Organized Workplace Quotes

How power is used in organizations determines whether it unites us with trust or divides us with fear

Great managers play favorites and spend most of their time with their most productive people. Not because they discriminate, but because they deserve the attention and have so much to teach you.

Winning is a wonderful thing if you can help and respect others along the way. But if you stomp on others as you climb the ladder and treat them like losers once you reach the top, my opinion is that you debase your own humanity and undermine your team or organization.

I can always tell about the health of a culture of an organization by how much gossiping is happening

If you want to become invaluable in a workplace—in any community—just do the useful things no one else is doing. Arrive earlier and leave later than your compatriots (but do not deny yourself your life).1 Organize what you can see is dangerously disorganized. Work, when you are working, instead of looking like you are working.

In my opinion, all HSPs are gifted because of their trait itself. But some are unusually so. Indeed, one reason for the idea of “liberated” HSPs was the seemingly odd mixture of traits emerging from study after study of gifted adults: impulsivity, curiosity, the strong need for independence, a high energy level, along with introversion, intuitiveness, emotional sensitivity, and nonconformity. Giftedness in the workplace, however, is tricky to handle. First, your originality can become a particular problem when you must offer your ideas in a group situation. Many organizations stress group problem solving just because it brings out the ideas in people like you, which are then tempered by others. The difficulty arises when everyone proposes ideas and yours seem so obviously better to

For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge! This means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and half-formed ideas.

Hierarchy (or, more specifically, the fear it creates when not handled well) reduces psychological safety.

These two voices represent opposing paths for the feminist movement. On the one hand, Sandberg and her ilk see feminism as a handmaiden of capitalism. They want a world where the task of managing exploitation in the workplace and oppression in the social whole is shared equally by ruling-class men and women. This is a remarkable vision of equal opportunity domination: one that asks ordinary people, in the name of feminism, to be grateful that it is a woman, not a man, who busts their union, orders a drone to kill their parent, or locks their child in a cage at the border. In sharp contrast to Sandberg’s liberal feminism, the organizers of the huelga feminista insist on ending capitalism: the system that generates the boss, produces national borders, and manufactures the drones that guard them.

By bringing together people who share interests, no matter their location or time zone, social media has the potential to transform the workplace into an environment where learning is as natural as it is powerful.

We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign). But the way we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story.

Poetic Terrorism WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ... Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc. Go naked for a sign. Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty. Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement... The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails. PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now. An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE. Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you. Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.

The ramifications of workplace violence can have a lingering effect on the organization for generations.

Finding out that you are wrong is even more valuable than being right, because you are learning.

The ramifications of workplace disruptive behavior can have an extremely serious effect upon an organization.

I will focus on how the institution is organized, and how that structure—anachronistic, paramilitary, rigidly bureaucratic—produces a workplace culture that serves as a breeding ground for racism, corruption, sexual predation, brutality, unjustified lethal force, and excessive militarism.

Practically speaking, when more than 90 percent of women got married and divorce was rare, discrimination in favor of men at work meant discrimination in favor of their wives at home. When workplace discrimination worked in favor of women at home, no one called it sexism. Why? It was working for women. Only when discrimination switched from working for women to working against women (because more women were working) did it get called sexism. For example: During the years I was on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City, the most resistant audiences I ever faced in the process of doing corporate workshops on equality in the workplace were not male executives—they were the wives of male executives.

turning the traditional hierarchical pyramid upside down to emphasize that everyone is responsible—able to respond— for living the constitution and getting the desired results while modeling the organization's valued behaviors.

If you are under someone else’s power, you should have a say in how that power is used. That’s the world I believe in. That’s the world I want to build. And anyone who claims those as their principles is commanded to organize their workplace today.

Accepting employment in any organization requires the new employee to adjust their personality in order to meld in with the operable business environment and applicable social climate. An employee whom cannot parrot the ideas, standards, mores, and ethical mandates of their professional organization might endure a turbulently relationship that will expose their core ideology.

you have to accept that no matter where you work, you are not an employee—you are in a business with one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses. There are millions of others all over the world, picking up the pace, capable of doing the same work that you can do and perhaps more eager to do it. Now, you may be tempted to look around your workplace and point to your fellow workers as rivals, but they are not. They are outnumbered—a thousand to one, one hundred thousand to one, a million to one—by people who work for organizations that compete with your firm. So if you want to work and continue to work, you must continually dedicate yourself to retaining your individual competitive advantage.

Cheating and covering up are natural by-products of a top-down culture that does not accept “no” or “it can't be done” for an answer. But combining this culture with a belief that a brilliant strategy formulated in the past will hold indefinitely into the future becomes a certain recipe for failure.

Every organization needs to make room for the time or effort a person needs for his or her personal life, and the dividends of this effort are not measured in business terms.

The nature of your work does not have to be the culture of your team.

