Crosby B.C., Bryson J.M. - Leadership for the Common Good (2005)(en)

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Exercise 3.2. Assessing Your Team, Cont’d.

Good Average Poor

Trust and Spirit

1.Achievement is rewarded.

2.Adversity is overcome.

3.Team leaders recognize they are empowered by other team members.

When you are done with the ratings:

1.Identify two or three of the items that you have rated good. Bring them to your group, and celebrate!

2.Now identify one or two that you have rated poor and for which you have some ideas for improvement. Bring them to your group and develop mutual strategies for improvement.

public health officers, and a few politicians and their aides created new organizations and reoriented existing ones. The AIDS Research and Education Foundation in San Francisco and the AIDS Medical Foundation in New York were examples of new organizations created specifically to fund research into the cause and prevention of the disease. Gay activists in New York launched the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982, and before long the organization was a social service agency staffed by hundreds of volunteers who answered a telephone hotline and operated a “buddy program” for people with AIDS. Meanwhile, the emerging AIDS coalition pressured the National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, city health departments, and university research departments to set up new programs and reorder priorities to stop the advance of the disease.

When Stephan Schmidheiny sought to mold a business message for the 1992 Earth Summit, he organized the Business Council for Sustainable Development, which he thought would be a temporary organization of fifty CEOs from around the world. After the summit, however, the members decided that the council should continue, and in 1995 it merged with the World Industry Council for the Environment to become the World Business

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Council for Sustainable Development. The council is now a coalition of 170 international companies and has developed a global partnership network of forty-five national and regional councils and other organizations.

In both the African American Men and the Vital Aging cases, change advocates created new programs within existing organizations; their leadership focused on helping their institutions respond to opportunities and threats in their environment. In all four cases, change advocates developed new interorganizational networks; that is the focus of the second part of this book.

Whether leaders are launching a new organization or reshaping an existing one, they must perform three crucial overall leadership tasks:

1.Paying attention to organizational purpose and design

2.Becoming adept in dealing with internal and external change

3.Building inclusive community inside and outside organizations

Each includes several more specific tasks, which are distilled from the vast literature on organizational leadership. The preponderance of research and writing on this subject has focused on hierarchical business organizations, and often on senior executives or managers. Increasingly, scholars are concerned with leadership in nonprofit and government organizations and with development of leadership throughout organizations of varying design. We highlight the leadership tasks that seem to be important regardless of organizational type and recommend sources for information about leadership in specific types. We emphasize the need to create organizations that can thrive in a complex, interdependent world—that is, imbued with leadership capacity at all levels. The approach presented here has much in common with several other contemporary approaches—specifically, servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1977), authentic leadership (Terry, 1993), connective leadership (Lipman-Blumen, 1996), systemic leadership (Allen and Cherrey, 2000), complex leadership (Marion and Uhl-Bien, 2001), and shared leadership (Pearce and Conger, 2003).

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Paying Attention to Organizational Purpose and Design

An organization’s purpose and connected core values serve as the collective raison d’être for everyone there, as a way of framing reality and as a guiding compass for choosing direction. Continual, explicit attention to purpose and core values is especially important in any large, decentralized organization.

Purpose and core values may be captured in formal mission and philosophy statements. (We’ve also come across at least one organization that has a “passion statement,” expressing the concern or desire that prompts the mission.) To foster the long-term sustainability of the organization, the values should be in some way an expression of the fundamental virtues of justice and mercy (Dutton and others, 2002; Locke, 2003). Organizational purpose is enacted through goals and strategies, vision of success, governance and administrative systems, and a supportive culture. A leader has a special responsibility for being a politician and role model for carrying out the organization’s purpose and core values.

Developing Mission and Philosophy Statements

A mission statement succinctly communicates what the organization is, the need to which it responds, whom it serves, its basic strategies, and its uniqueness. The organization’s core values and basic principles and standards may be incorporated into the mission statement or else presented in a separate philosophy statement. The mission statement should be action-oriented and aligned with organizational mandates and stakeholder needs and expectations. It should be short and memorable, yet possess “breadth, durability, challenge, and distinction” (Angelica, 2001, p. 6). It should indicate how the organization contributes to the common good and call forth what Rosabeth Moss Kanter (2002) calls the members’ “better selves.” What’s more important than any formal mission statement, however, is that people throughout the organization know what the mission is and, as Collins and Porras say, “live it in their toes” (1997). Robert Terry concludes that mission work is really identity work; the mission should communicate the organization’s essence. Although, the mission is a guide for the future, he recommends phrasing it in present tense (2001, pp. 153–156).

