Center for Positive Organizations’ faculty members Gretchen M. Spreitzer, Monica Worline, and Lindy Greer came together to provide the Michigan Ross Business and Society podcast listeners a deeper dive into the practice of thriving.
In this episode, How Can We Thrive at Work This Year?, they explain how loneliness, drained energy, and a lack of patience are side effects of low-quality connections, but also how to combat this to create interactions that energize people. Taking steps to improve the quality of your connections is a vital part of engagement and creating connections in the workplace. They discuss what we mean by thriving at work, trends and changes facing the workplace in 2023, actionable tips for managers and individuals to encourage thriving, and potential pitfalls that can get in the way of thriving.
Spreitzer is the Keith E. and Valerie J. Alessi Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan.
Worline is the Faculty Director of Engaged Learning and Innovation at the Center for Positive Organizations and CEO at Enliven Work.
Greer is a Faculty Associate at the Center for Positive Organizations, Sanger Leadership Center Faculty Director, and a Professor for Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan.
Experiential Exercise to Combat Burnout:
Tiffany Johnson, Georgia Institute of Technology
In Memoriam:
Olivia (Mandy) O’Neill, George Mason University
Exercises in the [not very] Plane Geometry of Translating Theory for [some] Practitioners:
Jean Bartunek, Boston College
Reigniting Joy in our Practice by Embracing a Design Mindset:
Monica Worline, University of Michigan and Betsy Erwin, University of Michigan
The Power and Possibilities in Creating a Landscape of Connection:
Jane Dutton, University of Michigan
Facilitator:
Brianna Caza, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
About the Session:
Our students, colleagues, and others that we encounter in our daily lives are longing for empathy, compassion, and space to be vulnerable. Ongoing crises in the world elevate the need for us to translate POS research into practice. It is possible for POS to inform how we show up in our teaching, service, and outreach work. To that end, we invited several scholar-practitioners to enlighten us on ways to bring POS to practice in our teaching, communities, and work. This experiential session will incorporate movement, exercises, and meditative spaces so that POS can carry us forward into our future.
Recognizing the prevalence of suffering among management teachers and students, we raise the importance of compassion as central to the practice of management teaching. To aid in understanding how suffering and compassion arise in management teaching, we call upon a theoretical view of their rhizomatic structure, which conveys the widespread, complex, and largely unspoken spreading of suffering and corresponding need for compassion in the work of management teaching. To meet this suffering with compassion, we propose two clusters of practices central to teaching that lend themselves to helping management teachers see possibilities for more skillfully intertwining suffering and compassion. The first focuses on how management teachers can design the context for teaching in ways that make compassion more likely, focusing specifically on roles and networks. The second draws upon Honneth’s recognitional infrastructure to focus on how teachers can approach the relational practice of teaching with emphasis on enriching human recognition of suffering. We conclude with a caution about overly simplistic approaches and overly individualized views of compassion in the work of management teaching. We call for systemic approaches to action that will enrich our imaginations as we approach management teaching and its role in our collective responsiveness to suffering.
Thriving Accelerator Series
Accelerate Your Career Success
About the Thriving Accelerator Series
The Thriving Accelerator Series, created from the research excellence of Michigan Ross’ Center for Positive Organizations, will help students build thriving lives, teams, and organizations. Students will engage with Ross thought leaders and with world-renowned tools, created by Ross faculty, to deepen their self-awareness and ability to resource others.
About this Accelerator
You may think you know your strengths, but research shows that most of us have a very limited view of the impact we actually make. Expanding your view of strengths enables you to tell more powerful stories about yourself and your contributions to organizations. This accelerator speeds up your ability to stand out by deepening and broadening your view of your strengths and how to use them in recruiting and interviewing. You will elevate your approach to your career search and discover new ways to stand out and utilize your unique strengths.
This workshop is co-hosted by Ross’ Career Development Office and the Center for Positive Organizations.
