Anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI) work takes place in the millions of workplace conversations and interactions, both large and small, that make up our daily working lives.
Meaningful, inclusive conversations and interactions are the engines that grow ADEI cultures of connection.
But there is often a gap. Far too many of us don’t have access to the capacities we need to engage in the connecting conversations ADEI is asking of us.
How do we bridge this gap? Relational practices are learnable capacities. When we grow our organizations’ collective relational intelligence, we support the networks of diverse, equitable, inclusive professional relationships which are the lifeblood of successful organizations.
Explore our Relational ADEI Pathways to better understand how.
Our work at The Relational Workplace offers a multitude of relational frames, capacities, and pathways, designed to grow relational intelligence in client organizations.
Below are four examples of the many Relational ADEI Pathways we’ve created as part of our ongoing work. They’re designed to be adapted to the distinctive needs of individual organizations via coaching, team trainings, facilitated panels, keynotes, and more.
TRANSFORMING ADEI RESISTANCE: Relational Listening Frames for Leaders
Coaching/Trainings
Outright resistance to ADEI work by employees can present a crisis for team leaders and managers. How does one respond to resistance and create an effective way forward to ADEI growth? Dr. Saliha Bava and Mark Greene train and coach leaders at all levels to use the processes and strategies in our ADEI Leadership Relational Listening Frames. This relational listening spectrum spans different levels of ADEI resistance from reactivity, to confusion, to committed but stuck. Our relational listening frames represent an artful form of engagement that leaders at all levels can practice. Discover how to move resistance along the spectrum toward growth by listening to stories and engaging curiosity, meeting resistance where it appears.
THE RELATIONAL LOOP: From Difficult Conversations to Connecting Conversations
Coaching/Trainings
If we are to create diverse, equitable and inclusive workplaces, we must not only recognize and acknowledge oppressive social systems and structures, but also understand how to identify and acknowledge their impact in the course of our daily workplace conversations. How can we learn to create inclusion and equity from within everyday business interactions and conversations? A systems and communication theorist, Dr. Saliha Bava has developed the The Relational Discursive Loop as a powerful meaning-making resource and visual guide for creating the courageous conversations we need to grow workplace cultures of connection.
(See video below.)
THE MAN BOX CHOICE POINT: Interrupting Dominance-Based Business Cultures
Coaching/Trainings
Masculinity author and activist Mark Greene created The Man Box Choice Point as a teachable process for self-reflection, designed to challenge the generations-old hyper-masculine business practices that have long defined our workplaces globally. In this training and coaching, Mark breaks down Man Box culture, the long standing retrogressive rules that govern how men engage in what research from Catalyst has defined as combative workplace culture. Because generations of men, women, and non-binary people have been given little choice but to adopt dominance-based workplace cultures, The Man Box Choice Point is designed to help all of us to notice how dominance-based business practices show up in unhelpful ways in our workplace interactions. We learn to identify the source of and then interrupt these behaviors in ourselves and others before they do harm to our professional relationships and careers. (See video below.)
THE RELATIONAL WHEEL: Capacities for Equity, Belonging, and Innovation
Coaching/Trainings
Dr. Saliha Bava and Mark Greene coach individuals and train teams to reconnect with our powerful human capacities to foster collaboration, engage collective creativity and generate innovative possibilities by engaging our relational intelligence. Our Relational Wheel contains six relational capacities. Listen with Curiosity • Consider Context • Stay Playful • Hold Uncertainty • Ask Questions • Reframe Our Stories. Participants learn why and how to engage these powerful relational capacities to help teams better communicate, innovate, appreciate differences and allow for the emergent, growing our collective relational intelligence.
Dr. Saliha Bava’s Relational ADEI Buckets form the foundation of an interlocking holistic ADEI practice, in which we hold ourselves and others accountable for anti-racism and anti-oppression work, ensure an emphasis on humanizing practices, and create inclusion for a plurality of views and voices.
It is in the daily back and forth of workplace conversations that this interlocking virtuous cycle grows a relational ADEI culture of connection. These Relational ADEI buckets form the foundation of all of our coaching and training services.
