61: Rita Sever on The Importance of Listening and Workplace Transitions
Rita Sever has worked as an HR Director, and HR consultant and a trainer. She has worked with social justice organizations throughout the country. Rita has an MA in Organizational Psychology and is a certified professional coach. Rita has taught “HR in a Nonprofit” to graduate students at University of San Francisco and Sonoma State University in California. Rita has also written two books: Supervision Matters and Leading for Justice.
Rita is a fan of Matt the Electrician (musician), loves a good book and her favorite way to spend an afternoon is playing a low-competition game with family and/or friends.
Main quote: Tying the job responsibilities to the mission, vision, and values grounds the job description and helps people understand why it matters.
Additional Quote: Be as intentional as you can, as a whole organization, of enlivening your values to support the culture.
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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
Transcript:
In this conversation with Rita, we talk about some spicy things, including how her white counterparts reacted to her directly telling them to own their own shit when it comes to supervising their teams. We also talked about job descriptions, and she gave some really practical recommendations for how to take out vague and subjective words and phrasing in your job descriptions, and what to do instead.
We also talked about why it's important to share interview questions ahead of the job interview, and she also gave some tips on how to use the job description as a review in the interview. This is really powerful stuff, and it really comes down to how you can be a better supervisor or manager, or in an HR department, as she says, the HR department stands alone.
This episode is for you. Enjoy. Rita Sever has worked as an HR director. An HR consultant and a trainer. She has worked with social justice organizations throughout the country. She has an MA in organizational psychology and is a certified professional coach. Rita taught HR in a non profit to graduate students at the University of San Francisco and Sonoma State University in California, and has also written two amazing books, which I highly recommend, Supervision Matters and Leading for Justice.
Rita is a fan of Matt the Electrician, who is a musician. She loves a good book, and her favorite way to spend an afternoon is playing a low competition game with family and or friends. So I'm curious, Rita, if Is the reason it's low competition because you're high competition by nature? No, I'm very cooperative and watching, making sure nobody's got their feelings hurt.
So if people get too competitive, it makes me nervous. Okay. Okay. I asked that because I'm very highly competitive and my family plays games with me. Uh huh. Okay. So I'd love for you to start by sharing a little bit about your two books, Leading for Justice and Supervision Matters. And maybe you could share a little bit about how those came to be and maybe also what the biggest topics are that come up time and time again as it relates to both of those books and their topics.
Great. Well, I love to talk about my books and my work. So thank you. As you said, I worked as an HR director in nonprofits for many years. And I noticed what a difference it made. Um, to an employee and to the organization when people had user friendly supervisor and, um, when they paid attention to that role and what a difference it made when their supervisor was hands off or unavailable.
And so, at the same time, I noticed that nonprofits don't do training around supervision, we just expect people to pick it up and to sort of figure it out on the job. And so as HR director, I instituted quarterly trainings at every organization I worked at and focused on giving people both the skills to supervise and the mindset of what it meant to be a supervisor.
So then when I started my own consulting practice, I decided to focus on supervision. My business is called Supervision Matters, very direct. And I also decided to write a monthly newsletter. So, after about 10 years of writing monthly newsletters, one of my clients asked me if they could have a copy of all the newsletters.
And I was like, uh, maybe. So I figured out how to do that for them. And then I thought, huh, other people might like that. So I thought it would be really easy to put together a book. And of course it was much more complicated than just sticking all my news together. But that was the, the result was supervision matters.
I love that. And then my second book, as I kept doing the work, I realized I had more to say. And I also realized that supervision matters, but so does culture in HR in terms of an employee's work experience. At the same time, I was working with social justice organizations and hearing over and over that people who worked so hard in the community for justice didn't feel like they were being treated fairly at work.
And so that led me to write Leading for Justice. I love that. There's a part in Leading for Justice that I remember when you, I think you speak specifically to your white colleagues and counterparts. Is that something that came from, I mean, I'm assuming it came from your work as a consultant and being in different spaces.
Has that been taken well? Do you know from people or have, have you gotten any feedback on that particular part of your book? A little bit not people don't point it out directly. Some, some white colleagues say I'm so happy to have this in writing and some understanding of what's going on. And some people laugh about my language that you know I say, I forget what I say but I talk about all new shit I think is what.
So a little bit but not as much as I thought. And interesting. Yeah. It's, it's, it was so beautiful to watch how you navigated really the, the reality of being so direct in both of the books. Like, it is what it is. This is the reality. And here's what you need to do about it. And I think that for me was so appealing because it just helps take out some of the confusion, maybe that especially when there's a nonprofit organization who doesn't have an HR team or an HR person that's in place.
