If you like where you are; if your organization is all
about itself and maintaining stability & control at the centre, don’t read
any further. I won’t convince you to change.
You are the person who tunes the radio to their favorite station and
then pulls the dial off the radio so it can never be changed.
Enjoy your music.
But if there is even a hint of impulse toward serving
someone or some purpose outside the space your building and people occupy, keep
reading.
Businesses often state they are about innovation for the ‘marketplace’. Churches say they are about the ‘mission’. Retailers focus on the ‘customer’. Non-profits express their existence is for
the ‘client’ or a broader social purpose.
Most state their organizational impulse is for a purpose or people beyond
themselves. Wonderful.
However, if your impulse is truly beyond yourself, do your current
organizational structures and processes reinforce & support that?
Within our North American culture we pride ourselves on
our ability to change with the times. We
believe we are innovative and flexible enough to adjust to the needs of our customer
or target audience. Yet in the business world the field is littered with
once-great, well known companies who have talked the talk but could not take
the walk. Blockbuster, Eastman Kodak,
Sears and Yahoo are but a few of the big-name examples of companies with commitments
to change but who did not adapt well. I
can identify a few non-profits who started with the most altruistic and noble of
impulses, but as they grew in size they grew in complexity and along with it
found they became bloated or myopic, and inevitably off course.
Much of the reason for this is that with time and
success, people in groups, whether as businesses or non-profits, think less and less
about the further development of ways to serve their original ‘outward’
impulses, and more about how to preserve what they have. (By the way, that’s a
natural tendency of all human beings). They
will walk and talk right up to the edges of change, but taking the step over into
real change is rare. Leadership talks
about innovation in order to keep serving the needs of the person or customer,
but leaderships' walk usually reinforces it’s about keeping the business or the organizations' status quo. When you see a company driven by
stock price over principle, or a non-profit influenced more by its donor-base
than the needs of the people it serves, you have an indication of what I mean. No one likes hearing this because we all live
in the illusion that we are change-agents.
Our culture regularly streams out the message of change, but our collective
rhetoric proves we no longer get the point.
Talk about change has become a cheap and easy way to maintain leadership
currency.
But true leadership is about identifying and declaring
current reality in light of where you want to go and then being bold enough to
address the gap.
Conduct a brief audit of your own organization:
·
How do we expend our primary personnel resources?
·
What does our budget indicate to an outsider as
our priority areas?
·
Where do most of our activities take place and
what does that say about who and how we serve?
·
What gets celebrated in our organization and
what does that indicate about what we value?
·
What are the top 3-4 areas where leadership
expends their energy? How does that
define the core ‘impulses’ of our organization?
(Would you be bold enough to
use these questions as a 360 of your organization?)
If the assessment reveals a significant gap, let me
propose a solution:
An ongoing perpetual strategy for maintaining focus on your
core impulses is to identify and release the people within your organization
who already have the capacity for reflection, ingenuity and innovation. I can tell you right now that there are
people within your organization who are connected to your original impulses and
who think about it...a lot. How are they
heard? Is there a place for them? They often exist a little ‘in orbit’ around
the hairball of your organizational inertia. Sometimes you might feel they work for you and
against you all at the same time. They
ask too many questions. They might even
be complainers. Their ideas are just a
little too off the wall. “Can’t they
ever just put their nose to the grindstone and do the job”??
Yet they are a key to ensuring that you make whatever
changes are needed to stay true to your original organizational impulse. Rarely do the answers to needed change & innovation
come from corporate strategy sessions.
Rather, they come from within individuals who are not only set free by
the organization to think innovatively, but who carry within themselves the
capacities for ingenuity. What you need to do as a leader is find a way to let them
be themselves to examine, criticise, dream and innovate. Come into their space once in a while and
hear what they have to say. Spin them
off in orbit on a retreat, or in specialized task groups. Ground them in the organizations’ core
impulse, and then release them to discover how to stay true to that. Feed them with the freedom of thought and
innovation towards a grounded purpose.
The Jesuits, of all organizations, have the most to say
to all of us about releasing ingenuity.
They were/are one of the most decentralized yet focused organizations on
earth. (You can read in detail about their
founding principles and extremely dispersed organizational philosophy in a book
by Chris Lowney, a former Jesuit himself who worked in the banking and
non-profit industries. His book is “Heroic
Leadership”, 2003, by Loyola Press). For
them, ingenuity is the readiness to ‘cross the world’ at a moments’ notice in pursuit
of a good opportunity. It is the willingness
to work without a script and the creative embrace of new ideas. It is not achieved merely by developing the
skills leadership pundits always champion for innovation: imagination, adaptability, creativity, flexibility
etc. Rather, it is about adopting the demeanour, attitudes and worldview that make creativity and adaptation
possible. What is that stance? It is an “optimistic
view of the world thoroughly shot through with (divine) love. Ingenuity
blossoms when the personal freedom to pursue opportunities is linked to a
profound trust and optimism that the world presents plenty of them. Imagination, creativity, adaptability and
rapid response become the keys for finding and unlocking these opportunities” (pg
128 – Heroic Leadership).
Ingenuity is NOT however the blind pursuit of anything
new and creative. It is in pursuit of a broader
purpose or a core impulse that ingenuity takes on meaning. The Jesuits had a purpose to ‘help souls’ and
left it up to the ingenuity of their people to make that happen. What resulted was a global kaleidoscope of endeavours,
but all in pursuit of this purpose.
Your organization may grow to get involved in many
things, but do they serve the core impulse of why you exist? Reject the impulse of inertia. As the leader, restate your organizations’ core
impulse and release the ingenuity of your people to help you regain that ground
and innovate your way back (or forward) towards the accomplishment of your
primary purpose for existence.
Harv Matchullis
