Rowing In the Same Direction

Divergent values among staff are often hard for organizations to square for a few reasons:

The organization’s mission and strategy hasn’t been made clear to the team. Social change work— whether its narrative change, system change, service delivery, advocacy, coalition work, philanthropic investing, etc—often requires working with partners across the political and power spectrums. For any collaboration to happen, all partners or audiences need to feel heard. Everyone needs to be aware of triggers that might block other partners. These are often in conflict with each other.

The organization’s leadership hasn’t made it clear to their teams that there is a difference between the organization’s strategy and individual values and political positions. Social change (and the systemic change it requires) is a chess game. It requires working gradually and ceaselessly to balance the values of the change agents with the motivations of the audiences they’re trying to convince that change needs to happen. This requires compromise and letting go of ideological purity. It requires embracing imperfect solutions and a “we can all win” mentality. The art of doing this work well is sacrificing as little as possible.

What’s more, people who approach the work from a place of privilege often look at systemic challenges from an academic or data-driven perspective. They often don’t come from or live in historically excluded communities (largely Black and Brown) who have experienced poverty, discrimination, violence, and lack of opportunity. The anger, distrust, and fear that these communities feel is justified. Why would we expect for people who have had such different experiences to see the world in the same way? In spite of these differences, it’s critical that they find ways to work together, build trust, empathy, and understanding to tackle challenges together. This means everyone needs to stretch out of their comfort zones to meet the other–especially those of us with privilege

There simply hasn’t been time and space for people on the team with different perspectives to engage with their work in conversation and to hear each other’s perspectives. Communication is built on conversation. On understanding where we all come from. On listening. On finding common ground. On learning about differences. It takes time and it requires safe spaces where people can share.

I’ll share a personal example of how I’ve experienced this from the perspective of leading a team. In the wake of social protests and racial awakening in the summer of 2020, our agency experienced some internal struggles over what our position was—what does being a social impact design studio mean?– and what our response should be.

Hyperakt is a design studio that works alongside nonprofits and social change organizations to ensure their brands are furthering their potential for impact. We are not a nonprofit or social change actor ourselves—we are experts in communication who support those doing the work.

Up to that point, we used a lot of language in our marketing that made the agency appear to be an activist organization. We even called people on the team Hyperaktivists. But that didn’t really reflect our work. We’re not activists. We don’t have the lived experience as individuals to be true activists. Our leadership team includes several immigrants, yes, but we have been lucky to have had ample opportunity in this country. We come from families with very diverse political points of view. And so we are led to take a very pragmatic approach to our work, finding ways to compromise, to give and take, to bring on people with different points of view.

In 2020, we had a couple of employees leave because they expected that Hyperakt would take more of an activist position. The difficult conversations that arose prompted us to intentionally focus our own brand positioning more on the fact that we are not ourselves the changemakers; we are here to help the changemakers figure out how to do the work, to lend our expertise and experience to their cause. Ensuring our staff is clear on where we stand, and on what to expect from us has been critical to bringing our team together and ensuring team member retention.

When we work with nonprofits in the social justice space to define and express their brand strategy, our close work with internal teams often surfaces a divergence between individual values and organizational ones. Ideological struggles are endemic in most nonprofits right now.

Brand strategy provides clarity; it’s the cohesive expression of the organization’s mission, purpose, and values. Nonprofit leaders tend to assume that their teams are already aligned on an organizational strategy and they just need a new logo and website.

But often, they’ve never taken the time to gather their team, to sit together and talk about the work and what it means and how it happens. People need to understand, share input, and decide if they want to be a part of it — that happens during brand strategy work.

When organizations fail to clearly define what they stand for, the resulting vacuum gets filled with the competing values of the individuals that make up their team. It also creates opportunities for those on the outside trying to purposely cause damage.