How do we foster healthy group participation?

​​Sarita Joseph: Welcome to the Smart Communications Podcast. This is Sarita Joseph. I use she/her pronouns, director of accounts, and worker-owner at Big Duck. Today we’re gonna ask the question: How can you foster healthy group participation? I’m so excited to be here today with my wonderful colleague and fellow account manager, Josh Kelley. Welcome, Josh.

Josh Kelley: Hello, hello.

Sarita Joseph: Before we get started, I just wanted to share a little bit about Josh. Josh uses they/them pronouns, is a senior account manager here at Big Duck, and has been with us for two years now. Before Big Duck, they managed strategic communications programs for both electoral and advocacy campaigns across the country. Most of their work has been focused on queer liberation, abortion access, and ending the gun violence epidemic. Josh holds a BA in theater from Pace University and has also done post-graduate research and critical gender studies in Vienna, Austria. Welcome again, Josh, to the show.

Josh Kelley: Thank you. So glad to be back.

Sarita Joseph: I know. Josh is actually on another podcast so make sure you listen: about planning an inclusive and welcoming project. You should definitely check that out. Well, Josh, a couple of months ago, they wrote a blog post about healthy group participation, and I was just wondering if you could take a moment to share why it’s important to talk about now.

Josh Kelley: Absolutely. I think often, what I was noticing is that we were having a lot of conversations within the nonprofit sector around how to get the right people in the room, which is a very important and big question, right? Especially if you are an organization that really centers equity and making sure that you hear from all the different voices that’ll be impacted by whatever sort of decision or project you’re working on together. But, I think, what was often missing from those conversations was, sort of, the step two, right? The 201 level of that is: Okay, so you’ve got all these great people, all these diverse perspectives in a room. Then what? And I know, you know, I had seen in my own life where, you know, I would be a part of something and we would, you know, get all these great people together, and then we would have a second meeting, and then most of them wouldn’t show up again. And it’s like, “Well, what happened here?” Right? And so I think, you know, healthy group participation is one way to talk about, you know, once we get people together in a room, how do we treat each other well? And, and in such a way that we all want to keep showing up in the room together, right? There’s a retention quality to this that I hope that this topic will bring to the surface.

Sarita Joseph: Yeah, those are great points. Can you tell me, Josh, why do we need healthy participation? And why is it important to the success of a project?

Josh Kelley: Absolutely. So there’s, I guess there is the functional component, right? If you are an organization with a DEI plan, I would hope that as a part of that plan, this would be something that would be a priority. But really what we’re talking about is improving outcomes, right? And that can look like a lot of different things. Often, the better the group participation, right? The more new ideas and perspectives will enter the chat. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has been in a conversation and I had what I thought was a great idea or a new perspective, and I chose to maybe not share, right? I chose to step back and say, for whatever reason, “I’m not necessarily comfortable participating in that way in this group at this time,” Which begs the question, why wasn’t I, right? And how can we create the circumstances so that that happens less and less? Not to say we want to move into an environment where participation is compulsory. Of course not. You know, we want to create a world of options, of acknowledging that not having something to say is also valid and also perfectly okay. But acknowledging that often new perspectives, new ideas can get missed when you’re not mindful of sort of cultivating the right environment for that in the context of a group conversation.

Josh Kelley: And it’s also about buy-in. I think this is, you know, not only is it about, you know, developing an outcome that is inherently better because there’s more, more fingers have shaped it, have shaped the pot, right? There’s some clay metaphor in there somewhere. But it’s also buy-in, right? Like, you’ll have more people. It’ll be more likely that you’ll see people supporting what you’re doing if they were included meaningfully and healthily in the process. Right? Otherwise, you know, we’ve all seen this happen where you don’t get buy-in from the right people and then they are either overtly or covertly sabotaging everything you decided. So I think healthy group participation is a really helpful step to sort of prevent some of those things from happening.

Sarita Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. I love that you brought up the clay metaphor because I’ve often heard you say, you know, “You want your finger fingerprints to be on the clay,” and that’s so true for our clients. We want to make sure that everyone feels included and everyone can see themselves in the plan that they created together. So, I love that you brought that in. So in this post, you lay out seven steps for healthy participation. If you could choose three of those steps, what would they be? And can you just unpack them a little bit for our listeners?