And in the book, I talk about. That my work in this area goes back to when I was at my last organization. And I actually write, that's where I learned I was white because before then you just don't think about it as a white person, you just show up. We were doing a lot of what was called diversity work in the.
Late nineties, early 2000. And people did speak to me directly about you've got power and you get to use it for good. And, and so I learned so much there and am so grateful to my colleagues who were patient and helpful and blunt with me. And then I knew it was important to carry that into my work as a consultant.
I also work with Roadmap, which focuses on racial justice. So that definitely kept me on the path. Yeah, that's fabulous. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about job descriptions. That's something that comes up all the time in the work that I do with my clients. And not a lot of people pay close attention to them.
And I think that's harmful. And I think that you probably agree or at least See the positives and the opportunities that there can be. So I wanted to read a quote from your book about job descriptions. So you said this job descriptions can be a roadmap that offer clarity and understanding when a job description is thoughtful and comprehensive without being restrictive, then each person understands the parameters of their role, the depth of their responsibility and how their work interrelates with all the other work of the organization.
Then you also say, they can use this well hewn document to clarify priorities and boundaries. That's so powerful. And I'm curious if the listener takes away just one thing from this conversation about how they could create better job descriptions or redefine the ones that are existing. What would you want the one thing to be?
It's hard to limit it to one thing, but I think in one way, the most easy, low hanging fruit, but also very powerful is to edit your job descriptions and focus on vague or subjective words. So words like assist with blank, blank, blank, or support the organization in. What does that mean? Yeah. And in terms of responsibilities, a vague thing like lead a successful team, that's so subjective, or, you know, help clients feel welcome.
What does that mean? At the same time, you don't want to make a laundry list of tasks. So there's, there is an art to capturing the responsibilities, weeding out those subjective words, and unpacking it. When you on board people, yeah, well, and I'm wondering if some of as you were talking about the kind of 1 side or the other of being vague versus not having a laundry list.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit and maybe add these 2 together about the 3 legged stool that you talk about with mission, vision and values. And I'm wondering if maybe, for example, make our customers feel welcome. Maybe it could be that they. In the job description, the values come up, or is that is that maybe absolutely the values must be in there because that the values are about how we do it any job description could say, make people feel welcome, but generally people.
Include the values of inclusion and respect and politeness or whatever their values are and emphasizing that in the job description by having some sense of greet people when they come in, learn people's names when you deal with them. Without making a laundry list, so it have a supplemental document that goes into those details, but tying that responsibilities to the mission, vision and values grounds, the job description and helps people understand why does it matter?
Yeah. What difference does it make if I. You know, say hello to people. They're just going back to see somebody else. Anyway, well, I love that. You said that about greeting people by name or getting to know clients or customers or the community members names and I think that it would be so refreshing to see a job description that said one way, you know, maybe semi colon.
One way that we do this is by ensuring that everyone knows the names of our customers and that could be really powerful. Yeah, it does such a difference when you walk in and even if somebody looks up and smiles at you, it's so much better than standing there waiting until they're done with whatever they're doing.
Right, right. Well, and I think about two job descriptions, you know, I wonder how often people even really read them when they're applying for a role and thinking then also about how Maybe I'm making an assumption here, but how little, uh, true efforts put into the job description as it's written. So then it just becomes this thing that we're hanging a lot of things on, but it's not maybe that meaningful.
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think the job description should be part of the hiring process. I used to, when we were doing interviews, I would greet people in the lobby and say, you know, we're not quite ready for you yet, but here's a copy of the job description. And often I would say, and here's a copy of the questions we're going to ask you, because as an introvert, I know that I have many times been caught like a deer in the headlight when somebody asked me a question, and I know it, but I need time to organize my thoughts.
As long as you give it to everybody. Right, right. I'm even thinking how cool that would, that would just feel so great and actually would feel welcoming to have the job description to review, have the list of questions. And even here's a printed list of our values. Can you imagine? That would be incredible.
And you're sending such a powerful message then. Yeah, and the other at the other end, job description should be used when people do evaluations. That should be the basis of any evaluation they're doing. Yeah, I agree. And I think there's, there's the concept of stay interviews, you know, which is a way to bring in more regular interviews or evaluation periods with your employees.
