Transforming Dysfunctional Organizations
The Desire to Dominate and the Willingness to Submit
By Wade Lee Hudson
A day will come when you will trust you more than you do now and you will trust me more than you do now. We will trust each other. I do believe, I really do believe in the New Jerusalem. I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous, and people are not yet ready to pay.
— James Baldwin
Introduction
Power struggles weaken organizations, but hardly anyone addresses the divisive social conditioning that inflames the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit for personal gain. Overcoming this divisive root cause can help fix dysfunctional organizations and build a systemic reform movement to transform society into a just and compassionate community rooted in democratic hierarchies.
Hyper-individualistic, hyper-competitive domination leads to exploitation and efforts to defeat “enemies” and punish scapegoats. Blind submission reinforces the status quo. The failure to distinguish between justified and unjustified domination/submission interferes with controlling adverse reactions.
Paternalistic human service professionals assume a superior, controlling, disabling attitude toward clients. Nonprofit housing corporations resist collaborating with tenant councils. Kind-hearted people-helpers seek ego gratification and social status. Teachers funnel knowledge into students’ minds in a one-way process. Traditional doctors and nurses treat patients as objects. Self-seeking trainers of all sorts hustle for money and praise.
Activist Turmoil
Numerous authors have recently issued compelling reports on the turmoil within activist organizations. For instance, Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, opened an important November 2022 essay, “Building Resilient Organizations,” with a report on his extensive interviews with fellow activists. He wrote:
Executives in professional social justice institutions, grassroots activists in local movements, and fiery young radicals on protest lines are all advancing urgent concerns about the internal workings of progressive spaces. The themes arising are surprisingly consistent. Many claim that our spaces are “toxic” or “problematic,” often sharing compelling and troubling personal anecdotes as evidence of this. People in leadership are finding their roles untenable, claiming it is “impossible” to execute campaigns or saying they are in organizations that are “stuck.”
A growing group of new organizers and activists are becoming cynical or dropping out altogether. Most read their experiences as interpersonal conflict gone awry, the exceptional dynamics of a broken environment, or a movement that's lost its way. . . . Individuals are pointing fingers at other individuals; battle lines are being drawn. Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces. . . .
Many of us are working harder than ever but feeling that we have less power and impact. . . . Although we struggle for freedom and democracy, we also suffer from tendencies toward abuse and domination, . . . shallow polemics, self-aggrandizement, competition, and conflict. (emphases added)
His essay prompted Michelle Goldberg to comment on it in her Times column:
It’s no secret that many left-wing activist groups and nonprofits . . . have become internally dysfunctional. In June, the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: “It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.”
Staff Subversion
Grim’s report describes “knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions [that] most often break down along staff-versus-management lines.” He said this pattern is “true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, . . . grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power,” resulting in “a real erosion of the number of groups who are effective.” The Democratic Party seizing power in Washington “coincided with a mass social movement demobilization.”
Staff who join an organization committed to the group’s work may subvert it by demanding changes in its mission or methods, as when ACLU staff condemned its long-standing policy to defend the free speech of extremists. Grim wrote:
Alejandro Agustín Ortiz, a lawyer with the organization’s racial justice project, told the Times that “a dogmatism descends sometimes. . . . You hesitate before you question a belief that is ascendant among your peer group [that] might give “offense to marginalized groups.” [This leads to] endless and sprawling internal microbattles. . .[with] colleagues who are required to pick a side. Under siege, many leaders cling more tightly to their hold on power. . . .
A looming sense of powerlessness on the left nudged the focus away from structural or wide-reaching change, which felt out of reach, and replaced it with an internal target that was more achievable. . . . The battles between staff and organizational leadership have effectively sidelined major progressive institutions.
People find power where they can. Staff insurrections “done in the name of justice” lead executives who screen job applicants to ask, “How likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?”
Calling Out
Callout culture aggravates this dilemma. “It’s hard to have a conversation about performance,” said (one) manager. “I’m as woke as they come, but they’ll say, ‘He’s Black, but he’s anti-Black because he fired these Black people.’” Some argue that if your organization “isn’t Black and brown, it’s white supremacy in heels.”
