On Becoming a Leader is a biweekly advice column in which Allison Fine, an author, consultant, and expert on nonprofit leadership and strategy, answers your questions about nonprofit careers and leadership. Have a question? Ask Ms. Fine using this form.
Q: It would be nice to see some additional support for managers who work with professionals having varying professional norms within the same organization. For instance, my organization is composed primarily of attorneys and social workers. We are all dedicated to civil rights for people with disabilities, but we have very different professional norms that influence everything from communication (especially in meetings and with clients) to professional ethics to office logistics (lawyers need closed doors to preserve confidentiality, but it can be very hard for a social worker with 20 years of experience to swallow that idea without feeling diminished when a brand-new attorney gets the last office with a door while she soldiers on in the same cube she has had for 19 years). Managing these types of dynamics effectively is very difficult, and I would love to see advice, suggestions, etc. on navigating these types of issues. — Anonymous
A: Organizations have a lot in common with Silly Putty. They are both artificial things that change shape over time. They also have a tendency to get inflexible as they get older and less willing to change.
Organizations get rigid when they slide into valuing “the way we do things here” and that overrides the individual styles, preferences, and biases of the people inside. Your question, Anonymous, really gets at the heart of how different perspectives and training affect what happens internally.
We are becoming more sensitive to the role that unconscious bias plays out in hiring and workplace interactions. Horace McCormick wrote in “The Real Effects of Unconscious Bias in the Workplace” that over 150 biases rooted in our brains affect our impressions and decisions. Here are a few identified in his paper:
Affinity bias: the tendency to warm up to people like ourselves.
Halo effect: the tendency to think everything about a person is good because you like that person.
Perception bias: the tendency to form stereotypes and assumptions about certain groups that make it impossible to make an objective judgment about members of those groups.
Confirmation bias: the tendency for people to seek information that confirms pre- existing beliefs or assumptions.
Group think: the tendency to try too hard to fit into a particular group by mimicking others or holding back thoughts and opinions. This causes them to lose part of their identities and causes organizations to lose out on creativity and innovation.
These are all valid and important issues to recognize and try to counterbalance in managing an organization. But these biases still don’t account for perhaps the most important lens through which we view our work, our workplaces, and ourselves--our professional training.
Anonymous, you raise the question of professional norms and how they affect issues like workspace. The norms are often embedded in professional training. Social-service agencies tend to provide a wide variety of services, and that means they employ a variety of professionals with very different perspectives and training.
We’ll use lawyers and social workers as two examples of professionals who may work at those agencies.
Lawyers are trained to develop logical arguments and conclusions and poke holes in other people’s arguments. Social workers are trained to listen carefully to verbal cues but also nonverbal ones. They are trained to view issues from multiple viewpoints and validate everyone’s feelings and reactions.
So, back to the issue of workspace. If the issue isn’t discussed in an open way, if decisions about who gets what space feel to staff as though they are based on personal bias and favoritism, then naturally there will be resentment from those left in the cubicles. However, if there is open discussion about the needs that different professionals have to do their jobs effectively, then the issue can be framed as what is in the best interest of the organizational as a whole.
However, there is a much larger issue facing organizations with different kinds of professionals with different views of work and organizations than workspace.
All organizations are challenged to keep up with the incredibly fast pace of change and uncertainty in the world right now. Leaders are wrestling with the question of how to change and how to sustain themselves. And within that larger question, if they are running a social-service agency, they are wrestling with how to manage their staffs and issues of change when some of them, e.g. lawyers, are trained to be risk-averse and others are trained to help people through discomfort. Where is the common ground?
These professional differences affect how decisions are made, how the work is organized, even how the office is arranged to do the best work.
Here are three steps to help managers reconcile these differences:
1. Take stock of the different kinds of professionals you have on staff and educate yourself about how they are trained and how that training is affecting the way they work.
2. Bring the staff together to talk about how their professional biases affect their work and what assumptions are baked into their work.
3. Walk through scenarios together that focus on risk and uncertainty. Organizations need to be thoughtful and ready to embrace change, and that can be difficult for people with different perspectives and different outlooks and fears to reconcile. Practicing together will make this much easier to do successfully.