Employing Differences, Episode 107: What shifts power dynamics?

Paul: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: 0:14

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:15

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:17

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "What shifts power dynamics?"

Paul: 0:27

So this is the third episode in a trilogy about power dynamics where we've been exploring – in the first episode, how do we come to notice the relative distribution of power between individuals, in organizations and groups, in teams, in all this? What are those power dynamics? How steep are the power gradients? And then in the second episode talking about how do we notice when we want to shift power dynamics? Is the current arrangement of positional power and authority and participation and things like that – is that serving us as we want it to be or is it causing us problems? And so what we want to dig into here today is the third part of that, which is once we've started to notice it, and once we've asked and answered the question, "Is this serving us?" and the answer is "no, we'd like to make a change," how do we actually do that? Because, as is with all change, it's not enough to simply decide we want to. There are absolutely things that are keeping the current arrangement of power and power dynamics in place. And we need to work with those if we actually start to want to shift and move from one particular arrangement – the current arrangement of power that we have – to a different one that we think will serve us better.

Karen: 1:54

I think one thing is that deciding is actually powerful. And it's probably not the decision by itself so much as the pre-work. But I do want to name that if we notice and name the power gradient, that by itself may begin to change it. If we then have a conversation in which we all can kind of see what's the impact of that power gradient, and oh, we don't like it, it's not serving us, it's not the thing that's working for us, that may begin to change it. And that goes back to what we talked about two episodes ago about how the people with the most power – and therefore the most ability to change power dynamics – are often the ones with the least awareness, the least understanding of the power dynamics. So if you can shift that thing, so that the person who wasn't aware is now aware, and you can not only have awareness, but that decision, "I want it to be different," I think that's often a good start. It's not usually the whole story, partly because the awareness slips away again. So one of the things to change is to keep that awareness. But I think that exercises that demonstrate the awareness are often really good starting places. So things like tracking speaking frequency in a room can change things. I had an experience in a training session once the the group was half male and half female. And at the end of the first day, we sort of did a closing round, "How has this been for you today?" And in that round, I said, "I noticed that in this group today, every time the instructor asked a question, the first response was from someone male. And I wasn't entirely comfortable about that." And that's all I said. I think the instructor said something like, "Well, isn't that interesting." And that is literally all that was said. And that was the first of, in total, twelve days of training, and it never happened again. Just making the awareness of it in a room where that value was shared, right. And then in that case, it was a pretty clear gender power dynamic that everybody was in agreement wasn't a good idea. So we really did almost nothing except name it. So I do think the decision is powerful. And most of the time that you need more than that.

Paul: 4:12

Yes. There's a classic model of human change, the first step of which is awareness. If we're not aware that this is going on, we can't possibly change it. And if we're not aware of a need to change it – if we're not aware of the impact that it's having – it won't change. And the second step of that is actually desire. Do we actually want that to change? Are we up for that? And that's, I think, what the first two episodes in this series have been about: aligning our awareness and aligning our desire around this. So once we get to that point, then in some ways the trickier work begins. Because now what we're talking about is behaving in a different way. We say, "Great, we want to behave in a different way." We understand what would be different, what would be required of us – at an intellectual level – and we want to do that. Now we actually have to start to do it. And once we start doing it, that's when we can very easily get the, "Oh, wait, no, I didn't really mean it. I didn't really understand what it was going to take." And we start to question whether or not we want to do do things differently. And so both our knowledge of how to operate differently in this new way of of operating with different power dynamics and our ability to do so can come into question. And so I think this often shows up – if you think about it, if we're ever shifting a power gradient, or shifting a power dynamic where, you know, even just say it's amongst two people, right, between Karen and I, and Karen's, on the uphill side of this... Karen's the one who always talks right in the meeting. So 90% of what is said is Karen and 10% is me. And we've identified that we want to shift that. We would like that to be closer to 50/50. So now what needs to start happening is, Karen needs to be making space for me, and I need to be using that space. And maybe it where I need to actually be creating space for myself, and Karen needs to be backing off when I start to do that. We have to negotiate what that that might actually look like. And that is likely to be very hard.