And I think that could be really powerful. So I'd love to talk about trust and HR. You talk a lot in your book about how those things might not always go together well. And here's another statement from your book. You said the currency of HR is trust. HR creates and maintains policies, operationalizes culture, which I I want to talk more about that.
Then you also say it guides managers and hiring and firing. It is also the bridge between management and non management. And this is the piece that really stuck out to me, Rita. You said HR stands alone. And I guess I knew that intellectually, but then it just felt so potent and quite honestly, just lonely to think about the people that are in that role.
What advice would you offer to a leader of a small organization who might not have dedicated HR personnel to both balance their duties while also supporting the people side and also maintaining trust. Yeah, that's a lot to ask. It's a lot. It's a lot. There's several things. I think, first of all, that leader must be impeccable with their word.
Don't make promises that you can't keep, tell the truth. Of course, with the caveat that people don't need to know everything, but it impacts them, they need to know about it. Treat people fairly, which in a, fairly and consistently. Which in a small org is sometimes hard because the first people who start with you like when you're only three employees of course you're going to be more close to them you're going to want to share more with them and pick their brain and either make that part of their job or don't do it with everyone or don't do it because those kind of conversations behind closed doors make people suspicious.
Yeah. So that's important. The other critical thing is to listen, literally have an open door and if and when people come to stop what you're doing and listen to them. And if they don't come to find a way to hear them, set up listening lunches, do an annual survey. Whatever you need to do to find out what's working, what's not working, what do you wish you could do more of.
Then that goes along with the stay interviews. That's another great way to set up the listening and listen. Don't respond immediately. Don't try not to get defensive and then respond after. After you consider what they've done. Well, you mentioned the annual survey and for the listener who's thinking, yeah, I would love to do an annual survey, but I don't know where to start.
You actually have a really good template of really great assessment questions in your leading for justice book. I do. Yeah. Uh, culture assessment is what it is, and that could easily be used for a survey. Yeah, it's really incredible. So talking about culture, I often recommend to my clients that we really work on operationalizing our values, and you talk about operationalizing culture.
What would you, I mean, I know culture is kind of one of those things that's hard to define, but what would you suggest that folks do to improve the culture in their workplace? First of all, I think people need to observe what's going on. What is our culture? And especially paying attention to alignment.
What are your stated mission, vision, and values and do those show up in your culture? Too often, it's either the values are either diluted or sometimes betrayed in the actual culture. Um. I've come to realize that that most often happens in the area of hidden rules is what I call them, unspoken words, the unspoken rules, the way people do things that may or may not match the policies and practices.
So an example is an organization that says we have an open door, we want to hear any concerns you have, sounds great, we resolve conflict directly, but then someone comes with a complaint, and the leader responds defensively, and then they're treated differently, or sometimes even labeled a complainant.
Yeah. And if somebody tries to deal with conflict directly, they're labeled the troublemaker. So those are the way, that's the actual culture, even if the words say differently. So start by looking at, are we in alignment with what we are? Think our culture is and then look for those hidden roles, hidden practices, and be intentional, be as intentional as you can as a whole organization of enlivening your values to support the culture.
If our value is honesty and transparency. How does that show up in our day to day culture? Yeah. So for the person who's listening, who's an executive director or CEO or president, they might have a little bit more like you were talking about earlier power decision making around shifting culture. How would someone who's maybe frontline staff or in the program department or something where they might not be at the decision making table?
What can they do to shift culture? I mean, I have an idea, but I would love to hear what you'd say. Sure, I'll share my thoughts, and I'd love to hear your thoughts. I think one of the things you can do is start just naming those hidden rules. And that takes courage. But if you are in a position where something like that happens, just not even challenging it right away, but just naming it.
I noticed that when we say, I followed the procedure about conflict and I didn't get supported. How, how can I get support around that? Just naming it is a start acting of course, individually as a team member, according to the values and culture that you want to see and inviting others to join you. And if you're in a position where it's possible, like in a small organization, it might be possible to say, I'd love to have some conversations about our culture.
Can we do that? Can we set aside 10 minutes at our staff meeting once a month to talk about culture? I love that. Yeah, those are really, I mean, they might not be easy to do and it might feel uncomfortable, but they are simple steps that will really start to, like you were talking, just name and normalize.
And one of my ideas was going to be when someone's being onboarded and a new staff member's coming, that's a really great opportunity to say something like, hey, I noticed that when the new hire came on, we didn't notice. Do X, Y, and Z, something that maybe we say is part of our culture. Is that something I can do for them?
