How to manage power and responsibility in a collaborative group

One of the things that emerged during the emotional spring-cleaning, is that there is a frustration that lives in several people that there are differences in informal power between people in our group, and that that is not in line with our aspiration of being a collaborative group.

I don’t consider myself an expert, but I did study the functioning of collaborative groups quite a bit. What I am afraid of is that there are some misconceptions about what it means to work together as a collaborative group, and that this lack of a shared understanding may have been the cause of quite some frustrations.

With this post I would like to offer a couple of clarifications.

1. Some misconceptions

1. In a collaborative group all members must have equal influence

I found two remarkable quotes on this topic. The first comes from ‘Many Voices One Song’ (Ted Rau & Jerry Koch-Gonzalez, p. 5):

“We define equivalence as “everyone needs matter”, regardless of that person’s role or status. Everyone’s voice has equal value, but not everyone’s voice has equal influence.”

The second comes from ‘The Empowerment Manual’ (Starhawk, p. 64):

“Of course, in collaborative groups we want to hear everyone’s ideas. But we should be especially careful to listen to those who have made big contributions to the group.”

If your jaw just dropped, so did mine :hushed:.

But I’m afraid they are right. In essence, working together as a collaborative group, means that you aspire to get rid of so-called “power-over”, which is the ability of one individual to control or dominate another person or group of people. Most so-called “teal” (collaborative) groups also aspire to making space for human beings as a whole, with all their quirks and emotions, in contrast to traditional workplaces, where we are expected to show up as a professional persona.

The idea of “horizontality” or “all being perfect equals” however, is not something I found in the books that I studied, neither do they seem realistic. There is a lot to be said about this topic, and I dearly recommend reading ‘The Empowerment Manual’ on that matter.

2. The Reef is sociocratic

It’s maybe a subtle difference, but in The Reef we chose to use as many sociocratic principles as possible, but we are not a sociocratic organisation. That is because the essential feature of sociocracy – the decentralisation of decision-making power down to the circles – is something we chose not to use.

If we would have done that, then all decisions about the building and financial matters would be made by the team members of the teams in charge, which given that we are spending our life-time savings, did not seem like an appropriate idea. Thanks to the introduction of a plenary meeting, which does not exist in sociocracy, we are de facto creating more space for all voices to be heard, including those who are doing less work.

Following a similar reasoning, we also decided to use consensus-based decision-making for heavy financial matters and decisions about membership. Here again, we are giving more power to individuals compared to when we would operate on a purely sociocratic model.

On the other side of the spectrum - and I’ll come back to this - what we have conveniently dropped from the sociocracy menu so far, is feedback and accountability.

3. Informal power is a bad thing

Starhawk disagrees (‘Empowerment Manual’, p. 49):

Understanding power-with and the variations of social power is key to making collaborative groups welcoming and effective. Conflicts around social power are also one of the key reasons groups break down. Collaborative groups often try to eliminate power-over and privilege. But when they mistake social power for coercive power, or fail to distinguish earned from unearned social power, they may actually undermine their members’ empowerment.

For if a group does not consciously acknowledge earned social power and decide how people should earn it and wield it, they may end up penalizing and driving away their strongest and most committed members. Such groups may be equal - but extremely unfair. If I were to write my own list of Proverbs of Power, here’s one that would be at the very top: Groups that refuse to let people earn social power inevitably favor those with unearned social power. The loudest, strongest, most educated or most charismatic get heard: those who do the actual work may be ignored.

What is important to understand is that in the absence of power-over, power is no longer a zero-sum game. The space is open and we strive to get to collective power and shared leadership.

4. Collaborative groups are emotionally more comfortable than traditional / hierarchical workplaces

This is a point that Ted Rau makes in his book ‘Collective Power’. In the first chapter, on what it takes from individuals to function in a self-managed group, he comes back several times on what he calls “ghosts from the past”: we continue to fight against power-over, even when we are no longer subject to it. It regularly happens that people go in a power-under stance, i.e. they take on the belief that they don’t have any power, and as result they behave either as a victim or as a rebel.

