11 230913 Who Is Responsible For Creating Healthy Workplace Culture?

11:26PM Sep 20, 2023

Speakers:

Meredith Holley

Megan Goering Mellin

Keywords:

responsibility

responsible

hierarchy

workplace

workplace culture

create

work

healthy

accountability

athena

dog

care

meant

situation

person

feel

experience

job

environment

top

Welcome back, where today we are going to discuss a topic I had been excited about for weeks. The question of responsibility, specifically, who is responsible for creating healthy workplace cultures? I am so excited to talk about this topic today. Because when a healthy workplace culture is there, everybody's happy. And when it's not there, we start pointing fingers. And some of us want to take sole responsibility for trying to see it through and make it work. And others of us really wish everybody else would be doing that, or someone specifically. And either way, sometimes it feels intractable, like what you want just doesn't matter. So I'm really excited to get your take on this today, Meredith. And I guess I just want to start out by asking, I'll just put it to you directly. Who is responsible for creating healthy workplace cultures?

I mean, I think it's both a more simple question. And a lot of times we think of and a more complicated question than we've been trained to deal with. Most of us live in workplaces work in workplaces, in organizations that have hierarchy built in. And so we say, okay, there's a certain amount of responsibility that this person who is the boss takes, there's a certain amount of responsibility, who, for a person who's a middle manager, there's a certain amount of responsibility who's just a day for the person who's just a day worker. And then we sort of expect workplaces to run with the boss taking overall responsibility, you know, and then down the hierarchy. In reality, I think that that's not how most workplaces play out. And I think a lot of us, especially those of us who have been socialized as women, are taught to take a certain amount of emotional responsibility for our workplace, some people are raised to take a certain amount of hard work responsibility staying late, you know, because of our socialization, we're individually trained to take more or less responsibility than what a simple hierarchy structures. The way that I look at it, though. And what simplifies it for me is that ultimately, I'm responsible for my career, and my career is worth doing hard things for some people really value their personal experience of life more than their careers. And so I think that like, you can also say that as I'm responsible for my life, I'm responsible for my feelings in my life, I'm responsible for my relationships, and for me, and how I show up. And sometimes that does spill over into choosing to take responsibility for other people and other other people's experiences in the workplace. But when I think about myself, being responsible for my career and my experience in life, I think that sometimes I'm willing to step up and take more responsibility for a healthy workplace culture in general, then if I am expecting someone, even someone who's assigned more responsibility than me to take responsibility for healthy workplace culture when they're not capable of it. Yeah. And

they're, I think, when you say responsibility, you don't mean like blame or shouldering burden, or appointing yourself, the drill sergeant of whatever, or the governess of whatever aspect, you mean, more a sense of responsibility, which is like activating and claiming your own agency, and viewing yourself as a shaper of the environment who isn't just going to be acted upon. But it's also going to preserve your own space and authority to act, whether or not that authority comes directly from the hierarchy.

Yeah, I think that when we look at healthy workplace culture, that means different things to different people. So for example, I've been working with a couple of people recently, who both agree that they and this is in a mediation context, who both agree that they want the workplace to be a quiet, respectful place. It means really different things to these two people. I'm doing another mediation or I just finished one up, where two people agreed that a successful lobbying campaign is the ultimate goal, but meant really different things to them what the specifics of that looked like, right, so healthy, and so for one person in a recent mediation, health meant a healthy workplace experience meant really solid boundaries between work and personal life. Like I do not take my work home. I don't answer phones after 5pm I take I have very solid boundaries about work and personal life for the person in the same mediation, same ultimate work goals. The healthy workplace experience meant feeling emotional compassion, and immediate responsive support from people on his team. He was willing to talk to people late at night, if he felt it was supportive, you know, and it was very different ways to look at what healthy workplace culture looks like. And I think that there's a lot of really effective tools to look at, where both of those experiences are valid. Like I like to do a lot of personality tests and astrology and human design and look at who people really are in these spaces as unique individuals, but also how do we work together collectively. And so but I think that we have to know what one person experiences is healthy is different than what another person that experiences it's healthy. But when I think about it, this falls under the accountability pillar of empowered communication. And, and accountability is always math. It's always, what is the nameable label visible result that you're either getting or you're not getting. So how do you operationalize what health looks like in the workplace. And if I'm not getting what looks healthy, to me, what my experience of health is, how, what's the next action step I can take? What is the next way I can treat myself so that I can actually create that.

