Employing Differences, Episode 126: Can you help us with our working agreements?

Paul: 0:08

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

Karen: 0:14

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:16

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, "Can you help us with our working agreements?"

Paul: 0:27

So this is a question that I've been asked a lot. In a lot of the environments that I've been in, working internally as a team coach for a number of years, one of the things that I did a lot was, as teams were starting up, or as teams were kind of resetting, one of the things they would ask is, "Hey, can you come help us with our working agreements?" And now I do this a bit as an external consultant, where groups are wanting to work together more effectively, and they want some sort of foundation for that. And so this is a question that I get. I know, Karen, you get in some of the work that you do. And we wanted to explore a little bit today, just kind of unpacking that question a little bit. When someone asks us that, what are the things that we think about and think through that come up? What are some of the traps that we try to avoid? And what does success really look like? When we do that well, what what does that really look like? So what we wanted to explore today here is the concept of what working agreements are and aren't, and how we might help a group to deal with them more effectively or less effectively.

Karen: 1:40

Yeah, I mean, the first thing that I always go to there is that word "agreement." I'm really curious what we mean by it, and my experience is that the first thing to talk about is, "What do we mean by that?" When we say we're building working agreements, what is it that we expect it to mean? What is it that we want it to accomplish? Why do we need them? And in my experience, fairly often the approach is a bit like in third grade, when somebody says, "Okay, we're going to make the rules together." And there's this expectation, "Ok, we'll have this list of rules, and then a teacher will enforce them, and everybody will have to follow them because, those are the rules." But we don't like to use that word rules as adults, because it sounds very hierarchical and dictatorial, and who would want to be enforcing the rules? So we call them agreements, but expect that they're going to have the same weight and function as the classroom rules list from childhood. And I think we just want to get really clear with each other, is that what we're wanting? Are we wanting a way to hold each other accountable? And if so, what will that accountability look like? And are we actually talking about spaces of agreement? Are we just using the pretty word or are we actually going to do the work to figure out where are we in agreement? And where I think things get really interesting is the value of the conversation. I think a lot of times, "Can you help us with our working agreements?" people are thinking the goal is the document. And I actually think the goal that I'm most interested in is the conversation where we realize,"I just always thought the first person and made the coffee and that worked really well. But it turns out for somebody else, they wanted it to be on more of a rotating basis, because the first person who comes in doesn't want to always have to make the coffee." That's obviously a very simple example. But I think that just that conversation about, where do we agree about things? Where do we not agree about things? And what do we want to do when my vision of what we should do working together – or the reality of who I'm going to be in work, which may not even be the same as who I think I ought to be – doesn't match the expectation on the other side? What happens then, I think, is the really interesting stuff.

Paul: 4:19

We've talked before about that idea of sort of surfacing expectations. What are expectations that we can have of each other that would be useful? And how do we help those come forth? And I think a lot of that– and I agree with you around the idea that usually the the most important part of this is the conversation – is really the discovery of what's going on. What are the things that we don't have agreement about because not everybody's thinking about them? Just to go to your making coffee example, somebody made an assumption about this, somebody else made a different assumption. We never discussed it, we never talked about it, and so we couldn't possibly have any sort of agreement about it. And so I think that the valuable part is discovering where we may have agreement and discovering where we may have disagreement. And just because we disagree about something doesn't mean need to resolve it in the process of this. We can discover that we have different ideas of what's actually useful for us, and by surfacing that we can actually figure out, "Okay, we still need to work this out." We still need to figure it out. We're now aware of it. And so I think one of the roles of the conversation is to bring into awareness things we weren't aware of before. If all we're trying to do is take all the issues that we already have on the table and create policy around them, I don't think that that's the best use of a group's time. And the other thing about that, often why it isn't – this is one of the big struggles that I deal with groups when we're coming in, this idea of agreement – one of the very early questions that I ask groups that gets me and them in trouble is, "So how do you make decisions as a group?" Because this is partly the "How would we know we agree?" What is the decision-making process in this group so that we know we have agreement? And of course, they don't have one yet. So there's this very much chicken-and-egg problem with this idea of creating working agreements, when we don't actually know how we would agree on something.

