The Social Psychology of Workplace Culture: An Interview with Dr. Jaiya John
I recently had the opportunity to speak with author Dr. Jaiya John about the relationships between us–from the individual ways that people connect in workplaces up to our global obligations of mutual care between all living things. His book Your Caring Heart: Renewal for Helping Professionals and Systems has inspired me and kept me moving forward during difficult periods of compassion fatigue and it’s a book that I recommend to everyone I know in the nonprofit space.
Dr. Jaiya’s work centers indigenous teachings about mutuality, care, and community. As a social psychologist, he has spent years visiting organizations and institutions that reached out to him for support with staff morale, burnout, and an overall sense of unwellness–this is the work that led to Your Caring Heart.
“I’m grateful for those moments, but they also took an incredible toll on me because I was immersing myself in toxicity. Our systems are deeply dehumanizing, siphoning of soul, oppressive of spirit, impeding of expressive creative flow.”
Dr. Jaiya found over and over again that hopeful, optimistic young professionals emerge from their studies ready to do world-changing work. But the world we live in is one that promotes individualism, competition, conquest, control, and accumulation. If we are born into cultures with these values–we work and live and raise our families in them–we unlearn community care very early. Our culture pushes us into the norms of separation, us vs. them, keeping up with the Joneses.
“There’s a deeply embedded training in us that says, ‘I have to look out for me. I have to get mine. I have to watch my own back. I have to lift myself up by my own bootstrap.”
The Importance of Mutual Care
What Dr. Jaiya found in these workplaces was a struggle of souls designed to be in mutuality and community being fed into a system that deprioritizes these essential human needs. This is directly at odds with our true nature of mutual care–the idea that our essential makeup is to be interwoven with others in ways that are symbiotic and collective.
“The symbiosis of all living things is that we are caring for each other, all organisms, from the mineral to the molecular, the cellular, plant, animal, insect, sky, wind, earth, trees, and us. We’re engaged in an endless dance of mutuality.”
He visited these workplaces to examine and investigate the roots of this consistent downturn of well being that happens in organizations–even those with impactful missions. Dr. Jaiya describes a “slippery slope” into pessimism, despair, depression, compassion fatigue, burnout, and a lack of safety in one’s own self and environment.
“Mutual care speaks to the necessity for a workplace to foster such a culture [of mutual care]. It speaks to the cost when a workplace does not foster such a culture–the cost to the employees, the cost to the enterprise itself, including…the financial costs.”
Transformative Storytelling
Speaking of the financial toll of workplace culture, we started to discuss the ways that internal storytelling impacts funding and philanthropy too. If you have a team of tired folks who are burned out and pessimistic in their work culture, it becomes harder to storytell about the mission you’re trying to accomplish in your organization.
Leaders get so caught up in how to tell the impactful stories to reach marketing and funding goals, but storytelling can also transform the inside of the organization–the workers, the culture, the mutual care.
“Storytelling is at the heart of my understanding of our human nature,” says Dr. Jaiya. He asks what we’ve been made for, what nourishes us, and also what in its absence causes such a decline in our wellbeing and nourishment. The answer, of course, is storytelling.
“There has been a…2000-year season of forgetting that has to do with the nature of colonialism and conquest and killing of indigenous light, wisdom, understanding, accumulated knowledge over thousands and thousands of years–this violent conquest era has created an amnesia like what happens to us when we get into a car accident and we have a brain trauma. We’ve been experiencing a centuries old trauma that has caused us to forget…why storytelling is so vital.”
Dr. Jaiya describes storytelling as a garden that we must take care of. It needs consistent watering and sunlight and nourishment. He especially encourages leaders to tell stories of successes. What are the things working for the team, the organization, the project? What experiences are workers having that are fruitful and beneficial?
We have a tendency to bury this fruitful, fertile storytelling under the toxic stories that take hold in a workplace culture. Dr. Jaiya says, “Our stories, our fertility, our beauty at work gets siloed…where other colleagues or sectors of the organization don’t even hear about the good things happening. What does tend to travel in organizations is the negativity and the lament, the morose–it travels like a heavy, dense cloud.”
The stories we tell make up what Dr. Jaiya refers to as the organism of the workplace–a living, breathing part of the organization that feeds on the stories we tell it. And so, if we want this organism to be hospitable, to be built on the impact and outcomes of the work the organization is doing, then that is what we need to feed it.
