The Move Podcast S2E3: Empowered Employment with David Wertheimer
In Episode 3, The Move Podcast interviews David Wertheimer, the former Gates Foundation Director of Community & Civic Engagement. We discuss what it means to be a relational versus transactional corporation, how capital is taking the place of kinship networks, and how organizations could better promote and support healthy relationships.
S2E3 David Wertheimer
David Wertheimer: [00:00:00] 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.
Ayushi Roy: [00:00:24] Hi, Ceasar.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:00:25] Hey, Ayushi, how you doing?
Ayushi Roy: [00:00:26] I’m good.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:00:27] Good.
Ayushi Roy: [00:00:27] Who do we have today?
Ceasar McDowell: [00:00:28] Oh, today we have David Wertheimer, and it’s a really interesting story. I met David a couple years ago. Actually, I was walking down the stairway in our department, in the building …
Ayushi Roy: [00:00:40] This sounds like the start of a really bad story.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:00:42] No, it’s a good story.
Ayushi Roy: [00:00:43] “I was walking down the staircase … “
Ceasar McDowell: [00:00:45] One of my colleagues, Sarah Williams, was walking down the stairs.
Ayushi Roy: [00:00:49] Okay.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:00:49] And she says, “I’m going to this meeting with these people from the Gates Foundation. Want to go with me?” And I said, “Sure.” She says, “Yeah, we’re meeting them downstairs.” So, I go down, and I’m actually having to be somewhere else in 15 minutes, but I sit in to the meeting, and David is there. Until just recently he was Director of Democracy for the Gates foundation, and we sat there and talked for a while, and I talked with him about some of our design principles and stuff like that, and then had to leave.
Then, low and behold, about three months ago someone emails me and said, “I was on a panel with David, and he mentioned the work that you were doing, and your whole concept of design for the margins, and the civic design framework, and really we’d like to talk with you.”
Ayushi Roy: [00:01:41] Oh my god.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:01:42] And then David called me, and we got connected again, and realized how what he was doing and the work that we are doing here are pretty much aligned.
Ayushi Roy: [00:01:52] Wow, you left quite an impression in 15 minutes.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:01:52] Well, it was interesting … Yeah, and so what I ended up doing, you know, we said, “We would love to have you on the show,” and you know how we normally talk and really take our time with people. Then he said, “So, do you want me to be on the show as someone from the Gates Foundation, or do you want me to be on the show in my new position at Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry?” I said, “Why?” He says, “Well, if you want me to do the Gates Foundation, we’d need to do it in the next three weeks, because I’m leaving.”
He’s been with the Foundation for 12 years doing the work around democracy, and it is not surprising that he is moving to a place in Theology and Ministry, as you will find out when you hear our interview.
Good morning, David.
David Wertheimer: [00:02:40] Good morning!
Ceasar McDowell: [00:02:41] How are you?
David Wertheimer: [00:02:42] I am very well. Happy Friday.
Ayushi Roy: [00:02:44] Happy Friday. Thank you so much for joining us.
David Wertheimer: [00:02:46] Oh, my pleasure. It’s an honor.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:02:48] This is really great. You know, there are a couple of things that are on our mind in this conversation. We were talking with you yesterday, really interesting conversation just setting up for yet another podcast with SOCAP. But as we were listening to you talk, it really caught us, because you were mentioning this whole thing about being inside of a foundation, and also looking at other things around as it relates to our civic life and democracy, and this important distinction between transactions and relationships and how that works. I was just wondering if you could say a little bit more about that.
David Wertheimer: [00:03:20] Sure. We live in a context and in a society here that is highly transactional, whether you’re thinking about the transactions we do here at the Gates Foundation, which are grants and contracts where we enter into a formal relationship with lots of documentation and lots of material, and work with our grantees or our contractors to provide specific deliverables to us around A, B, and C, that follows specific theories of change and theories of action.
But when you back away from that, and you think about what is it really that motivates and stimulates real change in communities, in individuals, or even in societies, I actually think the core of that is relationships rather than transactions. We are fundamentally, I think, a relational species, and we seek meaning, we find meaning, in relationships with each other. Those are some of the most powerful tools we have to both connect with other people but also to change our contexts and to change the world around us.
