FAITH CLARKE on Transformational Culture

In today's episode, I welcome Faith Clarke again to the podcast.  In last season's episode, we discussed the decolonization of work.

In today's episode, we discuss how crucial the intersection of team dynamics and inclusivity is for our workplaces. Drawing on Faith's extensive experience and her latest book, we delve into the necessity of cultivating a work environment where everyone feels they belong.

We look at the systemic issues marred in our workplaces and their impact on team trust. We talk about the importance of investment in internal capacity, fostering interpersonal bonds, and acknowledging the value and privilege of each individual in shaping a supportive and adaptable work culture. We put the spotlight on homogeneous teams, scrutinizing how their dynamics can breed an 'extractive relationship' and provide insights on fostering more open conversations in team meetings.

Further, we turn our attention to meetings and how to transform them into breeding grounds for engagement and innovation. We touch on the essence of valuing people's voices, nurturing creative thinking, and discussing the cost of a lack of creativity in the workplace.

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Connect with Faith here or
Instagram
LinkedIn

If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart, and you’d like to connect with me, here are a few ways you can do that.

One is my newsletter, it’s where I put most of my time and energy when I’m not working with clients or on this podcast. Sorry social media! It’s a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and of course updates on what’s happening with the podcast. Whenever something is going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.

Another resource that I have for you is my Guide to Doing Work Differently. The guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place to start.

Last, if you’ve got a burning question, a comment, or a situation you’d like my eyes on, you can email me at candice@fortressandflourish.com.


If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out, and if you’re feeling generous, leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.

Learn more about Candice and her work here.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

The hearth is for you if you're a business leader with a team. Here we have conversations about how to keep growing. When you feel you've reached your capacity, when what you're doing is working but you're starting to see the cracks, when there's a gap between where you're at now and where you want to be, here we find ways to transition through the struggle of survival toward creating a thriving business that supports you and your team as whole humans. Your host is me, Candice Elliott. I'm a business strategist and mentor who specializes in working with business owners who are going through periods of growth. Especially when you're adding more people to your team, the practices and systems that worked when your team was smaller just don't seem to fit anymore, and when you're caught in stress and reaction, it's tough to reimagine the way that you created your world of work, both your own personal one and the one that you created for others. I help people align their values and business practices to build practical, sustainable, thriving work ecosystems and no, this isn't just some work utopia talk. To do this, I bring forward my decade-long professional background in human resources and organizational development, working with growing businesses across many sectors, and my decades-long search for meaning and wholeness, which includes researching the history of work and how it came to be what it is today, practicing a trauma-informed approach to business and integrating work, life and spirituality into a meaningful whole. Let's take this journey together. Welcome back to the hearth. Brave souls.

Speaker 1: 2:28

Today I am so excited to share with you my conversation with Faith Clark. Faith Clark is a CEO and team effectiveness specialist. She did this amazing series about decolonizing work last year that you can check out. We'll link it in the show notes. And then she and I did a great series on YouTube that was about rituals in the workplace and basically the things that we can do to create safe space for our employees at work. So, without further ado, I am just going to take us over to the conversation with Faith, and I hope you enjoy what we talk about. Faith, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I'm really excited to talk with you, especially about your new book that's coming out.

Speaker 2: 3:26

I'm looking forward to chatting with you, because I think we always touch on such intricate, interesting aspects of this work. And, yes, hopefully by the time this is live, my book will be at least the first draft will be done. We'll have free sale going.

Speaker 1: 3:45

So tell us what is it about and why did you decide to write a book now? It's such a big thing to decide to undertake. I'm curious about.

Speaker 2: 3:56

Well, so I have been delaying the gratification of writing a book. So I wrote my last book, my first book, which was my last book in 2018. And almost immediately after, I shifted more into this how do we help humans feel like they belong to their work, with their work, in their work? Because, as a parent of kids with complex needs who are neurovariant, I just like how do we help my kids feel like they have meaningful work outside of me?

Speaker 2: 4:30

But I was doing a PhD in organizational performance and organizational psychology and I say was, and I felt like the writing of the book would be the carrot I would dangle in front of myself and I would say, when you're done with the PhD, faith, you'll write the book. And then recently I decided to free myself from the burden of the PhD and I stopped. So it was almost like, well, what's the thing you're going to create? The creative in me was asking this question, and I had just completed the series a year before called Decolonizing Work, and as I did that series, there's just so much goodness that I found in those conversations. I really wanted to marry some of what I learned with what, some of the stuff that I was talking about before in terms of inclusion, and I thought well, just just write the book, faith, stop, stop holding it as a carrot in front of you and just do the thing you want to do. So that's the story of writing the book.

