
Read more about my management trainings here!
Read more about my management trainings here!
Since the 2016 Presidential elections, I’ve been reading more and more of the work of Marshall Ganz (and wish that I had an earlier introduction to his body of work!).
Ganz worked for United Farm Workers for sixteen years before becoming a trainer and organizer for political campaigns, unions, and nonprofits. He is largely credited for the success of the Obama grassroots campaign.
Why am I writing about him now?
Well, let me draw your attention to this article: Leading Change: Leadership, Organization, and Social-Movements and in particular, the section on telling stories. I try to help health care workers see themselves as agents of change. In trainings, I aim to include elements that work to build motivation and build a sense of unity between health care workers and their community.
Whenever I am working to develop a curriculum or health care worker training, I like to ask three simple questions:
This is, of course, a re-visioning of the standard “know-do-understand” model of curriculum development. There are times when we need to ensure that healthcare workers are not perpetuating stereotypes or messaging treatment options in ways that may be alienating to patients. By helping to frame the story of health care, we can also help to ensure that patients receive the best possible care.
How do you incorporate storytelling into your work?
I keep a running list of topics that I want to write about and reflect about for this blog. According to my plan, I was going to write about the book Lean In today. But, I didn’t want to. In light of the controversy circling about Facebook and Sheryl Sandburg, the author of Lean In, her advice rings inauthentic. I have been thinking a lot about authenticity in the workplace and so, perhaps, my schedule was the best prompt to put some of my thoughts into words.
Authentic leadership is still being researched and formulated into a practice base–which to me seems, well, inauthentic. Authentic leadership is about building relationships based on honesty and ethics. Are we still in a place in our humanity that we need to build an evidence base around the benefits of honesty and ethics at work? Apparently so.
I have always been drawn to work at mission-focused and -driven organizations. Perhaps such organizations cultivate natural, authentic leaders. Perhaps that shows my bias, too, towards thinking that achieving a lofty mission while doing right by people is more important than the bottom line, profit, or reputation.
Why do we have to pit profit or self-interest against doing right by people, ethics, and authenticity? I have had the good fortune of working with and for truly authentic leaders and certainly hope that I emulate and model that style. My question today is how we can teach it and cultivate future leaders who put ethics first? Any ideas?
I’d like to share some ideas about what it takes to be a good leader. Leadership.
Take a listen to this talk by Roselinde Torres and find her LeanIn questions here.
The reflection questions below may give you insight into your own practices and habits (and maybe encourage a change or two!):
What do you think about her distillation of leadership qualities? I would add skills around trusting and transparent communication to her very valuable list. To me, trusting and transparent communication is critical to giving and receiving feedback and to ensuring that your team is helping you to see what is on the horizon.
Have you considered watching TED talks like this one with your own teams? I have always appreciated leaders and managers who ensure that I keep learning and developing. Plus, they are short enough to fit into team meetings or over a lunch break. How do you help to foster growth and development in your team and in yourself?
Continue your team discussion with prompts found in this post!
Did you catch this great news? Laughter is not only the best medicine, but it makes us better workers, too! Great news for those of you who (normally) enjoy the water cooler banter with colleagues and organizing the office parties–all of your efforts are justified!
I love tips about increasing productivity, but this one is extra special. Now, how does this news relate, say, to training efforts?
Well, I’ve facilitated lots of training of trainers (TOTs) and I’ve written lots of curricula that other people deliver. One challenges is convincing novice facilitators to actually do the fun activities that are written into my trainings. Yes, they are fun breaks and to allow opportunities for team building, practical application of learning. More importantly, they create lasting impressions of the materials. Those memories, especially when laughter is involved, can be the most lasting impression of a training and, thus, can help learners to recall other elements of the training. If you are a novice trainer, challenge yourself to pace your trainings to allow for the active components of the training. If time is running out, consider restructuring your training to limit the PowerPoint or the lectures before you ax the activities.
So, the moral of this story is…don’t skip the ice breakers, the energizers, and the activities. Your team will be more productive because of it.