Josh Kelley: Absolutely. So, I think the first one that immediately comes to mind is around being generous with time. And I can, of course, acknowledge like most folks working in the nonprofit space, we have a lot going on. Back-to-back meetings, back-to-back deadlines. So this one can be hard, but it is so incredibly valuable to be generous with time. And what that looks like is, you know, maybe you need to schedule a 30-minute conversation, but maybe you schedule it for 45 minutes, right? You want to create that spaciousness and make sure we have time so we don’t leave conversations feeling like, “Oh, we didn’t quite cover it. We didn’t get quite through it. We didn’t get quite done with this yet.” Right? And not that we’re ever done with anything, but I find that often conversations need just a little bit more space than we’re sort of willing to give them.

Josh Kelley: It can also look like switching up your norms around meeting start times, right? The meeting might start at 3:00, but you can culturally acknowledge that that’s a soft start, right? That we’re going to start gathering at 3:00, but we’re not really going to dive in until 3:05, right? Allowing that extra five minutes, right? I like to imagine, especially on Zoom, I think it’s hard, but in person, I imagine, “Well, we’re all here at 3:00, but I gotta come up the elevator. I gotta refill my water bottle because I ran out on the metro over here.” Right? Like, there’s this sort of settling that I think often gets missed that can be really helpful in making sure folks are really fully present for the conversation, right? Like, yeah, if I’m showing up at 3:01 and the meeting is out at 3:29, honestly, I probably didn’t participate. I’m probably just, you know, whiplashed. So, yeah, being generous with time I think can really help create the environment where more people will step up and be ready to step up in those moments.

Sarita Joseph: Yeah. I love that. That’s so true, especially in this remote world.

Josh Kelley: And I think another one too, which I do think is connected to this generosity of time, and that is embracing silence. If there is one thing I know, it is that almost every human being I have ever met is deeply uncomfortable with silence, and that includes me, right? And I know I often feel those impulses, right? Where we’re in a meeting and it’s silent even for just a half a second and already I can feel myself trying to fill the space, right? And I think what often gets missed is that silence is where so much work is actually happening, right? Silence is giving folks time to internalize, to reflect, to form a thought. And I think often, particularly facilitators and people in leadership, I think I see this more often in these spaces where it’s silent and folks in those positions really take on that responsibility of filling the silence. And I would encourage folks to sort of question that and to sort of push back on that and say, “Maybe sitting here for five minutes in silence is the most uncomfortable thing you can imagine, but maybe at the end of that silence, a really good idea will emerge.” So the more you can get comfortable with silence, the better.

Sarita Joseph: Yeah, that’s a hard one for sure. I definitely struggle with that myself, so that’s a good tip.

Josh Kelley: And then maybe a third one just to round us out is: One size fits none. I think, especially when we talk about like this conversation: What is healthy participation? Well, even though, you know, hopefully, some of the tips I shared in that blog post and I’m sharing right now will be helpful. But, you know, what I wish I could give you is a map or a checklist, and if you just, “You do these things and this is what healthy participation looks like.” Unfortunately, humans are messy, life is complicated, and it’s not that easy. And everyone is different, right? Healthy participation for me might not look like healthy participation for other people.

Josh Kelley: So, I think it’s important to acknowledge that as you seek to build healthier participation, while, you know, a checklist like we’re providing you is definitely an amazing place to start. What you really want to be doing is having these conversations, right? With the people. If there’s people that you want to participate with in a healthy way, well just ask them, “What do you think? What makes healthy group participation to you?” And acknowledging that that might be different. But that’s sort of the, the sort of luxury, right? Is that, well, I guess we don’t all work on small teams, but we often work in smaller configurations within a larger team. And I think that intimacy really lends itself to bravely and boldly customizing and making sure that, you know, not only do you want healthy group participation in general, but in any configuration of your team, what does healthy look like for that group of people?

Sarita Joseph: Yeah. And I know at Big Duck, we often have meeting norms before we start a meeting, especially with our clients. And I wonder what it could look like if we integrated that a little bit more of asking everyone in the room what successful group participation looks like. So I love, I love that idea. That’s a great suggestion. Josh. Anything else that comes to mind from your, from your blog that you want to share?

