There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals.
— IDOWU KOYENIKAN
A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.
— WENDELL BERRY
I started this book with the story of three people, Joan Smith, Barry Jones, and Fatima Mohammed, and their meeting at the Munchester Industries holiday party. The coincidental meeting of these characters at the party points to the reality and the promise of organizations as a source of belonging in our world today. At that moment, the three are confronted with their differences. Yet at the same time they are confronted with the reality that despite those dissimilarities, they have to come together on a daily basis and work together toward the common goals of their company.
One of the few places where people from different backgrounds come together and have to live and operate side by side is in the workplace. We don’t always get to choose who sits in the office or the cubicle next to us. We generally don’t get to choose the people we have to work with, the people we team up with on projects, and the people we see every day in the hallways. In that sense the workplace has, for many people replaced other social institutions as our main place of belonging. We identify ourselves, at least to some degree, by what we do and where we do it. We often form relationships with the people we work with that extend past the end of the workday. The workplace has the potential to build bridges to belonging by bringing together bonded groups and helping them bridge with each other, providing people with a sense of belonging that cuts across the areas of difference that we’ve examined.
That is not to say that workplaces are inherently great places. Many are still very difficult and have their own tribalism, race and gender biases, and many other issues that make them anything but ideal. Yet my own experience, after having spent the better part of the past thirty-five years working as a consultant with businesses in forty-eight of the fifty states and more than forty other countries, has been that workplace environments have the potential to orient people toward working across differences more than anyplace else we have available.
It is not unusual for a healthy workplace culture to be described as a “family-like environment,” generally meaning that employees actually know and care about each other. I’d like to offer an alternative to that because I don’t believe that “family” is the best metaphor to use in describing a healthy workplace. Families, for the most part, do not choose to be together. They are put together by the accident of birth, or because one of our relatives created a relationship. Many families have a great deal of dysfunction to them. I’m not sure that “like a family” is always the highest state of being for a workplace environment.
Additionally, families are generally, although not exclusively, homogeneous. The greater diversity of the workforce is a factor that has proven to improve business performance, as well as to provide a place for people who are very different to have to find a way to work together. This is why embracing diversity at work is important. The challenge is that greater diversity, in a structure or system that is not prepared to support it, can yield increased tension among employees. All of this supports the notion that it is in an organization’s best interest to learn how to structurally and systemically embrace belonging within an increasingly diverse workforce.
I believe that a more appropriate metaphor for the workplace is that of a community. One dictionary defines community as “(1) a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common; (2) a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals; (3) a group of interdependent organisms of different species growing or living together in a specified habitat.”1
I see community very much the way Scott Peck defines it: “If we are going to use the word meaningfully we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own.’”2 I am not being a Pollyanna and suggesting that all workplaces are like that. My own experience has shown that even with the best of intentions, maintaining a healthy work environment requires constant hard work. But the workplace offers a modern hope for creating places of belonging for people in which they can come together and fulfill a mission. Our work relationships, on the whole, cut across race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. They force us to collaborate with people who have more or less education than we do and who earn more or less money. We work next to people who are of different ages and who have different family situations and different politics. In all of it, we have to find a way to be successful in pursuing our goals and objectives. In that sense, the workplace offers the impetus and the opportunity for community and belonging to exist.
Major corporations are recognizing the reality that a healthier organizational culture creates a healthier work environment, which creates healthier, happier, more productive employees. Organizations such as Aetna, Google, Target, Goldman Sachs, General Mills, and Intel, among dozens of others, are offering mindfulness training to help their employees learn to deal with stress and be able to be more focused at work. Twenty-two percent of companies currently offer some kind of meditation training at work, and another 21 percent plan to add it in the immediate future.3 More than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies have some kind of diversity and inclusion effort, designed to help employees understand their differences and work together more effectively. Some have begun to add the word belonging to their goals in this area.