Karen: 6:36

I think it is really hard, and it's hard in ways we don't expect. I think one way that people can sort of go astray about this is – and those of us who tend to have power in a room often think, "Okay, I see what's wrong, I know how to fix it, I have a plan, I'm going to do this thing." And it feels very comfortable. Because guess where the control is staying? And guess where the power is staying? And I'm just going to be suspicious of that. I'm just going to be really curious about, okay, that's well intentioned, but is it actually going to make the difference that's needed if the person who have the most power is the one taking control of the change? I think probably one of the earliest stages of how to actually make change is to talk to the people who have less power, who are lower on the power gradient, and say, "What would work for you?" So in our example, if I say, "Okay, Paul needs to talk more, we've agreed to that. So I'm going to run my own timer, and I'm going to make sure that I just don't talk more than 50%." And then we've got dead air, because we haven't figured out how to balance it. Way better if I say, "Okay, Paul, so what would help with that? What is it about what I'm doing that's contributing to that? What is it that you need?" And to the point you made about it, even if I'm doing everything that I can do on my side, you also have a role in it. So it may even be that I'm saying, "So what would help you?" Not just what do you need me... because the tendency is to say, "Well, stop talking so much." But that may actually not be the thing. I may be legitimately filling dead air. We don't know, unless we're having the conversation. So finding ways to create trust, to show up with curiosity, so that the folks who have – ironically the very folks who have felt least able to contribute and become able to contribute to the solution, I think, is really essential. Because their ideas about what will shift it are far more likely to be successful than the ideas of the people who have been in the more powerful positions.

Paul: 8:53

One of the things that you have to work with there is a concept called learned helplessness, which is that if I've been in a situation where I know you're going to drive the meeting – you're going to talk, we're going to be through there– I don't have to worry about any of that. I don't have to worry about what it is that I want to put in. I don't have to worry about dead air because I can count on you to to fill that. Well, the thing is, that means I never learned how to actually work with it. So I don't even learn that I can. I have through this pattern of behavior come to believe I need for you to drive this. Even if I don't like it. Because we can very easily get into that space where I can say, "I don't like how I never am able to get a word in edgewise." And then that I discover that I don't like the alternative, which is that I have to take responsibility for the content of of what's happening here. That I actually have to step out of just being able to sit back and let you drive. I might discover I like that even less... at the beginning. Until we can actually figure out, "Okay, what would help." So that shift does really require participation on both parts, on both sides of that. Because in any power gradient, that is creating patterns that perpetuate it, that reinforce it. But that also means that there's action that needs to be taken on both sides to shift it. And that's not necessarily obvious. But it leads to the snapback thing that we see all the time, which is we try this for three of our meetings, and the dead air just lingers. And so you just jump back into,"Alright, I'm going to just take over. See, it couldn't possibly work any other way." Right? We just go back to where we were before and believe it's impossible. So I think that another important piece around that in addition to what you've talked about, which is we need to find out, not just from the people who have the power, and who are going to be trying to let some of that go what would work for them, and from the people who need to be stepping into that – who are going to be inheriting that – what would work for them? I think another important piece is, "What are we going to do when it goes badly?" Because we should expect it will. It's a new thing for us. We've not done it this way before. So when we are tempted to slip back into our old patterns, what do we want to do instead? It's creating the contingency of what are we going to notice that that's going to tell us we're starting to drift back into the old pattern? And how do we want to stop from sliding back? And having an agreement about that.

Karen: 11:48

And I think we're going to have to be talking about it. Because the slide back is so easy to slip into. And and in fact, the slide back will often feel better than the change we're aiming for. Because as we've talked about in other episodes about change, it doesn't feel good when we start. It feels uncomfortable, it feels unfamiliar. I at least am very good at coming up with stories about why we need the thing that is comfortable and convenient."Really, it just works better when I talk more because that just actually works better." Without realizing that what I'm really trying to do is escape discomfort. And here's the reality. We're using the who talks more as a metaphor for power. I want to be clear, that's there are all sorts of ways to have power, including by being silent. So you know, just keeping in mind that lots of different power dynamics could be in play. But however you get your power, if that way stops being available to you, it doesn't feel good. We as humans like to have power and control. I think particularly our mainstream culture in America has an association of that with safety. And so when we have less, even if at some level, we figured out, "Oh, the thing I want is best served by equalizing this," going from more power to less power is always uncomfortable. And as we've said, sometimes going from less to more is uncomfortable. And sometimes it's not quite as clean as that. Sometimes everybody in this system had power but they were using it differently. So your power gradient was sort of one way in terms of who speaks how much and another way in terms of how flexible people were and another way in terms of who has influenced when they speak. So you might have a lot of dynamics. This is that complexity we were talking about. But as you shift, it's gonna be uncomfortable. So if it seems easy, I'd make it really a high priority to have that conversation with the whole group about, "Is this working? Or are we shifting it? Do we like the results? If not, why not?" And then if not, is this because we're just in that the uncomfortable change space? Or is it because it's actually not working in some way we didn't anticipate?