All of our services are collaborative, co-designed in the process of exploratory conversations with our clients. The processes, timing, and goals of the work we do emerge in the exploratory back and forth about the organization’s needs and culture. Contact us to begin our conversation.
Saliha Bava, Ph.D., a Couples and Family Therapist, is a Professor of Marriage and Family Therapy at Mercy College. She teaches systems thinking, relational, and collaborative-dialogic practices. For 30 years, she has consulted, designed, and implemented change and reflective action learning processes within organizational, community, family, learning, and research systems.
As a Taos Institute Associate and advisory board member, she facilitated the development of the M.Sc. Relational Leading Program and served as a Taos Doctoral Program advisor. She is the Director of Research and consultant to the International Trauma Studies Program, NYC. She is a co-founding board member of the International Certificate Program in Collaborative-Dialogic Practices and served on the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA) Board. She has published and presented internationally on DEI, collective trauma, collaborative and performative perspectives, leadership, play/performance, creativity, research, and teaching/learning. Her research is focused on relational intelligence for inclusion.
Dr. Bava is the recipient of the 2023 AFTA Award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy and received a Leadership award from the City of Houston’s Disaster Mental Health Crises Response Team for the Katrina response in 2005. Dr. Bava is co-author of The Relational Workplace and The Relational Book for Parenting.
Mark’s client list includes, General Mills, Société Générale, Sephora, AOL, Bank of America, Catalyst, and The Better Man Conference.
Mark is the author of The Little #MeToo Book for Men, and Remaking Manhood, and co-author, along with Dr. Saliha Bava, of The Relational Book for Parenting and The Relational Workplace. Mark is co-host of Remaking Manhood, the Healthy Masculinity Podcast, available on all major streaming platforms.
In The Relational Workplace, authors Dr. Saliha Bava and Mark Greene draw on decades of organizational, systems, and communication theory, research, and philosophy, to help us create more fully connected working lives. Bava and Greene have written a playful, accessible, and deeply impactful resource for co-creating human connection, especially across the vast range of intersectional differences that define our global human family.
As organizations institutionalize much needed anti-oppression, diversity, equity and inclusion (ADEI) policies, including diverse hiring practices, anti-racism training, equitable pay policies, family leave and more, employees are confronting a fundamental gap. It is the gap between crucially important organization-wide ADEI initiatives and the individual challenges we all face creating inclusive relationships in our daily workplace interactions and conversations.
In The Relational Workplace, Bava and Greene offer a wide range of capacities and frames for fostering our relational intelligence, making a powerful case for how relational practices can help grow ADEI cultures.
Learn how to Listen with Curiosity • Consider Context • Stay Playful • Hold Uncertainty • Ask Questions • Reframe Our Stories and more. Explore The Relational Discursive Loop, Man Box Culture Choice Point, and Culture of Curiosity as Shared Inquiry, powerful systemic frames for positive organizational ADEI transformation.
Connect with Saliha on LinkedIn. Connect with Mark on LinkedIn.
Other books which explore our dominance-based Man Box culture of masculinity by author and healthy masculinity activist Mark Greene. A leader in men’s work, Greene examines the powerful work men are doing worldwide to create healthy masculine cultures of authentic expression and connection.
The Little #MeToo Book for Men
In just seventy-five pages, Greene explodes the bullying myths of our dominance-based Man Box culture of masculinity, inviting men out of isolation and into human connection.
“Concise, empowering, and at times radical, this book is a much- needed call to action for everyone.”
—Jennifer Brown, Founder, President and CEO, Jennifer Brown Consulting
Remaking Manhood is a collection Mark Greene’s most popular articles on parenting, fatherhood, and masculinity. At times, deeply emotional, Mark’s writing explores the vast generational narratives that define the daily lives of boys and men.
“Mark interweaves his own deeply personal stories with a salient and powerful deconstruction of manhood in America.”
—Lisa Hickey, CEO, Good Men Project