Employing Differences

Employing Differences, Episode 209: Who will do this?

May 14, 2024 Karen Gimnig & Paul Tevis
Employing Differences, Episode 209: Who will do this?
Employing Differences
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Employing Differences
Employing Differences, Episode 209: Who will do this?
May 14, 2024
Karen Gimnig & Paul Tevis

"We often say, 'Who's willing to do this?' And we wait awkwardly for someone to raise their hand. Willingness matters, but it is not the only concern that we have."

Karen & Paul share techniques and advice for filling roles within a group.

Show Notes Transcript

"We often say, 'Who's willing to do this?' And we wait awkwardly for someone to raise their hand. Willingness matters, but it is not the only concern that we have."

Karen & Paul share techniques and advice for filling roles within a group.

[00:00:00] Karen: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals. 

[00:00:08] Paul: I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:00:10] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig.

[00:00:12] Paul: Each episode we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, who will do this? 

[00:00:20] Karen: So this is one of those questions that gets asked in every organization from time to time, sometimes often. And this so what we're getting to here is this is we're choosing a board.

[00:00:32] Karen: We're choosing an executive director. We're choosing a chair. We're choosing a treasurer. We're choosing team, a task force to take on a particular task that's unlimited. We're choosing a group to draft a new policy. Any number of things, right? There's a thing that needs to be done and we have to figure out who's gonna do it. And what we see as the most common way that this gets dealt with is we say, we need somebody to do this thing, who's willing. And then we wait until somebody raises their hand.

[00:01:01] Karen: And very often only one person raises their hand and we say, great, somebody's willing to do it. We're all good. Yay. And I think what Paul and I are going to try and explain today is we think you're not all good. We think this is not the right approach.

[00:01:17] Paul: Agreed. I mean, it is the right approach to some degree, which is to say it is important that in any large group or group of any size, you know, there are things that make sense to delegate responsibility for to subgroups to take care of. We've talked about that several times on the show before, where, you know, it doesn't make sense for the 50 of us to try and rewrite the policy handbook for this. We want a committee to go do that. And so we need to have the right people to go do that. Or we need one person who's going to go and negotiate the new lease on this thing. Right. So we want to delegate authority to someone or a group of people. That's a good move. Right? Absolutely. Right on.

[00:01:59] Paul: It's the process by which deciding who's going to do that, I think that we go oftentimes a little problematic in because willingness is actually an important part. You know, we often say, who's willing to do this, right? And we wait for awkwardly for someone to raise their hand. Willingness matters, but it is not the only concern that we have. And I've heard this a lot, particularly in volunteer groups and organizations where they're like, well, we're just happy to have somebody do it.

[00:02:25] Paul: And that leads you down all sorts of problematic roads. So what we wanna talk about is some of the problems that we've seen with just finding one person who's willing or the three people who are willing or taking all the people who are willing and putting them into this subgroup to go do a thing. What are some of the problems that we have with that? And then what are some alternatives? What might we do instead that are gonna have a better chance of giving us a group or a person that can actually do the thing we need them to do and succeed at whatever this task or job or role that we need them to take on is. 

[00:03:02] Karen: Yeah, and I'm gonna point out to one very particular piece of the scenario I just described that we see so often, which is even if we wanted to start with the question of just who was willing, which we're gonna say we wanna do more than that, but even within that, who's willing to do the task? is not the same as who's willing to raise their hand in a meeting and say they're willing to do the task. 

[00:03:25] Karen: So even that already gives us a bias that we don't want, which is to say people who are shy about raising their hands, people who are less inclined to speak up in a group, they almost never end up in those roles. And they're very often people who are very good for the kinds of roles we're talking about. And what we end up with instead is the same people who always raise their hand, who by the way, very often, are so overworked and so put upon and sort of mildly resentful that they have to do all the work because they're the only one who will raise their hand. 

[00:03:57] Karen: So aside from what we're about to say about all of the things about more than willingness that we want, I also want to say that the willingness to say that you're willing by raising your hand, even that is a filter that we really don't want a very dangerous filter in my mind. So we want to figure out, okay, if we're not going to do that which is what we've all seen done and we know how to do and we're all familiar with, well, then what? What can we do that will work? 

[00:04:25] Paul: And I think a number of the things that we're gonna say here need to be right-sized to sort of the complexity or the size of the task or the job or the role that you're asking. So we're gonna throw out some things that we've seen that work well, do the right amount of them for the sort of thing that you're trying to dig into. So for example, right, if,

If I've got, you know, I need to put together a subgroup that's going to, that's going to revise the governing documents for this particular organization, right? 