So, my thinking really here over the last 13 years or so at the Gates Foundation has been that we constantly need to think about how to move our work from a purely transactional context to an interactional context where relationships are really helping to drive the work and helping to drive the vision and helping to drive the changes that we want to see in the world.
Ayushi Roy: [00:04:41] So, when you have transactions like you’re describing, you know, grants and contracts, you can actually kind of see the output, if you will, whether it be in terms of financial gain or otherwise. Can you give an example of a time that you’ve seen the gain from a relational or interactional experience?
I don’t mean to push back. I’m just curious. I think a lot of people think, “Okay, if there isn’t a quantitative output, if it’s not measurable, it hasn’t made a change.” So, can you maybe describe an example you’ve seen where that relationship has actually created this sort of almost tangible change?
David Wertheimer: [00:05:14] Yeah. That’s a great question. I’m someone who I believe that the plural of anecdote is data.
Ayushi Roy: [00:05:24] Wow.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:05:25] Oh …
Ayushi Roy: [00:05:25] The plural of anecdote is data. Wow.
David Wertheimer: [00:05:28] Yeah, that’s something I believe. For example, I worked here for 10 years on a strategy around family homelessness. We did a lot of grants, and we did a lot of contracts. We spent a lot of money working to help to transform the systems of care and the systems of housing that respond to families in crisis. One of the questions that’s always asked is, how’s it going? How are you doing?
Of course, you have these vast data systems that are the Homelessness Management Information Systems, called HMIS, that the Feds maintain. You can look at trends of family homelessness and trends of what’s happening, how many families are out there, where those families are in the process of moving through the system.
But when I really wanted to try and understand the impact of what we were doing, not just the specific outputs in terms of the data, but the impacts on people, I would go into the field, and I would actually ask some of the contractors or the grantees that we worked with to sit me down with families who had experienced homelessness or were homeless.
I would ask them, I’d say, “So, what’s made the difference to you, and what’s helped you move in a pathway from crisis to stability?” Time and again, what the individual families told me was it was the relationships that they had with the people that were around them, that were there to try to help and support them. It was, in a sense, the presence or the absence of social capital at a very granular level.
I’m someone who believes that the nuclear family is a construct of sort of the industrial revolution and beyond. Family systems used to be, for millennia, organized around extended kinship networks.
Ayushi Roy: [00:07:19] Yeah.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:07:19] Right.
David Wertheimer: [00:07:21] You had multiple different roles within kinship networks of individuals who were younger and older and in between, and families moved and communities were organized around extended kinship networks, or tribal relationships, even. With the industrial revolution, the motivation for organization of families and movement of families switched from kinship to capital.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:07:44] Wow.
David Wertheimer: [00:07:45] As they switched from kinship to capital, nuclear families began to become the organizing principle. If you’re at the very top of the socioeconomic pyramid, the nuclear family works, because the social capital that you’re missing, you can purchase. If you need childcare while you’re at work, or you need something after school, or even pay-to-play in terms of sports teams now in public schools.
But if you’re not in the top of the pyramid, and you have moved your family or reorganized your family system around work rather than kinship, you’re missing all those components of social capital. With the absence of those supports, that’s one of the reasons that families fall into homelessness.
It’s no surprise in our region here that about three quarters of the families that are on the street are headed by single moms. Single moms have the least access to capital because the family living wage in this community is a minimum of about $29 an hour. The minimum wage is $15 an hour. That’s a great, generous minimum wage when you look at other minimum wages around the country, but it’s still half of what a family needs to basically be stable in the community.
So, one of the things that I look for in terms of the relationship piece is, are the services that we’re funding, are the grants that we’re making, are the data that are being collected at the macro level, when you dig down into the granular level, are you in fact helping to replace the missing social capital that a family needs to thrive?
When I talk to individual families and they say, “It was our case manager who really spent time with us and helped me connect to the systems that helped me find a better job or childcare for my kid, or whatever I may need to thrive,” that, to me, is, again, the relationship piece. I think one of the really interesting questions in our society overall, particularly in the current era, is are we committed to the process of trying to replace missing social capital in ways that is maximally supportive to families that are not necessarily at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid, or are we not?
