Organisational compassion in challenging times

Descriptive transcript

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our second Positive Psychology and Positive Organisational Scholarship Community of Practice. Although I can't actually see you all, I know that you're out there, and we've had a really wonderful response—around 400 RSVPs from my students, academics, practitioners, and people all around Australia, the UK, and a great group from New Zealand as well. So thank you.

Just to begin, I'd like to acknowledge the Country that I'm meeting you on. At UTS Business School, we respectfully acknowledge that we're located on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The Gadigal people have cared for their community, land and waters for thousands of generations, based on their deep knowledge of their Country. We pay our respects to their ancestors, their elders, and acknowledge their ongoing status as the First Peoples of this land. I myself am actually on Guringai land at the moment, and you might like to pop into the chat the land that you're also meeting us on, and that'll give us a great idea of where everybody is, at least in Australia at the moment.

Okay, so I'm just going to frame up this morning before we open up our discussion. To introduce myself, my name is Rosemary Sainty, I'm an academic at UTS Business School. My background is over the last 10 years working in corporate responsibility and corporate sustainability, which has now morphed into business with a purpose and a positive social impact, which leans into positive organisational scholarship. So I teach in that here at UTS. Fortunately, also at this time at our university, there's a strong sense of the public purpose of higher education, and in the Business School in particular, a positive social impact.

Now, I'd like to do a little bit of webinar housekeeping. Zoom is fantastic for being able to bring lots of people together, especially our international guest speakers. But unfortunately, with the webinar, we can't see you all, so it'll be great to keep in touch through the chat function. That can just keep running as a commentary—any comments you'd like to leave in there. Whether people are speaking or not, we might be able to jump in. But in particular, what we'd like to do is, by 11 o'clock or on the hour, open up our discussion to all of you through the Q&A chat. So if you'd like to post your questions in the Q&A and comments, running comments in the chat, then that should work quite well for us.

A little bit about the purpose of the POSCOP: really, it's a broad purpose, and we're certainly watching what's happening over in the States in Michigan with their fantastic community of practice. But here in Australia, we're starting in a more modest way, and it's really about bringing academia together with the field of practice for one to inform the other and for us to be able to have a conversation. So really, quite as straightforward as that. Looking at the slide I've got here, it's about joining leading scholars and practitioners in the fields of positive psychology and positive organisational scholarship in a deliberative space where we can all have a voice to discuss the latest thinking in research, teaching and practice, and of course, its timely role. I think we'd all have to agree with that in the state of the world at the moment. Academics inform the field of POS through formal theory, research and teaching, and practitioners inform academia effectively through a depth of insight gained from real world practice. It's those two things that we feel create a community of practice.

Moving on to our agenda, for the first part of the morning, we're dipping into the academic side of things. My colleague Suzy Green will be interviewing our fantastic guest speakers, Jane Dutton and Monica Worline. Once we've had that conversation, where in fact Jane and Monica will also be introducing us to their fields as well as their experience, we'll then segue into the perspective of the business practitioner, Bob Easton, and I'll be interviewing Bob. Then, once that's got going, we'll invite Monica and Jane into our discussion as a panel, and from there, we'll open up the floor to all of you to post your questions and answers. So hopefully a good chunk of the second half of the morning where everyone can participate.

Now, I'm just going to test my technical skills and put up a poll for all of you, just so that we can have an idea of your experience in positive psychology and positive organisational scholarship. We'd like to ask you, have you ever used a positive psychology or a positive organisational scholarship approach in your work, your practice, your teaching, your research, or for my students out there, even in your studies? Fantastic, it looks like you've all found the poll. I'll let that go for another minute. I can see I've got one of my students in the chat over in China, so we're circumnavigating the globe. Okay, so that's quite a good mix. Thank you, everyone. That's interesting information. I'll just end the poll, and I'm just going to stop sharing my slides. Hopefully everyone can see everyone else. I've got two business school colleagues here, you can probably see in the frame. I'm going to hand on to Suzy Green to kick off our morning. Suzy and I are the partners in crime here, representing the practitioner-academic approach to this POSCOP.

Suzy is a clinical and coaching psychologist and founder and CEO of the Positivity Institute, a positively deviant organisation dedicated to the research and application of positive psychology in workplaces and schools. Suzy is a leader in the complementary fields of coaching psychology and positive psychology, is published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, and has lectured on applied positive psychology as a Senior Adjunct Lecturer in the Coaching Psychology Unit at the University of Sydney for 10 years. She also currently holds an honorary academic position at the Centre for Wellbeing Science at the University of Melbourne, the Black Dog Institute, and as an affiliate of the Institute for Wellbeing, Cambridge University. She is also the co-editor of the newly published Springer text, Positive Psychology Coaching in the Workplace, which launched just this week—well done, Suzy. She maintains a strong media profile, appearing on television, radio and print, and is a wonderful person full of a lot of energy. Suzy, over to you.