Communication is the lifeblood of an organization.

in a digitally enabled world, all businesses are global

Can we create soulful workplaces—schools, hospitals, businesses, and nonprofits—where our talents can blossom and our callings can be honored?

High standards in a context where there is uncertainty or interdependence (or both) combined with a lack of psychological safety comprise a recipe for suboptimal performance.

Despite the continual rise of the knowledge worker over the last 60 years, we haven’t done enough to question “how we’ve always done things” and redefine effectiveness in organizations.

Low levels of psychological safety can create a culture of silence. They can also create a Cassandra culture – an environment in which speaking up is belittled and warnings go unheeded.

we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story. It’s the story of a contemporary phenomenon that I call the New Groupthink—a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work and to deprive schoolchildren of the skills they’ll need to achieve excellence in an increasingly competitive world.

My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board of the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

A series of controlled experiments and field studies in organizations shows that when teams engage in conflict over ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect, they develop better ideas and perform better .

Hydrogen sulfide is so swiftly lethal that farm- and workplace-safety organizations urge anyone who enters a manure pit or attempts to clear a blocked sewage pipe to wear a self-contained breathing apparatus.

The beauty of a high quality connection approach is that you don’t have to overhaul the culture at your workplace to create meaning. Anyone, in any position, can change how they feel, and how their coworkers feel, simply by fostering small moments of connection. The results would be transformative. Dutton has found that high quality connections can revitalize employees emotionally and physically, and help organizations function better.

For organizations, burnout contributes to declines in productivity, a more stressed and unhappy workplace, and greater turnover. And it’s often an organization’s most talented and valuable workers who are most likely to burn out.

What I hope is clear at this point is that you don't have to be the boss to be a leader. The leader's job is to create and nurture the culture we all need to do our best work. And so anytime you play a role in doing that, you are exercising leadership.

When an organization starts hemorrhaging talent, CEOs and boards of directors want to know why. If the boss gets blamed for the brain drain and is ultimately removed, it means relief for the employees still there and ex post facto vengeance for the former ones.

To understand why psychological safety promotes performance, we have to step back to reconsider the nature of so much of the work in today's organizations. With routine, predictable, modular work on the decline, more and more of the tasks that people do require judgment, coping with uncertainty, suggesting new ideas, and coordinating and communicating with others. This means that voice is mission critical. And so, for anything but the most independent or routine work, psychological safety is intimately tied to freeing people up to pursue excellence.

Overall, on average, happier people earn more money, get higher performance ratings, make better decisions, negotiate sweeter deals, and contribute more to their organizations. Happiness alone accounts for about 10 percent of the variation between employees and job performance.

Our obsession with scarcity makes us take for granted the very things that our survival depends on—air, water, climate, food, safety or even relationships. It’s only when something critically important becomes scarce and hence expensive that the human mind begins to acknowledge its value.

People viewing their organization like a machine fail to realize that the machine parts who burn out in the workplace, both NeuroDivergent or NeuroTypical, tend to be some of the most devoted employees. Why? Because to work hard enough to burn out, you have to care about what you’re doing.

My old boss Jim Barksdale was fond of saying, “We take care of the people, the products, and the profits—in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work. Most workplaces are far from good. As organizations grow large, important work can go unnoticed, the hardest workers can get passed over by the best politicians, and bureaucratic processes can choke out the creativity and remove all the joy.

Steven Covey, author of the bestselling The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, feels so strongly about people’s need for appreciation that he states: “Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival, to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.”1

But I no longer believe that trust is essential to organizational functioning or even to effective leadership. Why? Because the data suggest that trust is notable mostly by its absence. Nevertheless, organizations continue to roll along, as do their leaders who seemingly suffer few consequences for being untrustworthy.

In fact, I should say to begin with that the term anarchism is quite a range of political ideas, but I would prefer to think of it as the libertarian left, and from that point of view anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist, in the tradition of say Bakunin and Kropotkin and others. They had in mind a highly organized form of society, but a society that was organized on the basis of organic units, organic communities. And generally they meant by that the workplace and the neighborhood, and from those two basic units there could derive through federal arrangements a highly integrated kind of social organization, which might be national or even international in scope. And the decisions could be made over a substantial range, but by delegates who are always part of the organic community from which they come, to which they return and in which, in fact, they live.

So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece “Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of “over,” “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.* If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground—like the rifle range or the car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

But ultimately, all this work to become indispensable comes back to you. Indispensable employees know that the workplace is simply an arena for their own development as people. They measure their worth not by how indispensable their organizations judge them to be but by how fully they live out the full potential of who they truly are.

What do you feel passionately about? What irks you the most at your office, or your campus? Create a protest around it. Ideas: Make stickers that say “FFC IS WATCHING” and place them over the mouths of sexist ads you see on the subway. Organize the women in your office to wear your bulkiest winter gear for a day—to protest how goddamn cold the air conditioning is.