Organizations are creating more flexible work environments to help improve work-life juggling (I’ve seen very few people who actually balance work and their lives outside work!), and employees with flexible schedules have a higher level of job satisfaction, less absenteeism, and less turnover. Similarly, companies have been instituting telework arrangements or variable schedules that allow people to better manage family obligations while meeting their work objectives.
The eight pathways to belonging outlined in the last chapter all apply to developing organizational community. Now I want to focus on some of the more specific behaviors that people in organizations can embrace in order to help make that happen.
Our consciousness lives in story. It shapes how we respond to people and circumstances around us. It gives us our perception of the world. Our organizations are no different. The narrative that we weave about who we are, why we are here, and what we stand for sets both our internal community and the external community on a path to understanding us. It gives people something to belong to. Having a powerful and positive organizational narrative around belonging and the value of diversity and dissenting views, and frequently communicating and reinforcing that narrative, produces a story that employees can repeat, reflect on, and internalize.
That being said, it is also important to encourage employees to share their own stories with each other and to support them in doing so, because sharing personal stories is a way of belonging, of being heard and seen. Sharing stories can happen in meetings, in employee resource groups, in diversity education, or anyplace else it fits into the daily lived employee experience. Sharing stories is one way to learn not only about each other personally but also about our distinctive worldviews.
Chimanda Ngozi Adichie shares a story that shines a light on how important it is that we learn each other’s worldviews:
I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
What struck me was this: she had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.4
By surfacing stories, we can understand people’s conceptions and misconceptions. And by clarifying these, we can help people connect and deeply understand each other, and also help them understand why they relate and react the way they do.
Businesses often have operated as if the only thing that matters is from the neck up. The more technical the business, the stronger the belief that this is true. But that notion couldn’t be further from the truth. Decision-making is overwhelmingly intuitive and deeply affected by how people are feeling. Creating an open environment to discuss how people are feeling is critical to leadership in an organizational community. Be sensitive to times when there is stress, whether it is inside the organization or societal. People need to talk about it, or at least be offered the opportunity to do so. We often avoid this kind of encounter because we are uncomfortable dealing with people’s feelings, but that doesn’t make it any less critical to success.
Education is critical to making sure that all employees have a common understanding and a consistent framework and skills for operating within the organizational community. While many organizations provide skills training, it is just as important to provide training in more interpersonal areas such as communication, diversity, inclusion, and unconscious bias.
Much has been written about diversity and/or unconscious bias training, especially regarding the question of whether such training has the ability to affect organizational performance. This is a vital inquiry because the time and costs associated with training programs are great enough to warrant a close examination of the results they produce.
As with many initiatives, there are a variety of ways in which diversity and unconscious bias training can be conducted, and results often depend on the approach taken. I have been studying the research about unconscious bias for more than fifteen years and actively working with clients in hundreds of companies all over the world, and have found ways to help our clients create significant, measurable success. This framework, which has four areas of focus, is an intervention strategy that uses education to impact the entire organization.
Traditional diversity training often emphasizes differences, which can increase tension between groups. This tension can result in backlash once participants complete the training, and so people sometimes claim that “diversity training doesn’t work.” There are eight factors that contribute to an effective training:
• Emphasize that bias is fundamental to the way human beings process the world.
• Speak to common ground rather than to differences.
• Provide an understanding of the human mind and how people think.5
• Create experiential learning.
• Make the training relevant and applicable to people’s worlds.
• Shift awareness and behavior.
• Focus both individually and collectively.
Training about unconscious bias can be an important part of a culture-based, systemic process of developing more inclusive workplaces, and beyond the workplace a more inclusive society, because it helps people understand how they make decisions that go far beyond the question of diversity or even individuals’ talents.
There is no simple way to resolve the challenge of unconscious bias. In many cases it is not possible to eliminate it. However, we can often mitigate the impact of bias by employing a thoughtful, systemic approach that focuses on four interventions: introducing the right kind of education, installing priming techniques, modifying structures and systems, and building the appropriate accountability measures. In this way, we can create organizational systems that support people in being more aware of their decision-making and more inclusive in their behavior. Ultimately, this produces an organization in which people’s biases don’t get in the way of their need for belonging and allows organizational community to thrive.
