Dignity and Agile working: a Catholic-informed perspective
Part I: Putting dignity at the heart of our Agile practice
“We ought to treat ourselves and others only with respect, love, honour, and care.” — Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York
The man who used to clean my council housing estate recently died. He was loved and respected, and many on the estate attended his funeral. His work was neither high status nor high-skilled, but it was essential, and people were grateful to the man who did it. He unblocked the bin shoots, mopped the floors, and kept an eye on the place. He made people in the community feel safer, looked after and more connected. He did the cleaning, but he was not known as the cleaner. He was Dave, a friend and neighbour. And while I can’t speak to his pay and conditions, people on the estate afforded him the deepest of dignity in life and in death.
Experiencing dignity at work is essential for our wellbeing and human flourishing. It’s also essential to productive teamwork. My neighbours helped me understand dignity in a new light and got me thinking about what dignity might mean in a knowledge-based workplace. When dignity is present we relate as equals, value each other’s contributions, and respect the complexity and depth of the lives we all live. As Pope Francis once said, “Respecting human dignity is important in any profession because even behind the simple account of an event there are sentiments, emotions, and ultimately, people’s lives.”
In this blog series I hope to introduce why I think Agile leaders and practitioners should put dignity at the heart of their approach to collaborative work. I’ll start in this blog by letting you know how I got to this point, and why I think the cornerstone for a human-centred approach to teamwork begins with human dignity. I’ll proceed from there, often drawing on the tradition of my own Catholic faith, but only to enrich a conversation I hope people of different faiths and none will find engaging. I believe dignity, as a concept, is a great bridge across different worldviews, and I look forward to learning from you.
Reading Lyssa Adkins’s Coaching Agile Teams marked a pivotal moment for me in my evolving beliefs about work. I’d been thinking a lot about the nature of workplace relationships. Why do interactions at work often feel transactional and even unkind? Why, when problems arise, do we blame and scapegoat others rather than collectively rolling up our sleeves to find a solution? In her introduction, Adkins writes, “[You] sense something ineffective, even inhumane, in the way you have been trained to work with others.” And this was very true in my situation. My experience as a trade union rep, HR advisor, and culture changer, means I’ve seen work at its worst: discrimination, bullying, harassment. But even at their best, workplace interactions often don’t add up to a culture that produces psychological safety, belonging, respect and care for each other’s individual human needs. Adkins makes no mention of dignity, but her book helped me understand its importance to thriving teams. And that more dignified teamwork was possible.
Agile can create enabling environments, but ultimately its success depends on rich and respectful human interactions. Coaching Agile Teams shows how coaching can achieve more mature, healthy human relationships in the workplace. Adkins outlines an approach that sets high standards for team performance, but is empathic and sensitive to the psychological needs of individuals. The book makes a convincing case that more open and respectful ways of collaborating are not only possible, but better for business. Work really doesn’t have to suck! Productive work can be good and dignified work.
The more time you spend in Agile circles, the more you’ll hear how Agile is both a more productive way of working, but also a more human way of working. As many Agile thinkers and practitioners know, to leverage the benefits of Agile — speed to market, efficiency, reduced risk and waste, customer collaboration, etc — you must start with people. “People do all the work,” as one popular Agile framework states. While Agile recognises the importance of processes and tools, it foregrounds people as the real drivers of creation. Agile is a more human way of working because it respects individual human needs. Its adherents often promote autonomy, trust, respect, psychological safety, and a meaningful sense of belonging; for their own sake, and because these concepts, when brought to life in an organisation’s culture, are the drivers of sustainable team performance.
We can strengthen the notion of the “human-centredness” of Agile by rooting it in the philosophical tradition of human dignity. From dignity flows related themes like autonomy, safety and belonging, vital cultural pillars of Agile, which I’ll write about further down the line. We’ll need to familiarise ourselves with the intellectual history of human dignity, specifically the dignity of work, and then explore what the implications for our Agile practice might be. Which is what I’ll take on in my next blog.
For now, I hope you agree it’s an interesting endeavour. When we draw on the concept of dignity to explore the human dimensions of Agile, we enrich the meanings of core Agile values and principles. What meanings can we draw from the first value of the Agile manifesto — individuals and interactions over processes and tools — if we centre dignity? This is the kind of thing I want to dig into. Why does any of this matter in the context of organisations? Because, to quote Monique Valcour, writing in HBR, “dignity is fundamental to well-being and to human and organizational thriving. And since many of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work, work is a major source of dignity in our lives.” I’ll look forward to engaging this topic with you over the next few months! Thanks for reading.