Each cooperative in Mondragon has its own workplace structure, though there are similarities and tendencies that most of them share. The firm called Irizar, which manufactures products for trans-portation, from luxury coaches to city buses, exemplifies these tendencies. To encourage innovation and the diffusion of knowledge, there are no bosses or departments in Irizar. Rather, it has a flat organizational structure based on work teams with a high degree of autonomy. (One study remarks that they “set their own targets, establish their own work schedules, [and] organize the work process as they see fit.”) The teams also work with each other, so that knowledge is transmitted efficiently. Participation occurs also in the general assembly, which meets three times a year rather than the single annual meeting common in other Mondragon firms. Its subsidiaries in other countries have at least two general assemblies a year, where they approve the company’s strategic plan, investments, etc. These participatory structures have enabled Irizar to surpass its competitors in profitability and market share.69

A hallmark of teams and organizations that are led by assholes, or where swarms of assholes run rampant, is that they are riddled with fear, loathing, and retaliation. In a fear-based organization, employees constantly look over their shoulders and constantly try to avoid the finger of blame and humiliation; even when they know how to help the organization, they are often afraid to do it.

Perhaps most stunning thing about the VW emissions debacle is that it's by no means a singular event. The same script – unreachable target goals, a command-and-control hierarchy that motivates by fear, and people afraid to lose their jobs if they fail – has been repeated again and again. In part that's because it's a script that was useful in the past, when goals were reachable, progress directly observable, and tasks largely individually executed. Under those conditions, people could be compelled to reach them simply by fear and intimidation. The problem is that, in today's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, this is no longer a script that's good for business. Rather than success, it's a playbook that invites avoidable, and often painfully public, failure.

A doctor of professional studies is a doctoral degree for working professionals.It allows you to combine your professional work with study and obtain a doctoral degree based entirely in your workplace.It is studied on a part-time basis and enables advanced practitioners to develop their professional knowledge at the doctoral level, benefiting both individuals and their organizations or professional fields.

We are inhabitants of a world where pride and divisiveness have become common in the workplace as people fight for status. It has almost become second nature for people to be overly willful, arrogant, intolerant, and rigid in order to establish dominance within the pecking order. However, leaders with these traits are trouble, for they erode the spirit of the organization by reducing staff resolve and creating chaos.

If the U.S. government and nonprofit organizations, private corporations and university laboratories are going to dedicate money and time to the future, they also need to do so for the present. They need to fund accessible buses, schools, classrooms, movie theaters, restrooms, housing, and workplaces. They should support campaigns to end bullying, employment discrimination, social isolation, and the ongoing institutionalizing of disabled people with the same enthusiasm with which they implement cure research. I want money for accessible playgrounds, tree houses, and sandboxes so that wheelchair-using kids aren't left twiddling their thumbs in the present while they dream of running in the future. If we choose to wait for those always-just-around-the-corner cures, lavishing them with resources, energy, and media attention, we risk suspending our present-day lives.

Managers aren’t looking for ten- or twenty-year change programs—they want simple, objective goals: profit, growth, healthy quarterly reports, trained people, orderly markets, competitive advantage. Until these organizations face reality, give up the futile quest for control and begin to respect such concepts as workplace democracy, the need to question everything, and the search for a more balanced existence, even the most modest goals will be beyond reach.

The relationship between humans and machines is better imagined as a partnership with machines employed to do work too repetitive or rudimentary for human intelligence, too dangerous for human well-being or too complex for human time. Human capability, on the other hand, has always excelled at fashioning such machines, creating meaning from the unfamiliar and in imaginative pursuits. In such an arrangement, technology does replace human effort, but only in areas where human effort is sub-optimal.

Burned-out, stressed-out, and frazzled leaders foster organizations that experience high turnover, low employee engagement, steep healthcare costs, and dysfunctional teams that often work against one another. The current models of leadership require organizations to motivate their people largely with fear and extrinsic rewards. Though no one argues that these forms of motivation can produce short-term results, they are usually accompanied by distrust and cynicism in the workplace, which have long-term negative consequences.

While we are all forced to participate in the games of office politics; it is very defeatist position for a Black woman. Many would argue that White men in America write the rules, mange the courses, and call all the plays. They are trusted to lead organizations and are in key positions to make positive change. I believe that at this moment in time, the onus shouldn't be places on the underdogs to pull themselves up. The onus is on White men in power to create work environments that are both inclusive and sustainable for marginalized people.

We take care of the people, the products, and the profits—in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work. Most workplaces are far from good. As organizations grow large, important work can go unnoticed, the hardest workers can get passed over by the best politicians, and bureaucratic processes can choke out the creativity and remove all the joy.