Speaker 1: 5:24

Wonderful. Yeah, I love that you decided to stop doing the PhD because it wasn't the right fit anymore and then went on to the thing that you really wanted to do.

Speaker 2: 5:33

My heart was saying do it, do it. You know, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 5:38

So people know you to talk a lot about teams and also inclusion, and I'm curious how do those two things connect?

Speaker 2: 5:47

Yeah, so when I was part of my own doctoral, research was on has been on new venture teams, but it was on its new venture. A new venture is just a business that's not yet resolved to crises that businesses have to resolve. The first crisis is do I have something that the market wants from me and you prove that by selling it? And if you sell it, if there's money, if you sell the thing and money comes in and you're like, oh, I do have something the market wants. And then the second crisis is do I have the capacity to produce that thing for the market in a sustainable way? And the new is not a good word, but there's so many of us in business that kind of stay in the cycle of those two conversations 80%, 90% of businesses. There is nothing like that's not a state of immaturity, that just is what it is. So then you have some other businesses that shift into a more static I would call it state, and I love this the dynamics of that new venture stage, because it's a stage where the context is constantly changing, the internal business landscape is constantly changing and what I noticed in exploring those teams that were effective is that those teams needed to be scrappy. They almost needed to be like sports teams and like emergency medicine teams and like first responder teams. They needed to have such an alertness to the environment and an awareness of each other so that, regardless of what came their way, regardless of what changed, they could just jump in. And when I looked at how those teams worked with each other, there was a really deep level of interpersonal awareness and interpersonal and knowing and a sense of belonging with each other and to each other that I have seen as similar. When I look at the research or inclusion, I'm like, oh, that's what they're doing. They're actually. They create community, whether temporary or longer term. They create community with each other. They create a sense of belonging with each other. They create really deep knowing with each other so that they can improvise on the spot when other demands come their way. And, like I realized that the team is the perfect place to build the behaviors around inclusivity and belonging and thriving and all the things that we tend to talk about when we talk in the DEI space about how to help the workplace be more human.

Speaker 2: 8:27

Now we're trying to talk about it in this macro way, but I could see it happening in these scrappy teams and they may not be including all the people, but they learn how to include the people who are in front of them For them to work. Well, for the most part, they're including the six of them, the eight of them. They figure out, through whatever processes, how to read each other and be with each other and accept each other for who they are. And so I think that for me, inclusion has to be brought down to the interpersonal for it to actually work.

Speaker 2: 9:04

And now we're talking about implicit bias, we're talking about microaggressions, we're talking about all these things as ideas, but it has to come down to how does it affect, in the relationship, the working relationship between me and Candice, what's showing up in our interactions around this work, and what's in the air that's acting as a barrier either to faith or to Candice, that's preventing this work from moving forward.

Speaker 2: 9:29

And as we look at this at that level, we'll start to see oh, I have a whole judgment around Candice and the orange wall that's behind her, because who loves orange? You will start to see where the biases are and where the judgments are and where the prejudices and privileges are, and then we can bring it down to the ground and say how do we do something about this so that the work isn't affected? So that was kind of how I brought the two together when I started to do the research and I just feel like that's the place. The team is like a hostage audience for this work, like they are all ready together and they're already working on a thing. So then it's an opportunity for all of us to do some of the healing work that we know is needed in the workplace.

Speaker 1: 10:16

I work with a lot of businesses that are in that kind of cycle of the emerging business figuring out something that works for the market, trying to have the capacity to meet the market demands, and in that tension there can be a prioritization of getting like getting a lot of work done and not so much prioritizing the team being able to have these interconnected relationships with each other. And so what are your thoughts on creating space for that and why it's important to do?

