Present Tense with Marianna Martinelli

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In the late 90s, at the birth of The Start Up (which, before the late 90s, was just known as entrepreneurship), one of the millennial developments in corporate culture was what we might call ‘water cooler perks’, which manifested themselves in the form on cupboards full of free snacks, endless refreshments, sometimes an overly elaborate wet bar or sushi chef, and shelves full of freebies like DVDs or stress-reducing toys available for employees at any hour of their extremely long days. It was the corporate culture display of Amy Poehler’s famous “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom!” line from Mean Girls, as if to say “you may work upwards of 90 hours a week and never see your family or the light of day, but who needs emotional nourishment when you have this lunked out (company branded) swag bag!” 

Twenty years later, these Start Up perks have become corporate standards at even some of the most conventional institutions, often going so far as to demand more personal time of an organization's employees to attend off-site events or after hours team building sessions. If you wanted to, you could draw a pretty detailed line between early 20th century employment practices and the spectacular collapse of WeWork (that none of us can stop looking at/consuming). As we approach the hundred year anniversary of the institution of the 40-hour workweek and concurrently emerge from a year when all of the boundaries between our office and our homes were eviscerated, companies have the unique chance to shape the practices they want to move into the future with, and build back better™  - ultimately benefiting both the internal community that powers their business along with the exterior community of customers they serve.

Enter Marianna Martinelli. Marianna is a Community Builder, the checkpoint for your organization that keeps everyone oriented toward that better future; not always at the sacrifice of hard work or long hours, but sometimes at the sacrifice of ego or convention. Centering community and its many forms and entities in your business’ ever-evolving mission statement is undoubtedly one of the most critical ways we can understand our purpose and our future. Over the past few months, Marianna has been helping to guide the community birth and growth for Saysh, the freshly-launched product line and community space by Allyson Felix, the Olympian and world champion runner who was unceremoniously dealt out of her Nike sponsorship whilst negotiating for maternity protections (a prime example of the kind of punitive community behavior we need to navigate away from as a society in general). 

I am so grateful to Marianna for sharing her expertise in this area that we are often all quite lost in, and would like to add as a side note that I have referred to my Feelings Wheels several times since writing up this discussion. 

Thank you Marianna for your time and your wisdom. Friends, enjoy:

Anja: Here's a simple one to start: how do you define "Community"?

Marianna: Community is a group of people helping each other out and repeating that action over time. To me this can apply to communities that gather to clean the local dog park, to mutual aid groups all the way to something like YPO. 

Anja: Relating that activity to a business, for a lot of entrepreneurs, community is something that is built naturally through engagement. We have also seen a lot of communities get out of control, become toxic, or take steps in the wrong direction, leading them to places they did not want to be. I have two questions about this, the first one is: how do you prevent this from happening?

Marianna: I agree that community is first and foremost built through *literally* talking to people. 

To use a dramatic and toxic example, when Twitter + Facebook took the steps to remove Tr*mp from their platforms, although it was ‘too little too late’ in many ways, that was also a really powerful form of moderation. 

One of my heroes, Priya Parker, speaks about ruling with “Generous Authority.”  That means a moderator steps in to stop behavior of an individual to allow for the enjoyment/ safety of others. An example of this is when attending a lecture and it’s Q + A time and a certain audience member begins to pontificate about their life story without asking an actual question.  The crowd starts rolling their eyes and shifting in their seats, because this is awkward and embarrassing! A moderator practicing “Generous Authority” would intervene and ask the question-asker to please ask the question., etc. 

Wild and unchecked behavior within a community can be a symptom of unclear operating values, a lack of safety + trust and also poor moderation. In this instance, I mean moderation as a way to check wild behavior. 

Anja: That’s so true, that moderator role is so crucial to a smooth operation for everyone. My next question, obviously, is: what do you do when this has already happened? What if there was no Generous Authority before things became out of control? 

Marianna: If this is happening within a community, my advice would be to Stop! Pause! Time to reflect, like right now!  As I mentioned above, this can often happen if there is a lack of clarity around operating values, and it might be time to create those community values, reassess them and/or get clear on what the consequences are if someone crosses the boundary or does not act in accordance with the values. This is to protect the community and keep it safe and sacred. 

Anja: I think most leaders and organizations would benefit from some Marianna in their lives, and I think part of leadership is creating a structure (be it operations, values, or any of those other interconnected issues) for everyone to be able to thrive within. If I’m a community leader coming to you for guidance, what foundational values are we centering in our work together to start building that structure?

Marianna: Let’s pretend this organization knows they want community to be an element included in their brand, organization, etc… but, haven’t tested any of their ideas. Here’s a bit of how I’d approach the work. 

I'd start by asking this leader: Who are you building this for? Why? Who is this not for? Why? Clarifying the boundaries or parameters of a community is an essential step to building something meaningful. The idea of creating an “in” and “out” group -- its to be clear about who you are designing for and clear is kind.  

Test and Learn: Remember in elementary school when you learned about the Scientific Method? Ask a question, draft some hypotheses and see what you learn? A lot of my work is testing hunches. So, as a recommendation for the overall mindset-- I’d ask folks to try and adopt a “test and learn” attitude. Successful work is also finding out what you don't know! 