Completing a training is like joining a gym: it’s great to sign up for a gym membership, but if you don’t go work out regularly, you won’t see any results. In the same way, training starts the process of changing the organization’s culture, but without a commitment to a regular pattern of behavior, nothing will fundamentally change. Priming is a critical part of the process of behavioral sustainability because it can be used to remind people to apply their learning at the appropriate time, as well as to be prepared to take in new understandings. Priming refers to activating particular representations or associations in memory just before carrying out an action or task. For example, if I were to ask you to say the word silk ten times, and then ask you what cows drink, you would likely answer “milk,” even though the correct answer is “water.” You have been primed.
We have identified several ways to use priming techniques to trigger more mindful behaviors, including performance support tools, nudging, and physical environment cues.6
It is important to understand how to build organizational structures and systems that create inclusive communities. When we build alternative ways to structure some of our basic systems, we can dramatically affect the level of conscious decision-making. Focus on the primary talent management systems: recruitment, sourcing, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, mentoring and sponsorship, performance review, calibration, recognizing talent, and developing and promoting talent. Remember, organizational structures can create both positive and negative results.
For example, many people have started to use “blind resumes” (resumes that have some information excised) in order to remove bias, along the lines of having musicians audition for orchestras behind a screen so they cannot be seen. This does, in fact, remove some opportunity for bias. However, it also makes it more difficult to identify a potentially valuable employee who may have a compelling story but because of that story has a resume that does not compare as well to someone else’s on paper. It promotes, unwittingly, the notion that what’s on paper is always the best way to make the choice. I’m not suggesting that we don’t use blinded strategies, just that we be careful to watch for unintended consequences and patterns.
The fourth intervention strategy is to use carefully constructed analytics to track organization performance around diversity, inclusion, and belonging. An effective way to accomplish this is by using batches of metrics instead of a single metric. Often, diversity and inclusion metrics are reduced to a question like “How many X’s are there”? But if we combine a batch of metrics, including measuring levels of engagement, inclusion, and belonging, we get a much deeper understanding of where breakdowns exist in our system. Work with a team internally and identify the milestones that you will be watching, and then watch them and communicate how you are doing. And be sure that feedback from employees to their leaders is always welcome.
My premise has been that we live in a world in which challenging differences confront us on a daily basis. We often live in the illusion that we can keep these challenges at home and just “come to work to do work.” As we saw in the discomfort between Joan, Barry, and Fatima at the company party in Chapter 1, people bring their concerns with them wherever they go, whether it is reaction to the political circumstances of the day, breakdowns in religious or moral beliefs, or emotional responses to a racially charged incident in our community. It is not easy to bring up topics like these. As Michael Norton has said, “It’s so appealing on the surface to think that the best way to approach race is to pretend that it doesn’t exist. But research shows that it simply doesn’t work. We do notice race, and there’s no way of getting around that fact.”7
Create a space where people have an opportunity to participate in dialogue using some of the ideas below. It is incredibly valuable to engage with different points of view, but it’s essential that this be done as a dialogue rather than a debate—we want to be more like scientists than like lawyers. We can validate the humanity of people on the other side of an issue, even if we disagree completely with their point of view. There is no problem with arguing for a point of view, even in strenuous terms, as long as you remember it’s a point of view, not the definitive truth. One of the great challenges we have in our interactions is that we work harder at trying to convince each other, to win the argument, or to be right than we do at trying to understand each other’s point of view.