I think of Scandinavian countries, where every new family, regardless of who they are or what their status is, get a baby box when their baby is born. Every single family gets the key ingredients of, gee, what do you need to have a healthy baby in your house? It doesn’t matter if you’re the king of Denmark or a newly arrived immigrant from North Africa. If you’re living in certain Scandinavian countries, you get a baby box.
Are we committed to that level of granular support at a relational level of the families that are most vulnerable in our communities?
Ceasar McDowell: [00:10:34] You know, it’s interesting, David, you said … I really, I just love that analysis, and I really agree with it. I think one of the problems we’re having in this country, too, it’s not … what you’re saying about this kind of move to having these kind of relationships actually be transactional when they really need to be much more relational, are not just affecting the folks who are most vulnerable in our society. They’re actually increasingly affecting larger and larger portions of our society, even people who are working.
David Wertheimer: [00:11:06] I agree.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:11:07] It’s like, that’s the real underbelly of what’s happening with … We talk about the 99%. Well, there’s so many people who are in this space. Even if they’re managing to hold things together through transactions, it’s not giving them what relationships would give them if they were getting the same thing. So, I think there’s a sense of loss of community, of connections with others.
I think, apropos, a part of what we’re focusing on in this show is, it also then erodes our civic culture, right? It really disconnects us from each other in a way that … and that’s not a thing, I think, that can be transactional. For us, that’s the thing on the table. It’s like, how do we, then, realize that we’ve taken so much of our social life and made it so that you can actually purchase it, it can be a transactional relationship? How do we stitch together a kind of a public with that kind of relative out there?
Because, that’s what we would need to do to change the way we are going forward. It seems as long as some people are able to have a transactional relationship around some of those things and others aren’t, then we have this divide, and then it’s going to be, well, who’s going to get to decide? Who’s going to get their issue on the table? I’m just wondering how we actually recenter ourselves around this notion of relationship.
David Wertheimer: [00:12:28] That is a really great question.
Ayushi Roy: [00:12:35] That’s the million dollar question.
David Wertheimer: [00:12:35] Yeah. It’s not a small question. I certainly don’t think I have an answer that’s conclusive to that question, but I will say this about that. I think one of the challenges in our society right now is the fragmentation of the systems that are supposed to be there to promote and support healthy relationships.
Ayushi Roy: [00:12:58] What are these systems?
David Wertheimer: [00:12:59] For example, we talk about the social determinants of health. Big conversation about what are the social determinants of health? If you work in the healthcare arena, that means one thing. If you work in the housing arena, that means another thing. If you work in the education arena, that means something else.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:13:19] Right.
David Wertheimer: [00:13:20] We talk about the social determinants of educational attainment. Well, if you work in the school system, that means one thing. If you work in the medical system, that means another thing.
If you talk about the social determinants of economic success, if you work in the banking industry, that means one thing. If you’re living on the margins in the city, that means another thing.
So, one of the interesting dilemmas that I’ve encountered over time is that when you frame social determinants narrowly by health or educational success or economic success, you don’t have a complete conversation. You don’t have a full conversation across all of the domains that should be aligned around creating the relationships that allow families and individuals to thrive.
What I really think we need to think about is changing that conversation in all of those systems to a conversation about the social determinants of wellbeing. What does it mean to thrive? Really, in the health arena, the social determinants of health are about wellbeing. In the education arena, the social determinants of educational opportunity are about wellbeing. In the economic arena, the social determinants of economic success are about wellbeing.
So, what would happen if we all agreed to have a single conversation rather than these fragmented conversations about the Affordable Care Act, or the public school system, or the economic infrastructure of our society? What if we actually recognized that they’re all connected, and they all are ultimately the same thing? What would it mean for educators and health professionals and economic analysts, all to have the same conversation around the same table?
Ceasar McDowell: [00:15:03] It’s interesting, David, because this is reminding me that another part of the Foundation, you’ve been going around in the country looking at our practices around civic life and democracy in different places. It seems to me, to have that conversation, then, we really have to have some kind of robust civic processes in place that actually can construct the space for that. As you have been running around the country talking to people and stuff, are you finding hope that we’re moving in that direction?
David Wertheimer: [00:15:29] I think so. I am, and here at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation we are by definition optimists.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:15:36] Good.
