Everyday Resistance: Democratic Decision-Making and Practices for Teamwork

Here at Round Sky we’ve been busy gearing up to attend and present at the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy coming up this weekend [after June 8th.] We’re delighted to be presenting on a topic near and dear to our hearts: “Everyday Resistance: Democratic Decision-Making and Practices for Teamwork” and we wanted to share our excitement by giving you a sneak peak of the content!

From our perspective, one of the most powerful places that we can resist the toxic beliefs and ways of being that run our world today and rebuild a world of care, compassion, effectiveness, and generosity, is at work. We spend an enormous amount of time at work and for most of us it’s a place of repression, disappointment, and disengagement (LRN, 2016), since most workplaces are implicitly run on autocratic values. Re-patterning how we use power at work, and practicing that re-patterning daily, enables us to leverage what is otherwise wasted time and energy to bring about a better world every day. Rather than only using the few hours a week that we can afford to volunteer for good causes (please keep those up, they are essential!) we can increase our impact by translating our values into action and traction at our workplace through everyday resistance!

While actualizing democracy at work is actually quite challenging because of the weight of our current culture, there are key practices and processes that you can implement that can make it possible to reliably, effectively, and efficiently share power. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be writing in greater detail about these key practices in blog format, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we wanted to share with you the recording of a recent webinar on how to untangle destructive power dynamics.

One of the take-aways expressed by a participant on the call was that we can use our structures and processes to start to shift power in our teams and to nurture generative power. That’s what it’s all about for us: process and practice (both individual and collective) to incrementally shift power! So join the conversation, check out the webinar recording here. These resources and tools come from Collab™ – the  decision-making, communication, and collaboration practices that we’ve developed for just this sort of problem!

Some of the tools you can start using today! I encourage you to look them over, ask us questions, and sign up for our online course, Collab 101 to get direct support for putting these tools (and more) to work in your teams (currently offered on a sliding scale for a limited time!!).

I’ll tell you a bit more. Collab 101 is an 8 module online course with several tools for collaborative leaders and their teams. Collab 101 is for you if…

• you’re facing issues with accountability on your team
• your meetings feel unproductive or too long
• your team is having trouble meeting the goals and holding all of the details
• it’s unclear sometimes when a decision has been made
• you’re looking for a structure and process that will guide you through shifting power in your team and managing the inevitable conflict that arises.

If you identify with any of these, then, Collab 101 is the next step for you! You’ll learn about:

• Meeting facilitation skills that will move your team forward and integrate multiple perspectives for creative and innovative solutions
• Collaborative meeting practices that are inclusive of all voices and work to keep the whole team on the same page
• Initiatives tracking system to support your team’s collective work on strategic plans while providing a forum for feedback and affirmations
• Personal development practices for managing challenging team dynamics and facilitating individual growth

Check out more information here.

References:

LRN. (2016). The HOW report: A Global, Empirical Analysis of How Governance, Culture and Leadership Impact Performance.

Republished by permission of the author.

Featured Image/graphic link added by Enlivening Edge Magazine.