Speaker 2: 10:57

Yeah, well, I think those the teams, the businesses that you're referring to and we've seen it a lot nonprofits are a great example of this. It's lean, there's not a lot of money to go around and so we have to, and then the funders are insisting that we have program goals being met. So you focus on that and not on the internal capacity. And what you see is the more you do that, the faster the internal capacity is eroding, the faster the revolving door is happening. One nonprofit I was talking to they had it was last year 103 job openings. I was like 103, how are you, vp of HR, navigating that? And she was like poorly, it's chaotic, right. So we already have a lot of data about how much that's not working. But we have to kind of notice that there's something underneath. That's like me and my constant freaking out at I don't know, spiders or whatever. I know that there's nothing to be, it's not gonna harm me, but there's something underneath that I would need to explore to deal with my reaction. So we're having a reaction in the workplace to the demand and instead of nourishing the resource that's actually the most adaptable, we keep at the. But if we only made enough money then we could nourish the resource, and if we only we keep on that and we have to understand what's going on there and there are lots of systemic issues that feed that thought process and that feed our fear of know what we have to make enough money. My solution, though, is a little bit longer view, like, if you know that you will be in the cycle, you've been in the cycle, it's not just ending, it's not ending tomorrow Then you can kind of give yourself a little bit of permission to say what actually will change the cycle.

Speaker 2: 12:46

Internal capacity means building the skills and power within the individuals for that scrappy adaptability we were talking about before and the ability to really harness the interpersonal power humans have with each other. And one of the things that has made humans so effective in some ways and harmful in other ways is that when we get into synergy with each other, our power is magnified. So this a lot of the burnout we're seeing in the workplace is a result of the relationships actually feeling extractive. The work is extractive and the relationships are extractive, and if the relationships are nourishing around hard work, the work is so much less extractive because the combined power of the humans together gets it done and it gets it done in a way that suddenly the hard feels like a good type of hard.

Speaker 2: 13:42

And so I think part of the switch has to be if we invest in internal capacity, just like back to my favorite teams, the first responder teams and the even military which I have issues with military but those teams are constantly working on the individual people's capacity all the time, even when they're not out doing quote, unquote work. And there's something about that model that says build the human so that when there is work they can respond to whatever shows up in a landscape that's gonna change right in front of their eyes. I think that has to be, and you have to just know that the human is the most adaptable. Hate the word resource, but let's just go with it. Resource that any business has going on for it.

Speaker 1: 14:31

My husband was in the military and when we talk about his time there, part of what he talks about is that it is a family. It was a family and so when they got into combat situations, they knew that their brothers, their sisters were there with them, defending them, and so it's like when there is this existential threat like is coming towards you, if you have a team that's strong, that knows each other and is very interconnected and has very strong bonds, then you can respond to that. And yes, I also have other things about the military that are a lot of problematic things about that. But that kind of brings me back to you. Had brought up systemic issues that show up in the workplace and I'm wondering if you could expand on that a little bit.

Speaker 2: 15:27

Well, let's look at that interconnectivity for a second. There's something about interconnectivity that creates these bonds of trust and there's a value that's put on the togetherness and the systemic issues. If we wanna go into them like supremacist systems basically said I know what's better, I have whoever the I is, I've determined that this is better and you don't have the value or place or power or privilege to determine what's better. So you do what I say is better, even if you don't understand that that's good for you. And to control the system supremacist systems controlled the whoever's were not in power through fear and for fear to work for that reasoning, to work I know what's better and then for fear to work as a mechanism of control, then the interpersonal bonds can't be. You have to break up the relationships Like the togetherness can't work. Which kid's movie was it when there was like ants must have been ants being controlled by the grasshoppers or something.

Speaker 2: 16:39

And there was a line in the movie where it says if they ever figure out that they're more than us, then we're in trouble. And so there is something about the low trust that we have in the workplace, the way that we you find that people are, they have to be in little pockets. I remember years and years ago I was applying for a job in a place that a friend of mine worked and she was in a reasonably senior position. She said to me I mean, she really wasn't supportive of me applying for the job. But she said to me you know, we can't have two black women, because there's going to be a good black woman and a bad black woman, cause we have to be pitied against each other and that's not going to work. And we both in the conversation were like we want our friendship more than we wanted this situation to, you know, financially or whatever, and so we both kind of just leaned back from it. And I remember, but I remember thinking about how much, how many forces against relationship exist in the workplace. And that is a part of the systemic struggle that is in place that we can't trust, because we don't believe whoever we've trusted will have our back, because there is this hierarchy that is implicit, invisible, but we don't want to lose our place and we don't want somebody else to hurt our place and whatever we're getting from it to prevent us from moving up the hierarchy. So the whole thing is really, really broken.