Robin Allison has a nice quote on this, in ‘Cohousing for Life’ (p. 248)

People inevitably bring their lifetime experiences of power and authority into new contexts. Some people are damaged by their experience of power-over and reject all leadership or bring a tendency to resist authority. In a group context it is important to become aware of attitudes to power, and part of the commitment to living in community is to be prepared to work on it. What is important is to grow an understanding of group dynamics, so we can work it out together, and not perpetuate the old in the new context."

Ted Rau moreover points out that it can be really scary to be a member of a self-organised group, because it requires taking up responsibility, both in terms of taking up tasks and in terms of using your voice to speak up in the interest of the group. In this regard he points to self-responsibility as an essential asset to be able to function in a self-managed group, with self-responsibility meaning the ability to be aware of where your own responsibility starts (i.e. carry out tasks and speak up), and where it ends (i.e. create space for others).

p. 44:

“The collective depends on individuals holding their boundaries and roles self-responsibly. Those are necessary conditions for healthy collectives. There are many methodologies that support personal agency and self-responsibility, such as different forms of communication, coaching and therapy modalities like Nonviolent Communication, clean language, or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Some of them serve to get in touch with our personal agency. Others help us hold our own needs, feelings and stories with a more healthy perspective. Yet, those are typically for individuals as a way to improve the relationship with oneself and one’s personal agency.”

In the context of our emotional spring-cleaning, this really brought home the sentence from ‘Cohousing for Life’ (Robin Allison) that we like to quote every once and a while (p. 8):

“There is a saying in the cohousing movement, that cohousing is the most expensive personal growth course you will ever do. And its true! Working together on a huge, complex, challenging project with a diverse range of individuals, with their own personal stressors and circumstances and varying degrees of self-awareness, can push buttons we didn’t know we had and requires us to bring as much patience, goodwill and generosity as we can muster.”

I sometimes refer to this in the public presentations, but it’s only now that I am really starting to grasp the extent of it (and even though sometimes it’s very painful, I’m still very grateful for it :grinning: ).

2. Balancing power and responsibility

All this of course doesn’t imply that there can’t be any problems around how power is distributed and exercised.

In this regard, ‘The Empowerment Manual’ has been a tremendous inspiration to me when I was drafting our Governance Document. For the sake of completeness, I am copy/pasting her conclusions from the chapter on responsibility and power:

Hallmarks of group sanity around power and responsibility: (p. 74)

  • A clear structure for making decisions and an agreed-upon process

  • Clear and transparent agreements about how people gain decision-making power

  • A clear way for people to take on tasks and responsibilities

  • Clear agreements about the scope of each member’s authority to meet responsibilities

  • Clear structures of accountability - who do people report back to? How, when and in what form is an accounting given?

  • A group culture of appreciation and thanks to those who make contributions and take on tasks

  • A culture of tending and mutual care for those holding responsibility

  • A fair and transparent system of rewards

  • Training and mentoring to help people step up to new responsibilities

When we were launching The Reef, based on the list of things that can go wrong in collaborative cohousing groups, I insisted that we have a governance document that addresses the points above. Imperfect as it may be, in combination with our commitment towards transparency and documentation, and our consistent use of rounds, I would personally find it a missed opportunity if all the things that we have put in place to maintain group sanity around power and responsibility would not be acknowledged.

That doesn’t mean of course that things can be improved or re-balanced, and in that context feedback and accountability to me is one of the things we could be doing better in our group. As Ted Rau writes in ‘Collective Power’ (p. 111)

“Self-managed organizations can be weak in how its members hold each other accountable. They either don’t clearly define responsibilities in the first place, or they don’t follow up when responsibilities aren’t met. While feedback is built into many systems, its effectiveness depends entirely on people’s willingness and ability to define clear responsibilities and give feedback.