Paul: 14:17

Mm hmm. Yeah. So the an important part of what shifts power dynamics is actually having that regular check in about whether or not the thing that we're trying to do – are we actually doing it? We said we wanted to share power in this way. And are we actually doing that? And then is having the effect that we want? And how are we feeling about it? How are we doing? Because it happens gradually and it's about creating a new dynamic. It's about creating a new, stable pattern of behavior in a system. That is uncomfortable and does not happen overnight. If the change were easy, you would have made it already. And so yeah, the other thing I think that you're talking about there... What shifts power dynamics is a willingness to be uncomfortable, and to talk about the discomfort, and in a lot of ways normalize that discomfort. I had a former coworker of mine who said, at one point, "Paul, your superpower is normalizing discomfort." Because when we realize that this discomfort isn't a sign of dysfunction, when we realize that it's actually a sign we're doing it right, that helps us to stay the course with it. And if we don't talk about it, we can often think that it's just us. Everybody else is fine with this, and we're the only ones who have a problem with it, and so there must be something wrong with us. Because ultimately, I think that when we talk about it, if we've gotten to that place where we recognize what the power gradients are like and what the power differentials are like, and we have a shared desire to actually change them, then we can open ourselves up into that collaborative space of how do we actually support each other to be making these more systemic pattern-based changes. So what shift power dynamics is also not seeing ourselves as disconnected from the other people involved in this. This is something that lives in this space between. And so we have to be on an ongoing basis, collaborating and supporting each other, in order to change the nature of that space between.

Karen: 16:34

I feel like we've covered a lot about the feeling around the process and that kind of thing. I would like to point to some more tangible things, and you and I probably both have some. Okay, so we know we want to change power dynamics. What are sort of tangible things that we can look at? I do think that speaking time is a big one that shows up a lot. And that one's so easy, because just simply tracking speaking time or speaking turns often makes a huge difference. I have this dream of a Zoom feature that will just have these bars across the bottom of the screen and tracks the number of minutes that people speak. I haven't seen it happen yet, but I'd love to see that programmed. You can just turn it on and have this totally unbiased, it's just data, we've all got it. But there are versions of that that you can do manually without fabulous computer programming that can begin to show us some data. So I think that's a good one to start with. I also think that using a tool to really look at how is power showing up in our organization or our community. There's a tool on the Cooperative Culture Handbook called "101 ways to get power in a group." And it's literally a list of 101 ways that people get power, and many of them are surprising. And often they are things we don't think of as ways to get power. So doing that exercise either as an individual– just to be thinking about yourself –or with a team, with a group and getting some awareness of different people's perceptions, and how is it landing, that can be a nice tool for having conversations that will help you actually identify some of those sources. And once you know where the sources of the power differential are, it becomes more evident what you want to do about them.

Paul: 18:23

It's always a good idea when you're trying to change something to be clear about what's currently happening. Just getting a sense of the landscape and being explicit about those sorts of things. The other one that I go to a lot is decision making, and just actually being clear about who is currently making these decisions. Because you don't always have – in fact, in most organizations, you don't necessarily have an explicit understanding, you have an implicit understanding of who you think makes decisions. Because decision making authority within certain areas... different people make decisions about different types of things. In a company, different people make decisions about what code we're going to write from who gets paid what. So what oftentimes when I am working with groups that want to shift power dynamics, we actually just start by enumerating what are the types of decisions that get made and how are they made? Who makes them and what's the mechanism by which they're made? And then you can start to go, "Which of those might we want to change?" Because then that gives you actually very tangible things. And starting to be behaviorally specific, rather than saying,"Well, we want to be more collaborative," what does more collaborative mean? Let's pick a couple of specifics. It means that we want to make these particular decisions in this particular process, because currently the way we're doing them is this way. We would like to shift that first. Or we want to make sure that information flows in a particular way. Information flow is another really important part of shifting power dynamics, because information is power. Who knows what is a big deal around that. And so usually, participation, information, and decisions are specific things that I will start to dig into with a group that will help them in terms of shifting their power dynamics. And in most cases, it's just a case of making those explicit."What are we already doing?" We're not asking you to change yet. Let's be clear about what we're doing now. And sometimes that's enough to create a change. But then pick one or two to start to shift. What are the ones that we think would be most critical? Whe most important ones that will start to move us towards the result we want to be getting from this change power dynamic. One other thing that I think is really important, that helps to shift power dynamics is keeping in mind the purpose for the shift. What's the goal? Why are we doing this? Keeping that front and center, because that helps anchor the motivation. Why do we want to be doing it? It's because we want to operate more like this. We want to get more of these results, we want to see that happening. And it helps give us the yardstick. Are we making progress towards that? How much progress have we made towards that? How much have things changed? And so it helps us feel like we're having some sort of sense of accomplishment. And we have ways to make decisions and evaluate. We can see if we do this kind of thing, if we change these three ways that we make decisions, we believe that will actually help us get towards the result we're trying to get to. So those are some of the tangible things that I will often go to when I'm working with a group.