Lastly, I’d recommend we talk about how we are going to receive, review and action feedback from members.  I’m a Taurus, I love to be right (and I often am) - AND in the work of building systems for actual people, it’s also important work to try and set aside the “I win, you lose” mentality. I can’t help but quote a useful Brene Brown mantra when it comes to self-talk. “You’re here to get it right, not to be right.” It’s a long-winded way to say, as community leaders it’s our job to listen to what the people say they want and organize to meet that need within reason. For example, if a community organization’s leadership team says, “Our members want oranges!” and when you speak to members they say, “Actually, we want a cat cafe from this community.” Leadership has to take that feedback, attempt to remove ego and build bridges within the experience between oranges and towards cat cafes.  This is one of the most clarifying things that mutual aid taught me-- the function of mutual aid asks the community what their needs are and organizes to meet that need and that need only. We could all learn something from the simplicity of that function. 

Anja: I have more of a career question now, which is: how did you come to find yourself leading companies through building their communities and "corporate" cultures? 

Marianna: In terms of work, I’ve always considered myself a “Jack of all Trades”.  I've worked in retail, restaurants, event production and even helped to produce two very low budget independent films that no one has ever seen.  My path to community work was not a straight line and, looking back, I can see that what drew me to all my previous career paths was people and a deep desire to understand them and help them meet their needs. 

The truth is I didn’t even realize Community was an option as a career path. When I landed my first community job, I was like “I love this. It’s so amazing, I feel like I’m tricking someone to get paid to work like this?!” 

It’s something I’ve always done even without realizing it had a name. Like, in high school I organized the biggest blood-drive the school had ever seen.  I like to rally people, organize folks, facilitate and hopefully set people up for an enjoyable experience. 

Anja: Segueing from your early blood drive success, earlier on in the pandemic I saw you get super involved with mutual aid work in the city, mostly supporting parents in need. How did your experience with mutual aid influence your outlook on community-building?

Marianna: Since I come from the brand-building community world, the sheer simplicity and direct action to meet community members' needs sort of made my head explode! The simplicity! 

Quite literally, folks who needed toilet paper, green veggies, hand sanitizer would ask for that and then the Mutual Aid leaders would organize to meet that need and only to meet that need! I have been a part of organizations that want to put bells and whistles on the process of listening, understanding and then taking action to meet a need. My biggest takeaway was: maybe it can be simpler. 

Anja: That is so true, companies love bureaucratizing impact initiatives like… “Hold on let’s not launch this critical aid until the branded tote bags are printed and delivered!” And most of the time, people really do just want the TP and leafy greens. 

So, many companies have been under a significant amount of strain in the last year as they deal with the uncertainty of operating a business in COVID times - and a significant number of those companies have, knowingly or unknowingly, passed that strain down to their employees. If we are looking out to a slightly more certain future, how do you recommend we begin repairing that strain? 

Marianna: I wish I had a magic wand to fix all this emotional strain! And since I don’t, I think the answer does require more work. Leaders and people in positions of power urgently need to take time to look within - like, deep within themselves to understand their own emotional landscape with real relentless honesty. Can leaders (myself included) work to  understand our own emotional triggers, our own traumas (big and little T) and examine how those can sometimes show up in how we lead or how we choose to build organizations? The next part of that is to recognize that everyone who works with us also has their own emotional dowry (as Ester Perel calls it). How can we build more responsible boundaries between leader and employee and between teams and customers? Maybe it’s dreamy or maybe it’s possible but, I believe that building structures with knowledge of your own emotions might create a more certain future. 

Also, print a Feelings Wheel! I use mine constantly. 

If you would like to discuss community building with Marianna directly, you can find her on the net here, or on Instagram here.  

** As I write this, it is forecasted to be 97 degrees in New York today, and last week in the Pacific Northwest it reached 117 degrees, breaking their local records. The term Global Warming is overapplied and misunderstood to the point that it may need to be shelved from the public lexicon for a while in order for people to understand the depth and breadth of urgent climate issues, which less wealthy regions and post-colonial nations have already been dealing with for some time. It is also well-known at this point that Big Oil and the companies that scaffold them (including our governments) have long known the unavoidable negative effects of their business and production practices; knowledge that has not hindered or dictated their growth plans. I am not here to tell you that the bottle you forgot to recycle yesterday is causing the Pacific Northwest to bake - we have long since debunked the “personal responsibility” scapegoat. But what I am here to say is that the cumulative practices of your everyday life by way of your investments, your business decisions, your advocacy, are nearly your only power in this fight, and that our cumulative actions together, as a community, will be the ones that tip the scales. 

If you have a moment, check out this global network of solution-oriented climate projects, and if you’re looking for some learning this summer, Slow Factory’s Open Education curriculum is online for your viewing. Don‘t forget to make a donation, and please meditate on one of my favorite quotes from their co-founder, Céline Semaan Vernon:

“Everything you make returns to the earth as either food or poison.”

2017 Photo by Twitter user Alex Wellerstein @wellerstein , remains relevant in 2021