What Organizational Health Requires That Good People Can’t Supply Alone

A little charcoal grill on a balcony. That is where this starts.

Some new tenants moved into my building not long ago. A young couple. They lit the grill on their balcony one evening, and the fumes drifted into the units around them.

In our city, there is a fire bylaw. Cooking on a balcony is only permitted with an electric cooktop. They may not have known about it. I tried to talk with them. It got heated fast.

So I brought it to our superintendent instead. What followed was a lot of unnecessary tension and conflict – mostly because they were perhaps unaware of the rule, and certainly didn’t like it once they knew.

Once things settled, I found myself thinking about what had just happened – and about what might be underneath that kind of conflict.

In the Genuine Contact Way, we work with something called givens. A given is one of the small number of fixed rules that govern how an organization – or in this case, a building – operates. Givens are meant to be minimal. They are the things that are simply true, and they are not open to negotiation. In my building, one of those is that we follow the fire code. When a challenge shows up, one of the first things to look at is: what are our givens, and are we following them?

The next thing to look at is assumptions. We draw this from the work of the Deep Essence Tool in Genuine Contact. We are all operating from assumptions about how things work and what seems to be true. When those assumptions are made explicit and we are able to work with them intentionally, we reduce the kind of conflict that comes from people operating from different pictures of the same situation.

The new tenants held the assumption that grilling was a great way to prepare food. I held the assumption that everyone in the building knew the fire code and would follow it. Different people can hold very different assumptions about the same situation, and when those differences stay invisible, you can end up with a conflict that could have easily been avoided.

The superintendent did speak with the tenants. The grilling stopped.

That part resolved. But something had been made visible that the resolution itself didn’t address. A neighbour who had also been part of this situation said to me afterward: “I wish the landlord would just write down all the rules so that we would all know what they are and everybody could just act accordingly.”

I’ve heard comments like that in the background of organizations for years – spoken quietly once the immediate moment has passed, in the parking lot with a colleague who is also wishing something were different, or around the kitchen table where there is little chance the conversation will actually change anything. There is a real solution in that wish. But it doesn’t have a chance of moving forward from there, because organizations often don’t have the structures that make it possible for this kind of wish to go anywhere.

I am a person who takes action. So I sent our landlord a short note. I mentioned the conversation and the idea my neighbour had raised – what if we wrote down the rules for the building and shared them with everyone, so that new tenants know the same rules from the start. The rules aren’t that many. They’re all reasonable and useful. I offered to help, because this kind of documentation is something I have some experience with.

She thought it was a good idea. She had been thinking about something similar herself. Together we put together a short document – the givens for the building, the rules and common courtesies that help people live peacefully together.

I had prioritized doing this because I wanted to protect my own peace. What I also knew was that the people in this building don’t have a clear way to raise concerns that actually get addressed. Instead, they manage as best they can. Or they end up in conflict with each other.

This story touches on two things that are part of organizational health and balance – clarity about givens, and intentional work with assumptions. But these are pieces of a larger whole, not the complete picture of what organizational health is.

In the Genuine Contact Way, a healthy organization develops across six cultural dimensions. Each of those dimensions can move toward health or toward imbalance over time, and the movement is not always dramatic. Health and imbalance are states that need to be monitored carefully in an organization – so that when these natural, human pockets of conflict show up, there is good process and good awareness to address them. So that what is working can be seen and strengthened. And so that what isn’t working can be recognized and improved.

When implicit assumptions become explicit, we get to choose which ones we actually want to work with. When conflict shows up, we know where to start looking. That is one thread of organizational health. It runs alongside many others.

I moved that idea forward. But not everyone in my building would have. Not because they didn’t have good ideas – they did, and my neighbour’s idea was the one worth acting on – but because there was no structure in place that made it feel possible to raise something and have it lead to anything.

That is true in organizations too. When people are asked what would strengthen the way things work, what they come up with is often exactly what the organization needs. They notice what isn’t working. They have ideas about how to address it. They know what is already working and worth building on.

What gets in the way is usually not the absence of good ideas. It is the absence of an intentional structure for bringing them forward – regular, built-in time and process for looking honestly at what’s working and what isn’t, and a real commitment to take action on what’s found. Not just to document it. Not just to acknowledge it. To actually do something. When that structure exists, people don’t have to wonder whether it’s worth raising something. The space has already been made.

That is the kind of organizational health you can design for. Not by waiting for one person to write a note to the landlord, but by building in the practice of reflection and response that makes this kind of action possible for everyone.

What would it take for people in your organization to feel like it is possible to name what they are noticing – and to have that naming actually lead somewhere?

Photo by Alexey Demidov on Unsplash