[00:04:53] Paul: We want to specify what the group is actually going to do, right? We want to say like, what we want is at our, you know, at our next meeting, we're going to want, you know, a report on the draft of the, and in a meeting after that, we're going to want to have a proposal that we could vote on, right? So we're kind of bounding. What is it that we want people, you know, what is the outcome we want to do?

[00:05:14] Paul: And we also want to be able to specify, what do we expect the people who are going to serve in this group to be doing, right? What are the qualifications that would make them good at serving well to achieve that? And so we want to be able to specify the outcome, again, in the right level of detail. When you're hiring an executive director for an organization, that's a very different level of description and laying out of qualifications than when you're asking someone to revise our policy on this other thing.

[00:05:45] Paul: Like, do the right level, spend the right amount of time specifying that. But the thing that a lot of people jump over, they ask for volunteers to do something, and they don't even, no one's clear about what they're actually signing up to do. And so the first thing that I think is really useful is, agree, like specify to some degree what it is you're asking them to do to create, to produce, what's the, the output of this thing look like? And what do you think would be qualities that would make someone good at that? And the types of people you want to attract to working on this?

[00:06:19] Karen: Yeah, and I will say a couple of downfalls that I've seen with that conversation is that for every role in every organization that I've ever heard about, we want people who are responsible and respectful and nice and good and dedicated to the organization. You don't have to say any of those things. Nope.

[00:06:37] Karen: I mean, there may be a particular task where something related to that is there. But in general, I'm going to encourage folks. What are the things that this task needs? So a treasurer needs to know something about how to do spreadsheets. It's very specific to the role and not sort of that broad. Well, we want somebody who's wonderful.

[00:06:58] Karen: Well, yeah, of course, we want somebody who's wonderful. But what does it mean to be wonderful? The one specific thing that I think also gets missed that feels like it's kind of like the wonderful thing, but it's actually not, is what level of trust is needed? So again, if the treasurer is writing checks, even if they're an accountant, if nobody's met them before yesterday, probably we don't put them in that role.

[00:07:24] Karen: If they're going to draft a policy that is going to go into effect on the basis of their recommendation, then they you can't have somebody there who's constantly upsetting other people in the group and that other people don't feel safe with. Like, what are the qualifications? Like, what is the level of trust? On the other hand, if you just need somebody who's going to, you know, draft a policy to bring it back for discussion, they don't have to be very trusted to do that, probably, if it's just coming back for discussion. 

[00:07:54] Karen: I mean, I think there are a lot of things or, or if somebody's, maybe they're super trustworthy, because they can have a lot of bias but they don't have any bias about the thing that's being laid out, then that's probably not a big deal. So, but just thinking about, can they be supported to have the authority that we're offering? We're saying this person is going to have the authority to do these things. 

[00:8:19] Karen: And if them acting in that because of past experiences, because of whatever is going to result in resentment all over the place, or they're gonna bring back a proposal and they're gonna be people who are just gonna discount it out of hand know, we know Paul's a terrible guy and I'm just going to oppose him every chance I get. Like if that's the relationship, then Paul can't be the one who writes that. It's not good for Paul, it's not good for anybody else. And so that trust, having the trust of the group thing can be an important criteria. And that's different than saying a nice guy that everybody likes. 

[00:08:50] Paul: Yeah. And that's because it's germane to the task at hand, right? It's relevant there. I've certainly ended up serving in those sorts of committees before where much of my qualification was not that I was the clearest writer, right, but because I could, I could listen deeply to different constituent groups and summarize their concerns even without agreeing with them. And that was often what was actually needed. And then there was also someone on the committee who felt very strongly. And like people wanted me on the committee to kind of counterbalance that. 

[00:09:25] Paul: So that but they didn't want to serve on the committee with that person. They knew they would get bulldozed. And so, and then, you know, and then we had a third person who was really good at the actual wordsmithing and crafting of the document and bringing stuff back. And so like as we could form the Voltron that we needed in order to actually get it done. But all of those things were about, you know, did we have the skills and knowledge that were relevant to our specific task? We would have been the wrong committee to do a different type of work. 

