's a little bit of the shift. It's not like, "Okay, now we're here. How do we start this work?" It's, how do we take the learnings that we're gaining sort of every day through the work we're doing and look back and apply them to really what we've become so far and how does it continue to shape into the future?

Tim Cynova:

Well, what do you both see as those opportunities for improvement? What's on your wish list or your immediate list in sort of near term?

Rooney Castle:

I don't have the perfect list, but one thing that I would like to try to figure out is how do we bring some of these conversations more to the forefront and make them more a part of the conversation, because Rhino does talk a lot about how do we be more inclusive, how do we have more belonging here. We do talk about our diversity, but I don't think we talk about... Or I know we don't talk about structural racism and white supremacy. We don't frame it in there because that's often triggering for white people because of white fragility and all the other sorts of reasons.

So how do we start to weave some of that conversation and some of the learnings that we're getting external to Rhino through WMRJ, how do we start folding that into some of the work we're doing here so that it's part of the conversation and that we can bring others into that conversation in a non-triggering way, in a welcoming way so that we can hopefully have more partners within our organization who are part of this work and can help us really steer Rhino over the next three to five, 10, whatever it is years?

Ted Castle:

The two things that I'm thinking of is for the last three years, really, we're trying to bring more voice to everyone. So typically years ago when we'd have a company meetings or we'd have our Rhino Days or whatever, it was mostly the leadership team. And then more and more, we're starting to give other people louder voices and be part of speaking out. So I think that is part of that background thinking when you grow up like I have is, like, "Yes, I should be the one talking. Yes, I should be the one leading. Yes, I should be the one representing Rhino," versus letting other people with their life experiences maybe can bring more light into what it means for inclusive hiring or some of the things. So I know that's one thing that we're starting we want to do more of.

The other thing that I'm very concerned about is that it's easy for us to have policies and practices that we think address some of these things. But how well are we really on that individual frontline, worker to worker level or supervisor level? So how well do our supervisors understand white supremacy and structural racism because they're dealing with it every day here? So if you said, "How many people out of our 250 employee workforce are new Americans?" It's about 30%. We do break down percentages of our population and we have a lot of Black employees and people of color and BIPOC people. So how are we doing really day to day, I think we need to find out more about that. And we do employee surveys and engagement surveys, but I think we can get much deeper into the organization to figure out really how are we doing. That's what I'd like to be able to stand up and say, "We know." Whereas if you really ask me, I'd say, "I hope, but I'm not sure" in many instances.

Tim Cynova:

I often think of that as kind of a balance sheet approach where you might not like what's on your balance sheet, you might not like your cash position, but it is what it is. And that it allows you to do something about it if you want. And oftentimes, that's seemingly a giant hurdle for white guys to even get to, like just to see who do we have working here because you're afraid of what you're going to find out. I mean, it feels kind of like you can't do it. It's a personal reflection of your own ability to do something or your own values and then you feel sort of stymied in what's next, then what do I do about it.

Ted, you gave me a tour of the building before we started in, talking about sort of inclusivity. I saw the wall where you have all of the employees over the years who have been nominated by their fellow coworkers around the values that you have as an organization. And then the two years prior, get to decide the current years employees about who's representing those values. You mentioned that it's a surprise to you even because you're not involved with that. It really resonates with me from a way that the employees start to say, "What does this value mean for us?" And what does this really mean, it's not words on the wall. And then get to demonstrate that by nominating and selecting the people who they feel espouse those values. And I think that's really a wonderful way of making those living values in a way too that feels like people have much more agency in how those show up in the workplace. And as we talk about things like white supremacy culture and decolonizing organizations, it feels like once again some of those early steps towards having a culture that is engaged in owning that.

Ted Castle:

Yeah, the Wall of Fame that you're referring to, it honors the employee that exemplifies one of our principles in their finance, employee, community, or customer supplier and then vision. What's so interesting about that is when you look at the wall, there's so many things you can notice right away. Number one, it's got everyone's picture. Number two, it's gotten something, a paragraph or two about why that person was selected. Number three is you can see the diversity. It's not the leadership team. It's so deep in our organization. You can see new Americans, you can see English language learners. You can see people from all departments. When you look at that wall, you realize how meaningful it is to win that award because you're nominated by your fellow employees and you're selected by your fellow employees, the last two years winners and the leadership of the company has nothing to do with it. That's sort of a true representation of trying to trust and respect and have people belong.

I think every business needs a few of those things that really speak to that. And for us, that Wall of Fame, just right in the main entrance of the building, represents that. It doesn't mean everybody's got to do it that way, but it sure is an example of us trying,

Tim Cynova:

Well, we've talked about a couple times already that doing the work doesn't mean it's perfect or that it's all, but that it's a journey. I wonder if you could offer your reflections on a quote from a colleague of mine. I was talking with Courtney Harge after I did a session about anti-racism in a workplace and got all the way to the very end and someone said, "That was really great. That whole hour was really great, but could you offer some tangible things that you've done?" And I thought, "Where have I failed this group?" Because the whole hour was tangible things. And she remarked, "I think people confused tangible with impactful. And impactful with visible. Adding pronouns to an email signature is tangible. Ending gender discrimination is impactful. Increasing gender diversity at an organization is visible."

We've talked about things that probably fall in all of these buckets during our time together. But as you think about those sort of buckets and your own approach to the work and where you struggle and what you're doing well, what resonates for you in that quote and those distinctions? Or you can just go a completely different direction and pull up something else. Best of interest.

