CARE LAB Completes Second Three Dinners Series
This fall, with the midterm elections approaching, CARE LAB fast-tracked our efforts to create a space for Senate staff leaders to counter divisiveness and othering.
Experts who monitor risk factors for political violence predict that we will see a sharp increase in incidents immediately following the elections.
Senate leaders may not be surprised by the prediction - they field threats everyday - but they are alarmed.
The Senate Chiefs of Staff that we work with spend every day in the daily grind that makes democracy possible; and they are up against tremendous challenges. They, their bosses, and their staff operate in a pressure cooker that incentivizes polarization and often leads to burnt-out.
Care Lab’s Three Dinners series is designed to provide Chiefs with the tools and skills that they need to lead effectively in this context. Through this series - and the follow-on 201 programming that we have recently launched - we aim to help them flex muscles of collaboration; listen better; and support young staff and diverse constituents who are experiencing feelings and frustrations associated with this moment of rapid change and tension.
This fall, we “graduated” a second cohort of Three Dinners participants, bringing our total core of alumni chiefs up to 28. Like their predecessors in our pilot Three Dinners cohort, cohort two received training on active listening and conflict-de-escalation from Amanda Ripley and engaged in a deep conversation about othering, belonging, and bridging with john a. powell. Across these first two dinners, we explored the question: “is there a narrative in the U.S. to which we all belong?”
At our last session, we invited Chiefs to take a reprieve from policy and politics and join a conversation with neuroscientist and psychologist Dr. Virginia Sturm about the biological and physiological basis of negative emotions and the very concrete ways they affect our ability to interact with and effectively lead others.
She also shared an emerging body of research on awe – a positive emotion associated with the presence of something vast or great. Many Chiefs could recall experiencing this feeling in relation to being part of historic processes and institutions. Dr. Sturm explained that awe invokes a “small sense of self,” and thus can help people feel more connected to larger communities, allowing them to cognitively take a step back from conflict.
At the conclusion of the series, we talked with our bipartisan group about what comes next. At the top of their minds and ours was the question: How do we grow this group to include a wider swath of Chiefs and leaders?
As one Chief (Republican) shared: “Providing a ‘safe space’ forum for Chiefs to learn, discuss and share strategies for resolving conflict, facilitating dialogue, and building greater trust is an absolutely necessary step toward repairing our troubled politics and civil society at large. I believe focusing on these efforts is actually far more important long-term than any policy initiatives we work on. I’m anxious to continue to be part of this effort going forward and welcome the opportunity to recruit others.”
Together, we have devised a plan: a scaffolding outreach approach that will allow us to work together with the Chiefs to recruit others into this work. With this vision in place, we continue onward toward our goal of reaching 50 percent of Senate offices by summer 2023 and slowly, carefully building a contingent of political leaders who are equipped with the skills of listening, conflict de-escalation, and care.
In doing so we hope not only to improve functionality and well-being on Capitol Hill, but to support the integrity of the U.S. Congress; helping it to become an institution we can trust to disrupt “breaking” rhetoric and carry on with the business of functioning democracy.