Teams as Communities

This line by Adam Grant about workplaces being communities and not families has stayed with me as I have been building One Future Collective. It's not one that. understood easily and I messed up many times before (I think) I started getting it a little bit right.

"A company isn't a family. Parents don't fire their kids for low performance or furlough them in hard times. A better vision for a workplace is a community—a place where people bond around shared values, feel valued as human beings, and have a voice in decisions that affect them."

What Adam Grant does through these brief sentences is that he defines what a workplace, and de facto a team, is not. He also goes on to define what a team or workplace could be by establishing rights, roles and boundaries to these relationships in a manner much firmer than those shared within families. This envisioning of teams does not take advantage of kinship of any kind to exploit worker rights, it assumes entries and exits into the community as something that is natural and establishes the need for voice, dignity and values as central to forming communities at workplaces.

Before I get into sharing my experiences of building teams as communities, a question that I find on every mind -- Why can't work just be something I do and then go home to my real community?

You very well can! Some would argue that the moment you are part of a workplace, you are automatically a part of their community - this may be true in parts, but your role and participation in the community remain your choice (we are speaking of workplaces that aim to build healthy communities). As per this graph from Sahil Bloom though, you will spend a significant portion of your life at work and with your coworkers. Do you want to have absolutely no relationship with the people you spend so much time with? Do you not want to engage in bettering a space you occupy for such large parts of your day? Can you not have multiple roles in multiple communities? If your answer to any of this makes you even the teensiest bit curious about thinking of teams as communities, read ahead.

Capitalism sucks. It makes community impossible. This is why we must try even harder to build where no hope seems possible. Ask yourself: are you able to distinguish between when you must see the individual and the system separately and when you must see them as one?

Where did I mess up? and continue to often

I started One Future Collective when I was 23, still in college. Accompanying me was an underlying extreme response to leaving a toxic workplace which left in me a deep need to make sure no one else ever went through what I witnessed others at that organisation go through. I invested every last ounce of energy, emotion and money into the people that formed the team then. We must have been one of the first few NGOs who had an HR-esque manual before we had enough funding for even 1 full-time employee. I bent policies and common sense to extend care while working weekends myself. Through all of this, I forgot that I was also a member of the community. Through my personal practises I was setting superhuman expectations from my senior team and was surely progressing towards crashing soon. Thankfully, the team I had then was able to bring me in, place checks and balances and move us towards more stability.

Over time, the sense of community within the team itself grew immensely. While this helped us work through very difficult periods as an organisation - it took me too long to highlight to team members that they had outgrown One Future Collective and it took team members too long to realise that they could leave and still retain a role in this community, albeit a different one. Sometimes communities become so strong, that they make leaving seem insurmountable.

While these mistakes were occurring, I often also placed the needs of the team as a community over the needs of the people we serve. Often the overlap was such that this difference felt indistinguishable and led to a reduced potential impact of some of our projects. It reached a point where we developed a reputation for being an organisation that you should come work for when you were burnt out. I hope you see my dilemma here. At first, I was overcome with joy and pride, this is exactly what I had wanted to create. While some folks excelled, many who joined us stating burnout at older jobs as a reason were unable to work at all. Over this period, I started noticing my irritation towards extra hours of last-minute work on the weekend becoming resentment towards the work in general, I observed those team members who were moving ahead with their work getting exhausted and dropping out. Where had I gone wrong? I had failed to establish boundaries, set expectations and honestly, get over my saviour complex. I had created an internal culture where people pushed beyond limits for each other and an external facing one where we communicated more than we could realistically deliver for new team members. We were and are a small organisation with limited resources and what we can provide team members is bound by that. Once I did realise this and started to enforce the policies that were already written for our team, I faced resentment, anger and sadness that I could not fathom. To me the rules had always been the same, just in practise they had gone astray for a while - I did not realise that for communities written rules rarely make a difference to how we feel daily, it is the practice of these rules that matter.

After these experiences, we got really focused on following policies and ensuring we were meeting all that was necessary to be a good workplace for everyone. In doing so, we took away some of the joy, friendship and warmth that had always been characteristic of the team. Recognition of this thankfully came very early and was broken by a simple message on a slack channel.

In my journey of wanting to create a perfect workplace and a perfect community, I made so many mistakes and I continue to make them. Many from these teams have stayed on in different roles through my mistakes and thought through with me on the question of 'what does it mean for us to be a team and a community' for each member, both of our team and the people we serve [shout-out to Sanaya Patel Jerin Jacob Uttanshi Agarwal Kuhoo Tiwari Shreya Joshi Karishma Shafi Arshiya Kochar Sanchi Mehra amongst countless others who have spent many hours way past midnight thinking through these seemingly unimportant questions with me and with each other]. All of these mistakes and some successes helped me understand what I mean by community.

What is a community? What is needed for a community to become one?

Communities for me are spaces where you can breathe, easily. There are many more (better) definitions of what a community is but in my body and mind, this is what every community I have been a part of has had in common, it has been a place where I finally felt like I could breathe more easily. I'm listing what I see as necessary conditions for a community to emerge, entirely non-exhaustive and non-linear - some of these overlap with necessary conditions for any group to form. Many of these will come together through friction, conflict, repair and love over time for communities:

1. Shared values: you need to care about some of the same things. Not everything, just enough to keep you together when things are tough.
2. Roles and responsibilities: even if these move and shift, clarity on what each person does in a community is essential.
3. Decisions and communication on boundaries: all of us have boundaries, whether we know it or not. Communicating them, negotiating them when needed and reaching common ground is imperative.
4. Star team and not star individuals: (h/t Professor Marshall Ganz ): communities need to be stars as a collective, individual stars fade out quickly.
5. Mutual investment in repair: everyone has to care about being there, and being there together, if only some people do, it doesn't work.
6. Communities are made out of practice: I could write a 100-page document but teams will remember, believe and practise what they see happening around them.
7. Perfect is the enemy of the good: I have failed every time I have tried for perfection and succeeded every time I tried for good enough (h/t to Serap Altinisik for reminding me of this once again).
8. Emotions are what make communities: you need to hold love, friendship and care for people in your communities, emotions and messy ones are always going to be a part of this deal.

What does 'teams as communities' mean for One Future Collective today?

It means all of the above and many tiny things that are unique to each community. When I lost three family members in the span of 20 days during COVID-19 or when my health took a downward turn, my team showed up above and beyond what I could have expected. When work forces me to travel for long periods, I know I can implicitly trust team members to step in or tell me when they can't. When team members have had long periods of ill health, caregiving or other needs, it has meant creating new support systems like interim disability covers for hiring, acting up budgets and ensuring we have comprehensive health insurance to support the varying needs of our team but at the same time we communicate clearly when we are unable to meet some needs. When team members outgrow the organisation or move away for a few years, we have been able to create new roles for them within the community - several of our ex-employees remain our biggest champions. More than anything, having teams as communities means knowing there are multiple voices in different rooms advocating for One Future Collective because the organisation is no longer about one person, we all own it.

We will share a public version of our internal culture book titled 'Sunflowers' very soon, keep an eye out.

I'm going to conclude with a clip from the Office (US version) of what a workplace means to me. Tweaking this for an NGO, our organisations are worth nothing without our people - we are here for people, both the ones we work with and the ones we serve. The day we see these dual responsibilities as one is the day we can start creating something that outlasts us.

"Our company is worth nothing. That’s the difference between you and I. Business isn’t about money to me, David. If tomorrow my company goes under, I will just start another paper company. And then another and another and another. I have no shortage of company names."