Sep 22, 2020 Past Issues of Good at Work

What Are You Broadcasting?

The signal we send all-day, everyday

How well does your reputation serve you? Thinking about this should be part of your personal and professional development. We may not realize it, but our daily life is like a radio station and everyone around us is tuning in. They are listening for reasons to trust us.

A reputation for being untrustworthy usually costs us in ways we never even see, because people look elsewhere when they have opportunities to share. It’s not something we’ll hear from people (who enjoys telling someone they can’t be trusted?), but the cost to us is real.

The message we transmit comes, in part, from our actions. Do we do what we said we would do? Are we kind? Are we patient? Do we take criticism well?

But a lot of the radio signal we broadcast comes from our words, too. It’s in the way we talk about things like integrity, respect, and accountability. These moments are often small enough that we don’t even notice them. Have you been annoyed at the inconvenience of someone doing the right thing? Did you use an excuse like “What they don’t know won’t hurt them”? Be careful: these little moments can send a loud message.

What signal are you sending out? When it comes to our trustworthiness, we generally broadcast one of three messages:

Integrity. People can think of times we spoke up about doing the right thing. They remember a time we paid the price to treat someone else fairly. Because of this, they expect us to treat them fairly, too.
Cynicism. People can remember a time we cut corners. They felt uncomfortable because we made an excuse for bad behavior. They heard us talk about someone else unkindly, wondering if we talk about them the same way.
Silence. People genuinely cannot remember a time we made a hard choice. When someone else was suggesting a sketchy idea, we never spoke up. They don’t know much about our integrity, because we never paid the price to protect it.

Notice that #2 and #3 do the same damage to trust. We have to be proactive in our integrity. It’s not something people will assume in our favor.

What can we do to broadcast more integrity, especially in the little moments? It matters because people are always tuning in.

Seeing Good at Work

Because bad news dominates the media, broadcasting good into the world is a choice, not just something that will happen on its own. The Solutions Journalism Network identifies news stories that describe solutions to the world’s problems instead of just talking about the problems themselves.

Their Solutions Story Tracker just crossed 10,000 stories. You can search their database for good news of all kinds. Also consider following them on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

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You’ll be hearing me say this a lot, but the most common misconception about ethics is that it’s just a matter of character. The truth is that good people make ethical mistakes all the time, because it’s more than character. Ethics is a skill.

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Sep 15, 2020 Past Issues of Good at Work

How Enemies Become Friends

Small moments of grace have power

I’ve been thinking lately about how amazing reconciliation is. I have a hard time appreciating it in the heat of conflict, but there’s always hope for making my enemy into a friend. Here’s evidence of how that works.

Ann Atwater was a black civil rights activist in Durham, North Carolina and a fierce advocate. Her granddaughter described her, saying “If something didn’t seem right, she was going to speak up for it. She really wasn’t afraid to ruffle feathers.”

C.P. Ellis, on the other hand, was a grand exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan who, in 1971, was determined to derail a school desegregation effort in Durham. He was chosen by fellow white supremacists to co-chair a 10-day community meeting, called a charrette, about the conflict. The other co-chair was Ann Atwater. The two already knew and despised each other.

Ellis came to the first meeting with a machine gun in the trunk of his car, while Atwater came carrying a Bible. (In a previous, heated encounter, she’d pulled a knife on him to make her point.) It wasn’t until after three days of contentious meetings that a small moment of grace broke down the walls between them.

A church choir was performing for the group, and Ellis was struggling to clap with the tempo. Atwater reached over and grabbed his hands to help him along, an act of kindness that softened his heart. This opened the door to a conversation, where they learned that both of them had children who were being bullied by classmates. The shared experience helped them see each other differently.

That’s when the walls came down between them and they began working together. The committee successfully adopted a set of school integration proposals that had seemed impossible at the start. Atwater and Ellis became lifelong friends. C.P. also publicly renounced his KKK membership and went on to a life of promoting civil rights and workers’ rights. Atwater spoke at his funeral in 2005. She passed away in 2016.

Reconciliation is almost always preceded by mercy. The question for us: Is there a small moment of grace we can offer in our conflicts? We may not realize what it could mean to turn an enemy into a friend.

(If you want to learn more about Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis, start with this beautiful NPR segment following Eliss’ death. There’s also a book about the two called Best of Enemies, and a movie by the same name.)

Seeing Good at Work

Restorative Justice is a criminal reform movement that brings victims and perpetrators together to find forgiveness and reconciliation. With enough resources and participation, the process substantially reduces two huge justice problems: high incarceration rates and victim exclusion/dissatisfaction with punishments. Victims typically find the restorative justice process far more satisfying than the criminal justice system.

This story in Slate is a great place to learn more about the movement and its history and challenges. To dig even deeper, I recommend the Restorative Justice Library, an online resource at the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation.