Rooney Castle:

I think that's a really insightful comment and what it makes me think of it first is that even my own desire for something tangible. So especially in this work, I think of the time after the murder of George Floyd when a lot of people were sort of jumping and saying, "Well, our company needs to do something." You could see countless examples of people doing things. I think a lot of them, they were focused on sort of tangible or visible. At Rhino, we didn't really quite know what to do.

I think the worst thing you can do is do nothing because you're not sure what to do so you get sort of caught in this feeling of it's too overwhelming and too complicated, therefore we don't do anything. But I think what we've tried to do is step back and say, "Sure. Could we put out a public statement? Could we quickly get somebody in here and do an anti-racism training?" Like sure. And are those good things? Yes. But at the same time, I think that my concern with those is what is the intent and impact of those and really how deep and meaningful are they towards creating change.

So I think what we try to do is focus more on how do we zoom out and look at the work that we're doing around open hiring, inclusive hiring, supporting people through the resource coordinator we have here, our Income Advance Program. To me, those start to be more impactful and less... It doesn't feel as maybe as flashy or sort of quick as like, "Oh, there's some reaction to something that's happening." But I think what I'm trying to get at is, to get into this work really requires a system change. These things don't happen overnight. It isn't a quick fix here, a quick this here, a training there. It really is looking at how you do things from a structural standpoint. I think that we actually do have a lot of progress in some of these areas and we just really need to sort of double down and look at them with this new lens that we're learning through and figure out how do we continue to drive progress in these areas.

Ted Castle:

So when I heard this quote, I don't think I understood it, number one. When I hear visible, I think about that if you're successful, you can see it and feel it in an organization. So if we walk through Rhino and any visitor comes here, within 15 minutes, I want them to see and feel our culture. And it's not by having something written on a wall. But if it is written on the wall, they keep bumping into examples and they walk out and they see it and feel it. I'm a visual guy. And then I think that visuals obviously are just one part. They have to be impactful. So if we have programs that impact people's lives, we should be able to demonstrate that with data, we should be able to show you that last year or in the last 10 years, there's been $560,000 borrowed in the Income Advance Program in thousand dollars increments. 93% of the people start a savings program. So to me, there's data behind impactful. And then visual is very much of a culture and feeling of which quite frankly is a big part of what we're talking about here.

Tim Cynova:

We're three white guys talking about racism as it relates to life in the workplace. We've had a lot of conversations as a group over the past 18 months to two years though. And there's been laughter and there's been hard work and it's also been energizing. I'm wondering for both of you, where do you find energy and where do you find it energizing in the work? Or do you?

Rooney Castle:

I think I find the energy and the motivation to stick with it in the recognition of the importance of it, especially as a white male with all sorts of privilege across the spectrum of privileges. I carry quite a few of them. The most obvious example is I'm sitting here taking over a business that was started by my family. So the amount of privilege and opportunity I have is immense. And that comes with mixed emotions for me, especially as I'm doing more of this work. It just seems unfair on so many levels. And at the same time, rather than get stressed out or hold myself back because of that or say, "Oh, I don't deserve this. Or how come it's me?" I'm trying to frame it in a sense of, "Okay, with this privilege and this opportunity, how can I do the best job that I can in lots of different ways for the business, but also now, as I'm learning more about anti-racism work from WMRJ?"

So my motivation comes from as I learn more about what I have been blind to for so long, it feels like it's my obligation to make sure that I'm taking that seriously and I'm finding ways through my circles, in my spheres of influence and my privilege, to impact this business because I know this business impacts hundreds and thousands of people's lives throughout the course of its history and how it's operating. So there's a lot of sort pressure at feeling like how do I deliver on that. How do I carry forward what Ted and Anne, my parents, have started to keep it as a family business within this community, privately owned, still doing all the great things that I think we're doing. That's a lot of pressure. And then I'm trying to layer this, and now it adds almost more pressure to that. I try to take that as a positive of that positive pressure to motivate me to really want to make that change.

Tim Cynova:

Rooney, that's reminiscent that prompt we've meditated on during WMRJ. How do I X in an anti-racist way? How do I walk the dog in an anti-racist way? How do I come to a new community an anti-racist way? And I really think sort of how do I take over a family business in an anti-racist way? Sort of how you unpack that sort of speaks to that intention and how you want to do this differently than how you might have 10 years ago.

Rooney Castle:

Especially because I keep coming back to that concept of, I think to truly dismantle white supremacy and to sort of live an anti-racist life, I recognize that that means that I'm going to have to make sacrifice because I think it's easy to do the... You can conceptualize the work, but really when it comes down to it, it means making certain sacrifices. And so I don't know necessarily what that means within the frame of this business and this business transition, but you're very much right. That's on my mind is how do I, your X here, take over a family business in an anti-racist way. I don't know the answer to that, but I'm motivated to figure out what it is and how I'm going to do it.

Tim Cynova:

Ted, what energizes you or motivates you in this work?

Ted Castle:

I like Rooney's answer of the importance is what motivates me. It doesn't energize me to show up. To show up is more like I'm committed. It's important I need to be there. I end up energized by the end because seeing the people involved, hearing what other people have to say, having me think about it maybe differently than I did, it always seems after an hour and a half that it was worth showing up. But it's pretty hard work. And it also is something that I believe if you don't show up a lot, then you sort of fall away like most things. So energize is a weird word for me. I'm committed to the work is what I would say, say. And I'm energized at the more I learn, the more I feel confident that I'm going to be making more right steps than wrong steps.