You are the steward of your people, of resources and time, and of the business. The subtle shift is in the focus. It isn’t about the control you flex, the dominance you project, or the power you wield. It’s about purposefully crafting a work environment that allows the human side of business to flourish. The shift is in caring for people in a way that improves their lives and positively influences the value they create for your organization. In a way, this book is about our human nature and the rich insights it holds to positively influence people and business.

Society, Burke believed, depends upon relations of affection and loyalty, and these can be built only from below, through face-to-face interaction. It is in the family, in local clubs and societies, in school, workplace, church, team, regiment and university that people learn to interact as free beings, taking responsibility for their actions and accounting to their neighbours. When society is organized from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.

This approach is flawed on multiple levels. First, when institutions conflate racial and gender diversity metrics with diversity of thought in their organizations, they implicitly reinforce the incorrect assumption that genetic characteristics predict something important about the way that a person thinks—the most fundamental assumption underlying racism itself. Second, this approach empowers entrenched managers to create the visible appearance of diversity in their organizations while avoiding the need to engage with true diversity of thought, including challenges to their incumbency. Third, when a narrow conception of diversity is implemented through affirmative action or other quota-based systems, that fuels racism and sexism by fostering tokenism in the workplace and animus among communities that fail to benefit from these programs.

one of the hottest topics today is ethics—ethics discussions, ethics curriculum, ethics training, codes of ethics. This book shows that while ethics is fundamentally important and necessary, it is absolutely insufficient. It shows that the so-called soft stuff is hard, measurable, and impacts everything else in relationships, organizations, markets, and societies. Financial success comes from success in the marketplace, and success in the marketplace comes from success in the workplace. The heart and soul of all of this is trust. This work goes far beyond not only my work, but also beyond anything I have read on the subject of trust. It goes beyond ethical behavior in leadership, beyond mere “compliance.” It goes deep into the real “intent” and agenda of a person’s heart, and then into the kind of “competence” that merits consistent public confidence.

Psychological safety is broadly defined as a climate in which people are comfortable expressing and being themselves. More specifically, when people have psychological safety at work, they feel comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution. They are confident that they can speak up and won't be humiliated, ignored, or blamed. They know they can ask questions when they are unsure about something. They tend to trust and respect their colleagues. When a work environment has reasonably high psychological safety, good things happen: mistakes are reported quickly so that prompt corrective action can be taken; seamless coordination across groups or departments is enabled, and potentially game-changing ideas for innovation are shared. In short, psychological safety is a crucial source of value creation in organizations operating in a complex, changing environment.

In about 1951, a quality approach called Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) came on the Japanese scene. Its focus is on maintenance rather than on production. One of the major pillars of TPM is the set of so-called 5S principles. 5S is a set of disciplines—and here I use the term “discipline” instructively. These 5S principles are in fact at the foundations of Lean—another buzzword on the Western scene, and an increasingly prominent buzzword in software circles. These principles are not an option. As Uncle Bob relates in his front matter, good software practice requires such discipline: focus, presence of mind, and thinking. It is not always just about doing, about pushing the factory equipment to produce at the optimal velocity. The 5S philosophy comprises these concepts: • Seiri, or organization (think “sort” in English). Knowing where things are—using approaches such as suitable naming—is crucial. You think naming identifiers isn’t important? Read on in the following chapters. • Seiton, or tidiness (think “systematize” in English). There is an old American saying: A place for everything, and everything in its place. A piece of code should be where you expect to find it—and, if not, you should re-factor to get it there. • Seiso, or cleaning (think “shine” in English): Keep the workplace free of hanging wires, grease, scraps, and waste. What do the authors here say about littering your code with comments and commented-out code lines that capture history or wishes for the future? Get rid of them. • Seiketsu, or standardization: The group agrees about how to keep the workplace clean. Do you think this book says anything about having a consistent coding style and set of practices within the group? Where do those standards come from? Read on. • Shutsuke, or discipline (self-discipline). This means having the discipline to follow the practices and to frequently reflect on one’s work and be willing to change.