You know, whatever that might be. And you're right, I think being able to say, let's just attack this and address this little by little, having a discussion about culture at a team meeting is a great idea. Yeah, I love that idea too. The other thing that I think is always good is introducing moments of fun play.
And I know you talk about joy. Yeah, absolutely. Our way to start shifting the culture. Yeah. You know, I'm a big believer in taking five minutes at the start of a meeting to play a quick game or do a round robin checking question. It just humanize the environment, the culture, and get people in the room. As long as it's a non competitive game.
Absolutely. It has to be safe. That's very true. Yes. Yes. Well, and I wonder about thinking about values. I think so often we don't individually have a good way to operationalize our values. And so maybe that's another thing for the person who's listening. If you don't think that you have decision making power.
Start with your own values. Maybe there's an alignment with your values and the organizations, and that can be another way that you can individually act to start to shift the culture, uh, is by bringing that in. Absolutely. So Rita, a lot of the work I do is around leaving and people leaving, which is a reality.
It happens. Is there anything that you would like to say about The maybe sometimes messy, I guess it always feels messy, um, process of leaving and how we can do better at that from an H. R. standpoint. Yes, absolutely. From both an H. R. and then a staff member viewpoint and a leader. I think too often people leave without leaving.
And I have a section in my leading for justice book about is pretending undermining your culture. And it's about the process of people pretending to change or pre, like I call it pretending to leave. And I know it's easy to do this. You've got one foot out the door, but you don't want to give up your job yet.
And there's a way that that makes sense. But when you realize that You're leaning more heavily on the foot out the door, then that's not, that's not fair to you or the organization. So, from an HR perspective, again, I think the state interviews can be very helpful, and the listening can be very helpful.
And for supervisors, talking about when you see somebody fading away. Or stepping back a little less engaged than they were. What's going on? How, how are you doing with your job? Are you happy? And having those somewhat hard conversations, but really important. We have an episode back in season two about state interviews.
And so I'll recommend folks that are listening to go back to that in that episode. Um, but I think what you said about the engagement is so important because especially in social impact or nonprofit jobs, where there is a deep mission, maybe to solve a problem or to eradicate some harm that's being done in our community, a lot of folks are overworked or have a lot on their plates, um, in this mission to end the thing that we're all fighting for.
And so I think that it's. It's really important as we supervise and as we manage to be aware of how the work is impacting the people that are working alongside us. Absolutely. And that's probably the most direct way we live out our values. It's seeing and supporting the people doing the frontline work and colleagues at any level and noticing when it's not working anymore, itself or for others.
That's the human part of work and I love that we are alignment or in alignment around that with both of our work. And it's, it makes a huge difference, even if you can't fix. The overwork, at least noticing it and being committed to try to find a way to fix it. It may not be fixable right now, but let people know you, you see it and you're going to try to change it.
I get this feeling as I was, as I've read both of your books, and I refer to them often. What I love about. The bluntness and the directness of your books is that you're just telling people, here's how to do it better. And I'm curious if there's anything that's not in your books that people are shocked or surprised when they hear you say about HR, or leading with justice, supervising, those kind of things.
I think, uh, what comes to mind when you ask me that is I have a different take on, uh, the framing of work. I hear a lot of people describe the work as Employee centered. And that, I disagree with that. It gives me pause when I hear that. And I think people mean human centered, supporting people, seeing people.
But employee centered, to me, means that individual employees matter the most. Mm. And I think it needs to be mission centered and we're working for the mission and that's what we need to focus on. Because if you are employee centered, you end up like this 1 organization I worked with where they called me and said, we've had an employee that.
Has been very sick and they haven't been able to work for a year and we've been paying their full salary and we need to stop now. And it's like, Oh my goodness. Well intentioned compassionate, but that is not serving the mission. If I was a donor to that organization, I would be horrified and I would of course, understand the intention, but mission centered.
Is not incompatible with being supportive of your staff. I love that. It does put the mission as the bottom line, not individuals. Yeah, that's that's a really important distinction. And I'm glad you brought that up because I think you're right that it does get really easy. To shift that, uh, and it's an important distinction.
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And then when I first say it, people are often like, wait a minute, right? What, what three words I'd love to shift to you a little bit personally, what three words or how would you describe your own relationship to change and or transition? Ah, that's, uh, that's where it really comes down, isn't it?
The reality, because my three words are resistance, conflicted, by which I mean that I usually understand in my head why the change needs to happen, but my actions don't show that. And then the third would be the idea of baby steps. That is how I eventually come to make whatever change I need to make, reminding myself that I can take baby steps and I'll still get there eventually.
