The Structures That Help Us

We had the BEST team.

Seriously — to my kids I called them my "work friends," because that's exactly what they were.

Trust and psychological safety never magically appear. These things are earned over many months of consistent care and authentic behavior. And we did this with our team: we earned their trust with really simple (but not easy) things.

Every Monday our whole team would gather for an "All Hands" meeting on Zoom. We had to do it virtually, because the team was spread across 3 continents and 4 time zones. Every meeting, we would start with our check-in ritual: two quick sharing "rounds" followed by watching one of our own videos + discussion questions, the same ones we sold to clients ("eating our own cooking," as we like to say).

We always insisted that doing this ritual was simple, but not easy, for a couple reasons.

First, it required a lot of discipline. On more than one occasion we were tempted to skip the ritual and "get down to business" because there was a client emergency or some other pressing urgent "fire" to put out. We did this a couple times and it was clearly a mistake; we were a better and sharper team when we did this ritual first. But let the record state: it's hard to maintain any ritual against the tyranny of the urgent.

Second, this exercise required us to get a bit emotionally naked. It's a vulnerable thing to share your life and your feelings with coworkers. This also meant our leaders needed to go first and demonstrate that this was both expected and safe to do... and of course that was sometimes hard for us, too.

Here's how it went:

1. Gratitude — Share something you're grateful for or are celebrating
2. Feeling Check-In — Describe in as few words as possible how you are feeling right now and why; there will be no judgement so be as honest as you can
3. Huddle Video + Discussion Question Round — Together, we watched our own video about that week's Practice and then passed the mic around the virtual "circle" so everyone could answer the question

Eventually we got pretty good at this and were able to combine 1 and 2 into one share. Even with 15 people on the call we could complete the whole ritual in 15 minutes if we needed to. (We blocked 30 minutes for the whole exercise because it was very important to us, and we wanted to give people extra space to share if needed.)

We called this ritual our Huddle.

Structurally, we basically just put the Huddle at the beginning of our already-scheduled "All Hands" team meeting.

The Huddle was finished when everyone was complete, and then we simply got on to our regular agenda of all the other business things we had to tend to as a team.

I realized this morning just how much I miss this ritual.

It was GOOD for me.

I didn't just enjoy it (though I did) and it wasn't just a great way for me to feel connected to these humans all over the world that I interacted with more than my family or friends (though it was), it was good for me.

It was a structure that helped me.

There are plenty of systems and structures around me that don't help me, that are basically the opposite of "good for me."

I am a parent, so I get approximately 832 emails every day from each of the kids' schools. I can never read them all, and this makes me feel like I'm always behind and not dad'ing as well as I should. I am a health advocate for someone I love, so I am constantly making appointments and navigating the unending sh*tshow that is the U.S. "healthcare" system. This often leaves me feeling angry and frustrated, and though I try my best to not take my annoyance out on the kind phone agent, I'll admit sometimes I do.

These structures — i.e. systems that are making choices for me — are by and large NOT good for me.

I'm guessing you could quickly list at least a couple structures in your workplace that are maybe NOT good for you.

But do you have any structures that ARE?

The structure of the weekly, scheduled Huddle ritual was good for me in so many more ways than I realized at the time...

• I was accountable to my team so I needed to show up and be present
• It was scheduled at the same time every week so it basically eliminated extra cognitive load and "brain friction"
• It gave me an outlet for my feelings
• It provided an opportunity for me to check in with myself and see what I was actually feeling (it's super easy to go through the whole workday and never do this)
• It built relationships, trust, and real friendships
• It helped me feel close to people that were physically so far away

This is a great example of what I mean when I say Work Can Heal The World.

A ritual/structure/system like our Huddle is inherently a healing activity.

And it turns out, perhaps counter-intuitively, that work is the PERFECT place for this to happen. In our workplaces, there are opportunities all around us to create healing structures that are truly good for us. At work, we have built-in relationships, scheduled times when we meet up with each other, and important and purposeful things to spend time on (hopefully).

Strange as it may sound, with the way our modern lives are structured I've come to believe that there's likely no better "container" for systemic healing than the one we call "work."

And it's also true that these practices — though admittedly they may feel odd to do at work, at first! — are tremendously good for organizational outcomes. Check out some research if you like, or you can also just logic into this: I bet you have personally seen that when people spread positive experiences and actually like each other, things work faster and better, more ideas get generated, customers are treated better, and so on.

So, what healing structures are you participating in? Do you need to create one?

Because they're actually good for us ALL.

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NOTE: I'll be taking next weekend off to practice gratitude and presence with my family here in Colorado. See you in December!