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David Day (2001) suggests that a successful organization needs multiple, or at least flexible, identities to deal with “an increasingly complex and changing environment” (p. 391).

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) has a relatively brief mission: “To provide business leadership as a catalyst for change toward sustainable development, and to promote the role of eco-efficiency, innovation, and corporate social responsibility.” The mission is presented on a Web page that describes the council as a “coalition of 170 international companies united by a shared commitment to sustainable development via the three pillars of economic growth, ecological balance and social progress” (http://www.wbcsd.org/about us/index.htm). The names of both WBCSD and the Vital Aging Network serve as slogans that communicate their missions.

Leaders are often responsible for clarifying how a part of an organization contributes to the overall mission. For example, Hennepin County government has a general mission to serve individuals, families, and communities in the county, but Cunningham’s Office of Planning and Development has to have a clear idea of what it specifically needs to do to support the mission.

Formal mission and philosophy statements can be put together by a small group of founders, a representative team, or the entire membership. It may also be wise to involve representatives of external stakeholders. Involving more people is time consuming but also increases the likelihood of widespread buy-in and allows everyone to contribute ideas. The process we recommend begins with stakeholder analysis and identification of mandates, followed by identification of mission elements. Exercise 3.3 offers guidance for doing a simple stakeholder analysis; Exercise 3.4 offers a process for developing a mission statement. Additional guidance is available in Bryson (2004) and Bryson and Crosby (2003). The use of the oval mapping technique in agreeing on mission is described in Resource B.

Developing Goals and Strategies

Mission and philosophy statements identify organizational directions and ends. A goal is a general statement further specifying the organization’s mission. Goals are “obviously good in their own

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Exercise 3.3. Stakeholder Identification and Analysis

Step 1. Participants convene in small groups.

Step 2. Each small group brainstorms a list of key internal and external stakeholders and prepares a flipchart that arrays them as illustrated here. (External stakeholders are those over whom the organization has little or no control.)

External Stakeholders

Internal Stakeholders

_________ _________

_________ _________

_________ _________

_________ _________

_________ _________

Step 3. After a small group has identified stakeholders, the group should fill out the following worksheet for each stakeholder. In filling out the worksheet, the group should pay attention to different perspectives and needs on the basis of gender, ethnicity, physical ability, age, religious preference, and other characteristics as relevant.

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Exercise 3.4. Mission Development.

Facilitator instructions:

Step 1. Ask participants to answer these six sets of questions silently as individuals, not as a group.

1.Who are we? What is our purpose? What business are we in?

2.In general, what are the basic social and political needs we exist to fill? Or what are the basic social or political problems we exist to address?

3.In general, what do we want to do to recognize or anticipate and respond to these needs or problems?

4.How should we respond to our key stakeholders?

5.What is our philosophy, and what are our core values?

6.What makes us distinct or unique?

Step 2. Ask everyone to record his or her answers on separate large Postit notes or a half-sheet of paper, one answer apiece. Then aggregate individual answers by placing or taping them to a wall and clustering similar answers. In other words, if an individual has several answers to question one, he or she would use as many Post-its as there are answers (if the person has six answers in total to the six questions, he or she would use six Post-its all told). Alternatively, have people silently brainstorm answers to the questions on prepared worksheets, and then go around the room in round-robin fashion recording answers onto flipchart sheets.

Step 3. Once answers are recorded, either on clustered Post-its on a wall or on flipchart sheets attached to the wall, give each participant eighteen sticky green dots and six sticky red dots (three-quarters or one inch in diameter). Tell people to use three green dots and one red dot per question. For each question, ask everyone to place a green dot by the three answers that he or she deems most important for inclusion in the mission statement. Ask everyone to place a red dot by the one answer—if any—that he or she cannot abide.

If the group is reviewing an existing mission statement, you may not need to ask all of the questions listed above. It may be enough to hand out a copy of the existing mission and use the round-robin process to record answers to the following questions:

1.Is our current mission dated? If so, how?

2.What changes in the mission do I propose?

The material resulting from this exercise can then be turned over to the person charged with drafting a mission statement.

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right, and do not seem to need further elaboration. Typically, they are morally virtuous and upright and tap the deepest values and most worthy aspirations of the organization’s culture” (Bryson, 1995, p. 269).

