Company's Culture Might Hinder Values
PAT MCHENRY SULLIVAN

     SOONER OR later, your values will clash with the values of others. The first time it happened to me at work was 1960, when I waited tables to earn money for college.

    Segregation was still entrenched in Virginia then. Even so, I didn't realize that when I served a "colored" family, I broke both local law and company policy. I was devastated. How could I have been so blind to injustices that kept so many others from privileges I took for granted? But what could I do to change a powerful system?

     Looking back at those times, it's often shocking to realize how few people were initially committed to the civil rights movement and the others that followed: feminism, environmental action and human potential, to name a few. Now most of these values are shared by a majority of us, even if we often act against them.

     For more than 13 years, sociologist Paul Ray has been studying American values. Based on surveys of more than 100,000 Americans, plus many focus groups and in-depth interviews, he identified three major value streams. The dominant culture (half of us) he calls Moderns. This group contains those who most value material progress and "what gets measured gets done." When we have problems like work overload, we look first to technical solutions, such as improved time management. Almost one-fourth of us, the Traditionals, dream of a more moral and leisurely world based on small-town or rural models. Another 26 percent and growing are Cultural Creatives, the population that is most likely to be both inner-directed and socially concerned.

     According to the new book by Ray and his wife, Sherry Anderson, "Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World," cultural creatives are "the ones who care most deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace and social justice, about self-actualization, spirituality, and self-expression . . . they're activists, volunteers and contributors to good causes more often than other Americans."

     Yet most cultural creatives feel invisible. Like everyone else, we spend much of our time at work, where it's still not deemed safe to talk about values. "What people say at work represents their attempts to conform to company culture rather than what they actually believe," Ray said in a recent interview. "This opens up the possibility that you work side by side with people who share your values much more than you now realize."

     For example, "79 percent of Americans are for the strongest possible ecological position, one that would give heart attacks to the American Manufacturing Association." 

     There are at least two reasons for the disconnect between workplace values and workplace polices or actions. First, Americans tend to devalue culture. Instead of seeing it as a lens that "shapes how we see what's real, how things work, and what's important to pay attention to," we tend to psychologize, which "puts the burden of explaining what we encounter at work and in the rest of our lives on people's personal characteristics."

    Second, when we hold values that appear contrary to those of the mainstream, we can feel isolated. If we don't speak up publicly about our values, we help create a culture that goes against them.

     All that can change radically, says Ray. "There is a massive shift occurring in American life just under the surface, and it's ready to break through in the most unlikely seeming places, where we discover just how many people share our values and what's most deep and tender in our hearts. The time is getting ripe for that breakthrough to happen on a big scale."

     Ray envisions a day when "the consciousness of the inner life will start working its way into the way decisions are made . . . and how the organization presents itself in the world. This will lead to more integral organizations."

     Like big social movements, creating integral organizations will happen not by fiat but step by step. We see, we feel, we ground the pain and hope, we build visions based on our values, we call others to help build them.

     Once the dream that women would be welcome in the pulpits of all major faiths seemed almost impossible. One manifestation of the fulfillment of at least part of that dream was the 30th anniversary this month of the Center for Women in Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. During that celebration, the Rev. Ruth Lesher read a litany that reads in part: "Each day opens with new steps and old ones intermingled, trampling on the foot of the other like two lovers creating a new dance, searching, searching, feeling their way along unknown landscapes. Steps which are made bold through inner callings, steps which retreat when hurt, steps which are lightened through companionship, steps which shake us out of our complacency, steps that are never taken, steps that transcend all else."

Whether our steps toward creating a more authentic and balanced culture at work are bold or tentative does not in the end matter. It only matters that we dare to take them.

Copyright 2001 by Pat Sullivan. All rights reserved.

Also printed on Oct. 29, 2000 San Francisco Examiner
originally printed by the Hearst Examiner
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/2000/10/29/CAREER4558.dtl