Tim Cynova:

Well, gentlemen, we are coming up on time. How do you want to land the plan on our conversation?

Rooney Castle:

For me again, I think it sort of feels strange to be having this conversation in a public forum like this. We're not public right now, but knowing it's going to be. It's recorded to be shared. Because I'm trying hard not to feel like I know, because I don't feel like I know what I'm talking about frankly. It's like I'm so new to this work. There are so many people who know a lot more about this than I do and have been impacted by this work and their lived experiences that it just feels strange to be having this conversation and speaking about it like I know what I'm talking about. And I think that's part of the journey, is just recognizing I'm not an expert and being very open to learning and to... Yeah, I don't know. I can tell I'm sort of struggling with it because the point is, I'm on this journey and this almost feels premature for me to be speaking about it externally like this.

Tim Cynova:

That's one of the reasons why I wanted to do the podcast, this mini series of podcasts, because we're all on a journey. We're all white guys on a journey. Two years ago, five years ago, being able to share stories, it's messy. "This is where I am. I'm building the plane while I'm flying it with others." I wanted to serve as a resource for others who are on that journey as well and also highlight a whole host of resources by not white guys for this work. So I think that that's one of the aims with having our conversations.

Rooney Castle:

Yeah. I think the reason, I'll again speak for myself, that I said yes to doing this is because it's part of the process of taking steps. So my first reaction when I saw your request to do this was like, "Hell no. I don't feel ready to have that conversation." I'd love to have this conversation with the two of you with a beer and then have it go nowhere beyond there except for between us and sort of think of it as a practice. But to have it shared publicly seems a little bit scary to me, but I think that's what some of this work is all about, is I need to get uncomfortable. I need to be willing to make mistakes. I'm sure I've said things here that are just wrong or didn't land right. And so for those, I do apologize, but that's part of this process.

So I saw saying yes to this as one of those small wins that we talk about in WMRJ of how do you sort show up... With your sphere of influence as how do you have small wins that are driving you towards a more anti-racist way of life, then this for me was a small win to sort of have the courage to say yes to do it. So thank you for creating that space and opportunity for me to do so.

Tim Cynova:

Ted, you get the last word.

Ted Castle:

I would answer similar to Rooney. Without repeating him, I would add Rhino has a purpose to impact the manner which business has done. We're a B Corp and their mission is business as a force for good. So the reason why white guys like us with privilege own businesses is for lots of reasons. So it's our job to do the best we can with the position, the power that we have, to make the changes that need to be made. We can only do so much with what we know and we just need to be trying. So for me, the plane is not even close to landing, but at the same time for us to step back as privileged white males that own a business, privately held business, employ 250 people to work really hard, our job is to create a team and be a great business.

I believe business has the opportunity to make more social change, positive or negative than any other place. For me, it's always been about the journey at Rhino and figuring out how to do the right thing. So this is just part of us trying. I find that there's a lot of shame and guilt. At the same time, I don't ever want that to hold me back because I think a lot of people stop when that happens. So I'm okay with making mistakes as long as people know that I understand that I will make mistakes. But at the same time, it's about the effort for me.

Tim Cynova:

Well, Ted, Rooney, our time has flown by. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise, your insight, for your vulnerability, for the struggles, the challenges, and thanks for being on the podcast.

Ted Castle:

Great.

Rooney Castle:

Thank you very much for having us.

Ted Castle:

Thank you, Tim.

Tim Cynova:

If you've enjoyed the conversation or just feeling generous today, please consider writing 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.

The podcast is available for free on your favorite podcasting platforms:

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

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Journey Towards Anti-Racism Ep10: Conversation with Kit Hughes (EP.63)

In episode ten of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews Kit Hughes, Co-Founder and CEO of Look Listen, a consulting company working at the intersection of creativity, data, and technology.

This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”

Updated

June 23, 2022

In episode ten of the 12-part podcast series, "White Men & the Journey Towards Anti-Racism," Tim interviews Kit Hughes, Co-Founder and CEO of Look Listen, a consulting company working at the intersection of creativity, data, and technology.

This series was created to be a resource for white men who might be wrestling with questions like, “What’s my role in anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and justice work as a white man with power and privilege?” and “How might my personal commitment to do this work manifest itself in the organization I help lead?”

Are you new to the series? Check out episode 54 where podcast co-hosts Lauren Ruffin and Tim Cynova introduce and frame the conversations. Download the accompanying study guide. And explore the other episodes in this series with guests:

  • Raphael Bemporad (Founding Partner) & Bryan Miller (Chief Financial Officer), BBMG

  • Ted Castle (Founder & President) & Rooney Castle (Vice President), Rhino Foods

  • Ron Carucci, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Navalent

  • David Devan, General Director & President, Opera Philadelphia

  • Jared Fishman, Founding Executive Director, Justice Innovation Lab

  • Jay Coen Gilbert, Co-Founder, B Lab; CEO, Imperative21

  • Marc Mannella, Independent Consultant, Former CEO KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools

  • John Orr, Executive Director, Art-Reach

  • David Reuter, Partner, LLR

  • Sydney Skybetter, Founder, CRCI; Associate Chair & Senior Lecturer, Theatre Arts & Performance Studies Department, Brown University

Want to explore related resources primarily *not* by white guys? Check out our compilation of 30 books, podcasts, and films.