David Wertheimer: [00:15:38] The term I prefer is urgent optimists, because I think there is an urgency to what we need to be thinking about right now. I would say, yes. I think there is cause for optimism, and it’s different in each community.
So, I had the great opportunity to visit six cities. That included Boston, where you guys are, New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Houston, and Portland, Oregon. One of the things, of course, you conclude when you do a trip like that is once you’ve seen one city you’ve seen one city, because each of them are unique.
But each city, there was something, or a number of things in each city that really stood out to say, wow, there’s something really fascinating happening here. For example, in Boston, where you guys are, I had no idea before I went to Boston that more than half the land area in Boston is occupied by non-profit institutions, educational institutions.
That creates in some ways an enormous economic challenge for Boston, because all of that land is tax exempt in terms of property taxes. One of the things that’s happened in Boston, which was fascinating to me, is all those educational institutions, or many of them, at least, are in partnership with each other talking about what it means for them as educational institutions to give back to the community that they’re actually a part of.
There are these collaboratives and these conversations, and the work that you guys are doing at MIT, and it’s absolutely fascinating to see the ways in which the rich array of educational institutions have entered into dialog with each other and with local government and with local community around what it means to be a citizen in the context of a community where there’s this rich array of educational, academic research talent that needs to figure out new ways to give back to the community because they’re not paying taxes. It’s absolutely fascinating.
In Pittsburgh, I was stunned by what’s happened there, because they were, 40 years ago, 750 thousand people, and today they are less than 350 thousand people. There are 27 thousand vacant lots in Pittsburgh.
Ayushi Roy: [00:17:41] Wow.
David Wertheimer: [00:17:42] Which is extraordinary. People have fled the city. The people who remain in Pittsburgh, at the community level, at the non-profit level, at the philanthropic level, at the government level, all of them are determined to have Pittsburgh shine again, to have Pittsburgh just be an amazing place.
The adversity of the economic downturn of the Rust Belt has really galvanized energy in Pittsburgh around civic relationship and civic participation. So, the four biggest foundations that are in their third or fourth generation that are old steel and coal money, they meet together quarterly. The $500 million a year that they pump into the local Allegheny County economy, they align their investments together to figure out the best way to have the maximal impact on their community.
We met with the mayor of Pittsburgh, who told us that he and the county executive in Allegheny County meet once a week for coffee, just the two of them. Their agenda is, what are we doing to make this region sync? I asked them, “How do you do that? You’re both politicians. How’d that happen?”
And what the mayor said to us was fascinating. He said, “I’m the mayor of Pittsburgh, and all I want is for this region to shine again. My friend, who’s the county executive, all he wants is to make Allegheny County shine again. We’re not running for other offices. We’re totally invested in what’s happening here, now.”
Again, it’s the relationship of the two of them, without all the transactional stuff of their staffs and their negotiators and all that. It’s just the two of them having coffee once a week. It’s like, that’s the key, that’s the connector, and those foundations meeting around the table together to coordinate. Those relationships have emerged from the adversity of the economic downturn, and are in the process of transforming the city.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:19:49] It’s funny you mentioned the Boston case, particularly around the universities, because we do have this issue here. I can just think about MIT and some of the northeastern others, where there are people inside the universities, and some of the leadership, who really do want to have a different relationship with the community, and at the same time they have this real dilemma.
I’ll take MIT for example. MIT’s in Cambridge. It owns a lot of land here, but it actually has a separate organization called MITIMCo, which is a developer, which actually is owned by MIT, but it’s an independent organization that does all of the development work. So, it has a highly transactional developer framework for how it goes about things.
So, I think one of the issues here, then, is there is no relationship aspect to the MITIMCo approach, while there may be inside of MIT people who are trying to do that for the community. So, then you find these really interesting issues where either the students are organizing, or the faculty and students are organizing, because they’re saying, “Well, there’s a disconnect between what the university says it wants, and then what this other part of it is actually doing.”
The university hasn’t figured out how to negotiate that, right? Because they’re driven by really different values. One is driven … it’s a developer, so it acts like a developer, right? And the other is a university, so we are an education space, and we’re supposed to be really adding value to our community in lots of different ways.
So, it’s a tension, right? It’s a real tension that I think is structurally built into things. I don’t think we know our way out of it, you know? We don’t know our way out of it, in some sense.