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Thanks for reminding us of this list. I would like to use the last item (“mentoring people to step up”) to re-bring in a pet peeve of mine: we need a new board for The Reef ASBL, and this is a great place to test “stepping up” in a situation where the pace of things is slower, and the stakes lower, than in Coral Reef SoSim. I resigned from that board long ago. Can we agree that my interim is fnished, and use one of the next plenaries to select a new board?

Any other actions you have in mind to improve accountability?

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The Reef asbl Board thingy is on the list. I held it off a little still, because I wanted to wait for more people to become Full Members. But it’s for sure coming up shortly.

For more accountability we could do more performance reviews, and I also hope that we’ll manage to develop a culture where constructive feedback is seen as a gift.

Thanks Lee for taking the time to

  • write this out

  • Make the link with our cohousing. As one of the latest full members it’s not always clear how you/we grew as a cohousing and what the reasoning was/is about certain things agreed upon

I am wondering where the ‘collective intelligence’ fits in, which I assume/wish is also something we strive to allow/have.
The first impression is that it seems it can be contradictory with ‘earning social power’, on the other hand it seems to allign with the ‘responsability to speak up’. And I wonder if it is always clear if somebody speaks from a place of ‘intelligence’ where it could benefit the group ( having knowledge because of having experienced similar situations, having acquired certain skills) or if it’s from a place of ‘fear/ personal experiences/trauma’s’.

Just to conclude that I find this very interesting and open for a chat with anyone about this.

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Being still somewhat surprised that many authors seem to be in consensus that it’s a normal thing that power is unequal, I went back to the masterful ‘Reinventing Organisations’ by Frédéric Laloux.

The gist of this book - for clarity: I only read the comic book version - is that organisations go through different stages of development, going from authoritarian to self-managed. The author uses different colours to refer to different types of organisations:

  • Red: impulsive worldview => clans: division of labour and top-down authority
  • Amber: conformist worldview => army, government agencies, religious institutions, universities: replicable processes, stable organisation charts
  • Orange: achievement worldview => corporations: innovation, accountability, meritocracy
  • Green: pluralistic worldview => sustainable companies like Ben & Jerry"s: empowerment, values-driven culture, stakeholder value
  • Teal: evolutionary worldview => Edgeryders-type of companies: taming the ego, inner rightness, wholeness, self-management

One of the pictures that appears on the wiki of “green” organisations is one of people in a circle, suggesting that all people are equals.
green
Picture taken from: Green Paradigm and Organizations - Reinventing Organizations Wiki

On p. 32 (and also on the wiki) it is explained that one of the shadows of green organisations is that they struggle with power and hierarchy. They try to do away with it, and as a result it often leads to organisational paralysis and even “unsavory power games”.

In the rest of the book Laloux then explains how “teal” organisations have moved on to the next stage of development. They have three main common characteristics:

  1. Self-management: distributed authority and collective intelligence

  2. Wholeness: people are encouraged to drop their masks and come to the organisation with their whole self

  3. Evolutionary purpose: the organisations are seen as a having a life and sense of direction of their own, meaning that instead of trying to predict and control its future, members of the organisations are invited to let the organisation go where it wants to go.

The part on self-management is further explained from p. 57 to p. 79. In sum it explains that different models are possible (without naming them: doacracy, holacracy, sociocracy, whatever-works etc).

I’m copy/pasting the page that says “no power hierarchy = lots of natural hierarchies” (p. 78-79), because I worry that I may bring in a bias if I’d try to summarise it.

Before going into the long quote, I’ll just conclude my post here though, to say that I now understand much better that there may have been a misunderstanding that being self-managed means being teal (and not green), and that that unavoidably means that different people have different degrees of influence.

One last word about self-management to put aside another frequent misunderstanding. It’s true that in self-managing organizations, there is no more power hierarchy: there is no boss who has the power to hire and fire you, to determine your pay raise, or to decide if your idea should be implemented. But this doesn’t mean that everyone is equal. Quite the opposite—in the absence of a power hierarchy, lots of natural, healthy hierarchies start to emerge.

