“It’s important to have a deep curiosity about the world”: Meet Abe Greenspoon
In this series, we are spotlighting our community members. In the Adaptive Space, we make room to receive the insights our community members have to offer. This series is where we will discover each other’s gifts! We will be spotlighting one story per week. Please engage with our star of the week by participating in the conversation below.
This week we are highlighting a member from the Building Belonging Mighty Network, Abe Greenspoon! Although he is not a member of our own Adaptive Space, Abe is a veteran of Theory U and is happy to share his knowledge with our group and help facilitate discussions of the content to foster an environment for change.
Name: Abe Greenspoon
Lives: Ottawa, Canada
Affiliation: Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC)
Superpower: Facilitation
How did you come across your professional path?
I joined the public service back in 2009. At the time, I was working in the private sector at an American bank. It was a really tough time for banks, right at the height of the economic crisis. There were a lot of people losing their jobs, and the government at the time was hiring, so I applied. It sounded interesting, even though I had never really considered working in government. I had studied political science, but I was more interested in an academic career at the time, so I was working to sort of buy myself some time to figure out how I was going to get into academia and maybe get my PhD. But the government hired me, and I started at Industry Canada, which was a sort of economic development organization that ran programs in grants for the private sector to support innovation. Since then, I’ve gone from being unsure if government was the place for me to knowing very deeply that government and public service is really where I want to be. I’ve realized that the philosophy of government as a social contract really resonates with me. So it’s interesting that I fell into this opportunity unintentionally, and now it really feels like a calling.
Who was the first person who believed in you?
There are really two people who first believed in me. Around 2015, I was hired by Natural Resources Canada, our Department of Natural Resources, and they had a plan to create a program called Free Agents. The idea of the program was to create a sort of internal gig economy inside the public service, to let employees work as “cloud workers” so that people could exist and work as internal consultants and do projects under many different contracts rather than having a long-term gig. I really liked that idea and wanted to contribute to it, so I pitched myself as being someone who could be a part of that program. The woman who was running the innovation lab took a chance on me. She knew a little bit about me, but she really believed that I could be an influencer and make a difference. She convinced the assistant deputy minister to hire me, and the senior manager of the organization eventually believed in me enough to put me in charge of it. The program ended up becoming very big, and still exists today. I ran it for about four years, and along the way he reinforced by capabilities and my responsibility. So it really started with the woman who hired me and continued with the man who ended up being responsible for the program later on.
How do you define success for yourself?
It always depends for me on the context that I’m in. I usually measure my success by my ability to support people and enable them to accomplish the things that they want to accomplish, because someone has to look out for public servants. It’s definitely always been my desire to have there be parts of an organization — if not the whole organization — looking out for employee experience. My mission has been internally-focused. I try to think about the culture of organizations, how they evolve, how people exist in them, and what organizational structures and designs are beneficial for people and their wellness and productivity inside them. So success for me has often been about how I can contribute to that. Other times, success is about implementation and facilitation. I like making sure that people are connected to the things and opportunities that they need. In a lot of ways, other people’s success is often a measure of my own.
What is your daily routine like?
Lately I get up every morning around 7 a.m., and do a half-hour cycling class on Peloton. Then I grab breakfast and jump right into my day. Usually my days are about eight hours, and made up of a lot of Zoom calls and video conferences. Every chance interaction or informal interaction now has to be formalized, so there are a lot of meetings. But after that, the evenings are for eating dinner and watching television or playing video games to relax. And I try to get outside a little bit throughout the day — it’s really easy to forget that I need to get outside and get fresh air sometimes. Then I usually go to sleep around 11 o’clock or so.
What’s been the most important skill that you’ve developed along this path?
I don’t know if this is a skill, necessarily, but curiosity is what comes to mind for me. A desire to learn about people and about things and situations, and how to do that really well, has been important. It’s important to have a deep curiosity about the world — nonjudgmental, just seeking to understand.
What’s been your greatest challenge?
My biggest challenge is in some ways is patience with the system. There’s a lot broken in our systems, from specific organizations to the whole of government to society to the global system. I see systems existing in a way that doesn’t make sense to me, and it makes me frustrated. I find it hard to be patient. I’m looking for people to change, to behave differently, and to want to be kinder and more compassionate. So I get frustrated when I feel like people are stuck and I can’t “unstick” them.
Alternatively, what’s been your greatest reward?
The reward has been to see people succeed. Going back to what I mentioned before, I really appreciate people’s success, especially people who I believe have good intentions and whom I’m philosophically aligned with. So when I see good people, who are kind and compassionate and also curious and open-minded, succeed and get rewarded for what they do, that’s a great reward. I’ve had the privilege and opportunity to support people in a lot of different ways, so when I see the people I’ve helped succeed, I always feel rewarded for that.
Tell us a story that demonstrates who you are.
I had the opportunity before I was in my current role to build a small team — there were just three of us. And I wanted to bring this idea of self-management to our work, which meant that people were responsible for deciding their own responsibilities. They could decide what their own work would be, how it would be done, and how we could bring our ideas together so that they made sense in the context of what the organization needed, what we needed, and what we felt was important. The way that the team formed was really organic, and was based a lot on the three of us contributing what we wanted to contribute and supporting each other. I wanted the team to be non-hierarchical, so the idea of having a manager was something that I thought a lot about. I had the responsibility of hiring them to join my team, but once they were there I wanted them to have the responsibility to determine their own jobs as much as possible. And then I became more of a facilitator than a manger. It was a really great experience, and a really fun space to be in. I hope I get the opportunity to do it again sometime, because I would love to keep building teams where decision-making is not the responsibility of one person.
What were/are you hoping to gain from your community under the Theory U framework?
Initially, I was hoping to be part of a movement of change. I was hoping to be part of a community of people who were interested in a new way of being in the world, and I felt like there was a vision about what the future could look like — a world where everyone belongs. That vision really resonated with me. And it still does. So I’m here to continue to work with those people to figure out what that looks like and how to welcome and integrate new people into the community. It’s useful for me to continue being in this community because it lets me bring it back to my work, too. I like trying to figure out how to integrate some of the practices back into the work I do in public service.
What Theory U practices have you found most helpful in your professional life?
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