As a young adult seeking truth and beauty in this world, a finance sub-committee is not where I expected to have one of my earliest spiritual experiences. This particular meeting started with each member expressing doubt that we would find a solution to our current challenge (the details are foggy involving budgets and numbers of all things). Despite this, we were able to find a workable solution, and at the end of the meeting I reflected that I was pleased and mystified at our process. I could not say how we had come to a solution and moreover I felt as if a greater entity had been present. To my surprise, I was not alone and the other committee members expressed a similar feeling. As a secular, non-theistic Quaker this is not something I had expected, nor do I really understand it to this day. Whatever it was it was intriguing enough that I caught the “consensus” bug. I learned that amazing thigs can happen when people gather as equals with open minds, open hearts, and above all humility.
Ever since that experience as a young Quaker, I have lived, worked, played and worshipped in many collectively governed organizations. Two decades of group life, studying things like Non Violent Communication, and Improv, I had grown comfortable in groups. I took pride in the fact that I enjoyed meetings and always felt them to be productive (I would later discover this is not how most adults feel about meetings). However, a commitment to egalitarian ideals had not prepared me for working in diverse groups where systemic oppression had eroded trust even before the group ever met.
It’s hard for me to convey how hard this realization hit me, and perhaps it’s too abstracted. I was used to working in groups where if an individual disagreed with a proposal, we would parse out the concerns and redesign the proposal accordingly. I trusted that people were comfortable speaking their concerns. As a white man comfortable in collaborative process it was natural for me to project my trust onto others; I assumed that regardless of diverse life experiences, others were as open an honest with me as I was with them.
Slowly, as I learned about the African American experience and the psychology of oppression, it dawned on me that the color of my skin carried the baggage of mistrust for a lot of people, and that I carry that mistrust everywhere. It was a harsh realization to juxtapose with my own sense of being a trustworthy person and the knowledge that I could be judged untrustworthy by my skin color alone.
Now I could have pulled the reverse racism card and say I was being oppressed, but that in no way would help me in my aspiration to work collaboratively. The development of skill starts with the recognition of ignorance. So, this question followed me through graduate school and later my research with The Center for Ethical Leadership: how do you work collaboratively in diverse groups? How do you build trust where it isn’t there at the start?
Well, read on friends…
“You’re white/male/cis gendered you won’t get it. I’ve tried and it never goes well.”
Nugget: A lifelong commitment toward egalitarianism was not enough to prepare me for the complexity of social oppression.
It mattered little how much I had developed personally; the listening skills, the patience, the emotional intelligence were all moot outside a homogenous group. I was used to working in groups where if an individual disagreed with a proposal, we would parse out the concerns and redesign the proposal accordingly. I trusted that people were comfortable speaking their concerns. When I learned that racial differences could inhibit a group member from speaking their concerns, I realized equality was an oversimplified ideal. The perception that as a white man I wouldn’t “get it”, that I was incapable of lending a sympathetic ear was devastating to me. Through no conscious fault of my own I was not to be trusted. Far from disheartened by this realization I became determined to understand how to foster collaboration in diverse groups. It is with this focus on the challenge of diversity that I pursued a higher degree in organizational development. In studying the application social and behavioral sciences, I slowly became aware of the central role of conflict in reinforcing social norms.
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In our Quaker tradition there is a saying, “The heart of a meeting (congregation) is not in meeting for worship, but in meeting for business.” It is precisely in that place where our faith that there is that of god in each of us is tested in our group process. The spiritual health of a Meeting can be seen in its ability to stay with conflict and how creatively members can engage their differences.