I love that, I think that sometimes we get and I love the different views points on health. Even if we have the same words around a goal, you know, the way that we would measure that or assess that can be different and that can create, it can create some conflicts, you know, where you wouldn't necessarily expect it. I think the other thing you're speaking to here that is insightful, from my perspective is, sometimes when I hear the term responsibility, I get this sense of like moralistic, like, oh, it's better to be more responsible, or this thing that's like, either kind of good, you know, are you good girl, you're good worker better than worse and like, and it also tends to come with some shaming, like, if you are responsible, then great, but if you don't like your outcomes, maybe you should have been more responsible, which is actually very different than the way I hear you speaking about what it means to be responsible, which is more to count yourself in as an agent of action. Like when you talk about people being responsible for their boundaries on time and off time at work or being responsible for the team, maybe they are going to choose to be available after hours. In some situations. I'm hearing responsibility more as a matter of commitment, like what are we committed to have accountability? Like you said, that's our pillar, which is like the task separation, the task math, what are we doing? What are we not doing, and willingness to act? So kind of rolling that up to our question, like, who is responsible for healthy workplace cultures? This is less a matter of like, should you be being more responsible than you are, like, take a hard look and see if you're an unfit human? No, no, no, that's not we're talking about. But I think there is an opportunity here, where if you're in a hierarchy, and you know that hierarchy, you basically given the role to defer, right, like the deference to people higher in the hierarchy than you just because that's what the hierarchy and FERS doesn't mean that you can't claim for yourself. renewed commitment to the things that you care about the things you need renewed accountability, I'm willing to account for what I am allowing and not allowing, and then that willingness to act like you can take that for yourself.

Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that like, I mean, I think I like to think of like, I'm gonna get to the point here in a second, but it might be a little bit of a roundabout journey. So so. So I like to think of our bodies as like, the first animal that we're ever given to care for. And then, you know, we get a puppy maybe when we're a kid, and then that's the second animal that wherever, and then maybe we grow up and we have children, and we have another little body that we care for. And I think that in some ways, I think of responsibility as like creating that safe container for for at least ourselves to thrive, you know, at least our bodies to thrive, at least our souls to thrive. And like I'm responsible you and I both have dogs and so my dog's name is Pema and I am responsible for Pema, but I'm not like whoa, I better feed Pema today. I'm like, did I remember to feed her if she okay? What a cute little dog she deserves a treat and she gets a lot of choose in our house because I'm responsible to create a thriving to invite You're meant for perma. And so like, that's kind of how I think about it is like we have these little bodies that we've been given. We have pets that we've been given we have co workers we've been given. How do we create safe containers, at least for ourselves to thrive in?

Love app. So on this specific topic, which definitely came back around, but I'm going to stay out there with you and come back around on my own. I quit my dog. You did? I did. Athena melon has been re homed. She is she's on her journey she's living. She's moving into her next best life. But I think that strangely, it's doing the work for me here where I'm like, Huh, no, because actually there there is some responsibility. We have a 21 month your month old. I don't love when we say month year old but like sometimes it just slips out. We have 21 month olds, Orion, who is getting even more rambunctious and his interaction with small dogs. We have another baby on the way in February, God willing, assuming everything goes hopefully about that, and it and God love Athena melon, like she was a rescue. She came to us when we were Foster's, we adopted because she really freaking needed somebody that was not going to be a multi layer interface with the health system, because her spine was in a whole state and she was maybe going to be paralyzed and all stuff, couldn't get medical care. And we were calling the foster agency and they were having a call the medic, it was like this terrible thing. And we were like, look, what this creature needs is it needs one of one directly responsible party. And at that time, it was to two of us, we like had this extremely calm house, it was the safe container. And we were set up for that. And then here we came, it's like it just it fell out of alignment. It wasn't quite right. She was never around kids, she had been a dog in the wild of nature before she kind of ended up in the you know, people care system. And it she came so far. But also our environment was not the right environment for her. So we having Athena was was a challenge in some ways, because we were like, are we being bad, it really was the same topic

because we have responsibility there and you want the you want Athena to be safe. And you have this duty to Orion, who is a baby whose little body you need to care for. And you need to care for Athena so that she doesn't accidentally bite a baby and they need to be put down. And so like when I think about responsibility, it is not a full lifetime commitment of I owe this organization, my free labor. And I need to prove myself like it's not a but it is a blood pact. Yes, yes. But it's care, it's care for ourselves. It's care for the other people in our environment, I think that we are individuals. And we're also collective beings like we're also we're also connected to each other. And so what we do healthfully for ourselves impacts other people. And sometimes, sometimes the healthiest way to be responsible in that space is to separate sometimes it's to adjust. Sometimes it's to stay as we are and say this is who I'm going to be and you have to decide what you're going to do around it.