Here’s another great post about laughter making us better workers!
social justice
It seems we’ve all been thinking deeply about race and racism in the United States. My interest in public health stems from a desire to work towards equity and social justice.
One of my favorite TEDTalks is by Mary Bassett: Why Your Doctor Should Care About Social Justice. Dr Bassett is the Health Commissioner for NYC and a long time health activist.
As you may know, I worked for several years at Partners In Health and so appreciated her nod to the work of Paul Farmer when she says:
“But I knew that epidemics emerge along the fissures of our society, reflecting not only biology, but more importantly patterns of marginalization, exclusion, discrimination related to race, gender, sexuality, class and more. It was true of AIDS. It was true just recently of Ebola. Medical anthropologists such as Paul Farmer, who worked on AIDS in Haiti, call this structural violence: structural because inequities are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world, often in ways that are invisible to those with privilege and power; and violence because its impact — premature deaths, suffering, illness — is violent. We do little for our patients if we fail to recognize these social injustices. Sounding the alarm is the first step towards doing public health right, and it’s how we may rally support to break through and create real change together.”
“Our role as health professionals is not just to treat our patients but to sound the alarm and advocate for change. Rightfully or not, our societal position gives our voices great credibility, and we shouldn’t waste that.”
Videos like this can be great ways to spark ideas among your team members. What if you showed this video to your team and had a conversation about it?
PS: Need another good video-conversation-starter with your team? How about this one?
This week, I have been thinking a lot about the role of a manger and how complex it can be between driving a project or program forward, supporting our teams, helping our teams grow and develop, and strategizing about the future. Leadership.
At times, our own growth and development can get lost in the mix. For me, I have had a wonderfully fulfilling time focusing on my career. My development has certainly not made it to the top of my to-do list. So, today, in some ways, I am letting us all off the hook. There are many moments where we can seize the moment to be a good leader without planning or forethought. There are leadership moments at every turn.
Take a few minutes to watch this Everyday Leadership talk by Drew Dudley where he describes the everyday leadership as “lollipop moments”.
His call to action for us today is…”that we need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be in each other’s lives. We need to get over it so we can move beyond it, and our little brothers and sisters and one day our kids — or our kids right now — can watch and start to value the impact we can have on each other’s lives, more than money and power and titles and influence. We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments –how many of them we create, how many we acknowledge, how many of them we pay forward and how many we say thank you for. Because we’ve made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world. There’s only six billion understandings of it.“
Let’s start our day by thinking about someone who has made an impact in our lives—who should you acknowledge and thank today? How are you going to pay forward the impact that person had on you? How can you make your team feel like they have an “everyday leadership” role on your team and in our work?
Enjoy the everyday leadership in your day!
Want to watch this with your team? Awesome!
Here are some discussion questions that might help to spark a conversation!
Here are some discussion questions for you and your team on what it takes to be a good leader.
I’ve been working hard on a few great contracts! It’s been feeding my creative side as I love, love, love, thinking about how people learn complex topics. Training tools.
I went out and bought some puzzles to add to my training toolkit (which is literally a big box of stuff–from blocks, to rubber bands, to Solo cups, and play money!). When I made my purchase, I realized that part of the fun I have with training is getting people to think through problems or challenges in a new way and to see a situation in a new light.
So, to help you guide learners through some experiential learning, I present to you…
aka: what is in my toolbox!
I got myself this gem and love it! I love that it is as big as it is, that the timer rings loudly for everyone to hear, but not obnoxiously so. It is a great tool for keeping folks on task and on target without nagging about the elapsing time; plus I can fully immerse myself in the processing of each group and not have to focus on timekeeping. Its size is also really helpful as it can be seen throughout a training room. I use this to time presentations, group work, and even breaks.
These mini whiteboards, complete with marker and eraser, are a fun way of increasing participant engagement. I’ve used them as an evaluation tool by asking questions about the training or content and having participants give me one word answers. For example, I could for participants to give me a one-word description about how they are feeling at the end of a training day. They write for a moment and then all reveal the whiteboards at the same time. Similarly, they can be used as a means of quizzing the participants. The uses are endless.
