the sacred bundle: unwrap your team’s backstory
Learn an indigenous storytelling technique to help you and your team reconnect and remember the moments that mattered most in your journey to ‘happily ever after’
While I was doing research for my paper on storytelling & school discipline, I came across a concept called ‘the sacred bundle’.
The sacred bundle is a reference to an indigenous American storytelling practice, where a tribe would place objects that represented key moments in the their history into a bundle.
from, ‘The Sacred Bundle: Unwrap Your Team’s Backstory’ www.kishasolomon.com
The sacred bundle is a reference to an indigenous American storytelling practice, where a tribe would place objects that represented key moments in the their history into a bundle. This bundle was kept safe by 1 or 2 ‘keepers of the bundle’ - usually 1 male and 1 female from the tribe. The keepers of the sacred bundle had the responsibility of remembering a specific song or story that related to each object in the bundle. At certain tribal celebrations or gatherings, the keepers of the bundle would remove the objects and recount the stories to the rest of the tribe. This was done as a way to preserve and pass on the moments that defined the tribe’s culture and their shared histories and futures.
Organizational consultant Peg Neuhauser extended the concept of the sacred bundle into teams and organizations, and posed the idea that, much like a tribe, teams and organizations have key moments that define their history. She posited that there are 6 organizational sacred bundle stories that every organization has:
How We Started
Our People
Why We Do What We Do
What We Learned in Failure
How We Succeeded
How We Will Change the World
I was so inspired by this idea of sacred bundle stories, that I decided to use them for a year-end retrospective with my product team at Ford. I asked each member of the team to share an object or image that represented each sacred bundle story. Later, we gathered as a team and took turns letting each team member share their object or image and explain what it meant to them.
The exercise was so well received, that I also decided to use it for my own year end review for 2022. I shared my own sacred bundle objects and stories on Instagram.
The 6 Sacred Bundle Stories of a Team
1. How We Started
2. Our People
3. Why We Do What We Do
4. What We Learned in Failure
5. How We Succeeded
6. How We Will Change the World
Why Use Sacred Bundle Stories?
The sacred bundle exercise made for a much-needed alternative to the typical year-end review or retrospective. Instead of only focusing on what tasks we completed or what I personally achieved, the sacred bundle stories allowed me and my team to look back at the moments that had the most meaning for us over the past year.
By sharing them with each other, we were all able to get deeper insight and understanding to what those moments meant to the the people we work with every day. We went deeper in our conversations than we had in our other team-building sessions or our quarterly OKR reviews - we shifted the focus to our journey together, how far we’d come and most importantly… how much we had all changed and grown. It was also a great way to honor and say farewell to a couple of members who were transitioning out of the team onto new projects.
The Importance of Backstory
Understanding what brought the main character to this point is really a pre-requisite for writing stories that will engage your audience. Before we can emotionally invest in the main character and her journey, we need to understand where she’s been, why she makes the choices she does, what happened before that has shaped her into the person we see today.
The same is true when you’re preparing to write the next chapter of your personal story or your team’s story. You want to re-engage with and celebrate how far you’ve come, you also want to be sure that you won’t forget the lessons you learned so that you don’t run the risk of repeating them again. There’s also the need to re-center on your values and remind yourself what has the most meaning to you - this is how you will avoid getting distracted or caught up in trivialities as you continue to journey towards ‘happily ever after’.
How Organizational Diversity Initiatives Lose the Plot
A ‘different flower’ is brought in as a transplant. She may thrive initially, but soon the toxic cultural norms of ‘one-size-fits-all’, ‘when you’re here, you’re family’, ‘it’s a lifestyle, not a job’ creep in.
Contrary to popular opinion…
Diversity is not an initiative. It is not an imperative. It is not a strategic priority.
Diversity… is a fact.
You see, nature tends toward abundance and redundancy. When nature is left to its devices, not only is there enough, there’s also a variety.
Not just one type of cloud
Or grass
Or cat
Or human.
But many. And for no more apparent or justifiable reason than survivability. Of the whole.