Caroline Wanga, the chief diversity officer at Target, has conducted many “courageous conversation” sessions for Target employees that represent many dimensions of difference including various religious perspectives; political perspectives; across the spectrum of gender identity, race, sexual orientation and age; military active duty and veterans; work experiences and geographic regions; learning and communication styles; and physical and mental abilities and socioeconomic backgrounds. She has found that
We don’t automatically listen the same when we agree, versus when we disagree, to what we are hearing. The value of listening to a point of view different from yours is that you learn how additional perspectives can help you craft your personal narrative. In my experience, courageous conversations are really more about courageous listening. The most important part of courageous listening is that we allow all perspectives to exist equitably, so we learn how to be one group and the one in a group. When I talk to our team members about how to listen courageously to a point of view they disagree with, I encourage them to resist what they normally do: debate, cut it off, drive agreement, try to convince the other person and win the argument.
Caroline goes on to say that the conversations have had a broader impact then she imagined.
At Target, we know we’re most successful when we listen to what our guests (customers) want. By listening courageously to each other, we are sharpening the discipline of listening to what our guests need and want, agnostic of if they are saying something comfortable or uncomfortable for us to hear. This behavior increases the likelihood that you we hear the entirety of what the guest (customer) wants, which accelerates our success toward accomplishing our business objectives. It also equips our team members to impact an inclusive society by modeling how to co-exist amongst the dimensions of difference their communities represent, which ultimately enables them to play a role in helping their communities thrive. It has a multiplier effect that’s pretty powerful.
Fear is always a factor in these kinds of interactions. Going back to the social science and neuroscience findings described in earlier chapters, we know that people want to be accepted and need to be validated in order to feel safe. Sharing differences of opinions about emotional issues in the workplace can not only threaten our social standing but, in our mind’s eye, maybe even threaten our jobs. Fearful times intensify “us versus them” thinking. Although much has been written about creating dialogue across groups in the workplace, here are a few ideas to help get you started:
• Create a safe space for the conversation. Be sure that there is enough time and that distractions are limited. It also helps to create a safe container and ground rules for the conversation.
• Invite everybody to recognize their own biases. It is helpful to do this at the beginning of the conversation, so that employees are aware of how those biases might affect their participation.
• Encourage participants to be willing to be emotionally vulnerable as well as intellectually engaged. That includes inviting them to share what they are afraid of.
• Consider having participants reflect what they are hearing. This will help others be sure they have been heard.
• Distinguish between group perspective and personal perspective. Keep doing this throughout the conversation.
• Resist the temptation for perfectionism. Focus on promoting the progress of the conversation. Just being able to listen to each other without being defensive can be a significant accomplishment.
• Look for ways to move the conversation forward. Collective action can be especially helpful in doing this, so seek out ways people can work together toward continuing the conversation.
Leaders should be regularly communicating with employees. Where are we being successful? Where are we struggling? What are the challenges that we see coming down the road? Communication strengthens and updates the narrative, reinforces the values of the organization, and gives employees a sense of security and also belonging. Employees begin to feel that they are part of something, and that their being informed matters to their leaders. Even if there are times when a leader doesn’t know the answer to something or certain information has to be kept private, you can still let people know what you know and what you don’t. Being honest and acknowledging what you don’t know is not a weakness!
I remember working with two utility organizations that were attempting a merger. When companies are merging, there is often information that cannot be legally shared because it may impact stock values. I was conducting a listening session with the designated human resources leader of the combined company, and people were expressing a general frustration at the lack of information. All of a sudden one of the people in the back stood up and said, “Our manager tells us everything!” The HR lead and I were surprised, and frankly a bit concerned that this manager might have been sharing too much, but later we found out from the man who had spoken up that his manager was not telling his team any more than any other manager but was just regularly pulling the team together to say, “Here’s what I know and here’s what I don’t know.” Just taking the time to do that left the team feeling like they could count on him to keep them informed. It reinforced their sense of connection to him and to the organization.