In her 2017 essay, “I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic,” Loretta Ross said, “Call-outs happen when people publicly shame each other.” She described call-outs as
increasingly vitriolic ways to disrespect one another. . . . People attempt to expunge anyone with whom they do not perfectly agree. . . . Most public shaming is horizontal and done by those who believe they have greater integrity or more sophisticated analyses. They become the self-appointed guardians of political purity.
In 1976, Ms. magazine published Jo Freeman’s “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood.” She said:
Trashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination which amounts to psychological rape. It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally disguised by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all. But it is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy. . . .
It was a social disease, . . . a very powerful tool of social control. The qualities and styles which are attacked become examples other women learn not to follow. . . . The consequence of achievement is hostility and not praise. . . . The Movement's worship of egalitarianism is so strong that it has become confused with sameness. [It results from] being raised to believe that women are not worth very much. . . . Instead of trying to prove one is better than anyone else, one proves someone else is worse. This can provide the same sense of superiority that traditional competition does.
Her essay evoked more letters from readers than any article previously published in Ms. Most respondents described their experiences of being trashed.
The facilitator, adrienne maree brown, argues:
We do strange things as we compete with each other to bring attention to our work. We stop listening in a spirit of collaboration and start listening defensively, competitively, listening for where we are left out, or not at the top of the list; listening for where we must insert ourselves.
She attributes this dynamic partly to “legacies of betrayal, of war, of being pitted against each other for survival and equality.”
In one of the strategy workshops Roma Guy and I convened in the 1980s, the participants proposed topics for breakout groups. The most popular was “Why are we so mean to each other?”
When I’ve asked people, “In what way do you want to be a better person,” people have generally, in so many words, said they want to be less judgmental.
Ross advocates “calling in” with love that seeks greater understanding rather than “calling out” that aims to condemn and punish. However, she said, “Most Black people say, ‘I am not ready to call in the racist white boy, I just ain’t gonna do it.’”
Fragmentation
With great difficulty, the major civil rights organizations united for the 1963 March of Washington, but no such coalition has formed since. The once-powerful Women’s March devolved with internal strife. At the height of their strength, labor unions stopped organizing the unorganized and focused on the self-interest of their own members. Activist organizations are highly competitive with each other.
Social fragmentation reinforces personal fragmentation. The impact of unconscious bias is critical. Implicit bias occurs automatically and unintentionally. It's an individual’s pre-reflective attribution of qualities to others. These reactions affect judgments, decisions, and behaviors.
To clarify this issue, you can take the online Implicit Association Test and react to images related to thirteen topics. In “Cognitive Bias: How to Make Objective Decisions,” the Mind Tools Content Team examines common types of cognitive bias that involve making decisions in an unknowingly irrational way. The ten types of bias they address include confirmation bias, first-impression bias, and overconfidence bias. Acknowledging these biases can help prevent “gut reactions” from determining your actions.
Trust and love are deep, ancient instincts that fueled early human development with compassionate cooperation, but fear and anger are also strong instincts that divide people with self-centered competition. Power-hungry actors trigger irrational fear and anger to manipulate people.
In “The dysfunctions of power in teams: A review and emergent conflict perspective,” Lindred L. Greer, Lisanne Van Bunderen, and Siyu Yu “review the new and growing body of work on power in teams” and “develop an emergent theory of how power impacts team outcomes.” They conclude:
Power struggles, in turn, have routinely been demonstrated to harm the ability of teams to function and perform. . . . While power may make individuals feel empowered and lead them to pursue their goals, power within teams may actually make people more focused on their dependencies and vulnerabilities towards one another and may resultantly often be contested and unstable. . . . Members frequently make claims upon one another to legitimize and or promote one’s own power and influence, and the others in the team have the choice to grant these claims or not. . . .