Ayushi Roy: [00:21:29] Yeah, and I think there’s like a sort of … For me, what I feel like you’re saying resonates on this deeper level of, like, there’s a problem in that what you were describing earlier, David, about the sort of kinship networks disintegrating and capital taking the place of social relationships, is true on not just an individual level but on a sort of organizational level as well, even if the intention of individuals within that organization is otherwise.
I guess, for me, it becomes the question of how do you then scale, for lack of a better term. Even that’s such a market word, sorry. But how do you, I guess, scale or whatever, quote unquote scale, the sort of individual intentions to the level of the organization? What does that even look like, especially at a time when maybe as individuals we’re also struggling with this sense of connectivity, and it’s evident through individual mental health, and it’s evident through so many other, like you said, social determinants?
As we’re going through this individual crisis, we’re also going through, understandably, an organizational crisis. How do you negotiate that? Can you negotiate that?
Ceasar McDowell: [00:22:39] What can you negotiate? I think that’s part of what we’re struggling with in some ways.
David Wertheimer: [00:22:44] You like the big questions. I love that.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:22:46] Yeah, well, we do. It’s just kind of … and I assume inside the Foundation the same thing exists, because there are these multiple worlds that people are living in.
David Wertheimer: [00:22:56] I actually think there are multiple worlds that we’re living in, and I think that I’m not someone who believes that corporations are individuals.
Ayushi Roy: [00:23:04] Yeah.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:23:05] Right.
David Wertheimer: [00:23:05] But corporations or organizations are a collect of the individuals that comprise them, and those individuals, I think when they feel empowered, have the ability to shape the culture that they’re part of.
When they’re feeling disempowered, they don’t necessarily feel the power to shape the institution that they’re a part of. I think that’s an issue within families. It’s an issue within communities. It’s an issue within organizations. It’s an issue within our nation. Right now in our nation, who is feeling empowered, and who is feeling like they own the collect, if you will? Who’s inside and who’s outside? It’s who belongs and who’s othered?
I think that as we think about our institutions, the more we think about what it means to promote belonging at all levels of the institution, the more we can think about going back to that sort of framework, that it is the individuals, it is the individual stories that each of us bring to life that collectively are the institutions that we’re a part of.
Ayushi Roy: [00:24:16] That’s so interesting. I’ve never thought of corporations as being disenfranchised in some way. Like, I mean, you talk about if they were empowered, they might take on a sort of more productive role in our civic life, but I’ve never thought of them as disempowered, which I think is so fascinating.
Could you speak to … Is this a sort of bullied becomes the bully-er mentality? What is this about that you’re talking about with empowerment in corporations?
David Wertheimer: [00:24:40] No, I think it’s empowerment of the individuals who comprise the corporation.
Ayushi Roy: [00:24:42] Oh, I see.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:24:43] Yeah.
Ayushi Roy: [00:24:43] Okay.
David Wertheimer: [00:24:43] Not the corporation itself.
Ayushi Roy: [00:24:44] Okay. Okay.
David Wertheimer: [00:24:46] So, here at the Gates Foundation, for example, where we have about 16 hundred employees …
Ceasar McDowell: [00:24:51] Wow.
David Wertheimer: [00:24:52] The employees, in many respects, the employees define and shape the culture of the organization as much as the organization defines and shapes the culture of the people. I think the key to a learning organization is the ability to listen to and understand the voices of the people that comprise the organization.
So, one quick story. Many years ago here, I … was accidental hallway conversation with a very influential person at the foundation, and we were talking about the organization, and one of the metaphors I use is the metaphor of DNA, right? You can’t really change your DNA yourself, but if you understand that all DNA has flaws, and if you understand the flaws in your DNA, you can mitigate some of the risks. So, if you know you have a predisposition to diabetes, you can watch your diet and your exercise, and you can do something to mitigate the risk of diabetes.
Here at the Gates Foundation, our DNA is in the hallways. We have amazing living donors who are very present and engaged with the work. I was having this conversation with a person that I won’t name, and I shared this metaphor about DNA, and I said, “Our DNA here is highly transactional, and it’s the job of staff in the organization to push the organization from the transactional to the relational so that there’s a balance between transactions and relationships, and we can be maximally effective in our work.”