One of the great frustrations I have had as a business owner is the reality that organizational cultural challenges never seem to be fixed. One day everybody seems satisfied and happy; the next there’s nothing but complaints. Sometimes both seem to occur at the same time. It is important to realize that these are the natural ups and downs of life. There is no way for any organization to be perfect all the time. Maintaining a healthy dose of reality about this can help us avoid feeling discouraged and resigned when we have to deal with “that issue, again?”
Kaiser Permanente is the real thing in terms of creating a culture of belonging. Kaiser was founded in 1945 and is one of the largest not-for-profit health plans in the United States, serving almost 12 million members, over 8 million of them in California. Kaiser employs more than 200,000 people, including almost 22,000 physicians and more than 54,000 nurses.
By almost any measure imaginable, Kaiser would have to be considered a major business success story. In addition to being financially successful, Kaiser has been recognized as one of America’s best employers and one of “America’s happiest companies” by Forbes; has been recognized for excellence by U.S. News and World Report; has been selected by ComputerWorld as one of the best places to work in IT; has been chosen by Diversity Inc. magazine as a Top 50 company in diversity and inclusion; and has received a host of other health care leadership awards.
George Halvorson served as CEO and chairman of Kaiser from 2002 until retiring as CEO in 2013 and chairman in 2014. Halvorson had a very clear vision for the kind of culture of belonging that he wanted to create at Kaiser. Understanding the natural tendency of people to separate themselves into “us versus them,” Halvorson set about creating a culture in which people could gain at least a significant component of their identity from their association with their employer.
Halvorson created a model that outlined all of the key elements of the culture development process that he and the leadership team of Kaiser employed (Figure 10.1).
Figure 10.1 George Halvorson’s Culture Model
A company’s mission or vision involves creating a clear goal for what the company is trying to accomplish, why that is important, and what kind of impact the company wants to have. Having a mission or vision is essential. Sometimes there is a singular, charismatic leader whose vision is so powerful and attractive that employees want to align with it. If that’s the case, the leader’s vision needs to evolve into an organizational vision if it is to become sustainable and persist after the leader’s tenure is over. In most cases, however, the company is better served by a mission that is not tied to any individual.
Halvorson found that driving from mission was more powerful at Kaiser: “I never had leader loyalty as a motivator because I did not want people to think they were doing anything because of me. I wanted them doing it for the right reasons . . . for our mission and vision . . . and for our members. That was particularly valuable for labor unions, for example. They were much more inspired to be working for the members than to be working for a corporation.”8 This also made it much easier to transition leadership when Halvorson retired and was replaced by the company’s chief operating officer, Bernard Tyson. Because the company was focused on mission more than on any one person, it has been able to continue to thrive.
It is easy to understand how powerful a mission can be. The tension between unions and management can be a great example of how two groups can be pulled apart by competing needs. Management’s responsibility is the effective running of the organization, including maximizing the organization’s financial health. Unions exist to protect their members. Yet when we slip into “us versus them” thinking, management can move toward trying to get any cost reductions they can, regardless of the impact on workers, and union leaders can move toward protecting the union as an institution without considering the long-term benefits to their members in having a stable organization with which to work.
One of my clients, a health care system in the Midwest, had this very thing happen. It resulted in four labor stoppages over a seven-year period, each of which closed the hospital for a time. The impact was devastating to the hospital’s reputation in the community, to the largely low-income African American population whom the hospital served, and to the employees, who found themselves out of work for extended periods of time.
We worked to bring all of the parties together to clean up the past. Each had an opportunity to take responsibility for what they had contributed to these breakdowns. As a result, we worked to create a committee comprising representatives of unions, management, patients, and the community alike. The committee members met regularly and established a sense of belonging among themselves in service of the goal of improving the community’s overall well-being. They have not had another work stoppage in the past twenty years.
Organizations function best as a unit when all associates have a stake in the organization’s success. This often includes financial reward. This can be done by making sure people are paid a fair wage relative to their job classification, as well as by having a strong retirement program and benefits. We have also found that creating a profit-sharing program for all employees helps people feel that the success of the organization will tie directly into their own personal success. The message becomes “We do well by supporting each other.”
