Building Relationships, Inside and Out: Takeaways from a Conversation with David Wertheimer
The key to a learning organization is the ability to listen to and understand the voices of the people that comprise the organization, and it’s the job of staff in the organization to push the organization from the transactional to the relational. — David Wertheimer, former Director of Civic and Community Engagement, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
This spring, The Move hosts Ayushi Roy and Ceasar McDowell made an appearance on Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) podcast series, in conversation with David Wertheimer, the former Director of Civic and Community Engagement at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and current professor at Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry.
The three pick up their conversation this summer in Episode 3 of The Move Podcast, where they discuss the important contributions of private foundations to shaping our civic spaces and building social capital — and unearth opportunities for individuals within private institutions to inspire more relational, rather than transactional, practices, that may strengthen the public’s muscle for democracy.
David kicks off the podcast by illustrating these two types of relationships in action in his experience at the Gates Foundation. In making grants and funds social impact projects, for example, the foundation enters into transactional relationships with its grantees, defined by grants and detailed contracts that align with the foundations stated goals and theories of change.
Yet, these connections can also help organizations working on the ground to build relationships that people need in order to thrive. David’s experiences speaking with families experiencing homelessness in Seattle who benefited from programs supported by the Gates Foundation show the value of relationships with case workers, social service organizations, friends, and families, in supporting these folks as they made it out of hard times.
Similarly, at the institutional level, collaboration and relationship building are also important between the public sector and civil society organizations. For example, David recalls the strong collaboration among governments civic organizations in the city of Pittsburgh and its surrounding Allegheny county to advance opportunity and wellbeing in their region in the face of economic hardship.
Finding opportunities to collaborate and advance a collective good can be easily framed as part of the mission of philanthropic foundations, civic organizations, and the public sector. But what does relationship building for positive impact look like among private actors with transactional missions or practices?
Eric Gordon of Emerson’s Engagement Lab provides one perspective in the previous episode of The Move podcast. Gordon mentions that private, highly transactional organizations, such as data companies or corporations, exist in a dichotomy with relationship-oriented, civic-minded organizations and governments. Gordon offers that there is a refreshing “clarity” in the latter’s mission to make a profit, and importantly emphasizes the responsibility on behalf of these transactional institutions to make their practices ethical and transparent.
Yet in conversation with David, Ceasar complicates this dichotomy by referencing the transactional practices of university land development that can come into conflict with efforts on behalf of these same institutions to build relationships with their surrounding communities. Blurriness exists between transactional and relational goals within a single institution.
David sees this blurriness as a powerful opportunity to blend the transactional and relational, the two ends of Gordon’s dichotomy, in the practices of private institutions. By doing so, these organizations can strengthen their commitment to the public good.
This work, he states, starts with empowering the individuals inside these organizations to recognize themselves as “culture makers,” who “through relationships, and even a brief hallway conversation, can learn, can grow, can evolve” the ways their institution functions internally, and its sense of responsibility towards the public and the strength of our democracy.
Empowering its employees to recognize themselves as valuable culture makers, then, is one way that any private institution can become a learning organization, where internal culture evolves to strengthen its commitment to the organizations members and the public.
Perhaps, then, the conflicts inherent in towing the line between transaction and relationship are not a problem of institutions. Rather these might be a feature, or an indication,of living and working in capitalistic democracies. As David noted, the way forward is for organizations and individuals to peacefully struggle with these challenges through a commitment to continual listening and learning.
