Are you a fundamentalist or a believer?

Somewhere in your professional life you’ve probably run across someone who vehemently resisted change. Turns out there’s a term for these sticks-in-the-mud: author Anthony Muhammad calls them fundamentalists. And they have a lot to teach us about why the career ladder is so pervasive, and what we can do to advocate for a more exploratory approach to our professional lives.

In Transforming School Culture, Muhammad outlines four types of participants in school culture, based on research at 34 schools:

• Fundamentalists - people who resist change in favor of keeping things as they are. Muhammad describes a fundamentalist as a “me first as opposed to a we first individual.”
• Believers - the group locked in battle with the fundamentalists for a more positive culture. Believers want what’s best for students and are flexible as things change. In career river terms, these would be your fellow navigators, open to twists and turns in service of the larger ecosystem.
• Tweeners - this group is relatively new to the school and hasn’t yet chosen their side in the culture battle. They are actively targeted by fundamentalists for recruitment.
• Survivors - these are the people suffering from burnout, whose objective is simply to make it through the day.

Thanks for reading Explore Your Career River! Subscribe for weekly inspiration.

Crucially, this framework is based on the different groups’ objectives, not just their behavior. As Muhammad points out, in some cases both a believer and a fundamentalist may resist change. However, the believer would be opposed because the change wouldn’t be good for their students. The fundamentalist, meanwhile, would be against it simply because they want things to stay the way they are.

My mind immediately sparked with ideas when I first learned about Muhammad’s framework. I felt like I had been given the keys to understanding people I’d encountered who were resistant to change. And if you can understand someone’s motivations, you can find the right levers to change their behavior.

While Muhammad is focused on school culture and serving students, this framework applies to work culture and our motivations in our professional lives. When it comes to career expectations, the ladder is a fundamentalist viewpoint. Fundamentalists are invested in the system that they have mastered. This shows up in a number of ways, including the idea that you need to “pay your dues” (because that’s what the fundamentalist did).

If you’re reading this, it means you’re interested in an approach to careers that prioritizes the intrinsic value of exploration over extrinsic status awards for continual linear advancement. If you are more we first than me first, you’re a believer — but that comes with responsibility.

I had to take a hard look at the mirror when Muhammad pointed out that believers, by and large, were silent instead of challenging their colleagues’ viewpoints.

Believers “appeared to be content to work with their students and control their own spheres of influence instead of actively engaging their colleagues in philosophical debates about what they felt was best for students.

“If schools are going to effectively create positive and productive cultures, the Believers simply have to become more active and aware of the day-to-day assaults on the very belief system that they adhere to.”

Meanwhile, the fundamentalists are the most active in speaking out and organizing to protect their beliefs. Our work culture will be better if more people feel comfortable embracing twists and turns, rather than worried about the repercussions of a much-needed step back or pause. That’s up to all of us to find ways to showcase the alternative to the ladder.

Muhammad says that in most cases, fundamentalists can be reformed. Crucially, he found fundamentalists “tended to be more emotional rather than rational.” They’re committed to their beliefs because they’re emotionally invested in them. This becomes clear when a question about why things are done a certain way is answered with “because that’s the way we’ve always done it.” That’s not a reason — that’s a security blanket.

One last note from Muhammad for all the believers out there who are worried about how colleagues and others might respond if you start speaking out: “remember that in mathematics the product of two negatives is positive, and the product of a negative and a positive is negative.”

“If negative people view you negatively, that’s positive. If negative people view you positively, that’s negative. I would argue that we spend too much time worrying about the arbitrary opinions of others, rather than being true to our authentic selves and our core values.”

Happy navigating,
Bridget

Thanks for reading Explore Your Career River! Subscribe for weekly inspiration.

🔗 Learn more:

• Transforming School Culture (Solution Tree) - professional development resources
• Understanding the Framework for Change (Anthony Muhammad, Cognia)