In a less material sense, it is important that every employee understands how his or her role serves the greater good. Does the person at the front desk understand how welcoming people can affect the mood of what follows? Are the people who do administrative work and almost never actually see the customer acknowledged for how what they do contributes to the customer experience? The acknowledgment of everybody’s contribution to the mission keeps people focused on the big picture and away from thinking that nobody cares how well they perform.
It’s like an old story I heard years ago about a traveler who comes across three stonemasons in a quarry: the first one in a somber mood, the second one more focused, the third seemingly elated by what he is doing. The traveler asks each what they are doing. “Cutting this rock into a brick,” says the first. “I am building a cathedral,” says the second. And then came the third, who looked up, almost glowing, and said, “I am working to allow people to celebrate the greater glory of the Divine.”
Everybody has to know that his or her contribution, regardless of how small or mundane it may seem on the surface, is contributing to the fulfillment of the mission.
In an organization where belonging is practiced and generated, everybody sees him- or herself as part of a team. At Kaiser, Halvorson said, all employees were encouraged to see themselves as a caregiver for their members and patients. “Even the computer programmers felt like they were a part of the caregiving team,” he told me. “Even if they never saw the members, they thought of themselves that way. Treating every patient like they were a member of our family was another way of treating the patients like an us.”
As I’ve emphasized throughout this book, human beings naturally gravitate to an “us versus them” orientation. It is a core survival instinct. We protect those who are in our “us” group, providing support, defending them, and nurturing them. We are suspicious and territorial toward anyone in the “them” group. We have seen this in the dehumanizing language used toward other people in war, and in the ease many people feel in considering a Muslim ban today. “They are different and dangerous,” we are told. “You can see that by the way they look, and the way they dress, and the way they pray. Keep them away so we will be safe.” Even though we know statistically that only a tiny percentage of Muslims are actually a threat, which can really be said about almost any identity group, it becomes easier to keep all of them away from us than to figure out which ones are safe. When our organization fosters a culture of “us,” we look out for each other in a different way. It can override our individual and societal belief systems.
A lot of the work of generating belonging occurs in language. The way we talk affects what we think, and what we think affects the way we act. Halvorson said it this way: “What we did in the corporate setting is to try to create a larger ‘us.’ We languaged the values in terms of ‘we the people of Kaiser Permanente.’ . . . I refused to let anybody refer to the labor groups or others as ‘them.’ It was all ‘we’ or ‘us.’ I even had to let go of a leader who just couldn’t get himself to do this. People feel good about being an ‘us’ because when we are an ‘us’ you can rely on things, you can trust that you are supported.”9
Halvorson went on to say: “If people have a sense that somebody in the organization or outside the organization is a ‘them,’ then you suspend conscience. It becomes okay to lie to them, to take things from them. As soon as somebody becomes a ‘them’ the basic rules of ethics drift away. As soon as they are an ‘us’ their well-being is our well-being. It’s very dangerous when any part of the company is a ‘them’ because that part of the company doesn’t feel the need to tell the truth or take the other’s concerns in mind.”10 This applies to a company’s customers too: organizations that countenance language like “the client from hell” or “those overly demanding customers” won’t be able to provide consistently good customer service.
Halvorson also wrote a letter to his employees every week to celebrate “who we were and what we were doing.” The letters were so positively received that they were used for recruiting new employees.
Our need to belong often shows up in our relationship to teams. We have strong instincts to be in teams, to work in teams. If we go back just a relatively short time historically, that was overwhelmingly the way people lived. It was almost impossible to survive otherwise. It’s only recently that we have bought into the worship of individual achievement over team performance.
Emphasize all of the behaviors that people engage in, but especially emphasize team behaviors. Halvorson and his leadership team taught leaders to be team leaders rather than bosses. There were hundreds of teams, and they were all based on the organization’s values. Every team was given the task of trying to improve the organization’s stated values, and then best practices were shared.