Josh Kelley: I would say maybe something to avoid could be… I’ve been thinking a lot lately about control and how the very human desire to control, particularly in a world that often feels uncontrollable, can be. And I think this really shows up in moments of healthy participation, at least in my experience, where often if you really are invested in healthy participation, it can feel really vulnerable.

Sarita Joseph: Yeah, absolutely.

Josh Kelley:. You know, you’re a group of people coming together and in those moments, right, in that moment of vulnerability, that impulse to control, I know for me can get really big, right? Because I just want everyone to have a good time and “Everybody will have a good time if it kills me!” And I think that that impulse for control can be really good to check because I think that often motivates the habits that get us out of healthy participation, right? You know, control over time. It’s one thing to say, let’s, you know, have a meeting at 3:00 that actually starts at 3:05, but you know, there’s going to be someone on that meeting with their eye on the clock the entire time just waiting for :05 to hit, right? And, you know, wonderful intentions, but also maybe that level of exertion of control is actually working against the very thing you’re trying to create.

Josh Kelley: And I think it also shows up with embracing silence, right? I think that’s where discomfort around silence comes from, is silence feels uncontrollable. It’s a moment where nothing is happening. And so I think often the more that we’re sort of able to be with our own sort of impulse for control in situations, especially in the nonprofit world right now, right? Everything feels so wildly out of control, even more so than maybe it did just a year ago. So, really checking the ways in which that desire for control shows up. Same with “One size fits none”, right? It’s, you know, you can’t just say, “This is healthy participation and you need to make sure this works for you.” Right? No. Like, it’s, it’s a little out of control, right? And so I think embracing that sort of release of the need to control can really help not only sort of bring these, these sort of tips to life, but also help shift the culture in a really positive way as well.

Sarita Joseph: Anything that folks should avoid altogether, Josh?

Josh Kelley: Perfectionism and people-pleasing. I think I know these are things that I experience in my own life. I know a lot of people that I think that resonates with and that’s probably connected to control if we’re gonna go like deep into some analysis here. But I can appreciate that for a perfectionist like me, it’s often coming from the place of wanting everyone to be okay. And I’m guessing if you are a person who is listening to this and is invested in healthy group participation, I’ll go on a limb and say that you also are probably a person who really wants to make sure that everyone is okay, that everyone is taken care of. And unfortunately, none of us can actually do that 100% of the time. And not to say that we don’t do our best to sort of take, own our responsibility in a group, but yet a group is several people, not just one of us.

Josh Kelley: And so I think that’s where sort of accepting the lack of control comes in, right? It’s not going to be perfect. You can show up and you can be so comfortable with silence and that’s going to do nothing for your other colleague who still is not comfortable with silence and will continue to fill the space when it maybe doesn’t need to be filled, right? And then that could be triggering to that perfectionism, to that people pleasing, right? Both pleasing the people that want the silence, right? You might like feel yourself trying to manage that coworker because you want everybody to be happy with the silence and that sort of thing. So, or just trying to be perfect, right? “I want to be perfect in how we do group participation.” And that’s, I mean, if any of you figure out how to do that, please call me, because I would like to have a very long conversation with you about how that happened.

Sarita Joseph: I know, and I always as we facilitate meetings, often we have open facilitation and we’ll, you know, candidly say things in our meetings where we’re like “open facilitation” or “candid point of facilitation” where we can just be clear and open with our participants, too. So just knowing that meetings don’t have to be perfect, both from the facilitator side and from the audience perspective, and that we’re all humans and that we can do that together. It’s a meeting point. So, appreciate that. Josh, any last takeaways before we close?

Josh Kelley: I think maybe the only final thing to add, and I think what you just shared Sarita really, really teed this up nicely, is that healthy participation is a process, not an outcome, right? It’s a process that has outcomes, right? Where we’re having a group participation moment in order to achieve something together. But the participation itself is not an outcome. It is a process. And so the more that you can lean into that and the sort of ongoing growth, the better. And embrace the discomfort of process. I don’t like it. It’s uncomfortable, but it is human and it is, it is life. So enjoy it while it lasts, I guess.

Sarita Joseph: Absolutely. That’s a good reminder for us all. Alright, well thanks for joining us and we think, talk and write a lot about developing brand strategies and identities for nonprofits. Visit bigduck.com/insights to access more blogs and podcasts on these topics. Josh, thanks so much for being here.

Josh Kelley: Thank you.