Let’s take Buurtzorg as an example. Whatever the topic, some nurses will naturally have a larger contribution to make or more say, based on their expertise, interest, or willingness to step in. One nurse might be a particularly good listener and coach to her colleagues. Another might be a great planner and organizer. Another might be a living encyclopedia of arcane medical conditions. Yet another might have a knack for handling conflict within the team or within the feuding family of a patient. Some nurses build up reputations and influence well beyond their team and are consulted by nurses from across the country in their area of expertise. Because there is no team manager, space becomes available for other natural and spontaneous hierarchies to spring up — fluid hierarchies of recognition, influence, and skill.

This is not about making everyone equal. Some people will tend to focus on narrower roles, say a machine operator focusing on the work related to a certain set of machines. And others will contribute with a broader perspective, say an engineer that takes the lead in designing a whole new factory. But the engineer has no power authority over the operator, not on hiring, firing, or salary. The genius of mechanisms like the advice process is to channel decisions and resources fluidly to the most appropriate person: sometimes the engineer will ask the operator for advice, and sometimes it will be the other way around. The goal is not to make everyone equally powerful, but to make everyone fully powerful. This is best understood using a metaphor from nature. A fern or a mushroom growing next to a tree might not reach as high as the tree, but that is not the point. Through a complex collaboration involving exchanges of nutrients, moisture, and shade, the mushroom, fern, and tree don’t compete as much as they cooperate to grow into the biggest and healthiest versions of themselves.

It’s the same in Teal organizations: the point is not to make everyone equal; it is to allow all employees to grow into the strongest, healthiest versions of themselves.

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On a personal note: in this thread I’m trying to bring a bit of the theory. I’m arguing mostly that most authors agree that not all group members have equal influence. That doesn’t mean however that there can’t be any issues with group dynamics. I’m working on a post on a personal issue related to that, hopefully to be finished in the next coming days.

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Thanks @Lee !
I really enjoyed reading this post :slight_smile:

Three things that seem relevant to me:

Firstly, the term ‘hierarchy of power’ compared to the term ‘hierarchy of influence’ seems particularly interesting. If I’ve understood the literature correctly, the goal is to minimise the former and accept the latter. What’s less clearly stated is how to recognise, and therefore address, situations where those with influence exercise it as power (intentionally or unintentionally). This is not a critique of us collectively, or of anyone individually, but just an attempt to highlight the grey area between the two.

Secondly, it’s really notable how often the importance of ‘clarity’ features! The workshop on sociocratic conflict management I did with Ted Rau focussed on this a lot. Clarity about decision-making, working methods, organisational structure, circles of responsibility, etc. are all essential for the wellbeing of a group. The first thing we can be clearer about is the existence of hierarchical influence, which is also something that came out of the emotional reset workshop. We also need to continually improve our clarity regarding our decision-making processes. Questions relating to consent, when proposals can be introduced and what constitutes as a valid objection are all potential sources of conflict if left unaddressed. This is also not a critique, because I think it is only by doing what we are doing that we unearth these issues, so it is therefore a sign of our progress.

Thirdly, the only thing about your post I disagree with is that the Reef is not a sociocratic organisation. In every workshop I’ve done with Ted Rau he says that the principles are more important than the features, and that it is important to adapt the framework they put forward to the specificities of each organisation. The sociocracy of a cooperative organic shop will be different to that of a nursery, and both will be different to that of a cohousing group. It may be a matter of semantics, but the fact that we have plenary meetings doesn’t necessarily mean that we are centralising decision-making, which implies that a central group makes decisions on behalf of the rest. Because every member is part of the decision-making organism, I would argue that we are honouring the principles of sociocracy as best we can in the context of this type of project. While it’s true that the inclusion of consensus-based decisions is the least sociocratic thing we do, I think it is a step too far to say that we aren’t sociocratic. However, perhaps another area to be clearer about…

:slight_smile:

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I’m going to switch to your other post on the emotional reset follow up, for how we might move forward…