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Chapter 19 - So, What’s Your Job?

Carmen S Lowry

Synopsis

Rhea is a humanitarian worker in Lebanon tasked with creating a support and training plan for female caseworkers who work with Syrian refugees. The training would help caseworkers better understand their jobs through more detailed job descriptions. She encounters struggles as she attempts to implement a participatory process that involves invitational strategies. These strategies encourage caseworkers to critically examine their roles and responsibilities, listen to other perspectives that may be at odds with their roles, and make job descriptions that reflect their everyday tasks, but still meet organizational standards.

Keywords: Invitational Rhetoric, Perspective, Gender-based Violence, Accountability, Job Descriptions.

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Key Takeaways

  1. Invitational processes can be experienced as empowering and instructive if organizations invite employees to share their experiences, find ways to value those experiences, and create opportunities for employees to inform organizational policies.
  2. Invitational processes need to be managed so that different perspectives and critical feedback can be shared in supportive ways.
  3. Working in different languages can be difficult when using invitational processes because it might be easy for people to feel disrespected if others don’t agree with them.
  4. Senior management may be resistant to using invitational processes during planning meetings because outcomes cannot be decided prior to the meeting but rather emerge from the meetings.
  5. Invitational processes allow for individuals to speak from their own experience and claim the knowledge that emerges from their own lives.

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