When we talk about why we’re named the Good Work Institute, we usually focus on the meaning of good work in the world. That through good work we can build and amplify our collective power to create regenerative communities. That starting from a foundation of regenerative practices, if our collective good work advances Just Transition principles, we’ll be bending today’s transitions toward justice and regenerative economies that can bring us into right relationships with one another and our shared home.
“Bending” transitions toward justice is a nod to Martin Luther King, Jr. who said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The term “good work” itself is a nod to Wendell Berry who wrote that “the name of our proper connection to the earth is good work, for good work involves much giving of honor [and] is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known” as quoted on the cover of the GWI Manifesto.
Inner and outer alignment is important to me. I’m proud to be part of an organization that is trying to practice what we preach, imperfectly, but always learning and growing. So if we shift the lens of the good work spotlight away from “the world” and point it inside our organization, what makes work good?
Last week, one of my colleagues handed me a sheet that said: How to Work with Susan. My colleagues each got their own sheet with their own name on it. It had a handful of boxes with labels like: my style / what depletes me / how to communicate with me / what energizes me. The invitation was to spend 15 minutes reflecting on the prompts and making notes. We then came back and shared with one another a few things we wanted them to know. And then we discussed what we learned by hearing from one another.
This sort of activity is not uncommon at GWI. We refer to it as tending to our culture. Our org culture feels to me like the part of our org that is alive. Yes, we have policies that are like bones, structuring how we work together. And practices we’ve agreed to, like muscles that can move the bones in the direction we want to go. But what gives life to our organization – as a learning and growing organism – is culture. It felt good to hear one of my colleagues comment when we finished that it was much easier for them to engage in this kind of reflection and sharing now than it would have been when they joined the org.
The activity gave me some new things to think about. I heard myself say to my colleagues that being in relationships of mutual trust and respect with my colleagues is what I’m after. It brings me energy and draws out my best contribution. Together we reflected on how we would complete this worksheet differently in different work contexts. More than one of us talked about how important it is to know the purpose of undertaking certain tasks, that things that might be dreaded are much more manageable when the purpose is clear and feels relevant.
What I heard others share in some cases clarified and affirmed my experience of them and in other cases gave me new and deeper insights into the why behind how they work. We’re all so different, with unique values coming to the fore, and different needs mattering more. As Wendell Berry also wrote: “Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth.”