Qualities such as honesty, determination, and a cheerful acceptance of stress, which can all be identified through probing questionnaires and interviews, may be more important to the company in the long run than one's college grade-point average or years of "related experience." Every business is only as good as the people it brings into the organization. The corporate trainer should feel his job is the most important in the company, because it is. Exalt seniority-publicly, shamelessly, and with enough fanfare to raise goosebumps on the flesh of the most cynical spectator. And, after the ceremony, there should be some sort of permanent display so that employees passing by are continuously reminded of their own achievements and the achievements of others. The manager must freely share his expertise-not only about company procedures and products and services but also with regard to the supervisory skills he has worked so hard to acquire. If his attitude is, "Let them go out and get their own MBAs," the personnel under his authority will never have the full benefit of his experience. Without it, they will perform at a lower standard than is possible, jeopardizing the manager's own success. Should a CEO proclaim that there is no higher calling than being an employee of his organization? Perhaps not-for fear of being misunderstood-but it's certainly all right to think it. In fact, a CEO who does not feel this way should look for another company to manage-one that actually does contribute toward a better life for all. Every corporate leader should communicate to his workforce that its efforts are important and that employees should be very proud of what they do-for the company, for themselves, and, literally, for the world. If any employee is embarrassed to tell his friends what he does for a living, there has been a failure of leadership at his workplace. Loyalty is not demanded; it is created. Why can't a CEO put out his own suggested reading list to reinforce the corporate vision and core values? An attractive display at every employee lounge of books to be freely borrowed, or purchased, will generate interest and participation. Of course, the program has to be purely voluntary, but many employees will wish to be conversant with the material others are talking about. The books will be another point of contact between individuals, who might find themselves conversing on topics other than the weekend football games. By simply distributing the list and displaying the books prominently, the CEO will set into motion a chain of events that can greatly benefit the workplace. For a very cost-effective investment, management will have yet another way to strengthen the corporate message. The very existence of many companies hangs not on the decisions of their visionary CEOs and energetic managers but on the behavior of its receptionists, retail clerks, delivery drivers, and service personnel. The manager must put himself and his people through progressively challenging courage-building experiences. He must make these a mandatory group experience, and he must lead the way. People who have confronted the fear of public speaking, and have learned to master it, find that their new confidence manifests itself in every other facet of the professional and personal lives. Managers who hold weekly meetings in which everyone takes on progressively more difficult speaking or presentation assignments will see personalities revolutionized before their eyes. Command from a forward position, which means from the thick of it. No soldier will ever be inspired to advance into a hail of bullets by orders phoned in on the radio from the safety of a remote command post; he is inspired to follow the officer in front of him. It is much more effective to get your personnel to follow you than to push them forward from behind a desk. The more important the mission, the more important it is to be at the front.

Peopleware. A major contribution during recent years has been DeMarco and Lister's 1987 book, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Its underlying thesis is that "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature." It abounds with gems such as, "The manager's function is not to make people work, it is to make it possible for people to work." It deals with such mundane topics as space, furniture, team meals together. DeMarco and Lister provide real data from their Coding War Games that show stunning correlation between performances of programmers from the same organization, and between workplace characteristics and both productivity and defect levels. The top performers' space is quieter, more private, better protected against interruption, and there is more of it. . . . Does it really matter to you . . . whether quiet, space, and privacy help your current people to do better work or [alternatively] help you to attract and keep better people?[19]

She also felt like there was something slightly more insidious going on, about how you were now supposed to feel like your work was your everything: where you got your paycheck, yes, but also where you got fed and where you found your social circle. Everything had started bleeding into everything else. These kids—she felt no compunction about calling them kids—expected that their workplaces would provide all this for them, as if work were an extension of college, with its own clubs and student organizations. Even more disconcerting was that many TakeOff employees lived together or had roommates who were in some way connected to other TakeOff employees, and now there were even apartment buildings that were actual dorms for grown-ups, where you lived in a suite with a few other people and had common areas and nightly activities. It was almost like a return to the days of Henry Ford, when a company provided you with housing and meals and social events. What had happened to having to figure out life on your own?

I awoke to the fraud that had been committed in socialism’s name, and felt an immediate obligation to do something about it. All those laws formulated by the British Labour Party, which set out to organize society for the greater good of everyone, by controlling, marginalizing or forbidding some natural human activity, took on another meaning for me. I was suddenly struck by the impertinence of a political party that sets out to confiscate whole industries from those who had created them, to abolish the grammar schools to which I owed my education, to force schools to amalgamate, to control relations in the workplace, to regulate hours of work, to compel workers to join a union, to ban hunting, to take property from a landlord and bestow it on his tenant, to compel businesses to sell themselves to the government at a dictated price, to police all our activities through quangos designed to check us for political correctness. And I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe.

is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece “Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of “over,” “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.* If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground—like the rifle range or the car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they

My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

If this is true—if solitude is an important key to creativity—then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We’d want to teach our kids to work independently. We’d want to give employees plenty of privacy and autonomy. Yet increasingly we do just the opposite. We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign). But the way we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story. It’s the story of a contemporary phenomenon that I call the New Groupthink—a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work and to deprive schoolchildren of the skills they’ll need to achieve excellence in an increasingly competitive world. The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place. It has many powerful advocates. “Innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy—is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell. “None of us is as smart as all of us,” declares the organizational consultant Warren Bennis,

