Stewardship Chapter 6
Upsetting Expectations:  The Emotional Work of Stewardship

We need to be sure that we are personally choosing stewardship and not acting out of obligation or desire to please.

Choice is real when:

• We have found a good business or organizational reason for proceeding.
• We can clearly define our customers and can identify the unique value we bring them.
• We can be specific about the results we need to stay healthy and meet our obligations to those who finance us.
• We have named the principles we commit to and will guide any change.

To surrender is to accept that good things can happen without needing to control them.  Acceptance is to simply see what is real without having to color it, fix it, or soften it.

Stewardship is the choice to unravel this connection between control, safety, and success.

Our first instinct is to want to engineer change (to focus on what is outside of us).

If there is no transformation inside us, all the structural change in the world will have no impact on our institutions.

Dependency is the belief that my safety, self-esteem, and freedom are in the hands of other people.

Adults place their autonomy in the hands of others by choice.

It is the willingness to place our survival in others' hands that fuels the engine of patriarchy.

Our willingness to reevaluate our expectations is the first step in implementing stewardship.

We cannot create partnership or foster empowerment within our own unit if we continue to relate to those above us as parents.

The Wish for Dominance

Dominance fulfills the which to be in control.

Our own wish for control has to be owned before we are ready to be serious about stewardship.

A certain percentage of people do not want to claim their autonomy.

The way to renegotiate contracts is to accept the dominance and dependency that live deep within ourselves and others.

There is a dependent and autonomous part of each of us.  There is also a dominant and yielding part of each of us.

Accepting this places the problem in our control and implies hope for those who seem to resist the ideas of partnership and empowerment.

The expectations we have of dominance are that we are entitled to unstated emotional wants (compliance, loyalty, and gratitude).

Normally unstated wants from those around include:

• Expectations of a relationship
• Which get expressed in expectations of a boss
• A boss's reciprocal expectations of a subordinate
• Service/Staff person's expectations of a client

Emotional wants represent questions and doubts about our life that other human beings cannot fully answer.

Choosing stewardship is the choice to say no to others' desire for you to claim control and in exchange offer them protection.

Creating a social contract based on partnership and empowerment means saying no to others' wishes for protection and relinquishing our claims for control.

To claim stewardship, to claim our freedom even as an act of service, is a destabilizing act.

When we tell subordinates we can no longer take care of them, we also need something to offer.  What we are offering is real choice in defining an organization that has purpose and meaning for them.

"Choice in exchange for a promise.  both important, both offered up front Stewardship chosen. Democracy rediscovered."

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Block P.  Stewardship:  Choosing service over self interest.