Host: Tim Cynova

 

Guest

KIT HUGHES is a typical technology entrepreneur. He dropped out of college to start a company (it failed), spent a period of time homeless (by choice), and became an overnight success (slowly). Eventually, Kit returned to school as a two-time research fellow at the University of Georgia leading experimental technology research projects exploring mobile computing and connected devices. He credits his business smarts to his studies in strategy and innovation at MIT Sloan. Kit co-founded Look Listen in 2007 as a mash-up of a digital studio and a consulting company working at the intersection of creativity, data, and technology. Look Listen grew to have offices in Atlanta, Denver, and Portland with three centers of excellence: Brand Experience, Performance Media, and Marketing Automation. He has worked with a variety of B2B and B2C brands across multiple touchpoints: Anheuser-Busch, Arrow, BP, Char-Broil, Coca-Cola, Flextronics, GE, NCR, Philips, and Steve Harvey. Under Kit’s leadership as CEO, Look Listen was recognized as one of the fastest growing privately held companies in the US by hitting #408 on the Inc 500 in 2015—staying on the list three years in a row—and has been in the top 100 fastest growing companies in Atlanta three years in a row, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle Pacesetter Awards. Find out more about Kit here.

Host

TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, 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, Indiana Courier-Press.

Transcript

Tim Cynova:

Hi all, it's Tim. Before we launch into the episode, I wanted to let you know about a companion resource we've developed in tandem with our White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-Racism Series. It's a study guide that includes questions, specific to each episode, that can aid in deeper reflection.

Tim Cynova:

In particular, if you're a white guy listening to these episodes, I invite you to download it and journal your reflections. The guide is linked in the episode description and also on the main series page, on workshouldntsuck.co. Thanks so much for listening and onto the episode.

Kit Hughes:

White people don't think about themselves as white people. White people think about themselves as people, and they don't understand that everyone else thinks about themselves, as fill in the blank people. Black people. Asian people. We don't have any qualifiers onto the words we use to describe ourselves. We call ourselves Americans and we call the people that were here before us Native Americans and I'm excited to see that there is more of a understanding now of indigenous populations.

Kit Hughes:

But the thing I want to really say too, that ties into that, is that it's a journey for white people to understand that they are white people and it's a self-reflection and that's really uncomfortable. Anybody that's gone through therapy understands that it is uncomfortable to examine yourself and examine the blind spots that you have and that's why therapists refer to it as, the work, and I love your language around calling this, the work, as well. The deep feeling that I have is, oh, this is going to take a while.

Tim Cynova:

Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well that. We've paused our regular podcast episodes to produce this 10-part mini-series called White Men and the Journey Towards Anti-Racism.

Tim Cynova:

While you can listen to the episodes in any order, if you're joining us in the midst of this adventure, I invite you to check out Episode 54 of our podcast, where my co-host Lauren Ruffin and I introduce the series and frame these conversations. All of the episodes, as well as a whole host of amazing resources on the topic, not by white guys, can be found on workshouldntsuck.co.

Tim Cynova:

In this series, we're talking with a variety of white guys who are personally and professionally engaged in anti-racism work. When asked, they each define the work in slightly different ways. Some articulate it as anti-racism or anti-oppression work. Others say they approach it more through a justice lens. Others inclusion and belonging. Still others, equity and impact. Through these conversations, we'll explore the moments that led each of them to do this work, including their initial realizations, that this was work for white guys to be doing.

Tim Cynova:

We'll discuss what's been most impactful and resonant to them in the journey, what's been most challenging, and since this is a podcast about the workplace, we'll discuss how this work shows up in the organizations they lead and the ones they work with.

Tim Cynova:

On today's conversation, I'm joined by Kit Hughes, Co-Founder and CEO of Look, Listen, a consulting company working at the intersection of creativity, data, and technology. You can read more about Kit in his bio, linked in the description for this episode. So in the interest of time, let's get going.

Tim Cynova:

Kit, welcome to the podcast.

Kit Hughes:

Well, thank you. Welcome to you as well.

Tim Cynova:

Thanks so much.

Kit Hughes:

How many people have actually welcomed you to your own podcast?

Tim Cynova:

You might actually be the first one who has welcomed to be the podcast. So yeah, I appreciate that.

Kit Hughes:

I'm happy to be with you, Tim. I really am.

Tim Cynova:

In our green room, we talked about how we've had conversations about this topic over the years, but haven't talked about recently, so probably we haven't connected in about a year or so, so really interested to hear how things are evolving for you personally and professionally.

Tim Cynova:

Before we dive in, how do you typically introduce yourself and your work these days?

Kit Hughes:

You know, I'll start with, after I get over the claustrophobic panic that I have when somebody asks me what I do, or how do I describe what I do, it's a panic because I have to like put myself in a box and I don't like that. I can feel sort of cagey around that. So after I get over that, I usually say that I'm a CEO that believes in business as a spiritual pursuit. I'm a self-taught designer. I'm an underdog investor. I'm an aspiring philosopher-king. And then I always throw in that I'm a lapsed musician, so that if the audience of people that are asking me, "Tell me what you do or who you are," that there's maybe an angle in all those things that gives people a point entry.