Goals are often operationalized as objectives, which are measurable and possibly linked to a timeline. Strategy is the means by which goals are achieved. They therefore link mission, goals, policies, programs, and actions. It is extremely important to ensure that strategies include plans for obtaining necessary resources (staffing, training, equipment, supplies, travel budgets) for the organization to function.

Organizations express goals and strategies in various ways. Here is how the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, for example, refers to its strategic directions:

•Business leadership: to be the leading business advocate on issues connected with sustainable development

•Policy development: to participate in policy development in order to create a framework that allows business to contribute effectively to sustainable development

•Best practice: to demonstrate business progress in environmental and resource management and corporate social responsibility and to share leading-edge practices among our members

•Global outreach: to contribute to a sustainable future for developing nations and nations in transition (http:// www.wbcsd.org/about us/index.htm)

Compared to mission, philosophy, and goal statements, strategy development is more likely to be a source of friction, since mission, values, and goals are usually general enough that diverse people can accept them but the specificity of strategies can generate intense disagreement because of their implications for the organization’s image, methods, power distribution, and resource allocation. In the early days of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, for example, board members hotly debated whether the organization should pursue mainly service strategies or add a prominent advocacy role.

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Constructing an Inspiring Vision Embodying

Organizational Goals and Key Strategies

Leaders help people in the organization develop a clear picture of what it would look and feel like if it were achieving its mission. In Margaret Wheatley’s terms, the vision should become a “force field” that runs through the entire organization, generating energy for putting the vision into action (Wheatley, 1999). We talk more about creating and communicating an inspiring vision to guide interorganizational change efforts in the next chapter, and much of what we say there applies to creating and communicating a vision of organizational success. Quite often, development of a fullfledged vision (and even a precise mission statement) is not realistic in the beginning. People in the organization may need to focus on developing and implementing strategies that they can agree on before clarifying a vision to sustain them over the long haul (Bryson, 1995). This approach can help ensure that the vision is what Hively calls “an umbrella within which there are multiple definitions of aspects of success, based on the needs and visions of key stakeholders” (Hively, personal communication, July 2003). The vision can be captured in a written statement or in a variety of media (logos, film, stories, presentations at an annual conference and other events). Exercise 3.5 offers guidance for constructing an organizational vision statement. Other advice and approaches (such as construction of a “vision collage”) can be found in our chapter in Carol Weisman’s book on retreats (Bryson and Crosby, 2003) and in Burt Nanus’s Visionary Leadership (1992).

Aligning Design with Organizational Purpose

Leaders ensure that the organization develops flexible, transparent, just, and compassionate governance, administrative, and employeedevelopment systems that develop and sustain the organization’s core competencies (Light, 1998; Collins and Porras, 1997). The organizational systems should also allow conflict to surface, so that the organization is able to learn from varying perspectives, support organizational members’ efforts to carry out the mission, and respond to stakeholder needs. (Helpful ideas for conflict management systems are available from the Association for Conflict Resolution Website, http://www.acresolution.org.) Training and development programs should include leadership development and be tailored

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Exercise 3.5. Constructing an Organizational Vision of Success.

A vision of success should include the organization’s:

•Mission

•Basic philosophy and core values

•Basic strategies

•Performance criteria

•Major decision-making rules

•Ethical standards

To develop the vision, assemble participants in small groups to answer the following questions individually. Each group should share and discuss its answers and then develop a group report that can be discussed in a plenary session. After the group reports are presented and discussed in the plenary, someone can be appointed to prepare a draft vision statement. The draft should be circulated to key stakeholders and modifications made as appropriate to achieve general agreement.

The questions:

1.What is the organization’s mission?

2.What are the organization’s basic philosophies and core values?

3.What are its basic strategies?

4.What are its performance criteria?

5.What are the major decision-making rules followed by the organization?

•What processes and procedures are followed to make major decisions? to make minor decisions?

•What is decided centrally?

•What is delegated?

•How are exceptions handled?

6.What ethical standards are expected of all members?

to the type of organization and people’s role in it. A particularly effective approach to training is to tie it directly to organizational tasks or change efforts (Raelin, 2000).

All too often, internal systems actually undermine mission accomplishment. In the AIDS case, for example, the administrative systems within large government public health agencies such as the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) prevented the agencies from providing substantial re-