[00:09:56] Karen: Yeah, and I think one of the things you're hinting at there that I wanna state explicitly is, particularly when you're talking about a committee, there will be things that you want everybody on the committee to have that criteria. We want everybody to have experience of our community and know something about who we are.

[00:10:16] Karen: There will also be things that you just need represented. So you need one person who can write well. You need one person who knows the law around this thing. If that's a factor, you need one person who knows how to do a spreadsheet or whatever, but you don't need everybody to have that. So I've even done again, if you have the time and the, and the role is worth it. A criteria of list of in order to be on the team at all, you have to have this. And when we're done making the team, we need someone on the team to.

[00:10:45] Karen: And it may even be we need somebody who feels strongly in one direction about this thing, and we need somebody who feels strongly in the other direction because we need those voices represented. We don't need everybody who feels strongly. Right. But we need that range. So that that idea that it's not just a list of five people who are all good for the team. It's five people who have the various skills so that collectively they have everything that you need.

[00:11:14]  So again, for me, it's important to right size that amount of work that we're doing, right? For, you know, don't spend more than twenty minutes if this is a task force that's going to exist for three hours, right? Right. But, you know, if it's bigger and has a larger impact and is more important to your organization, to your group than you have, then do. Like spend, like be thoughtful about it. Be clear and craft about it. And then, once you have done that, right, you want to share that with the group, so that people are aware, because oftentimes we'll realize, you know, we said before, like, you know, we're asking, like, you know, who's willing to serve on this committee?

[00:11:49] Paul: And now there may be people who are thinking, well, I was before, but now that I see what this is actually doing, I'm not, right? There may be some people who are looking at it going, oh, I didn't think my skills would be useful in this group or in this role. But now that I see the criteria, I could see that maybe they are actually are.

[00:12:07] Paul: But we still don't recommend doing the, all right, whoever's the first person to raise their hand or the people who raise their hands the fastest, that you just put them into the group. So what we wanna talk about now is, after we've gotten clear about what it is we're trying to do, what the criteria for serving in this role or in this group are, then what do we do? That doesn't just put us right back in the same trap we were in before, but now we're clearer. 

[00:12:34] Karen: Yeah, and I think, exactly. This is kind of the order. What are we looking for? How do we know that we found it? And then as much as we would love to put it in a newsletter, we're looking for board members. And that's a good thing to do because that you will get some people. There's no reason not to do that. But what I'm going to say is I'm not going to assume that putting it out in a newsletter or announcing it in a big group meeting or all that kind of thing. 

[00:13:02] Karen: That's just throw it out to the group that that's gonna generate what we're looking for. Generally somebody, and again, right size it, but it could be a nominating committee, it could be a member who just happens to care about this thing and wants it done well, it can be casual or not. But usually the way that really good people land in positions that are well chosen for them is because somebody calls them up or has a one-on-one conversation with them and says, I'm just been thinking we need this role filled and I think you'd be really good for it.

[00:13:34] Karen: I'll say that another way, a way that I did in one organization that I founded and was pretty involved in getting those leadership positions filled for, whenever a new member joined the organization, I met with them and said, what would you like to contribute? How would you like to connect? What kind of role would interest you? Okay, maybe you'd be interested in taking on this thing that we have open and needed, but that personal touch, that getting to know and connecting with what's the skill set that we need and matching it, very often people who didn't think they were up for leadership or they thought they were too new or various reasons, in the one-on-one conversation, you can get some interest there.

[00:14:17] Karen: And so I think we can talk, we'll talk about processes for one, as a group, how do we talk about who do we pick? But realistically, I wanna say, if you skip the one-on-one thing ahead of the meeting where it gets selected, you likely will miss a good candidate. 

[00:14:36] Paul: And this is one of those places where systemic bias comes in, which is also the thing that we're fighting against with the who's most comfortable raising their hand in front of a group of people to volunteer a thing for and sort of recognizing, in particular, who are the people who are likely to be good at the job but are unlikely to volunteer for it, right, or unlikely to do that in front of a group of people. 

[00:14:59] Paul: And it's not promising them the role, right? It's not saying you will be part of this group. It's reaching out and saying, I'd like to encourage you to do this. I'd like you to think about, and here's why I think you might be a good candidate for this or why you may be a good thing as part of this. This is probably ten years old at this point, but there was a point inside Google when they were actually looking at their manager promotion process inside their engineering group, and it was a self-nominating process.