Yeah, I love that. Change is hard. It is. It's very hard. And you know, sometimes it's even harder when it's not your choice. Yes, 100 percent agree. And I think that that there's some people that I work with, or that I have been in a community with, where personal change is easier to deal with than changes in the workplace.
You know, I'm not sure why that is. But I think it, it rings true, that changes in the workplace can sometimes really be a disruption to our mental state and well being. Absolutely. And unfortunately, I think some of that is often that you don't know why it's happening, that it's sort of just announced that we're changing job descriptions or you're being demoted, and there's no understanding of why or how that came about.
That adds to the stress. Absolutely. Well, and I wonder, and you might not want to answer this, so that's okay, but I often have had an experience with folks in HR. Where they lean more towards the, we can't tell you anything, you know, as, as the kind of carte blanche answer to everything is like, well, we just, you know, we can't tell you everything.
Is there a middle ground where we can in the HR role be more transparent with the why around something or is, or is it maybe more of hosting conversations and listening opportunities? I'd be curious what you'd say. I think there is a middle ground for sure. There are certainly areas like I can't talk about why someone was terminated.
That's their private business. But when I'm asked that I usually say I can't answer that directly, but I can tell you there was a good process and we did it as fairly as we could and we would respect your privacy if you were ever in a situation like that. Uh, there's very few instances where I think we can't talk about things like when somebody's terminated, when there's a harassment investigation, maybe when the specifics of like layoffs coming, sure, we're not going to talk about that, but we can tell people our finances are looking iffy, and I certainly hope you will all stay, but.
A major grant is coming up and we don't know if it will get renewed. And if so, we're going to have to make some changes. Why wouldn't you tell people that? Yeah, well, I can answer that too, because you're afraid you might leave. Right, right. Which is only fair anyway. Yes. Yes. Yes. People will leave if they both either fear something's coming or they don't know.
Yeah. Well, I think to that point about talking about finances, so often nonprofit folks don't even have access to budget. They don't have access to their own department's budget, let alone the whole organizations. And I just think there's so many beautiful ways to practice and it can be small experiments, uh, but to practice being more open about the functioning and the operations of a nonprofit.
Right. And there are some supports coming along with that in terms of like, I live in California and we have. Compensation transparency is required, and it's a great push for organizations to be open about what is the pay range for this job. That's something that everyone should know. Yeah, I agree. Before we wrap up, is there anything that you would like to share with the listener that I haven't asked you?
I'm sure there's plenty of things. With your vast knowledge, but I think I'm just going to underline what I've heard myself say so many times during this talk is to pay attention to listening, to really practice seeing and hearing the people that you work with. Uh, so often we're focused on doing and producing and moving things along that we forget that.
We're in conversation to be in relationship. We need to be in conversation. And, um, the other thing connected to that is relationship is critical. Make they make organizations work and. There's a time when I advise leaders to, okay, I understand and support that you are in relationship with your staff, but while we're making these hard decisions, like who's going to get laid off, we need to look at positions, not people.
And then we'll bring in the people, not literally, we'll talk about how will this, how will we do this with the people in those positions. So both are true to, there is a time to look at positions and there is always the appropriate time to be in relationship. I love that. The last question then for you, Rita, is what does the concept of leaving well mean to you?
I think for me, leaving well means first of all, knowing yourself. And taking time to reflect on, is this working for me, whether this is a relationship or job or any other situation you're in. Is this working? And if not, what do I need to do about it? Do I have to accept it? Is that tolerable to me? Can I change it?
Or do I need to leave? And if you, if it's time to leave, then doing so cleanly and clearly. With honesty, integrity, and hopefully, uh, a win win for both, in this case, the organization and the person, so that you don't burn bridges, you don't build resentment, you come out stronger for it. Rita, thank you so much for this conversation.
Thank you for all of the work, yeah, that you put out into the world. People listening are going to think I just want Rita to work at my organization to help all of us, but if that is not possible to work with Rita, go buy her books. They're both wonderful and we'll have all of the information about how to reach you and get the books in our show notes.
Thank you so much, Naomi. Great to talk to you and I applaud your work also. Thank you. Thank you so much. If you've not yet taken the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz to discover your natural relationship to change and transition, you can do that at NaomiHattaway.com/quiz. To learn more about leading well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace, visit NaomiHattaway.com. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide to shift culture and to create transformation. Until next time, I'm your host, Naomi Hattaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.