I got these several years ago and have used them dozens of times! I love them for helping groups to vote or make fast decisions. For example, let’s say that you want to decide on a day for a group to meet. Make a flipchart with each of the options written on it. Lay the flipchart on a flat surface. Participants can get a few tiddlywinks to put on top of their votes. In seconds, you can get a sense of when people are available. You can use them to build a bar graph or to evaluate understanding of topics.
I love creating really interactive trainings. There can be the tendency for people to team up and only work with people who they are friends with already; we all like to stay in our comfort zone, of course. So, to combat that inclination and to ensure that groups are always a mix of different people, I hand out playing cards to determine working groups. Of course, you’ll need to count out cards ahead of time to orchestrate your groups accordingly. Once they are passed out, you can have people with even numbers group together, 4s group together, Aces group together, and so on.
Another great use is to hand out cards to keep track of who has participated. You can reward those with the most cards at the end of a training. Way back in the day, when I was teaching in Mozambique, I realized that my Titanic-themed playing cards were suddenly missing the cards featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. Apparently having a picture of the heart-throb to hang in their dorm room was more important to my students than getting participation points!
I don’t often use a talking stick, but they can be really helpful is discussing hot-button issues or in a debate. The idea is simple, only the person holding the talking stick can talk. Period. As a facilitator, ensure that the talking stick is passed around fairly and everyone has a chance to share. The benefits of using the talking stick are many–I particularly like that there is almost always a shift to people practicing active and deep listening since no one is trying to cut in or interject. There are often challenges that come with working with introverts as well as extroverts–the talking stick helps to balance the needs of both type of learners.
For the same reason that I like using playing cards to mix groups up, I like making name plates for participants, too. I often arrange my training room by moving the name plates around which signals to participants that they, too, need to move around. I have used them to separate folks who engage in side conversations, to bring less engaged people to the front, and, sometimes, more engaged people to the back. If a training has lots of opportunity for pair/shares, I will especially use and mix up the name plates so that these intimate conversations can happen between lots of different pairings.
Are post-it notes the greatest project management tool ever? Maybe. I love them for trainings. You can use them for brainstorming and for connecting ideas. Have you ever facilitated a mind mapping type of brainstorming? Post-its make it come alive! I often ask a question for brainstorming and allow folks to generate ideas on post-its. They will almost automatically start grouping their post-its and, upon prompting, will organize them into stages, processes, and steps. Mind mapping with post-its is a great brainstorming tool for teams with folks who like a moment to quietly think before jumping in.
I have also used post-it notes as a way to categorize ideas. For example, in a leadership training I designed, I have participants describe a leader they know and admire. As they are talking, another participant writes the characteristics on post-it notes; one characteristic per post-it. Once everyone has shared their ideas, I ask them to group the characteristics according to the Integrated Practices for High Performing Health Systems developed by USAID and WHO. Once the characteristics are sorted, participants can easily see what is valued by them as individuals and collectively.
I have an arsenal of activities that use balls to teach lessons. But, my favorite way to use balls in training is to help get a sense of what people know and to quickly get everyone on the same page before the training starts. Using a giant beach ball, use post-its (see how versatile they are!?) to write a series of questions and stick the post-its on the ball….one question per post-it. Once you have a number of questions, you are ready to play! Assemble your group. Ask them to toss the ball to each other. When someone catches the ball, they pluck off a post-it and answer the question that is written on it. The participants get to show what they know, it is quick, it is fun, and helps to set a training off at the right level and pace. Easy peasy.
Flipcharts are underrated in this digital age of ours. They are hugely beneficial for helping to demonstrate where the training is going. I like to make all of the flipcharts for a training before we even begin and post them throughout the room. In doing so, participants, subconsciously, will start to make connections between the topic of discussion and a future or past topic. All on their own.