And this person said to me, “Do you really believe that?” And I said, “Yeah, I do.” And they said to me, “Well, if you really believe that, I’m not sure you should be working here.”
Ceasar McDowell: [00:26:32] Wow.
Ayushi Roy: [00:26:32] Whoa.
David Wertheimer: [00:26:34] I went home, and … Well, I said to this person, “Well, you know, I grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan when it was a dump. I’m a pretty tough street kid, and I have a thick skin. And if I heard that from you and didn’t have a thick skin, I might interpret that as an invitation to leave, but because I do have a thick skin, I hear what you’re saying as the reason why I need to be here.”
And the person said, “Well, I’ve got a meeting to go to,” and off they went.
So, I went home that night and I told my husband this story, and he said, “You’ve got a big mouth.” At 8:00 that night, I got an email from this person saying, “I need to see you in my office at 8:00 tomorrow morning.”
Ayushi Roy: [00:27:12] Oh, gosh.
David Wertheimer: [00:27:12] I showed it to Paul, my husband, and he said, “You’re going to get fired tomorrow.” I said, “I don’t think so.”
And I went in at 8:00 in the morning. This person said, “Sit down. Close the door.” I was relieved that HR wasn’t in the room with them. They said, “I thought a lot about what you said yesterday.” And I said, “Okay.” And they said, “Actually, when you’re talking about what our culture looks like, and this transaction … “ well, he said, “I think you’re right.”
I said, “Well, thanks.” And they said, “And also,” they said, “I need to apologize, because,” this person said, “I didn’t realize that someone in my position saying something like that to you might be interpreted as an invitation to leave the organization.” And I said, “Well, thanks very much.”
That, to me, was an indication that organizations, through communication, through relationships, a brief hallway conversation, can learn, can grow, can evolve, and they’re not stuck mired in one way of doing business, or one approach to problem-solving. So, even in a place as big as the Gates Foundation, and we’re minuscule compared to MIT, I think there’s the capacity for relationships, again, that granular level of kinship, to actually shift tectonically how a organization operates and thinks about itself.
Ayushi Roy: [00:28:33] There’s this really cool thing that you’re describing, where it’s like … You know, we’ve been talking a lot about the civic design framework in season one, and we talked a lot about this season thinking about how institutions and organizations can engage with the civic, outside, beyond their walls.
David Wertheimer: [00:28:50] Yes.
Ayushi Roy: [00:28:51] What you’re describing is kind of cool, because it’s like, well, organizations are this microcosm of communities. Maybe the way in which they learn to treat each other within the organization, across these sort of hierarchies that you’re describing in this exciting story that you experienced, is in itself a way that they can learn to better engage with civic life, just even internal to the walls, you know?
David Wertheimer: [00:29:14] I agree. I think that’s a really good observation.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:29:17] Yeah, I think this is fascinating, because this is saying in some sense that … I would take it to at least another place, which is just saying, look, if we’re really trying to strengthen the civic, and really strengthen the public’s muscle and democracy and their role in it, there is work to do inside all the places in which we reside and work. So, there’s work in the home to do, but there’s also work in these organizations. These organizations need to internally experience and grapple with relationship, and we need to actually push that internally.
What’s fascinating about that for me is just thinking about how I don’t know. I am going to say, you’ve witnessed more of this probably than I have, but how prevalent is that thinking? We feel like in some sense inside of the universities and community-based institutions, there’s a lot of push to become more transactional. A lot of things are pushing things to be more transactional.
But there was, particularly before a lot of community-based organizations, there was already a basis of relationship. So, it’s fighting this kind of push to transactional into these spaces that were highly relational. But in these companies sometimes, these large places, these large institutions, whatever they are, there’s also this huge infrastructure that’s all transactional, a lot of push for the transactional.
It’s interesting to think about what would it look like to … What does the relational push look like in organizations? How do you do that? I noticed that you evoked the whole thing about learning communities as one vehicle to do that, but I wonder if this is actually a call for corporations about their role, actually, in democracy, is actually to make their life inside more relational?