Speaker 2: 18:14

And I think when we look at what brought us here, when we look at some of the history of colonization as part of what I talked about, what came up in the decolonizing work, when really and truly there are hundreds of years of this idea where human bodies were commodities, like the value of a human body was X, whether it was slavery or indentured labor, whatever it was. So this number assigned to the value of a human body. So we have in the workplace today a person saying are you worth this thing? When people come to work for me, I tell them immediately that the number that we agree on has nothing to do with your work. This work that you do for me is priceless. It cannot be. I mean, we could try to put it into formulas, but it cannot be, because you as a human cannot be put down as a number. But for so much we're like, I'm worth 15 an hour, 20 an hour, 150 an hour. And then for those of us who are, you know, like, am I really worth 150 an hour?

Speaker 2: 19:23

All of this is tied to the systemic placing of value on different human bodies through whatever that human's effort is, and that value is placed by someone, it's not self-determined. So that whole thing of value, that whole thing of knowledge somebody else knows what's good and tells us what is good, all of that is playing into what we see as a lot of people harm in the workplace. And then I think the beauty of the pandemic if there's any is there's anything to be called beautiful about the pandemic, but going through something hard together and surviving those of us who are here at this site, at this point it's like I don't think I want to put up with that anymore. So there is a whole reawakening, an awareness of what is my value and do I want to put up, you know.

Speaker 2: 20:14

And so there's been a whole lot of questioning of all the systemic structures, not just work, because education is getting pressure. Places of worship and faith and all that's getting pressure because of the same things that wait. There was some kind of rigid structure that told me what I was supposed to do and who I was supposed to be and what my value was, and that entity wasn't asking me, that structure wasn't asking me. And so, even when people say to me, how do we do equitable compensation, I'm like ask the people you're trying to compensate. I can definitely give you lots of ideas and you're like talk to us some of them, but fundamentally, you have a human sitting right in front of you that you want to offer equitable compensation too. That person is the absolute expert on their situation and on their needs and what would be equitable for them.

Speaker 1: 21:05

Yeah, and when you have a group, it's that what does that group specifically need? Yeah, it's what's coming up for me around. This is, I think, a lot of people who start businesses or who start nonprofit organizations or become the leaders of these organizations it's not necessarily that they see that the organization is a way to, it's like a way of creating a culture of its own within a greater society, and that there is this. I mean, it's an opportunity, but it's also a responsibility. And so in creating an organization, a team of people that are working together, I think a lot of people just kind of go with what they have to do or what they came up in, what they learned through their own work experience or what they learned from their parents' work experience or their work in the community, and that there are choices that we have that people kind of default to operating within these systems that are really unjust and unfair and perpetuating those systems when really there's it's a time for a shift.

Speaker 2: 22:33

I mean, and we're not aware of that right. So I think about myself as a parent. I made some really deliberate choices to be a different parent than my mother was. As much as I've loved my mother, I love my mom and how she parented. I saw how she parented as different from my grandmother and I see how my parent is different.

Speaker 2: 22:54

And yet, as one of my favorite therapists was also a friend, said to me, the moment I decided not to be my mom, I already was, and that's the thing, that's the humility that is needed for all of us right now. Like the moment you've decided that you're not going to be racist, you are. The moment you've decided that you're not going to be misogynist, even as a person identifying as a woman, you are right, because there is this environment that we've been in and these implicit thoughts that we've had fed to us that have just been fed as normal. So then you're starting a business to offer some solution, nonprofit agents, even volunteer situation to offer some kind of support out there without addressing in here, and that's fine.

Speaker 2: 23:44

I don't think any of us should try to be the perfect parent, the perfect business leader, before doing the work. But the work is an invitation to our own transformation. And so I think part of the thing has to be now that I have the actual human that I've birthed, now that I have the actual business that I've birthed and I acknowledge that I cannot do this on my own then what's my moral, ethical responsibility to other humans in the place? And do I find myself saying, well, I just want a person to help me do this thing, or am I saying I'm inviting a person into this mission and is it mutually beneficial? And it's like, what kind of community do we want to start creating? I think that it becomes important for us to be answering that question when we are bringing in the first bookkeeper, the first virtual assistant, the first, because at those moments we're not thinking that, we're just thinking oh my goodness, I'm overwhelmed by this schedule or these bills of paperwork.