Research on power in the context of teams may have yielded a more negative picture than that given by research on power at the individual level because power in the context of tasks is more readily perceived, contested, and changed. . . . The benefits of power for individuals may paradoxically translate into negative outcomes at the team level.
These internal conflicts weaken social service organizations that relieve suffering as well as political groups that promote justice. Self-centeredness undermines other-centeredness.
These dynamics suppress compassion, cooperation, and the formation of caring communities. They prevent people from gaining the security and comfort they deserve. They fail to ensure everyone the means to be all they can be throughout their life, not just at the “starting gate.”
Ineffective Management
Grim concluded that activists don’t pay enough attention to “basic management.” Grim refers to the common aversion to rational power structures and quotes Mark Rudd’s criticism of activists: “We don’t want power. We’re allergic to it. It’s not in our DNA. We don’t like coercion. We don’t like hegemony.”
Grim argues:
Winning power requires working in coalition with people who, by definition, do not agree with you on everything; otherwise they’d be part of your organization and not a separate organization working with you in coalition. Winning power requires unity in the face of a greater opposition, which runs counter to a desire to live a just life in each moment.
As Richard Sennett argued in Authority, activists place leaders on a pedestal only to knock them off later.
Concerning activists’ effort to expand the Guttmacher Institute’s focus from abortion to the reproductive justice movement, Ross said that approach risks “mission drift. It’s a symptom of poor threat assessment.” This failure to “identify the main threat” is another example of a failure to employ pragmatic idealism.
Grim concluded that divisive “maximalist political demands” that are “focused on stuff that has no theory of change for even getting to the House floor for a vote . . . can also be a byproduct of internal strife” rooted in self-centered power games. With this approach, they “focus their energy on internal fights rather than the organization’s mission.” People feel pure but gain little that’s concrete.
These problems aren’t new. Freeman’s classic 1970 essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” reflected on how resistance to formal leadership in second-wave feminism led to passive-aggressive power struggles. Her diagnosis remains relevant.
Activists focus more on defeating and punishing their opponents than promoting a positive vision for the common good. In the United States, Republicans profoundly disrespect Democrats, Democrats profoundly disrespect Republicans, and many members of both parties will oppose or support a policy based on their party’s position. They focus on electing their people rather than nurturing compassionate communities throughout society to help build a new world.
Politicians and pundits talk about “kitchen table” issues and ignore deep personal, social, and cultural issues that concern people — issues that call for structural and systemic reform. Compassion-minded activists look to the Democratic Party for solutions even though it’s clear that without a strong, independent grassroots force (as mobilized before by the labor and civil rights movements) to pressure and support them, Democrats will continue to fall short. Due to these and other realities, humanity may spiral downward toward some hard-to-imagine catastrophe.
The System
These problems don’t happen in isolation. Society encourages everyone, for personal gain, to climb social ladders, get more wealth, status, and power, dominate and often punish those below them, submit to those above, and exploit the environment. This socialization shapes conscious and unconscious thinking, leading to arrogance, deep disrespect, and divisive resentment.
Our social system — the System — weaves together our institutions, our cultures, and ourselves as individuals into a single social system that perpetuates the dominate-submit paradigm that forms society’s foundation and is its driving force.
In one way or another, everyone supports the System. Consumers buy cheap products made in sweatshops. Taxpayers finance the government. Voters ratify the status quo. Partisans disrespect and place total blame on opponents. No one is innocent. Everyone is responsible. Moreover, everyone is a victim. The System dehumanizes even the wealthiest and most powerful and isolates them in bubbles with puppets who are afraid to criticize them.
Most people feel superior to certain people and inferior to others concerning superficial traits and their essential worth. They want to advance to positions of greater power over others. A common motivation is to gain more approval from others and boost their sense of self-worth. They achieve some power and want to keep it and get more. As Henry Kissinger said, “Power is an aphrodisiac.” Forming co-equal partnerships rooted in mutual respect and shared power is difficult.
Administrators and officials become corrupted. Power, wealth, and status become their primary goal, an end rather than a means, a form of ego gratification. They dominate and submit for selfish reasons.