Suzy: Thank you so much, Rosemary, and welcome to everyone. Thank you so much, Jane and Monica, for joining us today, and also Bob here today. There are so many familiar names on the attendees here today, so I tried to say a few hellos in the chat, but hello to everyone if I've missed you. It's so wonderful to see familiar and new names on the chat box and really pleased that you're joining us today.

As Rosemary said, I run the Positivity Institute, and a large part of our offering is positive workplaces. In fact, it's a large part of our offering, although we also do work in positive education—it's a smaller part of our offering. It's really where I cut my teeth, I guess, on positive workplaces or positive organisations. As a clinical psychologist by profession, I hadn't really had an opportunity to work beyond the individual or small group level, and having had the opportunity to work in schools here in Australia for the last 10 years, and working with my colleagues, including Aylin Dulagil, who's on the call today, about to become Dr Dulagil—I'm very proud of Aylin as well. Aylin's worked very closely with me as an org psych, and I've certainly learned a lot over the last 10 years in how we actually apply the science of positive psychology and positive organisational scholarship.

I first became aware of POS, I would say, when it really first launched, and I just wanted to check with Jane and Monica, was it 2004, or what was the correct date, would you say, of the formal launch of the field?

Jane: The first conference was in 2001.

Suzy: Wow, okay, fantastic. And the centre itself would have been?

Jane: We'd declared the centre about two years later.

Suzy: Right, fantastic. Well, I actually started teaching at Sydney Uni on positive psychology in 2004. At the time, I was aware, clearly, of the science of positive psychology, and I had utilised that for my doctoral research on coaching as a practice to increase mental health and wellbeing. But when I started to look around what had been done in the workplace beyond the individual level, I came across the centre, and was it originally called the Centre for Positive Organisations, and then it changed to Centre for Positive Workplaces, or has it always been?

Jane: It's always been CPO, so for Positive Organisations.

Suzy: And again, became very familiar with Jane's work, Kim Cameron's work, who's a leading scholar in positive leadership, and also Bob Quinn's work, and then had been following with much interest and awe the development and the evolution of the centre since that time. I've really seen it move from very academic—was my take on it in the early days—to much more applied over those 15 or so years. So it's been a delight to watch what's been happening over there and the incredible work that you've done and continue to do, and Monica's incredible work, particularly around compassion.

I guess it has been a little frustrating for me here in Australia, because I've had a number of conversations with business schools over the last 10 or 15 years, and there's been little bites of interest, but nothing really taken up wholeheartedly. So when Rosemary reached out and expressed an intrinsic interest in the field, I've just been so excited to work with someone who works in a business school setting, UTS Business School, and so excited to be involved in this emerging community of practice that we have.

I also want to thank Bob for being here, and just a little bit of positive reminiscing here. I actually met Bob for the very first time in Jane and Monica's workshop in Montreal, on your Awakening Compassion at Work workshop. So it's actually synchronicity—perhaps Carl Jung would have referred to that as. And then, of course, I've had the incredible privilege of working with Bob at Accenture for the last four years. Bob is not just a practitioner, he's clearly an academic, I would say, because he knows the research very, very well. He holds a Master's in Applied Positive Psychology from UPenn. And so again, it's been a joy to work with someone like Bob to look at what the science does look like in practice, and we've had a great opportunity to do that. Looking forward to Rosemary talking more about that to Bob today.

So for now, I'm going to hand over to Jane and Monica, and I'll just do a brief intro, because I think everybody has had access to Jane and Monica's bios. Of course, many people on the call today will know Jane and Monica. Jane is the co-founder and core faculty for the Centre for Positive Organisations. She's a Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Emeritus Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at the University of Michigan. Jane's research began with an interest in compassion, which I didn't fully realise, Jane. I knew a lot about your work in high-quality connections and have utilised that significantly in the work that we do, but also your research on job crafting and positive identities. And of course, your recent publication, which you can see is a very well-worn and dog-eared copy of your book that I have read and used a lot since it was published. I think that was back in 2017. And Jane, of course, has a book with Gretchen Spreitzer, How to Be a Positive Leader, that was 2014, and she's also written Energise Your Workplace.

Monica is the founder and CEO of Enliven Work, an innovation organisation that teaches businesses and others how to tap into courageous thinking, compassionate leadership and the curiosity to bring their best work to life. Enliven Work is a social benefit partner of the Centre for Positive Organisations, with the mission of helping change agents create workplaces that bring us to life each day. They're such long bios, I encourage you to take a look. Incredible people that we have here on the call today, but I don't want to intrude any longer on Jane and Monica's precious time to be with us. So I'm going to hand over to you, Jane, first, and then I believe you're going to make a smooth transition to Monica. So you're going to give us the big picture on POS, Positive Organisational Scholarship, and then hand over to Monica to talk perhaps a bit more specifically on compassion.

Jane: Thank you. First of all, let me just say I'm delighted to be here. It's a total privilege, and there's nothing I like to do better than talk about Positive Organisational Scholarship, because actually being an academic with this kind of lens has changed my life. That's dramatic, but it's really true.

