Sunday Contemplation # 46 Work, Trust And Accountability

Work Is Not Separate From Our Spiritual Journey

Image by Sydney Michalski. Sydney writes the Nature Moments newsletter here on Substack. Her work is stunning…I hope you will take a moment to also check out her website.

• This Week’s Quote

• A G’day

• This Sunday’s Contemplation

• A Guided Meditation

• Grateful For

• This Week’s Community Chat

• Upcoming Activities

This Week’s Quote

The life of action need not be renounced…If you meditate in the right manner then the current of mind induced will continue to flow, even in the midst of your work. It is as though there were two ways of expressing the same idea; the same line which you take in meditation, will be expressed in your activities.

Ramana Maharshi. Hindu Mystic and Advaita Vedanta Teacher (1879-1950)

From the book Be As You Are. The Teachings Of Sri Ramana Maharshi. By David Godman

A G’day

Hello Everyone:

I hope that you are doing really well. I wish you time in peace this week.

It is our eldest daughter’s wedding coming up this next weekend and there is a buzz afoot in preparation. I reckon, like every parent, ….I wonder how did this happen so quickly? I also wonder, given that I have not aged at all 😜 how is that she is old enough to do this!

I have been reading a book this week about the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi. (Mentioned above). Combined with that I have been contemplating a lot about work and it’s place in spiritual life. Hence this week’s contemplation.

I offer the following Sunday Contemplation for your consideration and I wish you peace.

Cheers,

This Sunday’s Contemplation

Work, Trust And Accountability.

Work Is Not Separate From Our Spiritual Journey

My experience is that we are all on a spiritual journey. Some recognise it, others, not so much.

For those who consciously consider that spiritual journey, integrating the lessons therein in a work environment can often be a big challenge. We may have certain inner practices and processes we attend to in the mornings, evenings and weekends. Work is rarely an environment that, on the surface, supports those practices.

Given how much time and energy work demands of most of us, we need to find ways to integrate the important inner discoveries of our life into our work. We need to do it for our own sake and sanity, and importantly, for the sake of transforming workplaces into safer human environments. In the most straight forward terms, I want to work in a place where I can just be my genuine self. I know we all share that simple hope.

It is for this reason I chose the quote from Ramana Maharshi that I did. He is the teacher who spent most of his life in silence, and when he did speak, it was sparingly and focused on a form of Self Enquiry designed to lead us away from the tyranny of thought and ego identification with our mind and body. Yet he said, “The life of action need not be renounced….the same line which you take in meditation, will be expressed in your activities”.

Clearly the workplaces most of us have experienced may not be big on mindless activity and a uniform of loincloths. But, for the sake of our own happiness, and the building of a better world, we need to bring the most important discoveries of life into our work.

For me the doorway to make this intention real is trust building.

I have written about trust in other posts…here, here, and here. Today I want to take a simple and pragmatic approach.

In most teams at our work, there are a measures of accountability. Most key performance indicators, KPI’s, or OKR’s, objectives and key results, are about financial results, sales numbers, product numbers, call numbers, growth metrics, deal size etc etc. There is focus here because these metrics are the most easily tracked and measured.

Of course measures like these are critical. But the danger, and the reality of this danger in many workplaces, is that the preference for so called objective measures of accountability, mask the most important measures of progress and success, and turn the focus of the business away from what is most critical.

The central determinant of business and organisational success is the quality of the human connections within that business or organisation. The most obvious and understandable measure of that quality is TRUST.

I suggest we tweek Peter Drucker’s famous dictum…”culture eats strategy for breakfast” to…”trust eats strategy for breakfast”.

Trust Building Is Where Our Spiritual Journey Meets Our Work

By bringing attention to measuring trust in the workplace we will bring energy and focus back to the quality of human connections. This will in turn, make workplaces more human, and more successful. Your spiritual inner work will have another home!

That which is not measured at work is deemed unimportant. That which is measured demands attention, resources, and accountability. This is not rocket science. Therefore, to make our teams, businesses and organisations more successful and more human, we need to measure trust and require accountability for trust at work.

Some might say, that there is no objective measure of trust, therefore we cannot rely on it as a business or organisational measure. In future posts I will write more on this, but let me summarise it here. There are increasingly accurate measures in place for trust in connections. To require absolute objectivity in measures is to deny the impact of that which is subjective, yet measurable.