People who initially aimed to correct injustice become enraged and use oppressive methods to stop oppression. They use “the master’s tools” and become obsessed with defeating and punishing “enemies.”
Hyper-individualism is pernicious and widespread. People ignore how they benefit from others, take sole responsibility for their decisions and accomplishments, and place total responsibility on others for their choices.
Domination and Submission
Blaming the poor for their poverty, mass incarceration for minor offenses, and convicting drug addicts for murder are examples of domination and punishment of those considered inferior.
Submission may be involuntary, as with prisoners. It may be due to pressure, as with the threat of job loss. It may be a rational calculation, a tactic to achieve a later objective, or a reluctant resignation to an unavoidable reality. On the other hand, it’s often blind, unconscious, and automatic.
People go along to get along. They conform to expectations, keep quiet, and don’t speak up. They fail to examine themselves, their biases, and their judgments, much less modify or control them. They mostly worry only about themselves and their families and refrain from fighting for the common good.
The climate crisis threatens humanity. Racial- and ethnic-based populisms suppress minority rights. Confidence in technocratic elites has eroded. The economy feels like it could collapse at any minute. Insecurity and despair spread. Authoritarian governments undermine liberal democracy. Armed conflicts between nations are problematic.
Solutions
Fortunately, many people are challenging these patterns. They’re planting seeds for a cultural revolution that could lead to a virtuous upward spiral to broad transformation. They promote personal and collective growth, cultivating alternative communities and developing methods for strengthening compassionate cooperation. The success of these efforts is critical.
Justified domination and submission serve humanity, the environment, and life itself. These patterns help maintain safe, stable, and effective societies. Well-managed hierarchies are essential.
Nurturing trust and love while managing fear and anger is imperative. Many people are working in this direction, providing laboratories for cultural growth. Married couples are developing co-equal partnerships. Healthcare professionals are becoming less impersonal. Teachers are organizing problem-solving teams with their students. Online ratings are an alternative to automatic reliance on experts. Digital cameras may reduce police brutality.
Brown calls activists to “focus on practicing our values within our work.” She recommends they “put their attention into their own values and drop under surface-level reactions.” She reported on a definition of “principled struggle” offered by N’Tanya Lee of Left Roots, who said:
In struggle that is principled, we struggle for the sake of building deeper unity, that we are honest and direct while holding compassion, that we each take responsibility for our own feelings and actions, and seek deeper understanding by asking questions and reading a text (such as an article or proposal) before we launch our counter-argument.
Brown reminds people that a particular group “may not be the space to work through interpersonal dynamics.” Nevertheless, she believes in
generative conflict, conflict that grows each of us and that creates more possibilities for what we can do in the world together, constructing a new society, rather than just using it as a hammer to tear things down.
We can be a majority, must be a majority, to get through this moment and to shape a future that works for all of us. So, our orientation here should not reduce any of our issues, undernourish our work, shrink the realities or the complexity, or run from the things which could keep us apart. We want to find more than a list of woes. We seek points of alignment. . . .
We must pivot away from competing for scarce attention, scarce liberation, and scarce justice. Instead, we must work together to generate an abundance of each of these.
She argues:
Movements need to grow and deepen. We need to “transform ourselves to transform the world” (Grace Lee Boggs), to “be transformed in the service of the work” (Mary Hooks). Movements need to become the practice ground for what we are healing towards, co-creating. Movements are responsible for embodying what we are inviting our people into. We need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberation paths. Not already free, but practicing freedom every day. Not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individual and internal work to end harm, which includes actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other and ending those cycles in ourselves and our communities.
Ross urges activists to “call in” with love aimed at greater understanding as an alternative to “callouts” that shame and punish.
In his essay, Mitchell offers solutions and affirms:
Rather than reacting to myriad symptoms, we must build resilient organizations that can weather internal conflict and external crises. Resilient organizations are structurally sound, ideologically coherent, strategically grounded, and emotionally mature.