Tim Cynova:

So we did a session together for the Conscious Capitalism Community and I was looking at your bio and I realized, we like grew up right down the road from each other, both musicians, both white guys, but went in really different directions in our careers and then somehow met up decades later. You were, by far, a more successful musician and probably a cooler one than I was, because again, I played trombone and you were like a rock musician.

Kit Hughes:

We also maybe even look like cousins too. We both wear black rimmed glasses and let our hair do its own thing. And so I think the only difference is I wear all black, but I think that we could look like we're actually family members.

Tim Cynova:

That's true.

Kit Hughes:

Distant family members, at least.

Tim Cynova:

Very much so.

Kit Hughes:

Yeah.

Tim Cynova:

So when we first met, we were at the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit, and you had asked a question in one of the sessions around the community's commitment or the intersection with the work around diversity and inclusion. And after the session, I was like, got to connect with that person. And we did. And I'm curious, are diversity inclusions, the lenses you're using today for the work, has that changed in how you're approaching the lenses you use for this?

Kit Hughes:

I'll say that I can't help but be the white guy that speaks up in the crowd of mostly white people to say, "What about diversity, equity and inclusion?" Or calling out the fact that, Hey, in that session specifically, there was talk about Conscious Capitalism and I love that organization. We're sponsors of the organization. We're chapter members. But that question that I asked and raised my hand about was tied to, we can't separate what we believe in conscious capitalism, or even a pursuit of being more conscious beings, when we don't include the fact that we have otherness going on and that we have separation, systemic separation, from other humans, whether that be because of age, because of background, because of skin color, because of religious beliefs.

Kit Hughes:

I think I've always felt like since a very, very early age, that was a live wire inside of me, if you will. That nothing felt like an energy source more than when someone was treated as an other, or when there was a homogenous huddling together that just didn't feel right to me. And so I think throughout my life, it's expressed itself in different ways. And you know, where I am now, like even referring to myself as an underdog investor, part of my work is I truly, truly, truly believe that a capitalism and capitalistic structures have alienated people that are not white and other characteristics, but that is a core characteristic.

Kit Hughes:

And so when I talk about being an underdog investor, I have seen the tremendous economic potential, both for generating wide economic potential inside of a city or a community, but then also the economic potential to change things like generational wealth and reverses wealth gaps through entrepreneurship, through building businesses.

Kit Hughes:

And so, yeah, part of my work in this season of my life, has also expressed itself in a different way than it did when I was in art school or when I was growing up, so it very much is still sort of core to who I am.

Tim Cynova:

Can you unpack a little bit of those early days around, you talk about there's a live wire in you, but how did you realize this was something?

Kit Hughes:

I'd like to first say and I may start every answer with, I'd like to say first, or first and foremost, because I feel like you have to answer these really super sensitive questions sometimes with caveats.

Kit Hughes:

I love where I was from. I actually just figured out last week, speaking with my parents, that I'm a sixth generation Kentuckian and so our roots run incredibly deep in Kentucky. Not in any kind of grandstanding way. It wasn't like I have a family member that was a state Senator or anything like that. We were farmers. We were community members. So I incredibly value where I'm from and the environment that I was raised in and had tremendously loving parents and grandparents.

Kit Hughes:

But what I saw in starting in childhood, we were in a incredibly non-diverse community. Very, very white and this is not, I'm making some sort of generalizations here and I'm not talking about my specific family members or whatever but what I observed was, people talking about people that weren't white as other and extrapolating characteristics of the one person of color that they knew, to an entire population and creating this monolith of understanding and I just saw that as wrong. And that was kind of at an intellectual level.

Kit Hughes:

But then when it got down to this like really superhuman level, the group of kids that I kind of ran with when I was really young, one of them being of African American heritage, and he was sort of rare in our community, and we grew up together. We all played basketball together. We didn't feel separate in that childhood. And then when you reach those teenage years, to have one of the white friends that was part of that circle, to join the Klan, to join the Ku Klux Klan, was stunning to me. To basically say, "How in the world could you have grown up with this person and been so close and how could I be so different from you when we've had very similar sort of childhoods?"

Kit Hughes:

I didn't know how to handle that information, so I got a little punk rock about it. I kind of got into arguments with Klan members and on the verge of these fist fights and the ways that you handle things when you're a teenager. And so the first day of my senior year, I made a T-shirt that said "Racism sucks," on it and wore it to school and the authoritarian figure at the high school said, "Turn your shirt inside out. It says sucks." And it's like, wow. You're telling me that I can't criticize racism because you don't like the word sucks. It showed me how different I was and how I saw the world. It also started to, I think, teach me how I need to approach the conversation.

Kit Hughes:

So going off to college, I went to art school, and I started to see that this live wire in me wanted to express itself through my artwork. I started to just experiment with different ways of dialogue. I started to make artwork about... And this was the mid-nineties. I was starting to realize that this was going to be a challenge in my life and so I did this project called The History of White People in America and the small Christian-based college that I went to, did not like that. And while I had support from a few people, they really shut down the project. They put pressure on me through my peers not to do this project, and it wasn't criticizing them directly. It was trying to open a conversation in a dialogue format.

Kit Hughes:

I was like, "Okay. Well, this is not going well." And so I dropped out of that school and I started my first company. It failed and then I went back to school to a much bigger state school and I was like, all right, well, I'm going to try this again. At that point I had been in business for a couple of years. I had taught myself design. I had felt like I was an adult now. I was allowed to make this kind of artwork. And so I did this project called Colored and that project was shut down and that project was in 2002, I think. 2002, 2003.

