Conditions that Count, Part 2
Care.
Our future should be based around four concepts:
Care
Compassion
Connection
Community
That seems intuitive and reasonable, and some might even argue that we’re already doing that.
Are we, though?
Pandemic aside for a moment, consider how these four things show themselves in our environments. What is the evidence that care weaves through our organizations, for example?
We might enact these ideas individually in our own spheres of influence, but my premise here is that they are not features of the systems that shape, drive, create, and reinforce our environments and realities.
(And further, I don’t think we have a shared meaning around these concepts. That’s another conversation for another day.)
Care and compassion, for example, can be reflected in policy but mostly aren’t. At the time of this writing, I’m thinking about new legislation in New Zealand around leave for miscarriage.
One reason I’m so struck by this policy is that bureaucracy assumes a neutrality and an objectivity that isn’t ever really that. The objectivity and neutrality is the “default human” model (male, white, able-bodied with someone else to care for those children and do that laundry), the model that guides everything from research in health and safety to compensation policies in individual organizations.
We definitely don’t ever want to talk about woman stuff in the bureaucracy. But look, in New Zealand, someone actually cared about that.
Care is problematic because it requires processes that aren’t accommodated in the bureaucracy. It requires time, for one thing. It requires our full humanity, for another. And it requires a rejection of some of the core elements of the bureaucracy and our broader cultural waters: This flawed idea of objectivity or neutrality, for one, plus the efficiency and rationality inherent in bureaucratic functioning, for another. It also requires us to reject these deeply-ingrained and flawed notions about “fairness” and equality: Treating everyone the same (as though they don’t have a uterus, for example) is not the same as treating everyone equitably.
What underpins equity, in my mind, is caring.
How might care actually look in our structured environments? I have ideas, and I’ll use the pandemic as an example.
I’ve talked with a lot of people from a lot of places about what happened in their organizations in the pandemic. I’m specifically interested in what happened at the beginning. I wanted to know how they figured *all of this* out and determined what to do next.
And I was especially interested in knowing about the messages they heard in their organizations because I had some assumptions about that.
My assumptions were that messaging would be about operations: Logistics, technology, and other rational matters. Those are the easy (relative to other human matters), clean, and measurable parts of a situation involving a lot of moving parts. I expected that orgs would dive into the technical matters immediately because the human matters are not necessarily part of our default mode of functioning.
It’s weird, right? Organizations are made up of humans but much of our work assumes that we’re NOT human beings with human needs and human emotions and human problems. We can dig into organizational policies to see how and if that’s true.
Our “care” during the early days of the pandemic was focused on systems, processes, operations, and logistics, and I might argue (as I do a little below) that this approach does constitute a certain type of care, but it wasn’t necessarily the right type at the right time.
I expected that organizations would focus on everything but the human matters in part because my own approach is the exact opposite. I made meaning from these events differently.
I know humans, and I know that we cannot effectively adapt to a changing sea of circumstances without having some very basic needs met (literally, this is education 101). In my mind, my top priority was reducing anxiety because anxiety and learning simply do not coexist peacefully, and I knew we had a whole lot of learning ahead of us.
Thus, before I even talked about technical matters as the events started unfolding, I focused on human matters with the individuals in my sphere. First, are you ok? This situation is anxiety-producing and daily-life altering. What do you need right now, and how can I make time and space for you to do what you need to do for yourself and your family?
People’s lives are complex, and I knew that women, especially, bear the brunt of care work both inside and outside of the bureaucracy. I wanted to address that head-on because I knew how this was gonna be.
(Results are in and no kidding!)
My own messaging, then, was about reducing anxiety, providing space and time, and gearing up for a long haul. I used travel imagery to help: Put some fuel on reserve; we’re on this road for a long time. And I demonstrated my care by enacting some specific environmental tactics: Things like pulling together messages into one instead of sending 16 different email messages each day, waiting until I knew we had a final resolution on something before sharing it, and ensuring that information would easy to find.
Thus, when I say that I think we have different definitions of care, this is what I mean: To me, care is not just in my individual interactions with people but is also inherent in environmental, policy, and workflow matters. But we need to know what type of care to enact and when. It’s contextual and driven by the demands of the situation; at the same time, care can be baked into our policies and serve as an organizational undercurrent. We just need to choose that.
And this is not an essay on the greatness of Christine Nowik’s leadership; this is a thinking-document about how understanding the intersection of the individual and the organization can build capacity in both for a sustainable, humane future. It’s a way to conceptualize the things that matter and enact them beyond just thinking about our individual interactions with people.
It’s also not an indictment on leadership or leaders, in general. The job is tough. The pandemic created a series of least worst options and the need for individualization and nuance in systems that make space for neither. People had questions and needed information and problems required immediate solutions.
But what if we met those challenges with this:
I don’t know what we’ll do next but I know what we’ll do now: Right now, we’ll take a breath and a pause. Because right now I know that you have people and pets and systems that depend on you, and you need to figure that out. I know that you might be working at three different organizations that are exerting different kinds of pressure on you, and I don’t want us to be one of them.
So we’re going to take a minute. We’re going to be in community to support one another on our individual paths. Because I’m going to ask you to exert a tremendous amount of care toward our students in the coming days and weeks, but you can do that only if you are first cared for. You can do that only if your oxygen mask is in place. Let’s put them on, and then we’ll be ready to move on to what we’ll do next.
What really happened was none of that, at least not at scale and at least not initially. In addition to my own formal research on the subject, I was also inundated with examples of communications from across my networks, including one notable message that “we don’t have time to answer your questions.”
(Can’t you see the men are working, lady?)
Providing information is a type of care work. Listening is a type of care work. And part of my thinking through leadership in the time of pandemic leaves me thinking about this brilliant observation from Rebecca Traister about reconfiguring what we consider “good leadership”:
She’s talking about political leadership here, but the point holds for org leadership, too: We need a new definition of leadership, one that prioritizes caring, listening, coalition building, compassion in both emergency situations and long-term strategic conversations.
And we need to inject care into our organizations in every way: On the micro level (individual interactions) but also up through the policy level. The pandemic laid bare all of our weaknesses in this area, but ultimately, it’s care that will sustain us over time if we rebuild our systems and processes around it.