Celebration and Appreciation
One thing that is an absolute must in Dr. Jaiya’s book is celebrating and appreciating employees consistently–not just once or twice a year. “As living things, we require celebration, affirmation, confirmation, and appreciation,” he says. The idea that professionals leave behind the need for celebration in childhood is a false product of our society’s pressures to conform and perform. “The idea that we don’t need [celebration] is a misunderstanding and a missed opportunity for growth.”
All of this nourishing mutual care that Dr. Jaiya encourages in the workplace also impacts the bottom line, as I mentioned earlier. In a culture–or organism–where we can uphold a sense of mutuality and collaboration, there tends to be less turnover because people stay in places where they feel affirmed and important. And this isn’t something that needs to be completely overhauled, we don’t need to start from scratch.
Just like the metaphor of the garden that Dr. Jaiya mentioned, we can look for places that are already thriving (and leave those to their hardy growth) as well as places where some weeds are popping up, or there’s a pest getting to the plants and damaging them. Start in one place and intentionally create a new organism–one of support and shared mission.
“...the way we treat each other in our staff meeting is intimately tied to how we are going to treat each other in the hallways and in the break room, in the cafeteria, at our desks and our offices and how we treat each other via email communications and phone calls and how we treat our clients, how we treat the community. So by virtue of the indelible web of interbeing, if we care for that aspect of the garden that has to do with our staff meetings, we are going to be caring for the garden itself.”
A Final Word
As we ended our conversation, I asked Dr. Jaiya if there was anything on his mind or heart to share with listeners and readers. It encouraged me, and I hope it encourages you too.
What's on my heart is that actually, it feels to me empathically as though we are grieving in a very deep and broad and multi textured way. Our hearts are tender.
And so in times of tenderness, we can all use more softness and gentleness, and part of that is not just in how we treat each other, but in how we treat our own personal existence–with deeper breathing, with stillness, with pause, with rest and renewal.
And many people in our condition of having to just grind, grind, grind, immediately the story comes up that says, I can't afford to rest. I can't afford to be still. Well, that's the nervous system, stuck in the fight or flight response, stuck in adrenaline and cortisol. And so it's difficult to disengage from that storytelling gear that says I can't afford to do anything but keep grinding, even though it's killing me.
So right now, a tender season, an overwhelming season, and I am praying from my heart, from my soul, that we will find the reason, the will, the cause, the impulse, the drive, the determination to remember who we are, remember back through time, through generations and centuries, and remember the ways of being that actually felt good to us. That felt sustainable. And can we remember how to work together in a symbiotic way, in a harmonious way, can we remember what it feels like to not be saturated with competition and conquest impulses and violence? Can we remember in our cellular nature, our archive of molecules, can we remember what it feels like to exist in harmony with all things?
And if we can remember that, which I know we can, then we can vision and create from that place. The way the garden really needs to be for us to thrive and flourish. It's our garden, and we are alive, so this is our time as the gardeners.
It was so difficult to distill this conversation into just what’s included in this article! I highly recommend you listen to this conversation with Dr. Jaiya in episode 70 of the Leaving Well Podcast: Dr. Jaiya John on Leaving Well and Storytelling as a Garden During Transitions.
If you are an organizational leader, board member, or a curious staff member, take the Leaving Well Assessment to discover your organization's transition readiness archetype at naomihataway.com/assessment.
About Dr. Jaiya John
Dr. Jaiya John was orphan-born on ancient indigenous Anasazi and Pueblo lands in the high desert of New Mexico, and is an internationally recognized freedom worker, poet, author, teacher, and speaker. Dr. Jaiya is the founder of the Soul Water Rising, a global rehumanizing mission to eradicate oppression. The mission has donated thousands of Dr. Jaiya's books in support of social healing and offers grants to displaced and vulnerable youth.
He is the author of numerous books, including Daughter Drink This Water, We Birth Freedom at Dawn, Fragrance After Rain, and Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution. He also wrote–which is the book that I have, that I am so madly in love with–Your Caring Heart: Renewal for Helping Professionals and Systems.
Dr. Jaiya writes and narrates and produces the podcast I Will Read for You and is the founder of The Gathering, a global initiative and tour reviving traditional gathering and storytelling practice to fertilize social healing and liberation.
He is a former professor of social psychology at Howard University and has spoken to over a million people worldwide, and audiences as large as several thousand. He holds doctorate and master's degrees in social psychology from the University of California Santa Cruz, with a focus on intergroup and race relations.
As an undergrad, he attended Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he studied Tibetan holistic medicine through independent research with Tibetan doctors and trekked to the base camp of Mount Everest. His indigenous soul dreams of fry bread, sweet grass, bamboo in the breeze, and turtle lakes whose poetry is peace.