Speaker 1: 24:45

I just need some help. Can I hire someone across the world for a couple of dollars an hour to do that?

Speaker 2: 24:50

Yes, get rid of it. And regardless of who we hire, where they are, we're inviting someone into our orbit and the relationship that we have with them is going to be a reflection of our beliefs, implicit and explicit, about how we treat humans who interact with us around work. So it's really an opportunity to kind of look at it deeper and just say, hey, what are my beliefs about this? And even write them down. I'll say to people who haven't hired anybody yet If you were to have a successful business in five years with I don't know 20 staff, 50 staff, what kind of culture would you want it to be? What kind of place? How do you want people to feel? How do you want them to interact? Imagine that and write that down. And then write down what will it take to be there with your first two people? How does that begin? What does that look like?

Speaker 1: 25:42

When you're working with these smaller teams six people, maybe eight people what are some of the ways that that the kind of extractive relationship can show up or that? What are some things that someone who already has a team might have going on that they don't realize are tied to these kind of systemic issues, but if they're seeing them it's kind of a clue to think about this, creating a more interconnected culture among the team.

Speaker 2: 26:18

I'm gonna just give that personal title. I'm just gonna make them either founder or CEO, just the person in charge, right.

Speaker 1: 26:26

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 26:27

And so a couple of things that they might be seeing. But first of all, if the team is homogenous in any way so all women, all one gender, all one background, racially, ethnically or something like that then be aware of that. That's the first thing, to kind of say that that's a thing here. There is a we that's been established in some way right Within that sameness. I would start asking some questions about what's the difference that's showing up. So if there is one person who tends to be on time I'll use the time one, because that's me, one person who tends to be on time and others tend to be late, what's the impact of that lateness or on timeness on the collective, and how is that showing up? Is there some angst about it? Is there some judgment that's showing up? Is there a little bit of snark? Is it not snark? But somebody feels like the meetings they're waiting, so meetings are a waste of time. These are really small things, but the small things lead to big things silos, conflict that doesn't resolve, launch, business launches or programs that are ineffective, funding that doesn't show up, and so on. So I'd start to look at where the differences are in a team and how that's impacting. And then who are people talking to about the effect of this difference? So for me, when I show up late, as a person that has a different, it's just I don't know. I feel like I can do 15 things in five minutes. Apparently. I'm still in a 50-something. I still have this notion. So then I'm like it's and I rush off to the place. When I do that, I'm running the script of everybody's judgments, even if you've said nothing, and my preoccupation with the negative stereotype about me impacts the quality of my work. All the research says that. Whether it is that it's impacting me because I am worrying or I'm being defensive and arguing because I've done that too, quarreling with you in my mind, how dare you not understand? Why are you so rigid? So I'm judging you back for the imagine.

Speaker 2: 28:47

All of that is happening in a meeting where we want to be innovative and creative and that's just a thing about time, right? What about this, since I have kids who are neurodistinct? What about a team where people have neurovariances, somebody's really visual and all the communication comes by email? Or somebody's very auditory and all the email is in voice notes? All of the messages are in voice notes, all the messages. Like I have worked on teams. I've supported teams where the team leader it just sends them. It's like an essay that comes through and he has a judgment about whether people are reading those messages or not.

Speaker 2: 29:32

And then a person is just not taking it in fully and but doesn't want to ask a question. So what are some of the differences that actually exist and how are those things playing out? So a person who feels free to ask questions in a meeting or a person who does not feel free to ask questions in a meeting, and then what are the implications of that? I've seen teams, small teams, where the meeting is silent. The team meetings are a great testing point for anything. The meeting is silent, people are afraid of conflict, or there is so much conflict that there's just 10 silence, so there isn't on the conflict itself, which is just difference inside. That conflict is the new, innovative, creative solution that includes everybody's differences and integrates everybody's brilliance. But we can't go through that. So what do people do? They discuss the possible brilliant solutions in the corridor or at home or by text, like that was so dumb. Why did we do that? You know that kind of thing.

Speaker 2: 30:30

And the team leader feels that they're holding the structure of the organization all on their own. So their response of they're driving the thing, they're making the thing happen, the thing is not shared by the entire team. A lot of that is also. The team doesn't feel like they have permission to really give themselves fully. They have to kind of stay in their place. The stay in the place thing is so systemic Stay in your place, stay in your lane, pay attention to your thing, mind your business. All of that is permission that people feel they don't have or it's not safe to have that power. If they were not to stay in their place, something bad could happen, and when bad things happen, that's your income that's being affected. So those are some examples of things that will be happening in a small team.

