How Might We Foster People-Centered Workplaces?

What I write below may not be original. I think it is implicitly felt and understood by people across the world. And yet, it needs to be said, repeated over and over again, and acted upon. Regardless of where you sit in an organization, what are YOU going to do to foster a more inclusive, respectful workplace?

Let’s start with the obvious: we have designed organizational systems and processes in a way that stifles humanness, boxes us in artificial constructs, and makes us small, irrelevant and replaceable.

I will explore three core elements of organizational systems that are broken and offer thoughts about how to re-think and re-frame these areas.

Organizational Construct # 1: Competition

Most organizations are structured in such a way that we are incentivized to work against one another. Essentially, it’s people vs. people, instead of people with people. There are limited promotions, limited raises; to get ahead you have to go up, at the expense of someone else.

By nature we may be competitive creatures, and that is wonderful, if the purpose of competition is to improve ourselves, not beat the other guy. We have lost our sense of purpose. Is our goal to be somebody’s boss, then somebody’s Director, and eventually, to be in charge of everything? We are forced up, or we are forced out. And sometimes, we are left to stagnate because the ‘up’ is not available, and the ‘out’ may be tricky. So in the absence of other options, we wither away, doing the same thing, with zero enthusiasm or hope for a positive change.

How do we care for everyone? How do we provide opportunities for everyone to contribute and feel valued? How do we coach people to find their own way of growing (outside of promotions)?

By pitting us against one another, the word ‘better’ has an entirely external meaning. It’s implied that we should strive to be ‘better’ than the next person. Thus, we start thinking of and defining ourselves only by comparison — higher salary, fancier title, bigger house (than our neighbor). And guess what? There’ll always be someone ‘better’ and so if our sense of self-worth is defined by how we fare compared to the next person, we are likely to be miserable. The kind of competition that’s inherent in most organizations (again, by design) leads us to forget ourselves. We move through life as if through a pre-designed simulation. This is not our life anymore.

What to do?

Let’s redefine progress. Advancing doesn’t have to mean climbing ‘up’. How about becoming? How about becoming the kind of person our children would be proud of? When we define progress and advancement as competing against ourselves, seeking to better ourselves in whatever ways we feel important, we are progressing inwardly. There’s no top, there’s no side. There’s peace. And there’s joy.

Organizational Construct # 2: Talent Management

First of all, managing talent as a concept is absurd. We should not be treated like puppets on strings where one corporate function defines who we are, what we are worth, and then proceeds to ‘manage’ our growth.

Of course, talent management works by comparison too, not because it has to, but because it’s easier that way (for the people who are doing the talent management). How do you measure “strategic thinking skills”? It’s much easier to say that person X has higher strategic thinking skills than person Y.

Everything has become binary. We have the ‘high potentials’ and we have the ‘low performers’. We have employees who are responsible and hard working, and we have employees who are lazy or unproductive. We have people who are good at X and people who are bad at Y. We have become someone else’s (HR, our manager, the director of adjacent department) label.

We are told people are the greatest asset. (Let’s ignore for a moment how inappropriate it feels to equate people with ‘assets’.) So we need to bring in the ‘best’ assets. But then what happens when the company brings the best? Well, they still need to go somewhere on a curve so some of those ‘best’ don’t end up being very good after all. To have ‘the best’, you must also have the not so good.

Then the thinking goes some people are truly special. These are the ‘high potentials’. All people are great assets; some people are greater assets than others… So in a resource-constrained environment, we coddle the ‘hi-pos’ because that’s the most efficient thing to do, and would bring the greatest value. So companies invest time, money and resources to upskill those ‘hi-pos’ (i.e. manage their talent) to lead everyone else.

Is this true? Is it really true? Do people fall in two camps — ‘high potentials’ and ‘everyone else’? High potentials in what? Everything? Is that how we have chosen to see and relate to people? This one over here is smart and talented, but that one over there is not very intelligent and kind of slow. How do we assess high potential? And more importantly, who assesses the high potentials?

What to do?