Monica is going to engineer our slides. She's also the maker of the slides, so if you think they're beautiful, I do too. Monica is the creative of the two of us.

So I thought I would just give you a brief intro to how I talk about what Positive Organisational Scholarship is. It's actually the way Monica and I talk about it together, because we often teach together when we're teaching about this.

If I were to say really simply, what is Positive Organisational Scholarship? It is really applied positive psychology plus applied positive sociology. And unlike psychology, which has sort of had this positive frame really flourish or really expand, in sociology, it's a little bit strange and deviant. But the sociological perspective, which looks at whole systems and whole institutions, is really important to understanding the advantage and the value of a Positive Organisational Scholarship lens. Because what we're really trying to ask and answer is what creates and sustains human, group, and organisational flourishing.

So what is this term flourishing? It's actually a beautiful term, but a little bit mysterious. What I mean by flourishing is we're really interested in what is it that is conducive to a person, a group, or a whole system being in a state of optimal performance or optimal functioning. And I love the analogy of gardens because I think it's really helpful. So imagine yourself as a plant in this garden, and you are flourishing, and the whole garden is flourishing. And you can tell by the life in it, you can tell by the variety in it, you can tell by the colour in it. It is optimal when a system or an individual is flourishing. It's optimal in several senses. It's more energised, it's more vital, it's more creative, it's more innovative, it's more engaged. And when we talk about this in Positive Organisational Scholarship, we're often talking about moments or periods of flourishing rather than flourishing all the time. That's actually a difficult state to achieve.

When we're thinking about organisations, we need to think about the soil. So we often talk about, in Positive Organisational Scholarship, what we're trying to do is identify what are the qualities of the soil that allow, again, collectives and individuals to flourish, which is a really different focus. And we often know what flourishing means by its opposite, which is often used in the literature by the term languishing. So Monica's going to flip up to a sort of a version of a garden that is dying, or at least is not nearly as, it may be on a path of slow death. And it's languishing. We know it's languishing because of the depletion of energy, a sense of dullness. At the extreme level, it can be where people and systems are anxious and depleted. So we're trying to understand flourishing, but we know it in part by the contrast to languishing.

Another way to look at Positive Organisational Scholarship is as a way of seeing. It is actually this change in the way of seeing, which has, as I said, sort of changed my life as a researcher, as just as a person in general. It sees organisations as sites of human collective strength and capability building. So it asks questions like, how can we build and cultivate organisations that are more courageous, that are more innovative, that are more compassionate—which is where Monica and I have been focused—but it really looks at the level of collective strengths. I was actually a strategy researcher for the first eight years of my career. So asking these questions about what is it about systems that creates these capabilities that allows an organisation to sustain excellence over time is very consistent with the Positive Organisational Scholarship lens. It just opens up the set of strengths that we look for in a system, the kinds of strengths that really, at the collective level, unlock human capacity and capability.

It's a quest to understand what conditions at the individual, unit and organisational levels cultivate flourishing in a continuous basis. Part of our argument is that the kinds of conditions that do this are ones that unlock resources from within people, within individuals, within dyads, within teams, and within organisations. The kinds of resources that I'm talking about are confidence, energy, hope—those kinds of key renewable human-based resources. The last point is just to emphasise, and why the garden metaphor is helpful, is that we try to focus on the life-giving or generative dynamics or conditions in organisations that cultivate flourishing. So it means really taking seriously the idea that these are living systems, they're not inert systems, and that systems can be more or less alive.

To get us to the question, the focus on compassion, I just want to say a framework that we find really useful in thinking about conditions that foster flourishing is a simple framework that puts its bet on three core conditions that are resource producing, that research would suggest are resource producing: positive connections, or those moments of interactions that you have with other people when you feel energy and mutual regard; positive meaning, or the times we interpret or impute something with a sense of value, worth and significance; or positive emotions. The triangle is just meant to say three sides. The triangle doesn't have any meaning beyond that.

But what it leads us to ask, and a question that I think is really important for researchers and for practitioners using a Positive Organisational Scholarship lens, is how do we design for conditions that foster flourishing? How do we design organisations that have more of these momentary positive connections? For example, how might we reimagine onboarding in an organisation so that instantly people have more of these positive connections? If we were thinking about positive meaning, how could we organise sessions like this or meetings that we have with people, institutionalised routines, so that there's more a constant cultivation of positive meaning? And finally, how could we change our communications or the emails we send or any other aspect of organisational life so that we induce more positive emotion, knowing that if we access any of these conditions, it actually is going to unlock resources and move us towards a more flourishing state?

So that's in five minutes—a very quick synopsis of some core ideas in Positive Organisational Scholarship. It might give you a background for what Monica is going to talk about with our compassion work.

[The transcript continues with the full session, including Monica's explanation of compassion as a four-part process, the panel discussion with Bob Easton, Q&A with the audience, and closing remarks. All content is presented in clear, accessible Australian English, with visual and contextual descriptions included where relevant, and all speaker attributions and key points preserved.]