Nature: Better make sure we have a lot of different types of these, so if something happens to one of them, at least we’ll still have the others:
Humankind: Oh, so you mean, ‘survival of the fittest?’
Nature: Um, no. That’s not at all what I mean.
Where there is either lack or ‘excessive sameness’, there is usually an unnatural and / or external cause.
An Impact on Diversity
Decreased genetic diversity in plant crops puts the entire ecosystem at risk.
A dam constructed.
A toxic chemical introduced.
A meteor fallen from the sky.
Something happened to cut off the naturally abundant and redundant supply. And it remained. Continued. Settled in. Permanently changing the landscape.
Later, someone with short sight or memory will come along and wonder, ‘Why are there none of that particular flower here? Is this not its natural habitat?’
A committee will be convened, monies will be raised, campaigns will be launched. The naturally abundant flower will be trucked in from its natural, undisturbed habitat and planted in this place with its nearby dam or insidious chemicals.
Over time, most of the flowers will wilt, die off. A constant committee will be needed to transplant a new batch every growing season.
Annuals.
Not perennials.
And the numbers are reported out at the height of the growing season. “We have hundreds of them here, thriving!”
But no one ever stops to ask the flowers.
****
If the idea of solving the wrong problem could be summed up in a word, that word would be, ‘diversity’.
I’ve been involved in diversity initiatives at work in one way or another since I started working over 2 decades ago.
I myself was what you’d call a ‘diversity hire’. Young, inexperienced, plucked directly from the natural habitat of an Atlanta HBCU thanks to a Big 4 diversity recruiting initiative. I was a lucky flower. I got transplanted into a patch with some experienced and invested black women who ‘understood the assignment’ and took me under their individual and collective wings, giving me the ability to take root in unfamiliar terrain with the aid of familiar associations.
This is an uncommon story.
The more common one?
A ‘different flower’ is brought in as a transplant. She may thrive initially, but soon the toxic cultural norms of ‘one-size-fits-all’, ‘when you’re here, you’re family’, ‘it’s a lifestyle, not a job’ creep in. She realizes that there is no such situation as thriving here, there is: ‘conform and constrict’, ‘grin and bear it,’ or ‘wither and shrink’. Her other flower-friends, once she finds them, are usually the ones to inform her of her choices. After all, these are the choices they have made.
And so the flower makes a choice: survive, wilt… or grow feet.
In short, the story being told about organizational and corporate diversity is a narrative missing perspective. A thin plot hurtling toward a flimsy ending.
Diversity initiatives don’t just need a rewrite, they need a whole new editorial team.
Black in Corporate America: on psychological safety
In advance of a recent town hall meeting, the Coca-Cola Company asked employees to submit videos sharing their experiences or perspectives on #racism and #discrimination. I recorded this.
At the beginning of June, the Coca-Cola Company held a global town hall meeting to address employees in this difficult time. In the days after the incidents of racial violence and police brutality captured on video in Texas (Ahmaud Arbery) and in Minneapolis (George Floyd), and the tragic police-instigated death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, many employees - including myself - wondered, how will our company respond?
In advance of the town hall, employees were asked to submit videos sharing their experiences or perspectives on racism and discrimination. I recorded this. 2 incidents that illustrate the subtle ways that racial bias is internalized and creates a burden that breaks down self-esteem and prevents open dialogue (aka, giving it a name) in the workplace.
Kisha Solomon is an Atlanta-based writer, knowledge worker and serial expat. She is also the founder of The Good Woman School. She writes witty, poignant stories about the lessons she’s learned from her life, work and travels. She deals with the sometimes frustrating and often humorous side effects of being black, female and nerdy. When she’s not writing, working or travelling, you can find her in deep conversation with herself or her four-legged familiar, Taurus the Cat. www.lifeworktravels.com
Covid Chronicles: Oh So You Thought You Were Just Gonna Work From Home?
As a single person with no kids, my work-from-home adjustment hasn’t been the same as my coworkers’, but it has come with its own challenges.