Let’s redefine talent. Let’s reconsider who has talent. And let’s rethink what we do with talent. Talent is simply a predisposition, something that comes more naturally to us. Talent is something we like doing. As a result, we do more of it, and because we do more of it, we become better at it. So is it hard to imagine that all of us have SOME sort of talent(s)? And if so, how about we help people discover and nurture those talents (instead of trying to ‘manage’ it)? How about treating everyone as a ‘hi-po’? Because we truly are hi-pos — we just have to look at ourselves and at each other with different eyes, expand our narrow worldview and move away from these binary constructs. When we do that, we will start investing in everyone because we actually believe that ‘people are our greatest assets’.

Organizational Construct # 3: Performance Evaluation

We get evaluated, in most places, once a year. Everything is ultimately condensed into two categories (another binary) — strengths and weakness. Most recently, we have become squeamish about weaknesses and re-branded those as ‘areas for development’.

This begs the question: is a strength NOT an area of development? In the very framing of the categories we have defined strengths as something static and weaknesses as something fluid. In other words, don’t worry about strengths — you’ve got them, you are good. Worry about weaknesses — they can (and what we are really saying, should) be improved.

Strengths are de-emphasized. They are seen as an obligation to come up with something positive because it would be slightly more polite than to jump straight into “you should do this, this and this.” (Or to put it more bluntly, we are ‘given’ strengths because the higher-ups have to put up the pretense that they see something good in us while in reality some of them see their staff as a walking misunderstanding that’s going to screw up the next sales call and cost them that 4th beach house.) Weaknesses are prioritized. In order to develop and grow, we must work on our weaknesses.

First of all, why? Secondly, who determines what’s our strength and weakness? We are sometimes encouraged to self-reflect and self-evaluate on these two areas, but this is inherently seen as subjective. We are too subjective so we can’t really trust our own opinion about ourselves. We need someone else to tell us. (And that someone else is not subjective?)

We get evaluated by our boss, who sometimes collect additional feedback from our peers. How often do any of these people see us in action, in a given day or week? Do they follow our every movement? Read every email we send? Attend every meeting we are part of? Hear every word we speak? Based on periodic glimpses into our work, others construct full pictures of what we are good at, what we are bad at, and then tell us what to do about it. Basically, our bosses tell us “fix this because it is annoying to ME.”

That’s the evaluation system. Oh, and of course, there’s a rating and a curve and everyone is clustered in the middle of that curve because you can’t have too many people underperform (the manager would look bad) and you can’t have too many people overperform (because now you have to promote them all and pay them more).

What to do?

Let’s redefine performance evaluation (terrible word, by the way). What’s the ultimate purpose? It should not be to air grievances and screw people’s raises. It should be to provide people with some external perspective (with the caveat that it’s someone else’s perspective and not universal truth) so that they can determine how they wish to continue growing. The process should not be prescriptive, but informative. Furthermore, we should move away from prioritizing weaknesses over strengths. Ultimately, it’s up to the person to decide what to do and how to grow.

We should be constantly asking people “who would you like to be? What would you want to develop? How do you see yourself grow?” We should be coaching people to reach those answers and create tangible action steps. And then we should provide support, regardless of where we are in the hierarchy, because we all learn and grow when we all help one another learn and grow.

Conclusion

First, we must think hard about our perspective of other people and really challenge ourselves to see people as humans full of talent, potential, goodness and desire to contribute meaningfully. Second, we must refrain from creating labels and binary constructs. Third, we must foster a culture where everyone has equal opportunity to grow, not based on rank or tenure. That means the CEO and it means the executive assistant. And that growth doesn’t happen through talent management and evaluation. It happens through care, support and dedication. It happens when everyone in the organization is invested in their own growth as well as in their colleagues’ growth.

Check out these seminal books that discuss this topic in depth and offer a plethora of actual, real-world examples of next-stage organizations:

• Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux
• Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan

Zarko Palankov seeks ways to connect ideas, people and organizations, to create platforms for learning, collaboration and growth, and to fundamentally change the leadership paradigm: how we work together toward a common vision. He is building a social venture, LeadIN, that grows the individual and collective leadership of people and organizations. LeadIN brings people together to learn, share, and grow their leadership.

Feel free to contact Zarko at zarko@lead-in.co or follow LeadIN on Twitter @leadincommunity.