[00:15:28] Paul: People had to put themselves up for promotion in order to actually even be considered. And anybody could, but you had to go through the process of doing that. And they discovered, unsurprisingly, a substantial gender disparity between the degree of self-nomination. And it turned out the intervention that they ended up doing was actually just their head of people operations, Laszlo Bock, crafted an email that went out to women and non-binary individuals and basically said, as you know, the window is opening up we'd like to encourage you to think about whether or not this is something you'd like to do. 

[00:16:05] Paul: It actually wasn't even personalized in any particular way. And just from that intervention, they saw the numbers that gender disequity start to change pretty substantially. So it's like recognizing where are there hidden structural barriers that may be preventing people from saying, yeah, I'm willing to do this and doing something, obviously in a group that's smaller, where you can do that one-on-one and it can be more personalized, it can be even more powerful.

[00:16:34] Paul But even in a larger group, there's things you can do, but it requires you to be aware of, I mean, in any group like this, when you ask who's willing to serve on this thing, anybody in the group can probably tell you who's gonna raise their hand for any particular thing. And if you're realizing that's not necessarily the people that you want, start to think about who are the people who you would want and how do you encourage them to put their hat in there? 

[00:16:58] Karen: Yep. So I think this might be the moment to give what I think is the gold standard for when you're really wanting to invest some time and energy into this. So what we've been saying all along is right size it for what you have. But I'm thinking of a time that I used this process when there was a very contentious thing in a group that, that a new policy was needed and people felt very strongly about what it should and shouldn't say and there was not agreement. 

[00:17:26] Karen: And it needed to be followed, like it was gonna need the support of the group. So how do you get out of this like deadlock that's been building for years? Okay, so now we need a team that's gonna write a policy and this one, it's worth taking all the time that it takes to do a really thorough selection process and know that you've got people that can draft a policy that will work for the whole community. This is no small task. 

[00:17:51] Karen: So for something like that, or something like choosing an ED or a really, somebody who's gonna be in a strong leadership position that's really meaningful for the next four years or the next year, like those really significant things, this kind of process. And then I'll say for smaller things, you can take pieces of this process and I think put it together. You don't have to follow the whole thing.

[00:18:12] Karen: And this is drafted in the land of sociocracy. I will just say this is the standard sociocracy leadership selection or role selection as it's called. And so starting with exactly what Paul led us off with, with the criteria, what's the role? What's this person or group of people going to be doing? And what criteria, how do we know that this is the right person? So get that defined. And those are both consented things, that the whole group.

[00:18:39] Karen: You talk about, you come up with a list and then the group consents, yes. Those are the criteria. And we're agreeing that as we move forward in the selection process, those are the things we're gonna talk about. So if the criteria is they need to be good with numbers and they need to be good with spreadsheets and they need to have good clear communication, and then we go around and we've all agreed, that's the criteria. 

[00:19:03] Karen: And then we go around and someone says, well, I think Sally should do it because she's new to the group and needs some encouragement, that's not the criteria that we agreed to, right? Like we're outside that. So either we need to go back and revisit the criteria, hopefully not, or we need to say, okay, we're going to stick to the criteria. That's what we all consented to. And then you do what's a nominations round. And the in-person, everybody does with the paper, you can adapt it for online, but basically everybody on a piece of paper writes their name and the name of the person that they're nominating for the role. 

[00:19:36] Karen: They pass it into the facilitator, who reads them out and says, okay, Paul, you nominated Sally. What are your reasons? And Paul says his reasons for nominating Sally. And we go to the next person. And, and the idea here is that you have committed to who you want to nominate without being influenced by everybody else yet. So we don't lose those people. Yeah. You don't have that first round where somebody says, Paul, oh, well, Paul's obviously the guy because he's amazing. Well, I'm not going to nominate Sally because yeah, Paul, obviously you want Sally's name to get spoken.

[00:20:08] Karen: And so you do the first round like that. And then in the second round, people having heard all of that have the option to change. And somebody says, oh, well I nominated Paul the first time, but after I heard about Sally's background with this type of work, I'm gonna change my nomination and say Sally. And so you do that, or people can say, no, I'm still sticking with my nomination for my same reasons or whatever. So you do that round. And having done those two rounds, and you could repeat that if you felt like you needed to. 

[00:20:41] Karen: This is a facilitator call, but the facilitator, based on their understanding of the criteria, all of the discussion around how we said we were gonna choose this and what they've heard about what skills each person has, they make a proposal for how we fill the role. So the proposal is Paul is gonna do this role because I heard.

