Community is a Metaphor for Business
By: Matt Auron
Originally published in Evolutionary Business, May 2022.
In great part, humans have achieved our status as a species from our ability to work and collaborate with each other. We are able to adapt and thrive through communications and social systems that serve as the foundation of how we live together. Society is held together by the principle of people living together and contributing individual value, collaborating towards a common cause, and supporting each other throughout. This principle is called community.
As organizational development guru, Peter Block, says, “community is the structure of belonging.” It’s where we live our lives and have a sense of rootedness and home. Community is a place where we feel a sense of essential responsibility for the place we live as well as for the others that surround us. Community is rooted in communitas, which is a spiritual principle of people living together, practicing a common purpose. Being with each other in common cause. In community, there is a deeper sense of buy-in, accountability, and responsibility for the greater whole. The metaphor is clear for businesses in that they too act as mechanisms for shared contribution, support, and common purpose. Community is a useful metaphor for business.
However, it’s not easy to be in community with others. Despite our complex brains, education, and years of experience we are still emotional, sensitive, and subjective creatures. Anytime more than one human is involved, tension of varying degrees ensues. Yet we find it is worth it, as we band together and realize more together than we could alone. It’s wonderful to live with people and feel a part of the greater whole. It settles something inside of us to know that we belong, even if those other humans can be challenging.
Although it’s important to understand that a business is not a community, the metaphor stands as an appropriate way to hold a human system. A human system is simply a web of people interacting under a central organizing principle (like a town or a company). A community has its own culture, systems, and processes like schools, hospitals, the police, communication mechanisms like the news, and other elements that hold it together. Businesses also metaphorically have their policies and procedures, communication mechanisms, and training. These things can all be optimized with the organization’s essence in mind, aligning the business to a thriving place much like a community.
DaVita is a healthcare company that uses the phrase “Community First, Company Second” and sees community as a metaphor for almost everything. Offices are called neighborhoods, titles reflect community titles, such as the CEO being called The Mayor, and programming reflects an unusual level of support for each other. The sense of ownership has been repeatedly used in democratic processes, where voting and participation determine cultural and strategic imperatives. The level of investment in education and communications is high, with most receiving leadership training as a means to understand the DaVita principle of “Community First, Company Second.”
Community can also be a shadow: the realities of the business can sometimes come into opposition with relational dimensions. For example, at DaVita, community can cast a shadow wherein paradox to relationships and the common good, individual agency and operations can be ruthless and fierce. Some of this is natural and exists in every business: the tension of the community and the individual.
In true community, there’s an opportunity to be in dialog with others. It means dissent and agreement, the collaborative circle of give and take. Community means being able to engage fully with each other in the spirit of co-creation. This can look like tension and conflict, however, in community, there’s a wall of safety and commitment that allows humans to lean into each other. Businesses that allow for this level of dialog are able to leverage this kind of collaboration for problem-solving and high levels of engagement.
Healthy communities also have deep investment from the people that live there, who act as citizen-owners of the community’s future. They participate in committees, give feedback on plans, volunteer for fire departments, and open businesses to add value to where they live.
The best businesses have a similar sense of ownership, pride, and engagement. Even though they aren’t elected, the leaders of great businesses act like elected officials and their leadership mental model is that of service. They lead for the people they support, which also includes customers and the broader world. This essential sense of stewardship creates a cycle where the people working at a company feel free to own the future along with the leaders, and similarly sign up for committees, pick up after themselves, and care for their neighbors. The feeling of being a part of something and feeling invested in it with others creates deep bonds and facilitates one of the core needs of humans: to feel connected.
This sense of connection fosters psychological safety and belonging, and allows for the full flourishing of the human potential. As people feel safe to be themselves and in partnership, they do great things. The business becomes a place where they stretch out of their comfort zone, test their limits, and even reprogram old patterns, learning how to be in more effective and fulfilling relationships with others. Business is not just a place to do work and go home. It’s a place of relationship and co-investment into a deeper sense of purpose. There is a giveback and a caring for the whole, there is equitability and support. People live their lives at work; it’s somewhat of a moral tragedy when business is a sterile place that lacks essential humanity.
The principles of community as applied to business allow for individuals to flourish, to have a place they feel proud of, and feel a sense of ownership over. The amount of time spent at work is the majority of our waking hours of adult life. Creating a sense of place allows for a business to acknowledge the principle that it’s home to many and a place where people go to live into their potential and shape the world with others.
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