By contrast, the traditional revolutionary demand for council forms of organization (what Hannah Arendt describes as "the revolutionary heritage") does not break completely with the terrain of hierarchical society. Workers' councils originate as class councils. Unless one assumes that workers are driven by their interests as workers to revolutionary measures against hierarchical society (an assumption I flatly deny), then these councils can be used just as much to perpetuate class society as to destroy it. We shall see, in fact, that the council form contains many structural limitations which favor the development of hierarchy. For the present, it suffices to say that most advocates of workers' councils tend to conceive of people primarily as economic entities, either as workers or nonworkers. This conception leaves the onesidedness of the self completely intact. Man is viewed as a bifurcated being, the product of a social development that divides man from man and each man from himself. Nor is this one-sided view completely corrected by demands for workers' management of production and the shortening of the work week, for these demands leave the nature of the work process and the quality of the worker's free time completely untouched. If workers' councils and workers' management of production do not transform the work into a joyful activity, free time into a marvelous experience, and the workplace into a community, then they remain merely formal structures, in fact, class structures. They perpetuate the limitations of the proletariat as a product of bourgeois social conditions. Indeed, no movement that raises the demand for workers' councils can be regarded as revolutionary unless it tries to promote sweeping transformations in the environment of the work place.

Performance measure. Throughout this book, the term performance measure refers to an indicator used by management to measure, report, and improve performance. Performance measures are classed as key result indicators, result indicators, performance indicators, or key performance indicators. Critical success factors (CSFs). CSFs are the list of issues or aspects of organizational performance that determine ongoing health, vitality, and wellbeing. Normally there are between five and eight CSFs in any organization. Success factors. A list of 30 or so issues or aspects of organizational performance that management knows are important in order to perform well in any given sector/ industry. Some of these success factors are much more important; these are known as critical success factors. Balanced scorecard. A term first introduced by Kaplan and Norton describing how you need to measure performance in a more holistic way. You need to see an organization’s performance in a number of different perspectives. For the purposes of this book, there are six perspectives in a balanced scorecard (see Exhibit 1.7). Oracles and young guns. In an organization, oracles are those gray-haired individuals who have seen it all before. They are often considered to be slow, ponderous, and, quite frankly, a nuisance by the new management. Often they are retired early or made redundant only to be rehired as contractors at twice their previous salary when management realizes they have lost too much institutional knowledge. Their considered pace is often a reflection that they can see that an exercise is futile because it has failed twice before. The young guns are fearless and precocious leaders of the future who are not afraid to go where angels fear to tread. These staff members have not yet achieved management positions. The mixing of the oracles and young guns during a KPI project benefits both parties and the organization. The young guns learn much and the oracles rediscover their energy being around these live wires. Empowerment. For the purposes of this book, empowerment is an outcome of a process that matches competencies, skills, and motivations with the required level of autonomy and responsibility in the workplace. Senior management team (SMT). The team comprised of the CEO and all direct reports. Better practice. The efficient and effective way management and staff undertake business activities in all key processes: leadership, planning, customers, suppliers, community relations, production and supply of products and services, employee wellbeing, and so forth. Best practice. A commonly misused term, especially because what is best practice for one organization may not be best practice for another, albeit they are in the same sector. Best practice is where better practices, when effectively linked together, lead to sustainable world-class outcomes in quality, customer service, flexibility, timeliness, innovation, cost, and competitiveness. Best-practice organizations commonly use the latest time-saving technologies, always focus on the 80/20, are members of quality management and continuous improvement professional bodies, and utilize benchmarking. Exhibit 1.10 shows the contents of the toolkit used by best-practice organizations to achieve world-class performance. EXHIBIT 1.10 Best-Practice Toolkit Benchmarking. An ongoing, systematic process to search for international better practices, compare against them, and then introduce them, modified where necessary, into your organization. Benchmarking may be focused on products, services, business practices, and processes of recognized leading organizations.

I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.

IN HIS 2005 COLLECTION of essays Going Sane, Adam Phillips makes a keen observation. “Babies may be sweet, babies may be beautiful, babies may be adored,” he writes, “but they have all the characteristics that are identified as mad when they are found too brazenly in adults.” He lists those characteristics: Babies are incontinent. They don’t speak our language. They require constant monitoring to prevent self-harm. “They seem to live the excessively wishful lives,” he notes, “of those who assume that they are the only person in the world.” The same is true, Phillips goes on to argue, of young children, who want so much and possess so little self-control. “The modern child,” he observes. “Too much desire; too little organization.” Children are pashas of excess. If you’ve spent most of your adult life in the company of other adults—especially in the workplace, where social niceties are observed and rational discourse is generally the coin of the realm—it requires some adjusting to spend so much time in the company of people who feel more than think. (When I first read Phillips’s observations about the parallels between children and madmen, it so happened that my son, three at the time, was screaming from his room, “I. Don’t. Want. To. Wear. PANTS.”) Yet children do not see themselves as excessive. “Children would be very surprised,” Phillips writes, “to discover just how mad we think they are.” The real danger, in his view, is that children can drive their parents crazy. The extravagance of children’s wishes, behaviors, and energies all become a threat to their parents’ well-ordered lives. “All the modern prescriptive childrearing literature,” he concludes, “is about how not to drive someone (the child) mad and how not to be driven mad (by the child).” This insight helps clarify why parents so often feel powerless around their young children, even though they’re putatively in charge. To a preschooler, all rumpus room calisthenics—whether it’s bouncing from couch cushion to couch cushion, banging on tables, or heaving bowls of spaghetti onto the floor—feel normal. But to adults, the child looks as though he or she has suddenly slipped into one of Maurice Sendak’s wolf suits. The grown-up response is to put a stop to the child’s mischief, because that’s the adult’s job, and that’s what civilized living is all about. Yet parents intuit, on some level, that children are meant to make messes, to be noisy, to test boundaries. “All parents at some time feel overwhelmed by their children; feel that their children ask more of them than they can provide,” writes Phillips in another essay. “One of the most difficult things about being a parent is that you have to bear the fact that you have to frustrate your child.

SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.

The responsibility of people in power is to continually eliminate useless traditions and introduce valuable ones. An organization where nothing ever changes is not a workplace but a living museum.

Those who have never worked in libraries view library work with the empty awe of admiration (Seale & Mirza, 2019), as a place where librarians fulfill a noble calling (Ettarh, 2018). Library employees, however, at times, experience their workplaces as marginalizing, demanding, disempowering, discouraging, frustrating, and draining, yet still are drawn into a chance to make a difference and follow their passions. Within this context, librarians may commit sabotage for several reasons. Chapter 7

Academic libraries, like the institutions they occupy, are often deeply hierarchical organizations masquerading as egalitarian ones (Freedman & Vreven, 2016). Chapter 7

Middle managers sit at a curious intersection of power; they are a significant factor in employee morale (Glusker et al., 2022; Kennedy & Garewal, 2020), yet relatively powerless to effect meaningful organ- izational change beyond their unit. Middle managers are subject to undermining from every level in academic libraries, whether from peer managers establishing their turf, from unhappy or ambitious direct reports, or from senior leaders that use shakeups or austerity measures as a way to establish power and demonstrate innov- ation and impact to campus leaders. Chapter 7

Strikes are uniquely powerful under the capitalist system because employers need one thing, and one thing only, from workers: show up and make the employer money. When it comes to forcing the top executives to rethink their pay, benefits, or other policies, there’s no form of regulation more powerful than a serious strike. The strikes that work the best and win the most are the ones in which at least 90 percent of all the workers walk out, having first forged unity among themselves and with their broader community. To gain the trust and support of those whose lives may be affected, smart unions work diligently to erase the line separating the workplace from society.

Organizational Fibrillation [OF]: Frenetic, irregular, or unsynchronized activity, further characterized by its unproductive nature, resulting from disorganized signals and erratic impulses, ending with the collapse of the organization’s ability to operate efficiently or effectively, absent an intervention.

DOLINSKY’S IMPERATIVE: “Individuals must take it upon themselves to form and grow bubbles of civility within and external to their organizations. Doing so creates new and deeper relationships across stakeholders. It prevents bureaucratic claptrap and friction from descending like a toxic cloud of dissatisfaction. Friction is reduced, and the spread of the workplace zombie virus is slowed.

DOLINSKY’S IMPERATIVE: Individuals must take it upon themselves to form and grow bubbles of civility within and external to their organizations. Doing so creates new and deeper relationships across stakeholders. It prevents bureaucratic claptrap and friction from descending like a toxic cloud of dissatisfaction. Friction is reduced, and the spread of the workplace zombie virus is slowed.

I’ve conducted the following thought experiment with audiences around the world: “Take a look at the Blameworthy–Praiseworthy spectrum: Which of the potential causes of failure do you consider blameworthy?” Answers to this question vary. Some will say only sabotage can be considered blameworthy. Others will chime in that inattention should be as well. Pushing back on that, others immediately recognize that people might have been put in difficult situations where becoming distracted was not their fault. It doesn’t matter to me where you draw the line. What matters is that you draw it and then contemplate your answer to the next question: “What percent of the failures in your organization or family can be considered blameworthy?” I’ve found that most people, when they think about it carefully, arrive at a small number: perhaps, 1 to 2 percent. I then ask the most important question: “How many of these failures are treated as blameworthy by those who matter in your organization or life?” Here, people will say (after a rueful pause or a laugh) 70 percent to 90 percent. Or, sometimes, “All of them!” The unfortunate consequence of this gap between a rational assessment of fault and the spontaneous response of those in charge is that failures—in our lives, households, and workplaces—are too often hidden. This is one of the ways we lose access to failure’s lessons.