Speaker 1: 31:19

I've had people ask me this question about, like we have this team meeting. I don't understand why no one is talking. Why is it and it's almost like there's this assumption that the team isn't able to grasp the question that's at hand or the issue that's at hand and then also from the team side not feeling really comfortable to be able to really talk about what's going on, especially if they're really formal agendas? I think Sometimes team meetings are just very you have five minutes to talk about this huge thing and so you don't actually really have the time to get into what you need to get into in order to resolve it.

Speaker 2: 32:04

For sure, at the top of meetings, like we do need to revamp just how, why we have these meetings. We have so much technology. There is no need for announcement type meetings. Half an hour of announcements we can roll that out on the visual screen in the corridor or send that to people. So we do need to rethink. How are we using the resource of people's time?

Speaker 2: 32:28

But then also, participation in meetings is about voice and in hierarchical structures, people who are lowered on in the hierarchy. No, they don't have voice, like you, you know. So if people aren't participating, then whether experts are, implicitly, they feel they don't have voice. The voice doesn't matter. It doesn't matter why would I say something when it either will have no impact or negative impact? So that needs to be shifted. How is decision making happening? How is the responsibility feeling shared? How are people's voices being valued? All of that needs to be thought about. If the meeting isn't, the meeting needs to almost be rock us, I mean, you know, in alignment with the teams, like sensibilities and stuff like that, but there should really be. I need to say something. Oh, wait, wait, but have we thought of the? Have we? Okay, you and Lucy, you and I were gonna talk afterwards, because I have a thought that that when humans get together, that synergy should be creating something.

Speaker 1: 33:29

It shouldn't be that we're all just like sitting there or listening to the leader saying all the things, dictating all of the things that need to be happening, and just being receptive. It reinforces that extractive kind of relationship.

Speaker 2: 33:46

I don't think any humans are ever just sitting and taking things in like that. That's not what we're actually doing. We're either in the room or there is an internal thing that's not coming out.

Speaker 1: 33:59

There's like this internal struggle that's happening. Yeah, that wears you down, I think.

Speaker 2: 34:06

I mean when I've been in that situation.

Speaker 1: 34:08

It's just over time. It just you can't keep doing it anymore, and the longer it goes on, it's almost like the harder it is. Yeah to get back from it.

Speaker 2: 34:19

The cost of the load of not being connected to the people you work with is so much more than the value of a paycheck, and what happens is that it shows up in the business as a cost on medical insurance and time off. It shows up as a cost in the revolving door of employees. It shows up in the 50% of people that leave within two months of being hired. It shows up in how hard it is to find people that feel like a good fit. It shows up in how many managers feel like they don't have time to be really supportive to the people that report to them. All of this is showing up somewhere and it's costing the organization. When they say that engagement is down to some ridiculous number like 30% 30% yeah.

Speaker 2: 35:10

Right. I mean, if engagement even came to 60%, that's double the productivity that we'd be getting for the same dime. I'm not saying I think we should pay people more, of course, but let's just think about the loss to businesses in terms of innovation and just overall everything, if we have all of this weight that people carry while being in the process of doing the work that we've invited them into.

Speaker 1: 35:38

It makes me think, too, about just the amount of creativity and innovation that isn't happening because people aren't able to be in that space and their work.

Speaker 2: 35:50

I think creativity and innovation, it's both a skill in these reps and it's something that happens. It's synergistic, like when you are wrong creative people, you're more creative. And both of those require you to have in the workplace, require you to have permission, because so many people have said, hey, look at this, and somebody has shot it down. So you quickly learn that work is not the place to be creative, which is such a shame, since the business problems that we're facing in this massively shifting context that we're in require a ton of innovation, a ton of borrowing from unrelated entities and bringing things together to create something new, which is what innovation and creativity is. But at work we don't get to practice that because we're just like head down, pay attention and do things, and even in the quote, unquote creative occupations you're seeing the formula. Like I worked. One of my clients works with a lot of digital creatives and video people make media and you're starting to see the formula and how the products are being creative.