He addresses these elements by suggesting that organizations address four questions: “What kind of vehicle are we? Where are we going? How do we get there? How do we behave on the journey?”
He recommends:
Encouraging and providing support for skills like effectively engaging in conflict with others. This means organizing with all five senses. Food, visual art, music, movement, and culture should be expressed in all corners of the organization to humanize our practice and develop more emotionally dynamic spaces. Normalize the idea that rigor, seriousness, and excellent work should coexist with fun and joy. . . .
While it is true that the “personal is political,” the personal cannot trump strategy, nor should it overwhelm the collective interest. . . . No organization can take on the emotional labor that is squarely in the domain of the individual.
Philip Wood has developed holistic democracy, which he defines as:
A way of working together which encourages individuals to grow and learn as whole people and facilitates co-responsibility, mutual empowerment and fair participation of all in co-creating their social and organisational environment. Four dimensions of practice are at its core:
holistic meaning: aspiring to as true an understanding as possible not only of technical and scientific matters but also the ‘big’ questions of enduring values, meaning and purpose, through development of all our human capabilities - from the intellectual to the spiritual
power sharing: inclusive participation in shaping organisational operations, policy, direction and values, and autonomy to exercise initiative within the parameters of agreed values and responsibilities
transforming dialogue: a climate where exchange of views and open debate are possible, and people co-operatively seek to enhance mutual understanding and reach beyond narrow perspectives and interests
holistic well-being: sense of belonging, deep connectedness, inner knowing, feelings of empowerment, self-esteem, and independent-mindedness through democratic participation.
Though this approach has been used primarily in schools, activists can use it in multiple other realms. With his systemic analysis, Woods embraces the need for a peaceful “social order.” Interpersonal interactions can be an important corrective to focusing solely on individual awareness and change. The belief that mere awareness “will dissolve systems (overlooks) the importance of context, including the effects of social inequalities and the distorting influence of ideologically driven discourses.” The social order “can be a conduit for the formation and exercise of power differences and the shaping of identities that are not consciously chosen but imposed.”
In “Against Ideology: Democracy and the Human Interaction Sphere,” Woods addresses the struggle between the dominant society’s “instrumentalising trends” (which reduce humans to objects) and “drivers to democracy” (which nurture whole people).” Woods affirms a non-ideological framework that transcends particular interests, acknowledges antagonisms, suffering, and inequalities, and articulates “aspirations to social justice.”
In 2021, the California legislature passed the California Community Schools Partnership Act. This project is consistent with Woods’ holistic democracy framework. A community school is a “whole-child” improvement strategy where the district and school work closely with teachers, students, families, and partners. In May 2022, California announced its plan to launch hundreds of “community schools” with $635 million in grants. This $3 billion program “stresses building partnerships, empowering teachers and parents.” As announced,
The program supports schools’ efforts to partner with community agencies and local government to align community resources to improve student outcomes. These partnerships provide an integrated focus on academics, health and social services, youth and community development, and community engagement.
Community schools often include four evidence-informed programmatic features: Integrated support services; Family and community engagement; Collaborative leadership and practices for educators and administrators; and Extended learning time and opportunities.
The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson affirms “democratic equality.” Colleagues have called Elizabeth S. Anderson’s 50-page 1999 essay “What is the Point of Equality?” “path-breaking,” and The New Yorker described her as “The Philosopher Redefining Equality.” Anderson wants to end oppression by creating communities “in which people stand in relations of equality” to one another. Her thinking is rooted in numerous grassroots egalitarian movements, such as the civil rights, women’s, and disability rights movements. She believes egalitarian principles must “identify certain goods to which all citizens must have effective access over the course of their whole lives.”
Founded by Riane Eisler, the Center for Partnership Studies’s mission is to
catalyze movement towards partnership systems on all levels of society through research, education, grassroots empowerment, and policy initiatives. . . . We draw from the latest social and biological science, including neuroscience, connecting the dots between the personal and political to address root causes rather than merely symptoms of dysfunction and injustice.
