It’s Friday and it’s almost Happy Hour!
(I know its a corporate coffee, but it was a gift and it’s necessary this morning)
A while back a reader and Substacker
asked me a question: “I just saw this phrase “healthy people-systems” and I’m so curious to hear you say more about it! Is there another post I could read?”I’m a big believer that human beings create systems that are only as healthy as the people themselves are healthy. And healthy means a bunch of things!
If you have a bunch of controlling, self-involved, narcissists coming together to build something but they are all experts at finance? You’ll wind up with a toxic mess that may be successful fiscally for a period of time, but you won’t have a healthy or happy place for people to work. If you have some completely self-actualized and deeply generous of spirit folks with no working knowledge of budgeting or how to run a business, it may be super fun but also make no money.
(spoiler alert, I think I was always pretty damn good at bringing together emotionally mature and kind and accountable people together - none of whom really “got business” and so we had a great time, and did super fun things, but none were sustainable financially. I’ve also worked places where there was money, but really horrific people systems and I’ll take the former if I had to choose.)
While I believe that we need fiscal resources to do the things we want to do in our organizations, I’m also a big believer that workplaces should be happy and healthy places for human beings to be, including healthy salaries, healthy benefits, accountability systems, transparency, and equity (of all kinds). I believe in this over the cost of the bottom line, if every so slightly (or maybe more than slightly). I honestly believe that people (us human beings which come in all forms and frames and ages and experiences) are all we have, and you can’t take the money with you, so you might as well build systems that are rich in health, as well as wealth. And I believe there are ways to do those concurrently. I think you can run businesses kindly and also find ways to live well.
This is apparently a pretty controversial statement, hyper-capitalism-wise.
I once worked at a very large University with a prominent College of Pharmacy. I produced most of the donor and alumni events and got to know a lot of the key players who were primarily well to do pharmacy owners and pharmaceutical company directors. They were all nice enough, polite enough, but I found that I (liberal progressive type that I am) disagreed with a lot of what I overheard them say in the meetings and events. And, I was a Development Assistant so I really wasn’t supposed to volley back. I found it emotionally and politically awkward, mostly, to dine out with people who ignored a lot of the problems the world faced and whose political and cultural views seemed so different than my own.
At one of these events, I was approached by a much older pharmacy owner from San Antonio who pulled me close and whispered, “I heard something about you.” Terrified, I asked what that could possibly be. He said, “I heard you were a democrat.” “Yes I am.” I managed and then surprise of surprise he said, “Me too! Now I know who to come sit with at these events!”
From that day forward he was my secret compatriot at all of the gatherings. We talked politics, activism, culture. We laughed together and enjoyed the time, and I got to know his wonderful family.
He was a small business owner who had done EXTREMELY well but who managed his family pharmacy, one that is now in its sixth generation, with people in mind. He paid attention to how the people in his community experienced health and wellness through his business. He focused on paying and treating his staff extremely well so that they would remain in his employ, which they did for decades upon decades. He brought countless high school students to events at our College and helped many, many of them to get into college with scholarship funds from his own earnings. He mentored hundreds, took interns into the business who wound up earning pharmacy degrees and working for him (some even started their pharmacies in other cities).
He truly gave of himself and his company. And he had LOTS to show for it. Like ample wealth. And great cars. And a beautiful house (or two) and vacations and the whole shebang. He had plenty and it was enough. He made money and he used that money to help a lot of people. He probably could have made much more money franchising and paying people less and all the things that happen these days, but he did not. Perhaps he was also a product of his generation and the times and culture within which he grew up, but he always served as a model of capitalism that seemed…sustainable.
His type of business philosophy seems really rare these days.
I see companies making decisions only with the immediate fiscal bottom line in mind, even when that current profit may mean that the systems won’t last, and the wealth won’t remain. I think about disruptive companies like Uber and Lyft that sell an app, so that the workers aren’t staff, they are contractors that don’t get any benefits and frankly can’t even keep up with gas money, or repairs on their cars. Does anyone actually make livable wages at those places?
I think about nonprofits that cater to donors for gifts with strings attached even as staff are clear those strings can’t be kept strung, because that gift in hand feels so necessary that you set your staff up for failure. Or nonprofit culture that demands you only spend 10c on every dollar to raise a dollar which means you basically can’t pay people unless you are fully funded through miracles and grants. Nonprofit should not mean impoverished.
More and more, I see charismatic leaders that just run staff and employees into the ground and take no accountability for the harm that they do. And I see boards tolerating it because those leaders look successful in finance and maybe the boards are either greedy about stardom or afraid to push back.
I think about a culture that is developing where people have to work two or three jobs to afford a house, where employers want workers to be and stay subordinate to their bosses, and who even are interested in rolling back worker rights and child labor laws.
For what? Why?
Just wealth? Control? I mean, what do you think?
Healthy and happy human systems (people systems) require equity, kindness, non-punitive and non-coercive accountability processes, privacy, mission, opportunities to rest and reflect, and salaries that actually are in line with cost of living.
This article will not take on all of those dynamics, but I will write more about the make-up of human systems, healthy and not. I’ll write about why “leadership” is kind of dirty word to me right now, because so much of the leadership I see is bereft of accountability. I’ll talk about followership as well, because no one does. Some of these will be based solely on my own beliefs, but I’m gonna move into this journalistically and academically more and more. I’m neither a journo nor an academe, but I think they deserve deeper dives with data.
I’ll leave you with these questions:
What’s the healthiest workplace you’ve ever been in and why? What made it so?
What about the most toxic? Same questions?
Is there “enough” wealth? Why do people get so HAM about more more more?
Are we just in a bigger global and cultural moment where these ideas are just naive? Like, it’s the end times and we’ve got to get what we can get locust-style on the prairie, or should we be pivoting HARD towards creating a new way? I mean of course we should, but what do you think about it ?
I hope you all have a wonderful and happy weekend! And Thank You! I’ve hit 100 subscribers and that means Substack sent me this fun little photo! You are the best for sharing this process with me and I really appreciate you!