For example. There are a series of survey methods and questions that go directly and accurately to trust. Such surveys are commonly used in 360 degree reviews for performance. Those same methods can be used much more widely and effectively in measuring trust building. In a team of twenty people or large organisation, an anonymised survey with questions like the following can build actionable measures of trust:

In your team who do you most go to when you have an issue with your work?

Who do you trust most on your team?

Who do you trust least on your team?

Who is the most reliable person you work with?

Who is the most credible person you work with?

How high do your rate the level of connection on your team 1-10?

Who do you go to when you want a straight answer?

Who do you not go to when you want a straight answer?

I won’t bore you here with technical speak. Suffice to say, there are already in place methodologies and systems to measure trust and the quality of human connection. For goodness sakes, we make huge decisions in our lives based on a four or five star proxy for trust on a digital platform. We trust our lives, family safety and our money to star ratings. What star rating did you give your last Uber driver? We can be much more sophisticated and accurate in workplace surveying.

This is not even touching on the technology already available for each of us to measure our physiological responses to human interactions. When we don’t feel safe, our body has measurable and predictable responses. We all already know what it feels like. Though of course this pathway must be traversed carefully and wisely, but physiological measures of human connections are already available and becoming more accurate.

But it is important for us to understand up front. Trust building is not some magic sauce or mysterious system. We all know what trust looks like and feels like. The skills for building trust are simple, natural, knowable and teachable. We just need to make them a priority in our workplaces.

We will have succeeded in this trust building, when we don’t need surveys and anonymity to measure it. We will be successful when we can build teams and businesses that openly and fearlessly put the qualities and skills of trust front and centre in their strategy and daily operations. Such teams will embrace the accountability and enjoyment that comes from working with people based on trust.

Trust is built when we are credible; we know what we are talking about. It is built when we are reliable; when we do what we say we will do. We are trusted when we act with integrity; when our actions align with our essential values. Building trust ask us to genuinely and demonstrably care about another’s wellbeing. Perfection is not required in any of these qualities; intention and a willingness to learn are.

None of these trust qualities are mysterious. Each of us could spin many stories of the teams we have been on that were undermined by the absence of any one of those qualities.

The need to make these skills a priority in our work is as plane as the nose on our face. To quote a great Aussie scholar…”it’s bloody obvious and we know we ain’t got it”.

Building Trust Into Every Role Description

I have lots of hopes. One of them is that in the not too distant future the following words will appear alongside the technical requirements and accountabilities, in every role or position description in a business or organisation:

Your Leadership

Our business model is built on the understanding that leadership is a team dynamic not an individual position. Therefore this role includes the need for the following skills, and/or the willingness to build the following skills into your role on the various teams you will be part of:

• Leave your ego at the door to work with the team in the spirit of service to others.

• Make trust building the central dynamic of your work in the team.

• Be credible. Be honest about your best skill set in the team.

• Be reliable to your team. Carry out what you commit to.

• Act with integrity. Align your words and your actions in the team.

• Care about each member in the team and help amplify the skills they bring.

• Be vulnerable enough to have hard conversations when needed.

• Do what it takes to help team members feel they belong, are valued and are safe.

More to come on trust, but I hope we might agree that a spiritual life and a work life are not, should not, and cannot be mutually exclusive. This horizon is reachable, clear and calling us to act.

Thank you for reading this. See you next week I hope.

I wish you peace.

A Guided Meditation

I have received quite a bit of feedback that a guided meditation connected to the topic of these contemplations has been appreciated. When appropriate I will provide one each week. This week’s guided meditation is called Work As A Practice I will publish that recorded meditation in a couple of days.

Grateful For

I include this section because I found that when I read or hear about what others are grateful for, I tend to think more about what I am grateful for. Feel free to share what you are grateful for in the comments. I think it is a beautiful service to others.

Today I read a beautiful post written by Gillian, another Aussie who publishes Spark In The Dark and Li’l Bean… here on Substack. I love her work, and I highly recommend you check it out. She wrote a simply beautiful article today that moved me, and made me grateful she is on the planet, and that in fact there are so many wonderful people like her on the planet. Thanks Gillian.

This Week’s Community Chat

The theme in the chat this week is:

Is it too pie in the sky to think we can make trust building a priority in workplaces?

Thank you.

Upcoming Activities

Please stay tuned.

Should you want to message me directly, please feel free to do so.