The Movement Strategy Center promotes
a transition from a world of domination and extraction to a world of regeneration, resilience, and interdependence. . .grounded in four elements. . .: leading with audacious vision and bold purpose; deeply embodying the values at the heart of the vision; building radical and deep community around the vision; and using all of that. . .to strategically navigate toward the future. . .. cultivating a practice of taking care of each other. . .. How can we develop the collective strength and insight needed to transform a culture and an economy built on racism and domination? . . . How can we cultivate our readiness to engage. . . A movement that can transform the world and each one of us in it . . . Who do we need to be to make that change? . . . We, individually and collectively, would need to be different as people . . . Changing ourselves individually and collectively will change the world . . . Collective transformative practice as the intentional and continuously repeated action undertaken as a group to cultivate new ways of being and thinking in that group and beyond it . . . Encourages people in a group to discover and unleash their core strengths.
The Othering and Belonging Institute declares:
WE ALL BELONG IN THE CIRCLE OF HUMAN CONCERN. Othering is the problem of our time. Belonging is the solution. The Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley advances groundbreaking approaches to transforming structural marginalization and inequality. We are scholars, organizers, communicators, researchers, artists, and policymakers committed to building a world where all people belong.
The Leading Change Network, founded by Marshall Ganz, is “organized people power leading change towards a more just, sustainable, and democratic world. We develop and support new civic leadership that organizes communities to build power and create change.” They are
a global community of organizers, practitioners, educators and researchers catalyzing change through the power of narratives, rooted in the pedagogy and practice of community organizing. We develop and support new civic leadership that organizes communities to build power and create change. We build the leadership, organizing capacity, and resources of change makers across the globe to enable them to win campaigns that strengthen justice and human rights. LCN members are developing leadership and building power in over 75 countries.
John Carver’s Policy Governance Model is valuable for strengthening management skills. This model assures that members of the Board of Directors “will not be involved in the day-to-day operations of the organization, but will provide necessary guidance and establish policy that allows [the staff] to fulfill this obligation, on their behalf.” To be effective, organizations require governing boards that select executives who select and delegate authority to staff. Boards hold executives accountable for their performance, and executives hold staff accountable.
Many options exist for how to democratize hierarchies. Servant leaders can use numerous personal and social tools to strengthen individual and collective growth.
Conclusion
These efforts that aim to integrate the personal and the political are solid, informative, and inspiring. However, they miss two elements. First, they fail to focus on nurturing mutual support for unlearning the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit for personal gain. Second, they fail to offer a worldview as an alternative to our social system that could provide the basis for widespread unity.
They don’t address how activists and advocates need ti examine their own desire to dominate and their willingness to submit for personal gain — as manifest, for example, in the selfish drive to be a leader who mobilizes followers rather than engage in collaborative leadership. They don’t engage in self-criticism; they only criticize others.
Moreover, this outward focus doesn’t include a systemic analysis. The occasional references to “capitalism” are shallow. The problem we face is deeper than that. The System afflicts every society.
People can take care of themselves to better care for others, but maintaining a balance that avoids self-sacrifice and selfishness is difficult. We can move away from competing for attention and affirmation. Instead, we can work together to generate abundant support for everyone. Reflecting on your efforts with trusted allies can help.
Individual and collective examination is necessary to rise above destructive dynamics. Time-limited communications need not disrupt productive work. Instead, they can enhance it.
Nonviolent activists could develop a network of small holistic support teams that advance holistic and systemic reform, nurture personal and social growth, and aim to give everyone the support needed to flourish.
With a focus on the whole person and the whole society and the underlying social system and a shared commitment to fundamental transformation, these small teams of trusted allies could set aside time to help each other overcome their desire to dominate and their willingness to submit for personal gain. Personal change comes best through people you care about. Members of these small, intimate teams could also correct disinformation (a growing problem) and gather people to engage in social service and political action.
With time-limited boundaries on interpersonal struggles, this network could limit disruptive conflict and become the foundation for a holistic and systemic reform movement dedicated to serving humanity, the environment, and life itself.
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