Kit Hughes:

And so I was told that white people can't make work about racism. White people can't make work about race issues and there was this nervousness to white people making art about this and my work was specifically tied to white and Black race relations. And so that was a real turning point for me when they shut that down. And then I realized, "Okay, I've got to be more..." Well, first off I need power. I need power because if I have money and power, I can make whatever artwork I want because those people in power told me that I couldn't. So that was when I decided I need to also repackage the way that I talk about race relations and I need to go and get money in power, so that I can make whatever kind of artwork I want. And that's when I started to go more heavily into business and realize that's the avenue by which to get money in power so that I can rent my own gallery, or rent my own building and show my work.

Kit Hughes:

And so I started a journey in which I became less combative with the type of artwork that I produced. I was able to speak at the International Child Art Olympiad on the Mall in Washington, a few years after that project called Colored gut shut down, and this was children from all over the world came and on the National Mall, I was invited to speak And so I gave a talk, talking about color.

Kit Hughes:

I said, to summarize it, I just talked about how color. Whatever you do, color. Bring color into this world. Be proud of your color. Be, kind of this whole thing, and I realized that, okay, that's actually the position that I need to take a little bit more of, to make sure that people can intersect with my own drive around reconciling these really problematic beliefs about people being other. So that's a lot to take in, but I wanted to take on that journey because it was kind of that journey from a spark in me, all the way to me understanding that I needed to actually interface with people publicly kind of differently and my journey to say, I need to figure out how to actually do more of that.

Tim Cynova:

A couple of things resonate. The racism sucks and reminds me, which of the people who, whether they hear Work Shouldn't Suck are like, "Well, I couldn't wear that button." And we're like, "So you're like the pro work sucks or should suck." It's like, it's so strange to be met with that reaction.

Tim Cynova:

The history of white people is interesting. I feel there's some direct correlation to the conversations that are happening right now in the country around critical race theory and in schools, in workplaces, the conversations that as we know, started to be more prevalent after George Floyd's murder in May of 2020 and now what's being met. Organizations starting to have the conversations and then drawing the line of like, "No, we're not going to talk about anything political. It's going to be an apolitical space."

Tim Cynova:

In your recounting that story, I hear the echoes in where we are today, around that makes me as a white person feel uncomfortable or shameful or I feel bad. And so this is the workplace. Those are feelings I shouldn't be having here, or I shouldn't need to talk about race or racism in the workplace. We should just all get along and realizing, well, that's a pretty privileged place to be coming from.

Kit Hughes:

It is.

Tim Cynova:

To be able to say those things. In life, to be able to turn that thing off.

Kit Hughes:

I agree with you and I think part of this journey, talk about the journey that white people are on that white people don't think about themselves as white people. White people think about themselves as people and they don't understand that everyone else thinks about themselves as, fill in the blank people. Black people. Asian people. We don't have any qualifiers onto the words we use to describe ourselves. We call ourselves Americans and we call the people that were here before us Native Americans and I'm excited to see that there is more of a understanding now of indigenous populations.

Kit Hughes:

But the thing I want to really say to that ties into that is that it's a journey for white people to understand that they are white people and it's a self-reflection, and that's really uncomfortable. Anybody that's gone through therapy understands that it is uncomfortable to examine yourself and examine the blind spots that you have and that's why therapists refer to it as, the work. I love your language around calling this, the work, as well. And a deep feeling that I have is, oh, this is going to take a while. We didn't get here overnight. We're talking about programming of consciousness of white people for centuries, maybe even longer.

Kit Hughes:

I understand an immediate reaction might be, "Well, there's a documentation of slavery by non-white people in other cultures," and those kind of things. Give me a break. I'll self-edit my curse words out. I'm going to try to not curse in this entire interview, but give me a break. When those arguments start to be lobbied, or sort of lobbed in response to the fact that we need to self-examine, it just shows actually where somebody is in their journey. That it's going to be harder for them.

Kit Hughes:

I have a belief that we need to understand that we're signing up for something that's going to take generations to correct. It doesn't mean that we slack off now. This is a long endurance race but we're unwinding centuries of programming that is going to take a bit. And so if we look at let's just take the past 400 years.

Kit Hughes:

The past 400 years, they were pretty good for most white people. What the hard reality is, is that financial gain has a kind of a messy history when it comes to squeezing other people, including other white people. I might add. Squeezing other people in order to have that financial gain. I think that part of what even business has to come to terms with is that it's going to take us a while to unwind this, but the businesses that are doing the work right now, that there will be an economic advantage and a competitive advantage, to whether it's attracting the workforce, whether it's actually bringing better products and services to market because of diverse viewpoints. All of those things from a business perspective, lead to a level of success that anyone would take, but that it's people are scared or they don't understand yet because it isn't the previous metrics of the past 400 years of product market fit and all of those things that you think about when you're running or starting a business.

Tim Cynova:

I think one of the interesting things and hopeful things that's happened in the past 18 months or so as we've been going through a global pandemic, sort of a racial awakening in the United States, is that people who haven't seen the systems and structures in place are starting to see the systems and structures in place and how we talk about white supremacy culture, that's embedded in the laws and the structures and everything here. People are starting to intersect with this in a different way, I think, as the system is being stressed. People are starting to realize, oh, that's problematic. And the question like, all right, well, what can we do about that?