At the end of the day. It is one of those bring your own context situations. And I think this underscore this elaborate dog metaphor, which I hope everybody's taken by I feel personally tickled thanks for bearing with us yell through that pa Z interval on toddlers programming. But I think that it shows that when it comes to what responsibility looks like for creating a healthy workplace culture, healthy can differ get person to person responsibility, and what it looks like to be being responsible can differ. Two people could both be embracing responsibility for creating a healthy, healthy workplace culture like a healthy library culture and one for one of those that looks like a vibrant space of interaction and for each other that looks like quiet. And so there can still be conflict between two people who are being responsible for creating a healthy workplace culture. But what we're trying to say here is that if you regardless of where you are in a hierarchy, we want to open the pathway and point to the pathway where you can feel and claim a sense of empowerment, to own your own experience of health in the workplace. Does that mean the toxic stuff is not happening around, you know, it can be really, really hard out there. But we want to hold open this space where we can learn to approach it in a way that is empowering to us so that we can do our job of stewarding our own career even if it's not going to mean Being at the same workplace forever.

And I think, you know, we might legitimately believe that the person at the top of the hierarchy should be responsible to create a safe and healthy work environment, that might be nice if they were,

wouldn't it because there is so much difference in hierarchy. And when that happens, it really makes it really makes a difference. So if you're at the top of the hierarchy, like follow your instincts that matters to do their job,

and poppin Yeah, and I think I think try, do your best, make mistakes. If you're at the top like, do the best you can listen, learn how to hold space, learn how to take effective action, become culturally competent, understand psychological safety in the workplace, take do all this learning. If you are at the top, absolutely feedback, cry, don't hide from problems. Yes, relish feedback, take, look forward to the next problem someone brings you. And if you're not the person in the top, you could legitimately believe it's unfair to have to take responsibility for things that I thought it was unfair when I was experiencing sexual harassment that I had to deal with that on top of my work, and that is valid, it was legitimate. It wasn't effective. For me, though I didn't from that space of thinking it was unfair. It did not help me take action to protect myself, it actually undermined me. And so we, we kind of talked about this before we started recording, but I used to say to people when Donald Trump was President, we could sit around all day and think Donald Trump shouldn't be president. And usually what that leads to is watching a lot of Netflix and drinking a lot of wine, and

suffering, hypothetically not like our personal stories or anything. Yeah, no one, no one's telling their personal stories

here. But instead, I think we can shift to Donald Trump is president, and I can do something about that. And I'm going to do the next thing available to me to share why that is problematic to me why that harms me. with other people, I'm going to take action. And in the meantime, I'm going to take care of myself, you know, like I think that struggling with reality, doesn't change reality. But we can take action to impact our realities.

But you're not discounting the unfairness in that situation. It's just that we're not getting, we don't have to, if it's serving you, great. If it's not serving you, we can do both, right, we can acknowledge the systemic issues with it. And we can get support and carve out space, where we're going to think thoughts that are both aware of oppression and of the systems that we're operating in. And that are promoting us being able to use and claim the power at our disposal to pursue a more empowering relationship with the situation at hand. It's like, is it an emergency? If there is a fire? Yes, it is. But if we only think this is an emergency, it can send us into like a total tailspin, thinking there isn't a fire when there is a fire. Like that's not what we're saying. You can't just count it. But we need to be like got it. Fire. Now what fire what next? And it actually kind of reminds me of post traumatic growth. Have you heard this stuff? Like there's Yes, Tronic stress, which is like, unfortunately ends up in this spiral. We've we've both been through it. That's like Why me, which has a lot feelings associated with sometimes you have to go through that terrain, but posted when post traumatic stress and the research switches into post traumatic growth. It's more of this, like, what now? Or what next. And it's not better, you're not a better person if you're there. But that format of deploying your own brain for your own benefit may lead you to be able to muster action that can lead you into a less harmful situation. Should that be your job? Of course not. We don't believe that. However we are we want to point to these pathways because when we end up being stuck or feeling stuck in these situations, sometimes it can be bleak, and it doesn't have to stay intractably bleak, you know, until you collapse, like we got to build another road out

of there. And I think it can be equally harmful it can be equally bad. If we also like we don't have to suffer to prove that something needs to change. Something can need to change something can create external results we don't want and we're allowed to still nurture ourselves and care for ourselves in the midst of that and take really strong action courageous action to change it. I one time somebody interviewed me and she said, Well, what if someone's attacked down an alley sorry, this is going to be a trigger warning situation but What if somebody is attacked down an alley? And then they walk away from that saying, like, I feel great about myself, I don't feel traumatized, then aren't we saying that that's not bad? And my position is no, it's still bad, we still socially have an agreement. You don't attack people down an alley. The person who got attacked is the last one that should bear the burden that should bear the shame that should bear any of the emotional ramifications. Although it is very typical to do that, it doesn't mean that something's gone wrong. Like it means you have a human brain if you've had that happen. And how do we ease that up? How do we say you get to know that you're amazing, you get to know that you're worthy, you get to know you are a full, like bright shining, wonderful human, and you encountered an abuser,

