What do I mean when I say: "I’m on a mission to make everybody fully powerful at work?"
I have been a collector of quotes all my life. I’d paste them to my wall and use them as a screen saver. Quotes about certainty and uncertainty. About being resilient. Or remaining soft in a hard world. About anger and forgiveness.
"Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." -James Clear
About closing the gap between the moment the milk gets spilled and just cleaning up the damn milk. About love and grief.
And when I came across this quote while staying nerdy about building organizations in which humans can thrive, something just clicked. It began to guide all of my work:
“The goal is not to make everyone equally powerful but to make everyone fully powerful. This is best understood using a metaphor from nature. A fern or a mushroom growing next
to a tree might not reach as high as the tree, but that is not the point. Through a complex collaboration involving exchanges of nutrients, moisture, and shade, the mushroom, fern, and tree don't compete as much as they cooperate to grow into the biggest and healthiest versions of themselves.” -Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations
The analogy of organization as a living system where each part has its role to play, and in which we each get to make our own unique contribution to the ecosystem--to be fully powerful--beautifully encapsulated what I’d been trying to do in my talent- and people-focused career.
This quote resonated so much so that when I left the workplace in which I’d had 10 wonderful years, I used it to bid farewell to the many folks who came to celebrate me on my last day.
Here’s an excerpt from my farewell notes.
"One of the things that I’ve always said about this place is that it’s ours to shape. It’s why I took on the Talent Director role even though I was pretty new to the org and just getting to know the partners; I had a sense that we shared the same sensibilities about what this place should become and that they’d allow me to help shape that in a way I could be proud of. I judged that one correctly. I see my fingerprints everywhere here. I might have had a positive impact on YOUR experience here even…without you needing to know I did it.
And back when I was leading all of our hiring, and we were much smaller, I would tell candidates that every time a new team member joined, it meant the firm changed just a little. Each person brought new energy, new interests and expertise, new fun quirks, new karaoke flair, that changed the fabric of the place. The work and the culture.
Think for a minute about the ways—big or small—that you have been able to influence a project team, a peer group in your time here. It’s true that you matter a lot at work.
So now, fully confident that I have left the mark I was meant to leave here, I am moving on to more fully focus on making work not suck for as many humans as possible.
I’m pretty nerdy in that pursuit and have been taken by the book Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux. Here’s a reflection he has about how the healthiest organizations work and the many roles that shape the whole:
“The goal is not to make everyone equally powerful but to make everyone fully powerful. This is best understood using a metaphor from nature. A fern or a mushroom growing next to a tree might not reach as high as the tree, but that is not the point. Through a complex collaboration involving exchanges of nutrients, moisture, and shade, the mushroom, fern, and tree don't compete as much as they cooperate to grow into the biggest and healthiest versions of themselves.”
I’m very sorry if you are offended by being compared to a mushroom. But for me, I have gladly played the role of the fern all these years.
And that’s what I want to leave you with. You each—wittingly or unwittingly—are making this organization what it is every day.
Yes, some of you have more authority than others. True, it’s riskier to take risks for some of us than for others. Agreed, there will always be power differentials, it’s just a fact.
But I encourage you to be mindful of this role you have taken on as an individual who is already influencing who this org is now and who it will become. Great orgs start and end with great people. Like each of you. So…what do you want this place to be, and what can you do in your little corner of it to make that happen?"
When you work with me, you can be sure that I’m operating with this image of the trees and the ferns and the mushrooms in mind. With the image of your organization as a living system, I’m thinking about how things both have a natural order and about how complex human-centered work is. And believing that we all have our own unique contribution to make at work.
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