David Wertheimer: [00:31:13] That’s a great idea, and I think that it’s beholden on the individuals who are part of the organization to act in such a way that that is their expectation, that they will be treated relationally and not transactionally. That means being able to, for lack of a better way of putting it, own your own power. Even doing that, going back to, Ceasar, one of the most important things you said to me, was starting at the margins with where the power sits, and creating that power at the margins rather than at the top or in the middle.
One other story. Years ago, I started an organization, or I was the first executive director of an organization in New York that was working on the issue of anti-gay violence, and it was in the early 1980s, and it was not an issue that anybody had really talked about, but it was an issue that was devastating to our community.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:32:10] Right.
David Wertheimer: [00:32:11] One of the things we did was we offered self-defense classes. Not to turn gay people into killing machines. That wasn’t the idea, but self-defense classes are to entail, empower, the individual’s sense of themselves, and their sense of who they are.
One of the things that our trainer did at the very beginning of the classes we offered was he would have, and I’ll take the example of a group of gay men who he had stand around in a circle and look at each other. He asked each man to say to the group, “I am a powerful gay man.” And it was amazing how many of the men couldn’t say it.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:32:53] Wow.
David Wertheimer: [00:32:54] Or, if they said it, they burst into tears while they were saying it, because they didn’t necessarily believe it.
So, in this case, a group that was in the margins in New York in the 1980s, especially as we were rapidly being decimated by HIV that had burst into the community, this was a group of individuals, again, at the very micro-relational level, were not in touch with or able to own their own power. Even getting them to say, “I am a powerful gay man,” was really hard.
But once they said it, and as the class proceeded, they began to believe it. They were transformed. They transformed themselves from a perspective of potential victim, to the perspective of an individual who has his own power.
Ayushi Roy: [00:33:50] Wow.
David Wertheimer: [00:33:51] So, I think that in our organizations, we have to think about how we empower individuals to say, “You really own the culture. You really are creating the culture.”
When I got my first big promotion here at the Gates Foundation, and the president of the US program, extraordinary man, came in and congratulated me, and he said, “Okay. I know you like to till the windmills, and I know you like to criticize the organization.” He said, “And that’s okay.” He said, “We need to hear that criticism.” He said, “But you’re now a manager here, so when you’re criticizing management, you’re criticizing yourself.” He said, “So, don’t just bring me the challenges. Bring me the solutions.”
That was a really empowering thing for him to say to me, and it also transformed how I thought about my role at the organization as a manager in terms of the culture that I was part of creating, and that I shouldn’t just go, “Wah, wah, wah, wah,” and whine abut it, but actually act, behave, and function in a way that reflected what I thought the organization needs and can be.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:34:58] I was just thinking, again, I’m just going to use MIT as an example, but it’s been in other organizations I’ve seen, too, is like, you come into MIT, particularly if you’re an employee here, and they’ll talk about the MIT culture, and about what things can happen, or can’t happen, or how things happen because of the MIT culture. In some sense, it places the people inside the organization as basically folks who have to adapt into a culture, and that culture is somehow static.
David Wertheimer: [00:35:29] Right.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:35:29] As opposed to saying, “You are the culture makers here. What’s the culture you’re going to make?” And, really, that’s much more empowering, and maybe that’s the call that should be out there inside of organizations, is really getting them to say, for employees and people to be able to say, “I am the culture maker inside this organization,” and for the organizations to actually acknowledge that and support that. Because then we’ll have a different space.
Particularly it’s the time where we’re trying to diversify more who’s in the organizations, who’s in power in these organizations or not, but as you diversify that, then you actually have to raise this question, is, well, the people who are here are going to make this culture, and we’re going to change. We’re going to be different, particularly with the idea of we’re going to be more relational, so we can be, actually, more responsible in relationship to ourselves and the broader society.
Ayushi Roy: [00:36:28] I love that call, yeah. From asking your employees to be an ambassador of the mission statement of a organization to being actually autonomous and carrying their own sense of individuality and empowerment, that makes my heart so happy to think about that being a world that could exist.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:36:43] A world that could exist.
Ayushi Roy: [00:36:44] Not just at MIT, but at my future job and all the future employment opportunities that people have.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:36:50] Yeah.
Ayushi Roy: [00:36:50] Yeah. That’s incredible.
David Wertheimer: [00:36:52] I totally agree. I think that in any organization or in any civitas, the people define the culture.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:36:59] Yeah.
