What have you learned about onboarding in your organization? How do new people get brought up to speed on how governance works?
Each person who comes into the organization changes the organization – they bring new skills, new ideas, new stories and new dynamics. That’s great!
But if new people do not understand the governance system, there can be tensions, for the new people and everyone else:
They are feeling less empowered themselves. They might not know what’s going on, how things work, or how to make themselves work. That feeds discontent.
They might not know how things work and undermine the system. It’s fine to bring a reaction in a questions round or not understand how agenda setting works – but if it happens too much, it does negatively impact our system.
They might clog up systems. I’ve seen people, for example, make complaints go to a listserv or the “highest” circle instead of the circle where they belong. That is frustrating for everyone because it takes longer, and more people need to be involved to funnel the complaint into the right spot.
That’s why robust onboarding is in everyone’s interest.
In my experience, sociocracy isn’t necessarily learned “by osmosis.” People don’t come as blank slates, and their expectations often get in the way of understanding how things work. They do need to be taught explicitly, or funny misconceptions form.
I also know from experience that those who have been operating sociocratically for a while just consider it common sense. It’s logical. So they might assume that things are obvious – and then they don’t take onboarding needs seriously.
What are good ways to describe and explain your system? How do you train people who are new in the organization? Do you make training for onboarding mandatory?
Our biggest struggle as an organization, is just the onboarding in general. It’s gone through some many structures, and tones of seriousness/rigor, that it’s hard to seize on one standard timeline when it starts or ends, or how.
The perennial struggle of our particular membership group, is always how to balance expectations of people who are not being paid in something we are being clear in is a closer to a community, than “movement-chapter.” We want to onboard people who already have some interconnection to with what we currently are working on, but also want to use the onboarding to align their efforts, as they start doing more relevant work. Some people bring strong emotions to the conversation about introducing any part of our sociocracy practice to people they suspect share the purpose and the work, but are more marauder in their work-style (slowly shifting some of their enthusiasm and resources as a project moves along, to their unrelated side idea).
The only consistent thing, aside from introducing things in stages, (from ‘sneaky sociocracy’ of having a person participate in a round about something, than later explaining it all the way up to, your taking on this domain-role, you really should shadow this leader/facilitator pair, to see how some of the backend work of the circle structure is approach by this specific leader/facilitator pair), is just to pair each piecemeal element of further involvement, with a bit on how we use sociocracy in relation to this. So like, oh I need to set you up with a Ramp Card, this is circle that makes those approvals, and a bit of how they got to the current policies that they did.
in reading, i felt this desire that people came in asking “how can i most effectively plug into the work”, not “here’s what i want to do, and also I hate following processes”