There are two opportunities to participate in the Accelerate Your Career Success workshop:
Thriving Accelerator Series
Accelerate Your Career Success
About the Thriving Accelerator Series
The Thriving Accelerator Series, created from the research excellence of Michigan Ross’ Center for Positive Organizations, will help students build thriving lives, teams, and organizations. Students will engage with Ross thought leaders and with world-renowned tools, created by Ross faculty, to deepen their self-awareness and ability to resource others.
About this Accelerator
You may think you know your strengths, but research shows that most of us have a very limited view of the impact we actually make. Expanding your view of strengths enables you to tell more powerful stories about yourself and your contributions to organizations. This accelerator speeds up your ability to stand out by deepening and broadening your view of your strengths and how to use them in recruiting and interviewing. You will elevate your approach to your career search and discover new ways to stand out and utilize your unique strengths.
This workshop is co-hosted by Ross’ Career Development Office and the Center for Positive Organizations.
There are two opportunities to participate in the Accelerate Your Career Success workshop:
The Thriving Accelerator Series, created from the research excellence of Michigan Ross’ Center for Positive Organizations, will help students build thriving lives, teams, and organizations. Students will engage with Ross thought leaders and with world-renowned tools, created by Ross faculty, to deepen their self-awareness and ability to resource others.
About the Strengths Accelerator
The two-part Strengths Accelerator will teach students how to deepen the self-awareness of their strengths. Participants will learn how to deploy a strengths-based approach in school, recruiting, and life.
The Strengths Accelerator is a two-part workshop series and students are expected to attend both sessions:
November 2, 2021
December 8, 2021 (new date)
Instructors:
Monica Worline, Faculty Director of Engaged Learning and Innovation and Core Faculty, Center for Positive Organizations
Betsy Erwin, Co-Director Engaged Learning and Innovation, Center for Positive Organizations
Thriving Accelerator Series
Connections Accelerator
About the Thriving Accelerator Series
The Thriving Accelerator Series, created from the research excellence of Michigan Ross’ Center for Positive Organizations, will help students build thriving lives, teams, and organizations. Students will engage with Ross thought leaders and with world-renowned tools, created by Ross faculty, to deepen their self-awareness and ability to resource others.
About the Connections Accelerator
This is an invitation to be inspired by the power of human connections. While we are living in trying times that put stress on our ability to be with one another, these times also highlight that human connections are essential for our well being and effectiveness. This 90-minute workshop will give you a foundation for new ways of seeing, understanding, and acting to build connections with others, even in remote work and online gatherings. You’ll leave with a new appreciation of how to design remote work and online gatherings to tap into wellsprings of capability, strength, and resilience. You’ll take away a customized plan that is designed to support high quality connections in your next remote session, as well as a design guide that will help you navigate the landscape of connections more effectively in these times.
Instructors:
Your guides on this journey through the landscape of connection are two passionate teachers who are deeply connected to this topic.
Kyle Duffy, an intern in the Office of the University of Michigan’s Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, interviews Dr. Jane Dutton and Dr. Monica C. Worline on behalf of Business & Finance positive energizers.
The division of Business & Finance (B&F) at the University of Michigan is on a journey to create a more positive and inclusive work environment for its 2,700 staff. As part of these efforts, B&F has enlisted more than 150 staff positive energizers who are working to raise awareness about positive organizational concepts and encourage their colleagues to help create positive change.
Recently, B&F’s positive energizers undertook focused efforts on compassion and kindness in the workplace, including their connection to organizational performance. Drs. Jane Dutton and Monica Worline shared their research and expertise on these topics with B&F staff in a recent interview.
This year’s Positive Business Conference hosted by the Ross School of Business will focus on the theme “Meaningful Engagement in a Fragmented Time: Connecting with Self, Others, and Society.”
At the conference, which is planned for a virtual format May 13-14, Michigan Ross faculty member Monica Worline will introduce this theme of “Connection” during the opening session. Worline recently answered a few questions about the concept and its value, especially in times like the present.
What makes the concept of connection vital to our professional or work life, as well as our personal life?
Worline: Research across a number of disciplines — business, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, developmental life sciences, marital counseling, clinical and health psychology — comes to a pretty striking conclusion: The quality of our interpersonal connections is a primary determinant of our health, our longevity, and our fulfillment with our work, our personal life, and our family lives. Whether we are focused on professional or personal roles, the quality of connections between people profoundly influences our quality of life.