Karen: 6:42

Yeah, and I do think that that one of the reasons that we reach for policies or rules or agreements or guidelines. In my line of work, there's all sorts of names that get attached to these things, but they all kind of mean the same thing, usually. And one of the reasons we reach for them is because it feels really insecure not to know what I can expect. I don't know what's expected of me. I don't know what I can reasonably expect of anybody else. And so it feels safer to say, "Okay, we're gonna get together, and we're going to agree about this is how we're going to do things. This is how we're divvying up the work, this is how we're maintaining the copier, or making the coffee." Whatever all the things are, whatever is related to the work. And if we all agree and we all do it the same way, then there's a lot of security about that – particularly if it can all be my way. If we can just all agree to do it my way then I'm gonna be really comfortable. And that's gonna be great. And most of us have some capacity to say,"Okay, it's my week to manage the coffee, so I manage the coffee that week. Okay. Got it. Now I know." But the thing that I think I really want to point out here is that while there is absolutely value in knowing this is what I can expect and this is what we expect of each other and we know what the rules are in this water that we're swimming in, there's also value in having some flexibility. And so I think sometimes we reach for working agreements with the idea that we'll all treat each other the same way, so we'll all know how to treat each other, and it will all be fair and we'll all feel good about it. And I want to push back on that a little bit and suggest that having everybody do things the same way might not actually be the best thing. Because if we all have to do it Paul's way, then I'm not going to be doing my best work. And if we also do it my way, then Paul's not doing his best work. Then we're not in that space. But if we can say, "Oh, I like to do it this way, and you like to do it that way. And you know what, it'll work out. It'll be okay." And so it's not that we create those expectations necessarily by having it the same for everybody. It might be that what we're doing in that working agreement conversation is learning to expect that we'll do things differently.

Paul: 9:24

Yeah, the other stumbling block that I run into with groups around working agreements is the level of specificity. Because there's a sweet spot that I think hits that trade-off between flexibility and vagueness. So on the one end, we have what I think of as behavioral categories. They're sort of labels of things. So it's like, "We want to be collaborative. We want to treat each other with respect." These also often have lots of values embedded in them. And that's really useful, except that we may not agree what those actually mean. And so, oftentimes, I'll push groups a little bit when they start there to go to a slightly more behavioral space. So when they say, "Well, we want to treat each other with respect." "Well, what would respect look like? If you were showing each other respect and I was watching, how would I know? If I was observing, what would I see or hear or notice?" And I think that can be useful because it starts toget at the place of what we actually agree about what respect means. Because there are maybe places where we disagree. I think I'm being respectful by challenging the argument that you have brought, and you think that I'm being rude by not just listening to you. I actually worked with a group where that was actually what was happening. There was a mismatch about what respect meant. But also, I think we don't want to go too far down that road of saying "You have to use exactly these words and these steps." These are more like protocols that I sometimes talk about. I think those are useful in certain spots, but I don't think they're useful sort of at the working agreements level. We have to give people some flexibility but within the boundaries of what the group finds acceptable. Everybody needs to be able to do this thing in their own way but in a way that works for the group.

Karen: 11:31

I think that's really true. And I want to lean in a little bit more detailed to what you were saying about people's experiences of what's respectful or not. Using words of respectful – appropriate is a popular one of these days."That's not appropriate." And the values that are attached to that... One that I run into with groups a good bit is about starting meetings on time. So I work with a lot of groups that say they want a lot of diversity, and they want people with kids, and they want people from various different cultures. And those same people will say,"And one of our working agreements is we always start our meetings on time, because that's respectful." That I'm just gonna say in mainstream, middle-class, white American culture, that is a value. But I lived in Africa for a year. If you're within an hour of the time you said you'd start You're early. I've had that experience with Latin American descent folk. I've had that experience with people who are deaf. So the breadth of culture and just that sense of "What does it mean to start a meeting on time?" and the idea that it's inherently disrespectful.... We put that language about something like starting meetings on time or how we take minutes. There's a lot of stuff that we arrived with that if we've only been in one cultural paradigm, that's just the responsible, the respectable the appropriate thing to do. And and I'm just going to say, if you're using any of those value-laden words, I'm going to encourage you to pause and get interested. You might be in a group that everybody's in agreement that we start meetings on time, we've talked about it, and if somebody is late, we're not going to hang them from the flagpole, but we are going to start without them. And that's what's expected and I know if I'm late, I'm going to walk into a meeting that's already been started. That can be the norm. Or you can have a culture that says, "What's respectful is to wait until everyone arrives." And then what do we do with that? How do you work with that? But something as basic as "Do you start a meeting on time," I'm going to say is not a clear cut value about what's respectful or responsible or appropriate. It's about who do you have in the room? And what are the beliefs and what actually works for that group of people? And I can almost guarantee you're going to have at least one who really likes to start meetings on time, and at least one who's almost always late. If you've got a group of people, you probably have that. So what meaning are we attaching to that behavior? And we can multiply that times, many, many other elements of being together and working together. I think that it's more about having those conversations so that when those differences arise – because they're going to – we don't let those degrade our relationships.

