{"id":2580,"date":"2010-12-21T16:01:56","date_gmt":"2010-12-22T00:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/?p=2580"},"modified":"2010-12-21T16:01:56","modified_gmt":"2010-12-22T00:01:56","slug":"moving-toward-an-egalitarian-work-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/21\/moving-toward-an-egalitarian-work-place\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving Toward an Egalitarian Work Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In everything I write and everything I do I am all about calling out and promoting our societal transition from hierarchical to more egalitarian institutions and practices. I do not stop in these efforts at my workplace, and am pleased to report that my work environment has a lot of egalitarian features, thanks to the efforts of my boss, many of my co-workers and myself. Following up on my piece from back in July, \u201cMuch More and Much Less than a Boss\u201d<\/strong><\/a>, I want to call out some of the aspects of that effort.
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Focusing on Making Others Successful<\/strong>
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\nI approach my work now with a total focus on doing whatever I can do to make my teammates and my internal \u201ccustomers\u201d successful. I even explicitly ask this now of my boss or my co-workers when I am brought in to a new project effort.
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\nAs one of the older (chronologically at least) members of the team, I feel I play an important role modeling this sort of behavior, particularly for our newer or younger team members who may be used to more hierarchical and perhaps more ego-involved work environments.
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\nFollowing Good Egalitarian Meeting Process<\/strong>
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\nIn meetings that I lead (which are generally conference calls rather than face to face) I always follow principles that enhance the \u201ccircle of equals\u201d context with me as \u201cpeer facilitator\u201d, and maximize the effectiveness of meetings including…
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\n1. Facilitating with a humility that I have been ceded this role by the other meeting participants and that in return I will do my best to keep the meeting as short as possible, on topic, and through the complete meeting agenda if possible.
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\n2. Encouraging everyone’s active participation, including doing \u201cgo-rounds\u201d where you do a roll-call for everyone on the call to speak briefly to the agenda item at issues, and taking items of contention (particularly between a subset of the meeting participants) \u201coff-line\u201d to be discussed further in another venue.
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\n3. Not using my position as the meeting chair to pass judgment on the other participants or wield an authority over them, other than assertively keeping the meeting on agenda if necessary.
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\nEverybody has their horror stories about meetings that seem to go on forever with people seeming to talk on just to hear themselves speak. In contrast to that, I have found that a well run meeting, that allows everyone to speak (briefly) but is moved crisply through its agenda by the facilitator, can instead energize the meeting participants.
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\nI am happy to see that my boss follows similar principles, while my co-workers have varying skill levels in this area. When my co-workers participate in a meeting that I am leading, I have an opportunity to model it for them.
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\nMoving Beyond Competition<\/strong>
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\nI am blessed to be in a work environment where we are not judged on how we do relative to each other but how we do in collaboration with each other. It’s not about me, about my ego, or my stature relative to others within the organization. My teammates and boss approach their participation the same way.
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\nAnd our boss does his part by not playing favorites, and by focusing on actions and behavior (rather than the people taking those actions or exhibiting those behaviors) when calling out his thoughts on areas that need improvement.
\n
\nShifting the Ownership to Internal Customers<\/strong>
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\nSince our team provides services to our internal sales and marketing departments (our \u201ccustomers\u201d as it were), part of the whole facilitative egalitarian thing is to empower our internal customers to direct the efforts on their own behalf rather than us \u201cexperts\u201d telling them what they need. Since in the real world they don’t always know what they need it turns into more of a partnership, where we jointly develop new business processes and the updated systems that support those processes.
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\nManagers as Resources not Order-Givers<\/strong>
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\nThis is the reality of \u201cturning the org chart upside down\u201d, something I have read or heard for more than a decade in books and seminars on the latest trends in management. In my opinion, it is evidence \u201con the ground\u201d of the humble beginnings of a larger cultural transition from patriarchy to partnership, from hierarchy to a circle of equals. This is all about empowering the \u201cworker bees\u201d to make decisions and proactively address issues rather than the traditional \u201ccommand and control\u201d directive management of people \u201cunderneath\u201d you on the org chart. Your managers and directors are there to escalate the issues that are beyond your scope to address, or provide backup when you need it.
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\nIn my life… I frame my efforts, whether at my workplace, the volunteer work I do in the community, or with my kids as a parent, as one small step toward dismantling a 5000-year-old hierarchical superstructure for society that has become archaic and is now holding us back from fully moving forward in this third millennium of the Common Era. (See my posts, \u201cThe Chalice and the Blade\u201d <\/strong><\/a>and \u201cChallenging Patriarchy\u201d<\/strong><\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In everything I write and everything I do I am all about calling out and promoting our societal transition from hierarchical to more egalitarian institutions and practices. I do not stop in these efforts at my workplace, and am pleased to report that my work environment has a lot of egalitarian features, thanks to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1269,1267,1268],"class_list":["post-2580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-context","tag-egalitarian-work-practices","tag-working","tag-workplace"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2580"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2585,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2580\/revisions\/2585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}