[00:21:08] Karen: You know, these people said these things about him or whatever, like, but it's all the criteria. This is not a majority vote. We don't say I nominate, you know, I propose that we select Paul for this role because five out of nine of us thought that was the best idea. That's never the basis. The basis is always because based on what the group has decided we need, this is the person that I think will fit it best.

[00:21:34] Karen: Nobody likes to be the facilitator that makes that call. Actually, it's a, you know, that's one of my least favorite things to do when I'm in the facilitator role, because you have to really be reading the group. And then you do a consent round for that proposal. So if the group, somebody can't live with that person or think something was missed, they can object. But otherwise you consent to that. And that's the person or the group that will that will do that thing. 

[00:22:00] Karen: And if it's a group, you can add an additional step where you've got the criteria, you've made the nominations and your criteria has that, everybody has to have this. So, okay, now we have a pool of everybody who has those things and how do we fill the specific, we need somebody who has this and somebody has this and somebody has this. And that can end up being a couple of people go and put together the team and then bring that proposal for who the team will be. But it's that same kind of thing. And, and the last thing I want to put in this is when you're choosing a leader, in that consent round or a role, a one person role, in that consent round, the last person to consent is the one who's being selected. 

[00:22:39] Karen: The idea being that you have the whole conversation about who has the skillset and who has the ability and they hear all of that before they decide whether this works for them. And so you really don't want to let that get sort of sidestep that process by the very beginning saying, well, who's available? who could be willing, we don't want to know who thinks they're willing before they've heard the whole conversation. We want to wait until they've heard it all and then they get to decide. 

[00:23:08] Paul: What I love about that whole process is in particular that last part that turns this whole thing on its head where, you know, the question of, you know, if we just ask, you know, who's willing to do this and whoever raises their hand first, right, that is in some ways like the last question we ask is, are you? having heard all of this, willing to do this. And it's sort of mind boggling the first couple of times you run into it. 

[00:23:36] Paul: And then you think about it and you go, and particularly if you see it in action, you go, oh, actually that makes a whole lot of sense to overcome a lot of the challenges that we've been talking about here today. So just to track through where we've been, the challenge that we run into when we're asking people to effectively self-nominate for who's gonna do a particular thing, right? Who's gonna serve in a role, who's going to serve in a group or a committee, where we do rightly want to delegate some authority off to an individual or a group of people. 

[00:24:08] Paul: How do we do that? The challenges that we just ask for in a meeting, who's willing to raise their hand, and then we'll make decision in some way, that runs into a lot of challenges, which is rooted in the fact that your ability to serve effectively in this role or on this group is not necessarily correlated with your willingness to raise your hand and volunteer in public. So what are things that we can do that actually get the right people into the right roles? 

[00:24:36] Paul: And the first thing we said is, you know, you wanna lay out your criteria of what is this group is actually gonna accomplish, what is this person gonna accomplish, what are the qualifications that people need to have in order to do that? Right size that process to the size of the work that you're gonna do, but then make that available to people. Let people know, here's what we're looking for, here's what we need.

[00:24:57] Paul: Recognize where the biases in your process in terms of self-nomination may be showing up and preventing the right people from putting themselves forward and do what you can to sort of nudge in the right ways that may be reaching out one-on-one to encourage people, hey, I think that you would be well qualified to serve in this role because of this thing, or you'd be a good person to have as part of this group. So that when we get to the point of having the conversation about who's gonna do it, they're already primed, they're already thinking about it, there and that they may be more willing than they were before, because they may be thinking of themselves as more qualified to do it than they would have been in the absence of things. 

[00:25:34] Paul: And then you need to have an actual decision making process for how you're going to decide who's going to do it. People need to be clear about what that process is. And Curren's laid out a very thorough, very detailed process that is, as she kind of says, the gold standard for this, like making sure that we are all really convinced that we're getting the right person, the right people in the right places, scale that up or down, that whole thing, depending on the needs of the situation you're in and the abilities of the group that you're working with. 

[00:26:03] Paul: But ultimately, we don't wanna just leave this to a question of who's willing to raise their hand in front of the whole group, because that's rarely the right way to get the best people to do things in any particular organization. 

[00:26:16] Karen: I think that's gonna do it for us today. I will put a note in the episode notes with a reference where you can get that process in writing if you want.

[00:26:24] Karen: And until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig. 

[00:26:27] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.