That’s right. Candy. Who doesn’t love having a little snack during a training? Who wouldn’t be motivated to try to answer a question if a Snickers was up for grabs? In all seriousness. People love candy. And they will love you if you give it to them.
What are YOUR favorite training tools?
As always, I am open to new contracts and to working together. Please let me know how I can help you to build effective, exciting, and practice-based trainings.
Every year on Martin Luther King day, I like to read something of his. This year, I am reading and reflecting on excerpts from The Other America, a speech Martin Luther King gave in 1968.
If you prefer to watch, here is the video.
There are times, and I must confess it very honestly as many of us have to confess it as we look at contemporary developments, that I’m often disenchanted with some segments of the power structure of the labor movement. But in these moments of disenchantment, I begin to think of unions like Local 1199 and it gives me renewed courage and vigor to carry on . . . and the feeling that there are some unions left that will always maintain the radiant and vibrant idealism that brought the labor movement into being. And I would suggest that if all of labor would emulate what you have been doing over the years, our nation would be closer to victory in the fight to eliminate poverty and injustice.
~~~
I’m going to really try to be brief, and say a few things about what is happening in our nation and try to say some things about our campaign, our Poor People’s Campaign, our campaign for jobs or income which will take place in a few weeks . . . and I want to deal with all of this by using as my subject tonight “The Other America.”
And I use this subject because there are literally two Americas. One America is flowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of equality. That America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. That America is made up of millions of young people who grow up in the sunlight of opportunity.
But as we assemble here tonight, I’m sure that each of us is painfully aware of the fact that there is another America, and that other America has a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In that other America, millions of people find themselves forced to live in inadequate, substandard, and often dilapidated housing conditions. In these conditions they don’t have wall-to-wall carpets, but all too often they find themselves living with wall-to-wall rats and roaches. In this other America, thousands, yea, even millions, of young people are forced to attend inadequate, substandard, inferior, quality-less schools, and year after year thousands of young people in this other America finish our high schools reading at an eighth- and a ninth-grade level sometimes. Not because they are dumb, not because they don’t have innate intelligence, but because the schools are so inadequate, so overcrowded, so devoid of quality, so segregated, if you will, that the best in these minds can never come out.
And probably the most critical problem in the other America is the economic problem. By the millions, people in the other America find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. We only need look at the facts, and they tell us something tragic. . . . The fact is that the black man in the United States of America is facing a literal depression. Now you know they don’t call it that. When there is massive unemployment in the black community, it’s called a social problem. But when there is massive unemployment in the white community, it’s called a depression. With the black man, it’s “welfare,” with the whites it’s “subsidies.” This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.
~~~
Somewhere in life, people of justice and goodwill come to see the dignity of labor. . . . Somewhere they will come to see that person working in the hospital—even if he happens to be a janitor in the hospital—he is in the final analysis as significant as the physician, because if he doesn’t do his job, germs can develop, which can be as injurious to the patient as anybody else.
We look around and we see thousands and millions of people making inadequate wages every day. Not only do they work in our hospitals, they work in our hotels, they work in our laundries, they work in domestic service, and they find themselves underemployed. You see, no labor is really menial unless you’re not getting adequate wages. People are always talking about menial labor. But if you’re getting a good wage . . . that isn’t menial labor. What makes it menial is the income, the wages.
Now, what we’ve got to do . . . is to attack the problem of poverty and really mobilize the forces of our country to have an all-out war against poverty, because what we have now is not even a good skirmish against poverty. I need not remind you that poverty, the gaps in our society, the gulfs between inordinate superfluous wealth and abject deadening poverty have brought about a great deal of despair, a great deal of tension, a great deal of bitterness. We’ve seen this bitterness expressed over the last few summers in the violent explosions in our cities.
And the great tragedy is that the nation continues in its national policy to ignore the conditions that brought the riots or the rebellions into being. For in the final analysis, the riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America’s failed to hear? It’s failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of justice and freedom have not been met. It has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, humanity, and equality, and it is still true. It is still true that these things are being ignored.