Our “us” is defined when we have a visible “them.” It helps strengthen our ability to coalesce around our vision, and it helps us see the connectedness between us in ways that are more important than our petty, internal “us versus them” dynamics. We have seen this in the way Americans came together in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It has even been celebrated in movies such as Independence Day, when all of the world puts aside their differences to confront an alien invasion.
Competition can be healthy, and sometimes it can even be fun. As Jonathan Haidt has said, “Cooperation and competition are opposite sides of the same coin. And we’ve gotten this far because we cooperate to compete.”11 We sometimes get our need for it filled in watching sporting events. People will dress up in their team jerseys, paint their faces or bodies with team colors, and throw themselves into the energy of competition. It can be unhealthy as well. When beating the other becomes more important than our own values, the competition has pulled us away from our reason for being. This can occur when people get so fully identified with a team that they can’t let go, possibly resulting in violence or depression after a game. The key is not to outlaw competition, as many New Age parents have tried to do with their children (to no avail), because competition is a great motivator. The key is to compete consciously and only within the construct of your stated values. This is true whether you are playing cards or golf with a friend, running a company, or running a country. When you leave your core values behind and focus only on “winning,” nothing else holds up over time.
Halvorson used the names of the other health plans and their presidents to motivate his team. You can use the competition that you face as well. This doesn’t mean that we can’t work with our competitors at times when the challenge is coming from outside.
When you look at this lower level in Halvorson’s model, it’s easy to see the likeness to the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy—the need for physical survival. The French writer Voltaire once penned, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”—in English, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”12 And it is often hardest to get people motivated to take on change when they are doing well. My own experience in consulting has definitely shown that. A client who is confronting a change but has a relatively well-functioning organization often has the attitude that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The problem is that what “ain’t broke” today may be insufficient for tomorrow. Ask any of the hundreds of companies that have gone under or been rendered largely irrelevant by new advances that they could have seen coming but didn’t because they didn’t appreciate the threat. This is especially important when we are experiencing a paradigm shift, which seems to happen almost weekly in business these days. The rules suddenly change because of new technology, new needs, or new products, and, seemingly all of a sudden, what has worked before doesn’t work as well anymore.
One classic example is Encyclopaedia Britannica, a historically successful business that got into real trouble a number of years ago because they continued to see themselves as a book publisher instead of realizing that their job was to get information out to people as easily as possible. Once Wikipedia and other similar formats were created, it made little sense for people to pay for sets of books that would become obsolete over time and had to be upgraded regularly, at a continued cost to the user. Older readers may remember a time when encyclopedias were sold door-to-door. Now Britannica’s sales force has been dropped and staffing cut, and while print versions can still be bought in bookstores, the focus is on electronic products. But the company responded too late to preserve its financial standing.
The danger in a business environment might be forces that could undermine us. In the case of diversity and inclusion work, that might mean lawsuits or bad press, missing out on the incredible diversity of talent that’s in the marketplace, or not getting a share of the multicultural marketplace. These pitfalls can be framed in terms of competition. Halvorson said he constantly reminded people at Kaiser that “the competition wants to steal our patients from us,” and “if we don’t do this we are going to go out of business” or “we won’t have jobs and pensions.” Keeping an eye on potential dangers helps motivate people to understand the risk in not creating a culture of belonging.
What the Kaiser story shows us so powerfully is that belonging breeds success in organizations. There is a reason that so many great companies, including Panera Bread, Nordstrom, The Container Store, Tom’s Shoes, and the giant Indian corporation Tata, among many others, have formed an organization called the Conscious Capitalism Institute to promote this kind of approach. Not only is it the right thing to do in terms of creating a healthier organization and community, but the members of the institute who are publicly traded companies outperformed the S&P 500 index by a factor of 10.5 over the years 1996–2011.13
What it finally comes down to is the reality that we can do well by doing good.
What are you waiting for?