Organize their money on a chopping board. Sort out your worth. $15,000 for outdated textbooks K-12. 
$1,000 for a lifetime of flu vaccinations.
 $8 an hour to help someone else make money.
 $300 a year for food coupons.
 $1,000 additional salary for any job that has a chance of expected death.
 $600 co-pay on medication for an illness they cause you.
 $2,000 for social security.
 $15,000 for pension.
 $150,000 for the average life insurance policy. $250,000 for a doctor’s fatal mistake.
 $350,000 if the doctor made it in a different state.
 2/5 of a soul lost in the workplace.
 3/5 of a soul lost to fuck for food.
 $4,000 to bury someone in the soil. And there you have you. Easy to make. Affordable. Special.

A healthy work environment will be characterized by a number of factors. Including - Quality team members, effective communication skills and procedures set in place to facilitate regular communication, trusting relationships, common vision and goals among team members, standardized processes and procedures including standards to be met and on-going monitoring of performance, healthy methods for correction and conflict resolution, clear lines of responsibility, including accountability and rewards for results. the more these characteristics exist in an organization, the more likely the organization will meet its goals and the team members will enjoy their work.

While we agree with and support the need for workers being held accountable for their responsibilities, we also believe that collegiality in the workplace, helping one's team members, leads to more successful organizations. When our focus is on getting ahead personally or reaching one's goals, regardless of the impact on others, internal tension often sabotages growth. True leadership requires a willingness to serve others, either one's customers or one's collegue.

If you cannot remember the last time you affirmed one of your collegues by words of affirmation that focused on his or her personality, let us encourage you to conciously look for their positive personality traits. Within the next two weeks, verbalize affirmation for a positive trait you observe. For some people, this is the primary way that they feel affirmed.

Once you have formulated your own statement of affirmation, read it several times until you feel comfortable expressing it verbally. Then look for an opportunity to verbally affirm a co-worker by focusing on one of their character traits. For some individuals, this is thte dialect that speaks most deeply to their need to feel appreciated.

Fowler, like other new Uber hires, had been advised of the company's core values.47 Several of those values were likely to have contributed to a psychologically unsafe environment. For example, “super-pumpedness,” especially central to the company, involved a can-do attitude and doing whatever it took to move the company forward. This often meant working long hours, not in itself a hallmark of a psychologically unsafe environment; Fowler seems to have relished the intellectual challenges and makes a point to say that she is “proud” of the engineering work she and her team did. But super-pumpedness, with its allusions to the sports arena and male hormones, seems to have been a harbinger of the bad times to come. Another core value was to “make bold bets,” which was interpreted as asking for forgiveness rather than permission. In other words, it was better to cross a line, be found out wrong, and ask for forgiveness than it was to ask permission to transgress in the first place. Another value, “meritocracy and toe-stepping,” meant that employees were incented to work autonomously, rather than in teams, and cause pain to others to get things done and move forward, even if it meant damaging some relationships along the way.48

But first, for the straight people reading this book, in case you are worried, reading about LGBTQ issues and trying to make your organization diverse will not make you LGBTQ. It doesn't happen that way, darlings. If you are straight, you will remain straight. Chill!

the quality of our professional relationships and the culture of our organizations are influenced directly by the way we communicate in the workplace.

Discrimination is hate, and there is no place for it in the workplace. Strive to be a person or organization who promotes diversity and commits to sustaining an inclusive culture.

For Swedish society, gender equality meant the equal distribution of society’s opportunities, positions, and wealth among women and men in every walk of life. It was qualitative, ensuring women’s and men’s knowledge and experience to promote society’s progress. Women and men were treated equally in educational institutions and workplaces. If any discrimination was noticed, educational institutions, authorities, and employers were bound to investigate and take preventive actions. The Swedish constitution was above all religions, religious beliefs, myths, superstitions, and gods. There was a gender equality agency that organized gender mainstream programs, and the goal was gender equality in every realm of people’s lives.

When employees get what they need, your organization gets what it needs.

The majority of the organizations assume that highly experienced individuals in certain areas, perhaps people with over 26 years' worth of work experience in the same company in specific expertise, make for great managers. Many organizations are being led by individuals who have been within the company for a significant number of years

My call to action goes well beyond asking you to pressure your recruiting team to hire a couple of token employees. That's easy and you've been doing that for years. My call to action is that you dig deeper and place focus on making the work environment sustainable for the minorities you introduce to your team. I'm challenging you to refrain from the habitual practice of listening only to the jaded opinions of people that you are more familiar with. Consider that, although you may be under the impression that your employees have strong ethics, morals and values, there is a possibility that they mat not be telling you the entire truth when speaking about the performance or demeanor of minorities. Furthermore, I challenge you to accept that racism, ageism, ableism, classism, sizeism, homophobia, etc., are real and shaping the semblance of your organization. Accepting that fact does not mean that people you work with and trust are bad people. It simply means that many of them are naïve, fearful, and more comfortable with pointing fingers at the innocent than they are with facing and addressing their own unconscious and damaging biases.