We talk about three types of connection — with other people, with society, and with ourselves. Connecting with ourselves might seem like the most challenging. Why is that important, particularly in a work setting, and particularly now?
Worline: As a part of examining this idea of connection, much of my focus has been on connecting through instances of suffering and distress. I often use the word “compassion” to talk about that.
In these times, we especially need to offer compassion for our own suffering, which is a form of connecting to ourselves. Many of us are exhausted from adapting to pandemic life, whether it’s remote schooling or remote work or adjusting to use of protective equipment that limits our human contact with one another. Many are also exhausted and distressed by ongoing political divisions, social ruptures, financial struggles, and racial inequalities that have become even more pronounced during the pandemic. As we feel more and more exhausted, we need to turn inward with care for our own well-being. It can be useful to adopt new rituals, get in touch with nature, and offer oneself kindness as part of connecting with ourselves.
Of course, many of us are doing this personal work of caring for ourselves while we’re also trying to meet the needs of our employees or understand the pain that our clients and our customers are going through. Connecting with ourselves with more kindness and compassion can help us also connect as colleagues or as managers. Leaders often struggle with this — to understand their own connection to themselves and their work, so that they can find new ways of renewing themselves so that they can in turn help others be resilient through this tough time.
Obviously the pandemic has made connection of all sorts harder. Has it made anything easier? Has the way that we’re living and working now opened up any different opportunities to make connections?
Worline: Yes. When historians and scholars look back on this period, I think we’ll see many profound effects, not all of which are negative. Connection certainly becomes harder in many ways. But many people were living overscheduled, hyperbusy lives where they never had a moment to pause, and we’ve seen that shift. More people have made time to renew friendships or deepen relationships with family. For them, the need to go more slowly and to be more cognizant of connecting with other people — even though it meant using technology to do that — actually deepened their connection and gave them more opportunity for connection rather than less. Slowing down and changing our habits of busyness has reshaped our landscape of connection.
The other thing that I know from our teaching work and from talking to students is that although they really miss being at the university in person, the experience of the technological classroom, for many of them, is actually more connected in many ways, rather than less. In the technological classroom, the opportunities to participate via chat panels or Q&A forums, and the new ways that professors can facilitate hearing many students’ voices, has expanded in-class participation. People have become more familiar and comfortable with many electronic collaboration tools that allow them to share ideas without the fear of public speaking. And we can invite guests into our classes and events from all over the world without the time and financial burden of travel, which has expanded the global participation of many in all kinds of online conferences and events. I think this is a change that is beneficial and will persist after the pandemic subsides.
Do you think that this experience of the pandemic will permanently change the way we connect in person in the future?
Worline: I hope so. I’m hopeful that people will take time to be reflective about what carries into the new normal in a way that enriches their lives. I’m hopeful that the value of slowing down will stay with us. I’m hopeful we continue to diversify participation in classrooms and in university events. I’m hopeful that we can reach beyond the university in new ways and connect to society for even broader impact. If we learn lessons about caring for these kinds of relationships, we could emerge from the pandemic more connected in some ways.
However, I’m not optimistic that all of this will happen easily. A lot of what I hear right now in the media, and just listening to people in daily interactions, suggests that they can’t wait to get back to life as usual. And as human beings, we are really good at doing what we’ve done before. It would be easy for us to fall back into habits of disconnection that we had before the pandemic. That’s one reason I am happy to have this as the theme of this conference, and hope to provoke some thoughtful discussion of post-pandemic life that is richer in human connections.
How has the recent social and political upheaval in our country affected our ideas of connection?
Worline: The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other people at the hands of police has ignited a discussion of connection across race as well as other forms of difference — an urgent discussion that needs more investment and more care. Right now it is too easy for race, class, and other kinds of social separation to feed a lack of empathy and to create more disconnection.
The globe is filled with spaces where we don’t know how to relate to each other well. Yet we all have the opportunity, every time we have a chance to connect with another human being, to learn about their experience and to become different ourselves by virtue of our connection with them.