Paul: 14:41

I think one of the most powerful agreements that a group can make is "How do they want to be in the presence of difficulty?" When things don't go the way that they hoped to, when conflict starts to arrive, when we notice that we're are struggling, how do we want to be? What do we want to do about that? What do we not want to do about that? Working agreements are pretty much always aspirational. That's why we are coming up with them, why we've asked someone to help us come up with them. Because we're not doing all them. We shouldn't expect we're going to be doing all of them. So part of it is – and we've talked about this before, I think in the episode about contracting, but – just this idea of we shouldn't expect that we're always going to hold on to these things. So we need to have some sort of recovery protocols built into it. But part of it is also when we notice we were wrong about something. When we noticed generally that we're having difficulty, what do we want to do? How do we want to be in the presence of that? I think is one of the most useful things that a group can do. And the other thing that I want to point to around the what we are accustomed to or familiar with or what we believe is respectful or efficient, or all of these different things, I think it's important to remember that these are working agreements. These are agreements that are designed to help the group be as effective as they can. And that doesn't mean that they're designed to make us feel as comfortable as possible. That's really where I tend to go when I'm working with a group – being clear about what the purpose of these are, and that they're for the group, they're not for the individual. And so in particular, if I tend to notice that it seems like there's one person who's insisting on things being done their way, I'm going to get really curious about that. Are we really actually making working agreements for the group? Is the group acquiescing to that person's wishes because they don't want to stir up more things. Because that's a thing they're actually going to need to have a working agreement around. I think working agreements necessarily involve discomfort, both in the creating of them, and also in the trying to work with them, trying to use them, and also in the dealing with it when we fail to actually live up to other people's expectations of us.

Karen: 17:26

So I think just to track where we've been, we started with a question that we both get asked in one form or another,"Can you help us with our working agreements?" And where we start with that really being first is the question of, "So why do you want working agreements?" What are you hoping to accomplish? And what does that mean? And are we really talking about rules? And what are we wanting to do if rules get broken? And if we're really talking about agreements, what makes us think we have agreement about those things. And then avoiding some of the common traps around working agreements. One of which is expecting that everybody is going to do the same thing and that that's where we're gonna get our security from. And instead just revealing, "These are things we're going to do the same, these are things we're going to do differently," and having matched expectations. We expect to do it differently or we expect it we'll do it the same. So the expectations have some alignment, but not necessarily the behaviors or the how to function. And then that piece about just getting really clear that working agreements are aspirational. They're what we intend to do. They're not necessarily what we will do. And when we don't do them, let's have some agreement about how we want to be with that. How do we want to engage when working agreements aren't what's happening, and we aren't getting to that aspirational place. And getting used to the idea that there's going to be some discomfort with this. We're gonna go through some uncomfortable spaces, we're gonna have some uncomfortable conversations, and how do we retain the relationships and the effective working space when we're outside of the agreements themselves? So I think one of those things we really want to lean into is "Don't expect that having a document that is your working agreements is going to solve all of your potential conflict problems." It's more that the conversation through which we make that document is going to give us a basis for talking through and repairing relationships, when the aspirational working agreements don't exactly match the behavior.

Paul: 19:33

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

Karen: 19:37

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