Karen: 21:37

I have one more. A lot of what you were talking about, there are sort of structural things that can be changed in the system. And I want to point to one more that's possibly more relevant with my usual client than yours, which is role changing. If you're in a corporation with a clear hierarchy, you're not going to just gonna swap jobs all the time. But often, especially in volunteer organizations, or community organizations, there's a lot of potential to change roles. And while I think you have to do it carefully, so you don't put somebody in a role that they actually don't have the skills for, to the extent that power sits in roles, I think it's worth thinking about something that is sometimes called term limits. I wouldn't make it a firm limit; I think you want to be flexible and thoughtful about how you apply it. But if the same person has been in the same role for a very long time, there's going to be a lot of accumulated power there that can often just feel like a brick wall for somebody coming new into that space. And so being thoughtful about particularly leadership roles, particularly roles that have a lot of inherent power within them, if you're looking to have a more egalitarian structure, making sure that those shift. Not necessarily that everyone goes through every role, but that everyone takes time out of those power roles, and that someone else then has a chance to step into them. And that you've got a pool of folks who are good at that kind of leadership work that are being grown and being supported and being built up. But also just that you don't have that power sitting in one person for too long. I get concerned in volunteer groups if the same person has been – particularly around things like process or facilitation, but really any role. I'd be asking myself, "Is there a reason that that person has been there more than two years, more than three years?" Something like that, depending on what the work is?

Paul: 23:35

Colombo-esque, I'm gonna throw in my "one more thing" at

the end here, which is: 23:39

I think a really critical thing that helps shift power dynamics is empathy. Because it's important for us – both in the awareness and the desire and then in the actual carrying it out – the more that we are able to step out of the position we are currently in and to be able to see things from the other side of the dynamic – or the other sides of the dynamic – to understand the human impact that the current arrangement has on everybody involved, and how we can want that to be different. I think that is another really important part. Seeing how the current arrangement is affecting us as people and also having empathy for people as they are trying to change, as they're trying to shift. Recognizing that it is difficult to get out of those patterns that you have been in even if you don't like them. And to have empathy and to support people who are trying to change even if they're doing it unskillfully – even when they're doing unskillfully because that is going to happen right. To have some grace with people when backsliding happens, when we start to go back into those into those old patterns. We need to have a process or a way of saying, "Hey, that's happening, and we don't want that; we want to get into the new pattern," but not to do that in a blame-y way or in a judgmental way. Recognizing that that's a natural response to that discomfort and being able to have empathy in that moment, I think that is the other thing that really helps us to keep doing the hard work of shifting power dynamics.

Karen: 25:31

So to track where we've been today, we're picking up on the last two episodes where we said that the first thing is look for power gradients in your groups. Notice where they are, and be cautious if you think there aren't any. Be looking. Once you've identified where those power gradients are, take a look and see if they're serving us. Do we want to have power differentials or not? Do we want to have power –either momentarily or a longer term – functioning in a certain way. So once we've seen how it's functioning, do we like what it's doing? Is it working for our group? Is it helping us reach our goals? And then what we were really talking about in this episode, which was, if we've decided it's not serving us, how do we shift it? And so simply making that decision is a start. We have to know that we want to and sometimes that's enough. Opening the conversation. Finding out from people on both sides of the equation or all sides of the equation or all the places in the dynamic, what's working for you? What's not working? What would work better? What are your needs around it? What are your abilities around changing it? And how do we engage with those? Checking back in, measuring progress, paying attention. Keeping in mind, "Okay, what was the thing we said wasn't working, that we're now trying to get working better?" Using that as a yardstick. And then looking for actual tangible tools for tracking things like speaker time, looking at the structural systems for roles, for decision making processes, and do we have clarity about those things? Are those sources of power differential that we might want to change? And then this last piece – which I think is so important – is what Paul was talking about, of empathy. That as we walk through the discomfort of naming it, of experiencing it, of being in it, and then of the change that it takes to make it different, having empathy with each other about the discomfort around that really helps us tolerate the discomfort of change.

Paul: 27:36

Well, that's gonna do it for us for today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 27:41

And I'm Karen Gimnig. And this has been Employing Differences.