David Wertheimer: [00:36:59] And the people have to feel their power to define the culture, which is really hard when you’re at the margins.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:37:06] Right.
David Wertheimer: [00:37:07] But, the more we can help people find their power, which can mean finding their voice, finding their energy, finding their time, finding their caring, in an organization, whether it’s small, large, or even the nation, right? We define the culture. We are the culture. And, again, put all those anecdotes together, and you have the data of what a culture is. We are all accountable to it.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:37:31] I love it.
Ayushi Roy: [00:37:32] David, this is an incredible-
Ceasar McDowell: [00:37:32] It’s been wonderful to talk to you. Yeah, I’m sorry.
Ayushi Roy: [00:37:37] You’re incredible.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:37:37] Yeah.
David Wertheimer: [00:37:37] (inaudible) I love these big conversations.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:37:38] Yeah, yeah. Well, this has been great. We really appreciate you taking the time to be with us.
Ayushi Roy: [00:37:43] Yeah.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:37:44] Yeah, I just … This has been wonderful.
David Wertheimer: [00:37:45] It’s a pleasure to do it, and thank you for everything you guys are doing. Again, that visit to MIT and your people was so powerful and extraordinary, so you guys are … you are changing the culture, and I thank you for that.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:37:59] Thanks, David.
David Wertheimer: [00:38:00] Thanks very much. Bye-bye.
Ayushi Roy: [00:38:05] Thank you. Bye-bye.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:38:05] So, Ayushi, what’d you think?
Ayushi Roy: [00:38:07] Wow. This was incredible to have him come right after Eric. It was so in sync. It was phenomenal that he, on his own, was talking about transactions and relationships and this sort of dichotomy, and how he sees his role in the Gates Foundation as sort of almost like bridging the two. It really spun … It was cool, because it addressed what Eric had said about this dichotomy, and yet he was looking for the bridge between them.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:38:36] Yeah. It really was. And I just so appreciate him and him making the space and the time, which must be a crazy time in his life right now-
Ayushi Roy: [00:38:44] Crazy time for him, yeah.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:38:44] … to actually make the time to be with us. I’m looking forward to see what he does next in his school of theology and ministry. We might have to have him back, and actually I think he would have a really interesting conversation about not just transaction and relationships, but actually where we are spiritually and how that actually drives where we’re headed.
Ayushi Roy: [00:39:05] Exactly. I think the work that he’s done is just showing us this connection between spirituality and civic-ness, or civic-ality, and that’s not a word.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:39:16] Civic-ality, not a word, not a word.
Ayushi Roy: [00:39:19] That’s not a word. And you know, I just want to actually thank him, and I will do this offline as well, but I want to thank him for the way in which he was able to verbalize some of these struggles that him and his organization and a lot of people in this work have taken on, and he has this incredible ability to put words to experiences that are still understandable to everyone involved, not just the people that have done the work. I just thought that was so incredible.
He also, and this is a really big compliment, I guess, coming from me, but he reminds me a lot of the literature I’ve read by Richard Sennett, who I really admire.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:39:56] Yes.
Ayushi Roy: [00:39:56] So, for all you out there, listen or read, The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett, and it’ll change your way of thinking, or just listen to David, because David brought all of that and more. So, I’m feeling this was great. This was incredible.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:40:11] Yeah, it was great. And We’ll have the link to Richard Sennett’s book on our website.
Ayushi Roy: [00:40:15] We’ll have also a link to David’s work and his future work.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:40:19] And his future work, and join us in two weeks when we have Lindsay Smalling from SOCAP with us.
Ayushi Roy: [00:40:24] Thanks so much.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:40:26] Bye-bye.
We’re a production of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT with support from MIT’s Office of Open Learning.
Ayushi Roy: [00:40:34] Our sound is produced by Dave Lishansky, our content by Julia Curbera, and Misael Galdamez. I’m Ayushi Roy.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:40:41] I’m Ceasar McDowell.
Ayushi Roy: [00:40:42] And you can find us online at themove.mit.edu.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:40:47] And on our Medium site at …
Ayushi Roy: [00:40:48] Medium.com/themovemit as well as our Twitter and Facebook. Thanks so much.
Ceasar McDowell: [00:40:54] Bye-bye.