Speaker 2: 37:02

I got people aren't stopping to say like, hmm, I wonder, no wonder, like there is a way. Somebody has already shown us Pixar or whoever, and my boss will be happy if I show them that way. I think that we have to figure out, otherwise we'll just all end right here and then some new person is going to recreate the wheel again with starting some new businesses. We all have to figure out how to shift what's happening at work. So humans feel free to do what humans do really well, which is synergistically create the new future. Over and over again. This is what we've done.

Speaker 1: 37:43

Yeah, I think about that, especially in different teams that I've worked with in government and then also architects in government Sorry. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 37:54

I mean, yeah, government is, is the creating systems and upholding systems and then requiring everybody else to participate in those systems and often not not looking at them again. You know, like a lot of the systems that are in place were created 50 years ago or 100 years ago and, yeah, and there isn't an understanding of how the changing dynamics that are happening in the world affect people and so then, how those systems should change to better serve the community.

Speaker 2: 38:31

Yeah, I think a lot of our building of systems also was built on the industrial model you know of a system is a rigid thing, you know, like a desk, and but the systems contain humans, support humans and respond to a context that's changing because of humans, so they can't be static, and I think that figuring out how to build a system that responds I remember the first time I tried to redo my website and I said is your website responsive? And I was like responsive, what's responsive? No, it should change according to the type of monitor, type of browser, type of, and the thing that makes a particular website powerful is this ability to respond to the actual setting it's in and to be able to do that for settings that it doesn't yet know about. Like we don't want to use tools that's going to break on the new version of whatever this is Big Sur or whatever I have on my Mac, and it's a similar thing that we're building systems like.

Speaker 2: 39:36

This is the way the world is.

Speaker 2: 39:37

Build it X million dollars, this is the way, but actually what we need to do is build a system that can listen for how the world is now and offer that and then keep listening and adjust itself, which means the system has to be built with humans who have this capacity. We're saying what's going on and what's needed right now and adjusting accordingly. That we can't do that if, back to the systemic things, if we haven't acknowledged oh, the system is built to support people with privilege versus people who do not. The people who are marginalized do not get as much value from the system. Or the system is built to make premium one particular type of knowledge and ignore all the other voices. Or the system is built to sell human bodies and their energy in a way that's similar to selling apples and car parts, like we have to own those things because those elements don't help us build responsive systems. We have to be willing to say, yes, that's what's going on and then we have to stop it. But we can't stop something we don't even acknowledge.

Speaker 1: 40:50

There's the community health centers in Mac County have a new rule that if people are late for their appointments, they can't attend their appointment and they have to reschedule. And so I mean, obviously there was a problem happening with people being late for their appointments, but instead of acknowledging OK, people have busy lives, people are late for their appointments, let's build capacity within our system to be able to handle the lateness of people. It's like no, we're going to put that back onto the individual, that they have to be here early in order to be able to get this appointment. And a lot of people are dealing with kids, bringing them to these community centers.

Speaker 2: 41:39

And my doctor's appointment today. The doctor was I was late too, but the doctor was late and it turned out that we all live in both myself and the doctor live in the same area. There's construction on the 84 lanes are blocked, and I was just thinking that this is, this was the doctor's reality, and so they explained it to me. But they didn't explain it to me first. First they said, well, you are 15 minutes late and so we don't know what time. And so I went back to them half an hour later and they're like you know, you were 15, you were late. And I was like, yeah, 15 minutes, it's been 45 now. And then they said, well, also, the doctor was late because of the same reason that you were late, and I just thought it's so interesting. I'm like it's cool.

Speaker 2: 42:23

How do we build the capacity, as you're saying, in all our systems? So I gave her some feedback. I was like you could have just told me that things are a walk and you have no idea. So you don't know how long I'm going to be here, because when you tell me that, that gives me information, that then I can make some decisions around, and I think so much like hidden inside there is all of this. No, certain people have the information, other people don't. You need to feel lucky that you're here, receiving whatever knowledge this person is giving you, and it's versus the system being a system that embraces humans all of our humanity, you know, not just the doctors.

Speaker 1: 43:04

It's helping. I think people like the person who works at that desk right to understand how to communicate with patients about what's happening, so that you know they have the information that they need to make their decisions to, because Right, right, because everybody has decisions that they need to make.