Look. I don’t have any kids. I don’t have a spouse or a live-in significant other or even a roommate. I have earned the right to be free of such encumbrances.
“This is a total change to our lives. It’s surreal.”
So all I know about the experiences that working parents with kids are having during the Covid-19 shutdown is through first- and second-hand accounts from my coworkers and friends.
One of my coworkers confessed today:
“Everyone at my house is stressed.” She doesn’t trust her two boys to go off on their own because they don’t get along and they have the shaky reasoning and judgment of pre-pubescent males. Her husband is getting irritated, even though he agreed to cover the kids while she attends to her work day. “This is not just working from home,”she laments. “This is a total change to our lives. It’s surreal.”
Things are slower. Priorities are different. You have been impacted.
On a regular work day, you’re focused on a variety of relationships - with your colleagues, your boss, your staff, the lady in the lunchroom. Your spouse and kids are in the background. They wait until you get home. You carve out space for them at the end of your work day, to make sure you give them the time and energy they deserve.
source: The New Yorker
Now that you are at home, this all has to shift. Your coworkers and all of those interactions are in the background. Your family and housemates are in the foreground. The people at your job may not only need to recognize that you are human, but that they are too.
Hell, you may even be having a hard time coming to that realization.
“The shape of work is changing… and it won’t be coming back.”
Another of my coworkers who has a toddler, has a block of time on her calendar titled, ‘toddler time’ (she uses her baby’s name instead). Not only has she prioritized and protected that precious time, now, when I look at her calendar, I’m aware of what’s really important to her, or at least, of what she needs to do to make her day work for her and the people she lives with.
As a single person with no kids, my work-from-home adjustment hasn’t been the same as my coworkers’, but it has come with its own challenges. Yes - all my snacks are my own to eat; No - I don’t have to worry about somebody doing or saying something weird in the background of a work call I’m on, nor do I have to feed, educate or entertain anyone in my household.
But, I am the only pair of hands in my house. Which means all of the extra work of work - the 9-to-5 days that are now more like 8-to-10, plus all the extra work of home - cooking multiple meals a day, doing dishes, grocery shopping, laundry, grooming, yardwork - are now mine and only mine to do.
Adjustments have definitely been made.
Kisha Solomon is an Atlanta-based writer, knowledge worker and serial expat. She writes witty, poignant stories about the lessons she’s learned from her life, work and travels. She deals with the sometimes frustrating and often humorous side effects of being black, female and nerdy. When she’s not writing working or travelling, you can find her in deep conversation with herself or her four-legged familiar, Taurus the Cat. www.lifeworktravels.com
When No One Knows The Way: 5 Steps To Make Your Mission Statement A Way Of Working
My client’s disappointed that the team hasn’t adopted or isn’t fully aware of the organization’s mission. How, she wonders, can she get her team to not only know what the mission is, but live it everyday?
Management Issue:
My client has been in her role as lead of her team for the past year or so. She’s put a good deal of her efforts into strengthening the team culture and creating a more collaborative and client-focused mindset within her department.
At the beginning of the year, she worked with other members of the organization’s executive team to develop a mission statement for her department. Shortly after it was finished, she proudly shared the new mission with the team in a town hall style meeting. Months later, she’s dismayed at how few people on the team have grasped the mission – she randomly polled a few of her staff about the mission statement a few days ago, and some didn’t even know that a mission statement existed!
Naturally, she’s disappointed that the team hasn’t adopted or isn’t fully aware of the mission. How, she wonders, can she get her team to not only know what the mission is, but live it everyday?
***
Training your team on your organization’s mission statement is not a once-and-done activity. Many organizational leaders put a great deal of effort and thought into the creation of their company or department mission statement, carefully crafting each word until it conveys a message that both inspires and succinctly describes what the organization does.
But once the hard work of creating the mission statement is done, the task of getting employees to learn and embody the words of the mission statement is the next big hurdle – one might rightfully conclude that this is the hardest work of all.
As a result, mission statements often end up being treated as canned corporate speak or a motivational poster without real-life impact. Organizations who move beyond this mindset and successfully instill the mission into their employees are poised to experience profound shifts in organizational culture.