Tim Cynova:

I think this is from a work standpoint, this is a really interesting place to be as people are asking themselves, how can our policies and our language and our practices and programs and initiatives be looked at through a lens of anti-racism, anti-oppression, justice, equity? How can we take our like hybrid work policies that many organizations have right now and say, "Does this work for everyone or just the white guys in power?" We're not going to solve racism in our lifetimes, but what can we do right now and how can we use our power and privilege in the roles we hold to be a part of that change?

Tim Cynova:

In your own organization, look, listen. You've wrestled with systemic racism. I remember one of the last times we talked, you've put out an action plan and been publishing around what your hopes were for that. Can you unpack a little bit more of like, what's it been like? How has that been received? How has it changed? Where are you now?

Kit Hughes:

I'd be happy to. I'll just say that I appreciate our previous conversations that we've had publicly that have been broadcast and I appreciate this dialogue because I think this is what it's going to take. It's going to take people sharing notes and saying, "Well, this is working right now." And somebody jumping in and saying, "Wait, it's working, but that's a short term fix." We would do this with our finances. We would do this with business processes. We would consult other CEOs. We need to be having this dialogue in the same vein as we do financial performance and business processes and those kind of things. So, thank you for being a person that is making these kind of conversations possible.

Kit Hughes:

I'd like to actually describe briefly, before I get into how things are going and the seasons that we've had as a company, and we grew really fast. We were on the Inc. 500, a number of years ago. We went through like this rapid growth. Company founded by two people, me and my co-founder. We were childhood friends. We grew up in that same kind of small town, Kentucky environment, not diverse. And what we found ourselves understanding a bit was, I think early on was, the power of business to affect people's lives, to change people's lives, even in small ways.

Kit Hughes:

I think that we had it easy early on because we were in Atlanta, we were conscious guys. We found ourselves having our first sort of season as a company, getting up to about 20 people and having a beautifully diverse group of people. I'm talking age, ethnic, geolocation, thought, backgrounds, racial and ethnic diversity. All these kind of things and we didn't catch it slip away soon enough. When we kept growing and it was this between 20 and 25 people was when that diversity started to really peel off.

Kit Hughes:

I have spent many sleepless nights trying to go back and say, "Was it one thing? Was it this? Was it that?" We all know, it's never just one thing. As much as human beings we want to truly believe that the cause of something is one thing, nature is such that it is never just one thing. Like we were so disconnected from nature.

Kit Hughes:

Because of the way our brains are wired and work and the way our society is has worked, we need to put things in boxes so that we can understand them. Over time, we've built structures. Our societies and cities and those kind of things that actually are built around our ability to have the cognition to understand and manage those things.

Kit Hughes:

When you go out into nature and you go off the grid, you start to understand that nature operates in a way that we cannot truly comprehend and so I have to remind myself, and my company, that it's never just one thing. That when I look at that moment, I think we made human decisions and it was likely due to people we put into leadership. It was likely due to our hiring practices. It was likely due to our management and appraisal practices. It got a little too far away from us.

Kit Hughes:

I tried to express a dissatisfaction with it, as it slipped away. It was difficult to get anyone to pay attention to it because honestly, it's just the way we were all programmed in business. Like, "Well, what do you want for me to do about it?" It was hard and I didn't have the tools. I did not have those tools by which to say, "Here are points of entry in which we can deal with this."

Kit Hughes:

And so we went through a season in which we lost that diversity and I made a huge, huge, huge mistake as a leader. I said, "Okay. Well, I can't get our company to understand that this is a problem, so I'm going to take that energy and that passion I have for this topic, and I'm going to send it elsewhere." And so what I did was I took that energy outside of my company and I made investments in Black owned businesses and minority entrepreneurs. I did a huge disservice to the company that I co-founded and last year was a humbling point for me because everyone woke up. Everyone woke up to that moment in time where, call it what you will, the fog cleared. The scales fell off the eyes, whatever, and people realized in that moment in time that there is a big, big problem.

Kit Hughes:

I sat down and I came clean on the mistakes that I made as a leader, as the CEO of a company, and I wasn't doing it to get credit. I told people, "I'm not saying any of this to get credit. I just need for you all to know that I made a mistake and this is how I made it and this is how we're going to fix it." I solicited advice from anyone that had ideas.

Kit Hughes:

So what we did last year as a company was we said, okay, we're going to look at our processes from top to bottom. We admit that there may be systemic racism in say our annual appraisal process, in how we hire, all of these things by which we bring people into the company. We took a version of my letter that I sent into the company post-George Floyd and we gave a public version of that letter and announced our commitment to changes and then we were really happy, within 90 days, to be able to say, "Here are the things that we have done."

Kit Hughes:

I want to track back to one thing, which is in 2019, after that conference that I met you at, I felt incredibly moved to try to do something at a level that helped people like us. When I say people like us, I'm referring to white males, in positions of power, to give them points of entry.

Kit Hughes:

So I wrote an open letter to white male entrepreneurs. I literally wrote it on the deck outside of that conference during the last session, I said, "Here are tangible ways in which you can actually help. You can take a minority entrepreneur and you can introduce them to your banker. You can take a minority entrepreneur and introduce them to your attorney." All these systemic things that we, in a good way, that we actually have access to because of systemic racism, we need to give out and we need to be Trojan horses into the system for these entrepreneurs that are not treated the same way.