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Sep 8, 2020 Past Issues of Good at Work

Giving Is Glue

Why a gift works so well on the giver

You’re probably familiar with the famous Harvard Study of Adult Development, known generally as the Happiness Study. Its most powerful conclusion: the key to a long, healthy, happy life is warm relationships.

So how do we develop these relationships? Being a giving person might be the best strategy. Altruism, for example, is something we strongly prefer in potential mates for long-term intimacy. But why does giving make for relationships that last? The answer is in what giving does to the giver.

Think about the relationship between a newborn and her parents. It’s almost entirely one-sided. Parents will sacrifice sleep, clean up vomit, change endless diapers, and endure being screamed at by a tiny human who gives almost nothing in return. (It’s a miracle my four kids survived.) Why do parents do it?

The reason is because caring for someone else generates love for them. We usually think of love as the motive for a selfless act, ignoring how it is just as often the result of one. Our attachments often come from our generosity, not the other way around.

This even works with strangers. Consider the pan-handler you donate to versus the one you pass by. If you gave a few bucks, you’re likely to think of that person all day, wondering about their life. If you walked by, you’re likely not to think of them ever again.

Giving is glue. And not just because it makes us feel indebted as receivers. We’re far too capable of ingratitude for that to be enough. Instead, our generosity binds us as givers to the recipients of our kindness. Giving is a way that we attach ourselves to others; it enhances our feelings of commitment instead of relieving them.

Can we give too much? Of course. But in a time when self-care gets more attention than care for others, it’s worth pushing back against the idea that giving too much is the bigger risk. Paraphrasing a good friend of mine, our relationships are more likely to rust out than to wear out. Giving is a powerful way to keep our connections vibrant and healthy.

Is there someone you need a deeper connection with? What can you give them so you feel more committed?

(For more on the Harvard Happiness study, here’s a fascinating TED talk.)

Seeing Good at Work

When it comes to making deep, lasting connections, I deeply admire SOS Children’s Villages. They adopt orphaned or abandoned children and raise them in family-like communities in 136 countries around the world, having helped raise more than four million kids.

Each of these village communities—556 of them worldwide—has homes with up to 10 kids of varying ages and are run by “moms” and “aunties” whose own children are grown and moved out. To work as a mom at SOS, you have to be willing to make a decade-long commitment so that the children can benefit from a stable relationship while they grow up.

SOS also helps the kids from cradle to career, well into their adult years, with college support and mentoring. Their work also includes extensive programs to strengthen families in the surrounding communities. It’s an incredible model that I’ve seen first-hand in Ghana, and one of my favorite global organizations working with children.

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Sep 1, 2020 Past Issues of Good at Work

The Problem with "Problem"

There was historic news last week in the work to eradicate Polio. Africa was declared free from any remaining wild virus, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative and the Kick Polio Out campaign started by President Nelson Mandela in 1996. That year, there were over 75,000 African children across the continent who had been paralyzed by Polio. Now there are none.

You may recall that a vaccine for Polio has been available since 1955 thanks to the team led by Jonas Salk. How could it be possible that, after 40 years, 1,000 children worldwide were still being paralyzed by the disease? When a cure costs pennies and only requires swallowing two drops of a liquid, how could Polio still survive?

We have a funny way of describing the world’s problems. We call Polio “a problem.” The same goes for human trafficking, illiteracy, and any number of other challenges. Each one is “a problem.”But this language doesn’t reflect reality.

For a child in northern Nigeria—the last bastion of Polio in Africa—an infection is the result of many problems: lack of medical infrastructure, armed conflict, lack of education, and remote living conditions, to name a few. But calling Polio “a problem” implies that there is “a solution.” Eradicating Polio for just one child means solving a tangled mess of wicked problems.

And the effort to solve them worked. The ongoing program has been a joint effort of the WHO, CDC, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation, Rotary International, and many others. It’s involved billions of dollars and literally millions of volunteers. It required innovations in GPS-mapping, public messaging, disease monitoring, and even a reinvention of the vaccine in 2009.

Solving these problems is never going to come down to a single invention—like a Polio vaccine—but that doesn’t mean we can’t solve them. It just takes a lot of us working on them.

Is there “a problem” where you can help by solving just one of the many tricky problems it contains?

(If you want to learn more about all the problems needing to be solved in eradicating Polio, I recommend this fascinating TED talk by Bruce Aylward.)

Seeing Good at Work

As Covid-19 still spreads around the world, we don’t yet know the full effect on poorer countries, like in Africa. VillageReach, a last-mile medical provider, has responded with its COVID 411 program to provide training to over 100,000 health care workers in multiple countries.

They’ve also launched a Covid-19 Action Fund to provide PPE to front-line health care workers in Africa.

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The signal we send all-day, everyday

Seeing Good at Work

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Small moments of grace have power

Seeing Good at Work

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Why a gift works so well on the giver

Seeing Good at Work

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Seeing Good at Work

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