So how do they do it? Here’s one approach for taking your company’s mission statement from words to action.
From Mission To Action
5 Steps to Turn Your Organization’s Mission Statement into a Way of Working
Step 1: De-construct the mission statement
Take action phrases from the mission statement and develop both marketing and training materials around them. Do the same for adjectives and descriptor words.
Step 2: Create marketing and training materials
Suggested marketing materials:
Wall posters of the mission statement with action phrases or descriptors highlighted and explained
3D toys, puzzles, games, figurines, etc. that demonstrate the action phrases or descriptors in some way or have action phrases or descriptors printed on them
Suggested training materials:
Self-directed eLearning modules – a la the security essentials training
Recorded video presentation of a member of leadership explaining the mission and its importance
Animated explainer videos
Step 3: Include mission statement in required annual training
Require that each employee attend an annual introduction or refresher training that includes or exclusively focuses on the mission statement. Require the training to be completed within the first 30 days of employment for new hires and once a year for existing employees.
Step 4: Provide and promote ongoing experiences
When launching a new or modified mission statement, provide 2-3 experiential learning activities or sessions within 6 weeks of revealing the new mission statement. Experiential training should be designed to create ‘a-ha’ moments that allow participants to act and reflect on the concepts of the mission statement.
After each training session or after all sessions are completed, recommend and regularly encourage activities for your team to continue ‘living the mission’, including:
Book clubs – read and discuss business-related books that focus on the action phrases and descriptors in the mission statement
Internal improvement projects - suggest and work on internal-facing improvement initiatives that embody the concepts of the action phrases and descriptors in the mission statement
Community service projects - plan and participate in external activities and hands-on projects that embody the concepts of the action phrases and descriptors in the mission statement
Informal social groups - encourage small group participation in fun, social activities that are aligned with or themed with the action phrases and descriptors of the mission statement
Step 5: Encourage and reward demonstration of the mission in action
Create a rewards and recognition program to identify, recognize and reward projects or teams that have demonstrated the action phrases and descriptors highlighted in Step 1. Be sure to focus rewards and recognition primarily or exclusively on team and group efforts, not individuals. This will serve to encourage teamwork, asking for help, collaborating and having shared experiences; and will discourage isolation, ‘hero’ behavior or the tendency to ‘pick favorites’.
Further reading:
https://blog.clickboarding.com/how-to-improve-employee-engagement-make-the-mission-clear
Kisha Solomon is an Atlanta-based writer, knowledge worker and serial expat. She writes witty, poignant stories about the lessons she’s learned from her life, work and travels. She deals with the sometimes frustrating and often humorous side effects of being black, female and nerdy. When she’s not writing working or travelling, you can find her in deep conversation with herself or her four-legged familiar, Taurus the Cat.
the superglue - my first taste of project management
One of the most interesting jobs I had was when I worked at a busy coffee shop in Midtown Atlanta. My coworkers were a diverse cast of characters from all kinds of backgrounds, and our customers were an often amusing mix of discerning coffee snobs and folks who just needed their morning cup of joe.
Each morning when I came into work, I was given a different position to play. Some days I’d be the cashier – keying in transactions and filling pastry and drip brew orders, other times I’d be the barista – creating all of the fancy espresso-based beverages. But my favorite team role was a position called the Superglue.
The Superglue was so named because it was the position that, quite literally, held it all together. If the cashier was out of change, the Superglue would go get it. If the barista was low on 2% milk, the Superglue would refresh the supply, so the barista could keep serving up the espresso. If the line got especially long, the Superglue would first get the queue formed in an orderly fashion, then start pre-filling orders so customers wouldn’t be too delayed. If there was a lull in the action, the Superglue would do a quick interim cleaning of the work area to make sure the back of the house remained presentable.