There’s a lot of work going on in all different social worlds, including the world of business, to change the way that people can connect to themselves with pride and confidence and to also be invited to connect with others, no matter what background they bring into a room. I’m hopeful that more people will be able to connect with themselves with greater compassion for the cultural and social wounds we carry, and as they do, they can also offer more understanding and compassion to others. Along the theme of connecting to self, other, and society, we can connect to our inner strengths in new ways that help us recognize those strengths in others who may have different backgrounds, and we can join together in collective work from this shared basis that helps us have more positive impact.
Part of reinventing connections in a fraught time is learning to honor the strength and the beauty in every single person that comes into our circle, including ourselves. The possibilities for doing that have opened up tremendously in the past year. Yet the fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, or not knowing what to say or how to act, is also heightened in fraught times. So it’s time to double down on seeing the best in people and learning to honor and celebrate that beauty. Being a human being living in this moment, it’s likely the most important part of the work we have to do.
This article was originally published by Michigan Ross.
Behind every resourceful woman is a support system of other resourceful women.
Many times the narrative of collaboration is lost in favor of highlighting a single hero. In particular, neglecting female interconnectedness perpetuates unnecessary competition among women. In striving to be the one who makes it, women can sometimes be pitted against one another. But working together unlocks an abundance of opportunities, resources, and solutions that could not be achieved alone. Center for Positive Organizations (CPO) professors Jane Dutton, Betsy Erwin, and Monica Worline demonstrate just this. The teaching trio celebrates its collective resilience throughout the past year, adapting to teaching under trying circumstances.
Dutton, Erwin, and Worline are co-instructors for the Center for Positive Organization’s Magnify Immersion Program. This course employs Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) to empower students to create positive work environments, improve workplace culture, and discover untapped possibilities. The program was taught remotely for the first time in Spring 2020, and will be offered in a virtual format in Spring 2021 as well. The teaching team brings their enthusiasm, along with the essence of POS, to their virtual classroom; helping students discover new ways of being and doing in these difficult circumstances.
Although the transition to remote teaching and learning was new for many, Erwin, Dutton, and Worline had been primed with the necessary virtual skills. Erwin, who taught the online MBA course, reflects: “Adapting to remote teaching wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was figuring out how to be there for our students throughout everything else: the pandemic, acts of racial injustice, and natural disasters across the country.”
Grappling with how to best support and connect with students was a guiding question for the teaching team, as they reimagined their curriculum for the coming year. How could they confront the grief and loss students were feeling? How could they provide resources for other educators making the same transition? And how could these things be accomplished in a completely virtual environment?
“Teachers are always, if they choose to embrace it, healers and caregivers. It’s what you do when you are invited into the immensely privileged position of touching someone’s life. I think in some ways the pandemic cracked open everybody’s teaching practice and said: You have to change, and you have to change now. It opened up the space for all of us to support each other in different ways and create a community where people could be held and supported and loved through this tremendously difficult time.”
– Monica Worline
Dutton emphasizes the importance of creating something with the goal of giving it away for the betterment of society. It shifts the scarcity mindset that so many of us have to one of abundance. A scarcity mindset keeps us trapped in trying to be the one to accomplish something, or the hero in a narrative. It promotes individualism, competition, isolation. Rather, an abundance mindset acknowledges that many people can be working toward the same goal, and that working together will help everyone get there faster and yield more creative solutions. Dutton and Worline highlight the feminist stance on scholarship of “giving away” what they learn. It is the practice of sharing their findings, resources, and tools back with others through a variety of channels. It allows teachers to make the greatest impact possible in helping others grow. “In teaching, part of what you’re doing is giving information away so that the students can make the most of it and share back with you in ways you could never imagine,” says Worline.
“To create a thriving classroom, we wanted to equip faculty members around the world with tools to imagine how to do things differently. It wasn’t just about the students, it was also about trying to reignite faculty to see a different way of being, as teachers.
Give it away, give it away, give it away. Whatever we’re learning—give it away.”