~~~
The problem with a riot is that it can always be halted by superior force, so I couldn’t advise that. On the other hand, I couldn’t advise following a path of Martin Luther King just sitting around signing statements, and writing articles condemning the rioters, or engaging in a process of timid supplications for justice. The fact is that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed—that’s the long, sometimes tragic and turbulent story of history. And if people who are enslaved sit around and feel that freedom is some kind of lavish dish that will be passed out on a silver platter by the federal government or by the white man while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite, he will never get his freedom.
So, I had to sit down with my friends and my associates and think about the people with whom I live and work all over the ghettos of our nation, and I had to try to think up an alternative to riots on the one hand, and to timid supplications for justice on the other hand. And I have come to see that it must be a massive movement organizing poor people in this country, to demand their rights at the seat of government in Washington, DC.
Now, I said poor people, too, and by that I mean all poor people. When we go to Washington, we’re going to have black people because black people are poor, but we’re going to also have Puerto Ricans because Puerto Ricans are poor in the United States of America. We’re going to have Mexican Americans because they are mistreated. We’re going to have Indian Americans because they are mistreated. And for those who will not allow their prejudice to cause them to blindly support their oppressor, we’re going to have Appalachian whites with us in Washington.
We’re going there to engage in powerful nonviolent direct action to demand, to bring into being an attention-getting dramatic movement, which will make it impossible for the nation to overlook these demands. Now, they may not do anything about it. People ask me, “Suppose you go to Washington and you don’t get anything?” You ask people and you mobilize and you organize, and you don’t get anything. You’ve been an absolute failure. My only answer is that when you stand up for justice, you can never fail.
The forces that have the power to make a concession to the forces of justice and truth and right, but who refuse to do it and they follow the path of darkness still, are the forces that fail. We, as poor people, going to struggle for justice, can’t fail. If there is no response from the federal government, from the Congress, that’s the failure, not those who are struggling for justice.
~~~
And I close by saying that let all of us assembled here continue to struggle for peace and justice. And, you know, they go together. I know there are those who still think they can be separated. They mention to me all the time, there are those who sincerely feel that. But I answered a man the other day who told me I should stick to civil rights, and not deal with the war thing and the war question in Vietnam. I told him that I had been fighting too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns. And the fact is that justice is indivisible; injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
And the other thing is we’ve got to come to see that however much we’re misunderstood or criticized for taking a stand for justice or for peace, we must do it anyway. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. . . .
And I say that if we will stand and work together, we will bring into being that day when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. We will bring into being that day when America will no longer be two nations, but when it will be one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you.
Read another Martin Luther King speech here.
What should we call areas in the country where healthy foods are at a minimum? Activists have often used the term “food desert”. But, as time has passed, many activities believe it is a misleading term as food often is available, it may be of a lesser quality (think mealy tomatoes or wilted lettuce) or of questionable nutritional value (think chips, soda, and fast food). Likewise, those who bristle at that term think that “desert” may imply a permanent, unchangeable state. The term “Food swamps” is an alternative. Some view the term as too charged and pejorative. Food swamps describe areas where unhealthy foods outnumber healthy foods by a count of four to one. Food word
Baltimore came up with an alternative term: “healthy food priority area“. This term is void of any charge that was intended to shock, motivate, or reform out. It feels bland and PC.
I recently read this amazing article called “Food apartheid: the root of the problem with America’s groceries“. Food activist Karen Washington uses the term “food apartheid” to purposefully bring up the discomfort that the term evokes. She wants us to grapple with the racism and institutionalized inequality that the word inspires.
I am on board. Food word
I am of the school of thought that we should use the term “impoverished” instead of “poor” to demonstrate that a structure is in place that is doing the impoverishment. Likewise, at a previous job, we tried to use the term “starving” instead of “malnourished” to evoke a reaction of a sense of unfairness and urgency.
What terms do you wish to see banished from our development and public health lexicons? What do you wish we would start saying? I want to see “empowerment” to go by the wayside!