Unlike the cashier or the barista, the Superglue wasn’t assigned any one specific task, but assisted with all of them. I guess you could say that the Superglue’s one task was to make sure that all the other tasks were performed as efficiently as possible with maximum support to the team and minimal displeasure to the customer. I didn’t know it then, but by ‘playing Superglue’, I was getting my first taste of project management.
As a project manager you don’t really do any one thing, but you must be reasonably skilled at or have a deep understanding of everything that all the other players on the team do. You also have to possess a certain empathy for the customer, being able to see through their eyes and respond to their needs no matter how sophisticated or simple those needs may be. Like the Superglue, a good project manager is an enabler that has the ability to support a diverse set of personalities, and respond to ever-changing needs while making sure that the quality of the process isn’t compromised.
And like the Superglue, you usually end up consuming a lot of coffee when no one’s looking.
what the wizard of oz can teach you about business
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
That’s got to be my favorite line from the beloved Hollywood movie classic, The Wizard of Oz. I’ve heard and used the phrase a hundred times or more, but just the other day I caught the movie on TV, and got a totally new insight from the scene in which The Great Oz is exposed as just a regular man. The Great Oz, it dawned on me, fell into the same trap that many small business owners do.
Heavy emphasis on marketing, not nearly enough on infrastructure. Think about it. Everyone in Oz – from Munchkins to Flying Monkeys – knows who the Wizard is. He’s got Glenda the Good Witch sending him referrals out the wazoo. And not once when Dorothy mentions, “I’m going to see the Wizard of Oz”, does anyone reply “Who?” Obviously, his Ozness has got one helluva marketing strategy if he’s that well known in a place that’s full of so many other colorful characters.
He’s also got a pretty good brand image that emphasizes exclusivity (no one gets in to see the Great Oz, you know) and dazzling opulence. But as soon as customers come seeking his service, it all starts to fall apart. First, the great and powerful Oz makes them jump through hoops to get his service (What? You don’t take credit cards? You’ve got no website? You’re only open every other Tuesday? It only works on a PC? I gotta kill a wicked witch to get an appointment?). And even once his customers have completed the extremely difficult task he asks of them, he stalls for time. “Come back tomorrow,” he says. “I know I said that if you did this, then I could meet your need, but…”.
Time and time again, I see businesses of all sizes spend a fortune in time and money on creating beautiful presentation and packaging for their business, generating a lot of buzz and publicity, and subsequently falling flat on their faces or driving themselves insane with work, when the customers hit the door and they realize they’ve got to deliver on the unrealistic expectations their marketing created.
So, am I saying that you shouldn’t do a great job of marketing and branding your business? Nope, not at all. But I am saying:
Your marketing and promotions should match your infrastructure. If you’re marketing to the world that you make the biggest and baddest widgets on the block or that you’re the premier, most exclusive this-that-or-the-other, then dammit, you’d better have the infrastructure to back it up, or someone’s going to call shenanigans on you.
Only promise what you can deliver. Better yet: underpromise, and over-deliver. Don’t tell your potential customers that you can get their product to them in 2 -days, when you know it could take 3 or 4, or even 2 and a half days. If you think it’ll take 2 days, tell them it’ll take 3, and surprise them with the good news. Set realistic expectations, and meet or exceed them every time.
It’s ok to have limitations, just be sure to reveal them upfront. You’re a small business. Everybody knows it. There’s no shame in having a limitation here or there. You’ll be surprised how forgiving people can be if you just tell them (yes, even in your marketing) about your limitations, and let them know how you’re working to improve.
It’s not ok to have the same limitations forever. If you’ve been giving the same “we’re working to improve” line to your customers for years, eventually they’re going to get tired of hearing it. They will expect more of you. And you should expect more of yourself. Spend the time and effort to stabilize your infrastructure, or if you don’t know where to start, ask for help.
The moral of the story is: The hoodoo, magic, pomp, and circumstance of over-the-top marketing might make you a popular little business, but you’ll need to pay some attention to what’s going on behind the curtain to be a successful little business.
The good news is… you probably already have everything you need. Some brains, a lot of heart, and a little bit of courage.
And a pair of sparkly red pumps wouldn’t hurt either.