Kit Hughes:

And so I gave these very tangible things and I also said a few things that were a little harsh, and I hope that in time, some people will forgive me. But I said, "Stop writing books about what you did that was successful and as your company and believing that in 250 pages, another company can just pick it up. If you don't have an entire chapter or more dedicated to the fact that systemic racism actually helped you achieve those things."

Kit Hughes:

And so that was not well received by some of my peers and I'm not apologizing for it, but I just hope in time that they understand that I'm not attacking that book that they wrote after they exited a company. You know, that's the thing that a white CEO does is that they write a book and say, "This is how I did it." It's like, stop doing that. That energy that you put into that, take that energy and disperse it elsewhere.

Kit Hughes:

One of the things that I introduced in that letter as well was a mantra that white male entrepreneurs, and I specifically say entrepreneurs because we're a different breed than just a CEO at a big company that's classically trained. We create wealth and can time hack the creation of wealth and systems, as entrepreneurs.

Kit Hughes:

And so what I said was, "Here's a mantra that you should consider and it's my mantra. I will not prosper until women prosper. I will not prosper until people of color prosper. I will not prosper until everyone prospers." And you could flip it and make it non-negative by saying, "I will prosper when women prosper. I will prosper when people of color prosper." That's probably the better way to say it, by making it positive. But what it is it's meant to give points of entry because we founded our company wanting to be a company that puts women in positions of leadership. We achieved that, but because of just that focus, we actually left some systems behind that allowed for people of color to prosper and so that's what we're sort of course correcting.

Kit Hughes:

For a white male that's in business to understand. These are points of entry. Okay, I get it if you can't feel like you're solving everyone's problem. Start with gender inequality. Start there and then also don't forget you haven't prospered yet when you solve that problem, but that it's when people of color prosper as well. And then when you get to everyone and the fact that we are all connected and that we're interconnected. Interdependence is one of my favorite words and concepts and you look to nature. It exists in nature. It exists in human nature, but we can't totally understand it or accept it. And so that mantras meant to be that.

Kit Hughes:

I'll rattle off a couple of quick hits that we've done as a company, beyond my own admission and we've done, you know, commitment pledges. Like in Atlanta, there's a great a program called The A Pledge, in which all of us agencies have gotten together and have pledged to create diversity inside of our industry, given ourselves timelines. We've made commitments. I signed the Georgia Hate Crimes Legislation, and I pledged to do so in every other state that we did business, that we had a presence, that type of legislation came available. I had no issues in doing that. But putting signatures on things are kind of like, "Okay, that's fine to commit, but you need to start showing it."

Kit Hughes:

We changed our HR processes in the most simple way as well, when we go to recruit. We said, "We cannot fill a position until a person that meets a diversity qualification has been interviewed." Also, when we go to schools to recruit, we need to go to more diverse schools. We cannot go to primarily white institutions. I'm also not saying that we have to exclusively go to HBCUs.

Kit Hughes:

In Atlanta. We have this amazing university called Georgia State. It's not an HBCU, and it's not a primarily white institution, but it's incredibly, incredibly diverse. So let's show up at GSU job fairs. Let's make sure that the universities we're recruiting from, actually have the fabric that we are looking to create inside of our company. And by making those few changes, we have seen immediate, immediate movement of the needle in returning us to what we were in our founding up to that 20 person range.

Kit Hughes:

We also created a DEI Council in which we're figuring out ways to engage our entire group of people. What we've ran into as a challenge is that it's really hard to engage everyone because not everybody's in the same place and I understand that a challenge that other CEOs are facing, but that doesn't mean you give up. You continue to play with formats. You continue to play with training. You continue to iterate, we're a culture of continuous improvement. We want to make sure that we're figuring out ways to constantly engage.

Kit Hughes:

And most recently we have decided that our DEI efforts for our council are actually going to be focused on creating a piece of content. A really, really cool piece of content that in a positive way, brings DEI education out there. What we found is a way that we can enlist our people through the work, through their own art forms, to actually create something. And so we've assembled a team internally that includes all of our business units, and it includes a diverse amount of people that are going to help to create this piece of content and it's going to be really, really cool. We've brainstormed it together. We're conceptualizing it. We're going to produce it together and it's a gift to the world in a way that says, "The DEI conversation doesn't have to always be around exactly what you're doing wrong. It's on the celebration side."

Kit Hughes:

That same message that I gave on the Mall in Washington, DC, around color and it's positive. It's like celebrate color. Embody color. That is what we want to be able to do with this piece of content and so we're super excited about it. It will be released next year. It will be a really cool piece of navigable, non-linear content, that has some cool interactivity to it and that tells a great story. I'll be happy to share that with you when we get done, but those are ways in which we're looking to engage people that may not all be in the same exact place.

Tim Cynova:

Kit, thank you so much for sharing your personal journey, your vulnerability, your mistakes, your learning, as a reflection of this lifelong journey we're on together and thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Kit Hughes:

Thank you for creating a forum for us to speak about this, for being open to the dialogue, and I do want to say, I hope nothing came across as me pretending to have all the answers. I think I might have all the questions, but I definitely don't have all the answers and this is a journey. Everybody needs to absolutely understand that and you've got to pack that backpack and get on the journey as soon as possible.

Kit Hughes:

I appreciate you, Tim, for creating this dialogue because it's going to help. It's going to accelerate the journey. It really truly is. So, thank you for that.

Tim Cynova:

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