Speaker 2: 43:23

But I mean it's, you know, like you're saying, it's the fundamentalists. They're like there's underlying things that we have to address to even notice that, right, she's being perfectly polite and the doctor feels he's being perfectly polite, and still there's a not valuing of me, my time and my, my place in the world, really, my child who's waiting on me, and so on. There's a not valuing of that. And so when people say Faith, how do we build these workplaces that value, all the things that you're talking about? That sounds impossible.

Speaker 2: 43:57

And it sounds impossible from the perspective of a system that does not. It does not become the system that does not, you know, assist at the desk. It does not become a tree, it's the distance. There is no sideways transition. There is only transformation. There's alchemy, you know there is. How do we take these five people and redesign our culture so that we honor all our humanity, leader and clients and us, all of us get honored. And that's not going to, it's not going to happen overnight, because we have so much learning on learning to do. But if we stay with that question, we'll get the answer for those five people, and the better we get at answering the question for those five people, the easier it will be to expand that when they become supervisors, to their five or whatever, to their other spaces that they have influenced. The, the practice of the yes, yes is what we need to start doing, because the systems have taught us yes, no, and most of us are on the no side.

Speaker 1: 45:01

But once you start working with those kinds of teams, it is kind of like you're describing it's like a fractal. It starts in one place but then it moves into all these other areas, because people aren't just in their work team right. There are other kinds of teams too, and when this is the way of creating relationships and working together, then it goes into these other places.

Speaker 2: 45:24

Yeah, and Sima was talking to a nonprofit leader recently, a funding organization leader recently, and just challenging where we put money. And so if we put money into capacity building, we meaning whoever the we's are that have money please put money into capacity building. Yeah, they want to be where the change is happening. But again, that's a really industrial model of looking at things, because when we build this human's capacity, even if that program fails, that human has gone to another organization doing other work or their team got invited into something transformation and they move that along. Like. It's not like 15 people in a program out there learn to X, y and Z. It's every human whose capacity we build that splinters out exponentially into all the areas of their lives, all their future work, all their present or all the people who report to them directly. It's so powerful it may be difficult to measure, but it is so powerful when we invest in human capacity.

Speaker 1: 46:35

Well, thank you so much for this conversation. Was there anything that we didn't get to talk about that you wanted to share?

Speaker 2: 46:42

No, I think this is it. I think, if we bring it back to the book, I don't I'm calling it the art and science of building a restorative team. I think I'm using art because so much of it, like science, is limited and when we think about art, we give ourselves permission to lean into our intuition and into our creativity, and I think that's what's needed for the healing of work and therefore the healing of humans. If we can, we've always. Whoever DaVinci and all these people were both artists and scientists, because we didn't have those false separations, and I think if we can return to that more integrated self, we will find that we already have the ability to create these spaces if we give ourselves the freedom to do so.

Speaker 1: 47:32

Yeah, I have always been living in those different worlds. For me it's never really been separate. I feel like spirituality and business and art and science and all of these things are interwoven Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And if people want to get into contact with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker 2: 47:58

Email. Faith at faithclarkcom is the best way. I am on all social media as Faith Clark or Faith A Clark and the book has a culture design assessment and the assessment is done even though the book is in early stages. So the culture design assessment is at restorativeworkculturecom and I will probably be in the show notes. I'll give it to you. But that's just an easy way to personally interrogate the culture you're creating as a business leader. Or if you have a team that you want to involve in it, have those questions be discussed among the team and just like what are we doing and what are one or two practices we could put in place? That would just shift the needle a tiny bit, because capacity building is an incremental game, it's a long game, it's not the overnight type of thing.

Speaker 1: 48:58

Thank you so much for coming on the show. I am always so inspired by our conversations and the depth of knowledge that you have and the amount of research that you've done. And yeah, thank you.

Speaker 2: 49:10

Oh, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 49:15

Hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out. And, if you're feeling generous, please leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource. If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart and you'd like to connect with me, there are a few ways to do that. One is my newsletter, where I put most of my time and energy when I'm not working with clients or with my family or working on this podcast Sorry, social media. The newsletter is a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and, of course, updates on what's happening with the podcast. Whenever something's going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.

Speaker 1: 50:09

Another resource that I have for you is my guide to doing work differently. This guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place if you're looking for somewhere to get started. Last, if you've got a burning question, a comment or a situation you'd like my eyes on, you can email me. All those links are in the show notes. Take care, brave soul, catch you next time.