which wasn't personal to you. It's nothing that you did. So then after Biden, why, right and might want that to be stuck inside our own identities as though it had something to do with us, as opposed to like, send the thing just happened on that day, a tree fell on my house, it's not that I'm like a tree house tree fall victim. I mean, it could be a tree fall victim. But it's like, it wasn't about me, the thing just happened. Okay, so I think that as we sort of draw this together, when we ask who is responsible for creating healthy workplace cultures? But really what we're saying is it? Ideally, it's everyone is taking responsibility. But really, we're asking the question, who's taking responsibility, who's choosing the commitment, who is claiming the accountability, who is deciding on the willingness to act, it can be really meaningful when it's up in a hierarchy, like, let's not forget that. And if you are lower in a hierarchy, and you feel like it's your job to just defer, it actually can work to pick up the mantle yourself to say, I will be responsible for my career and my own well being. And as we do that, we don't have to just suffer immensely and say, Look how much I'm suffering. Now, you should really act, right. That's what you said. And instead, we can come forward and say, you know, what, I am really committed to x, I'm really committed to a healthy workplace culture in this environment. And for me, what that looks like is I'm just not available between five and 6pm, when I do childcare pickups, and so it's not going to work for me to have this conversation at this time. I understand this is when it's coming up. This is the third time we've had this conversation, I regret to inform you that if we have this conversation of their time, I am still not going to be able to shift this. What would it take to find this another method to get this need met? Or what would it find? would it take for you to find another resource if something happens at 4:58pm,

or even so that's like the boundary side of it, it's sometimes on the accountability side, it can even be working towards a positive. So a lot of clients that I've had who have ADHD have dopamine deficiency, as as just a physiological experience. And so a lot of times what they do what I see them do with supervisors and say, Hey, I'm going to need more positive feedback than other people do. And I'm gonna need more FaceTime than then you might have experienced with other people, can we set up a schedule where I know I'm going to be getting positive feedback. And every time you think you see something that you like that I do, can can we create a system to reward that, because I know that that's important for me for thriving for the mediation folks that I just did. One of that, like they had this very sweet conversation, like very touching conversation this week. And one of them said, you know, I really is really important to me to feel supported. And it's really important to me to hear that I'm supported. And the other one said, you know, I don't want this to feel shallow. But I think you're amazing. I think the work that you do is amazing. I think that you are just outstanding in your job. But he wouldn't have said that, if he hadn't been asked to say it because he thought it was obvious. And so sometimes we can ask for that extra thing. That would be really spectacular for us. Like, if you see something you like that I do, will you remember to tell me Can we commit to doing that for each other? It's not cheesy, it is important.

And we want everyone to feel valid or like validated to train and to program the environments around this, you know, honoring sovereignty to be those safe containers for our spirits and bodies to thrive. If that doesn't feel accessible, you are not alone. And we just talked about this before as well. Obviously, I feel like that's when people really like we need like I have been there where I'm like, Oh no, I cannot do there's nothing I can do. That's a real estate that we all get in. I was like, man, we need to go therapy and Marathas like I mean or coaching though, so we don't usually talk about this on the podcast. But that's other one other option that everybody should just know exists. If you find yourself in a place where you're like, I really can't do anything, like I need to figure out what you know what what advice? Sure like, is this actually the leaf moment Right? Like, do I actually need to move? Or is this my brain caught in a in a spiral? In power communication coaching is the thing that you can do Mariska Mary goes, I, ya know, I'm happy to work with people who just were they, there's nothing that they can do. And I was like, Oh, my God, that like freaks me out so much. I don't know how to handle my own self when I get into that state. But I just I wanted to, as we're wrapping up here, I just wanted to call that out. That Meredith Holley is a person who is not afraid to sit with people who are in the bleakest state, and that way of just not seeing anything that they can do. And sometimes she can do that.

You just need someone to help you sometimes I'm

looking at it with you. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us today on power communication. We hope for many more conversations about responsibility and accountability in the future without any of the shame that usually comes with these topics. Let us know what you think. If you think that we're totally off base here, if you think we should have a different spin. If you have a challenge or a spicy question of some kind, get in touch with us, Meredith, how can people reach out

they can go to Aris resolution.com/story.

Let us know how it lands with you. We look forward to seeing you next time on power communication.