The surprising link between organizational structure and decolonization
Lessons from the journey of an inspiring Indigenous organization
“Now I get what shared leadership can look like. With roles everything becomes clear.” Erika, after adopting the first roles of her organization Snqʷeyłmistn.
April Charlo and Erika Koskela, co-founders of Snqʷeyłmistn, a Salish organization in Montana, USA and Samantha Slade, author of Going Horizontal, co-founder of Percolab, are collaborating to create an organizational structure for Snqʷeyłmistn that embodies shared leadership and good relationship.
Erika — roles and healthy relationships
One of my first memories of meeting with Samantha was going over our goals for the collaboration. Decolonization was one that quickly rose to the top. Despite the fact that the board and staff at Snqʷeyłmistn share the desire to create an organization that holds up traditional ways of being, we constantly have to acknowledge the reality that we have all grown up engulfed in a colonized world. The way that I see roles impacting our decolonization is through the healthy relationships that can be fostered when each person can take responsibility for their own role without needing another person to oversee, direct, or critique them in the process. Everyone involved with Snqʷeyłmistn shares a passion for restoring traditional values and practices, which lends itself well to shared leadership.
It took Samantha’s perspective to help me understand my predisposition to the use of roles in leadership. Samantha explained to me how naturally the indigenous worldview coincides with the use of roles, I was able to see how who I am as an individual is who I want to be as a member of Snqʷeyłmistn. By owning my strengths in this arena, I can revel in the many ways that colonization has failed to assimilate my mind and spirit.
I would like to address a reluctance in my community to use the word ‘decolonization’ in recent times. I have heard a shift to the positive in actively reindigenizing, which I support wholeheartedly. At the same time, I am still finding myself in the position of having to recognize and unlearn mindsets and behaviors that were introduced to me from an early age. So for me, I still feel the need to actively decolonize, in order to reindigenize my life.
Samantha — Delight with the first roles created
I appreciate Erika and April’s clarity that to cocreate new futures, how we are set up and doing the work matters just as much as what we are working on. The mission of this organization is certainly an ambitious one: Indigenize solutions for the foster care issues of the Flathead Reservation. They had unfortunately spent a lot of time creating job descriptions with carefully formulated tasks and I shook things up by bringing in this idea of “roles”. Conventional job descriptions and employee evaluations can encourage hierarchical dynamics, whereas roles break through to a shared leadership structure. I have written a lot about roles and worked with many organizations to develop them, but this was the first time I was doing it with a First Nation organization and it felt like we were reclaiming many traditional ways in a modern context.
To get to know each other we had some collective decision making sessions that helped me discover the context and complexities of the organization. We also took a moment to each draw how we see the organization and share it to each other, avoiding any critique or conversation, just appreciating the richness of it all.
The roles of any organization are contextual, so we clarified the roles we felt make sense for this organization, without judgment, or debate, just sitting with all of them together. Then we each selected a role to move forward and together we clarified the purpose of each of these roles using a playful purpose method. The relational way of working continued as we flowed with cooking and the outdoors, all so natural for Erika and April and the group.
The first roles that naturally emerged are foundational for this organization and its mission and we can feel the grounding.
We also clarified the principles of the role based system that includes how we adopt them, and who can steward them (because the role belongs to the organization not to any individual). Again things just flowed.
April reflects on the process
I am a Charlo, which means I come from a long line of Chiefs. The concept of Chief has definitely been colonized, where I thought that the Chief was the shot caller of all decisions.
From a colonizers viewpoint, someone was “in charge” and the chief was pointed out. One cool revelation that has been formulating lately is this idea of, what if the Chieftainship wasn’t a hierarchy? What if the Chief was just a role in a tribe of people who all carried equal power and roles? What if the Chief’s role was to bring people together, listen, perform some sort of shared decision and support the implementation of the collective decision?
The cofounders of Snqʷeyłmistn discussed how we don’t know how to lead the way the Chief’s did in the past. So, for now, we wouldn’t assign a leadership role to just one person, rather, we would co-lead, and employ consensus in all our decision making, and not move forward on anything without a prayer and proper deliberations. When we were introduced to this idea of roles, and taken through the collective based decision making process, it set into our bones like we had been waiting for it, and it was an immense sense of relief, almost speaking to our DNA of something we had been doing for thousands of years.
It’s refreshing to think that Indigenous people were never hierarchical, but rather, we were operating a social structure similar to that of roles.
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Read two other articles co-authored with April and Erika: Trauma Informed Decision Making and Difficult Conversations and Talking Circles
Go deeper into setting up your own roles: What’s all the full about roles in horizontal teams and organizations
Find out more of the general spirit of this way of working: Going Horizontal: Creating a Non-hierarchical Organization, One Practice at a Time (Berrett-Koelher Publishers) and visit Percolab Coop