– Jane Dutton
Designed and curated by Worline, the Thrive in Trying Times Teach-Out was a global conversation and week-long learning experience. The free lessons provided tools and practices to help people and organizations thrive while navigating the stress and uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Teach-Out embodies the philosophy of “giving away” resources.
Not only did the teaching trio share resources with other educators, they also were invaluable resources to each other. Dutton acknowledges the role that Erwin and Worline played in bringing out her abundance mindset. “One of the most joyous parts of my career has been collaborating with these amazing women and doing what we have done for such amazing students,” says Dutton. In particular, she credits Erwin and Worline for helping her develop her integrated self at work. An integrated self-identity is being able to embrace all parts of yourself, and bringing each of these parts together in a coherent way. “Bringing my whole person into the classroom, not just my academic person, has been incredibly freeing,” Dutton says.
And Erwin expresses gratitude for Dutton and Worline helping her expand the vision of what she believed was possible. Working with these women has given her the space to craft a job that is much more impactful than the one written down on paper. She has adapted her role to fit her unique self, and has found it to be “so much better for me, at my core, and so much better for the students.” Collaborating with Dutton and Worline has allowed her to grow, while also feeling trusted and challenged and supported.
“We grow in relation to other people,” says Worline. She acknowledges that not everyone has the luxury to collaborate. “It can be really lonely. A lot of people in lectureship and clinical practice are so burned out right now because they are having to do it alone.” Worline stresses the importance of finding the healing, positive relationships to get us through these difficult times. Working with people like Dutton and Erwin has made a huge difference in her capacity to engage in teaching and research. “It’s the reason that I’m doing this work at all,” says Worline.
This blog was written by Keara Kotten, a #UMSocial Intern and Michigan Ross Junior, and originally published on the University of Michigan’s Social Blog.
The article explores the evolution of corporate well-being programs. It notes that they began with a focus on physical health and its impact on the bottom line. In recent years, well-being strategies have come to include mental health benefits to help employees become more engaged and productive. Worline says companies that are serious about their employees’ well-being must strive to create a holistic experience that includes livable wages, adequate health insurance, flexible scheduling, and paid-leave benefits.
“This year, with COVID-19 and an uncertain economy, mental health and care for employee well-being has risen to the top of the list,” Worline says. “It’s no longer viewed as optional.”
Worline is a Lecturer at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She also is a Research Scientist at the Center for Compassion and Altruism at Stanford University.
Tools for Thriving Workshop Series
A Landscape of Connection: Foundations of High Quality Connections in Research and Practice
About the Tools for Thriving Workshop Series
The Tools for Thriving Workshop Series, created from the research excellence of Michigan Ross’ Center for Positive Organizations, will help students build thriving lives, teams, and organizations. Students will engage with Ross thought leaders and with world-renowned tools, created by Ross faculty, to deepen their self-awareness and ability to resource others.
About the Landscape of Connection Workshop
This is an invitation to be inspired by the power of human connections. While we are living in trying times that put stress on our ability to be with one another, these times also highlight that human connections are essential for our well being and effectiveness. This 90-minute workshop will give you a foundation for new ways of seeing, understanding, and acting to build connections with others, even in remote work and online gatherings. You’ll leave with a new appreciation of how to design remote work and online gatherings to tap into wellsprings of capability, strength, and resilience. You’ll take away a customized plan that is designed to support high quality connections in your next remote session, as well as a design guide that will help you navigate the landscape of connections more effectively in these times.
Instructors:
Your guides on this journey through the landscape of connection are two passionate teachers who are deeply connected to this topic.
Jane Dutton
Jane is a pioneer of research on high quality connections, teaching and writing about this field for the last 20 years. She is a co-founder of the Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
Monica Worline
Monica is a pioneer in the work of bridging academic innovation in Positive Organizational Scholarship with the world of workplace practice, and in addition to teaching at the University of Michigan, she is the CEO of EnlivenWork, an incubator that works to foster new tools grounded in scholarship and designed with beauty to help people and organizations thrive.
The workshop is limited to 150 undergraduate and graduate students, and is open to U-M students only.
