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

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sources quickly to understand and fight a new disease. Moreover, these agencies were part of the massive public health bureaucracy overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services. Since the department was headed by a presidential appointee, major policies and budget allocations had to fit the president’s agenda, which did not give prominence to health problems affecting gay people.

Medical researchers trying to garner support from their universities for work on AIDS didn’t fare much better with their institutions. The application process for research grants was cumbersome and time-consuming. Neither could they persuade academic journals to speed up their process for publishing research results so that the initial findings could be disseminated to other researchers.

At least some public health and medical professionals were able to make headway in the part of the system they did control. By the summer of 1981, James Curran, an epidemiologist at the CDC, was chairing an interdepartmental task force on the emerging disease. The task force allowed experts from several disciplines to trade information and analysis. The NCI finally convened an AIDS task force in April 1983. Marcus Conant persuaded other doctors affiliated with the University of California at San Francisco and San Francisco General Hospital to help him cobble together a clinic that he hoped could attract federal funding.

Monitoring and evaluating results is an important means of checking on how well organizational systems are fulfilling the mission. A key step is establishing reasonable performance measures for the organization as a whole, for subunits, for teams, and for individuals. Useful evaluation processes are 360-degree feedback (Tornow, London, and CCL Associates, 1998), the balanced scorecard (Kaplan and Norton, 1996), program evaluation (Wholey, Hatry, and Newcomer, 1994; Patton, 1997), and responsibility contracts (Behn, 1999). If designed well, these processes should help everyone in the organization focus on what’s important. Leaders should also ensure that the evaluation results are used to improve organizational performance.

Ensuring That Organizational Culture Supports Mission and Philosophy

Organizational culture is an organization’s greatest cohesive force and often its most formidable barrier to change (Feldman and Khademian, 2002). A culture consists of shared assumptions about

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how things should be done here, stories we tell about ourselves, the rituals we observe. Founders, of course, have a prime opportunity to shape mission and values; those who attempt to alter an existing culture have to build awareness that old assumptions and approaches are not working and develop understanding of how the best of the old culture can be preserved in new ways of working. To nurture effective and humane organizations, leaders should foster a culture of integrity, inclusion, learning, and productivity.

A culture of integrity promotes expectations that everyone will align his or her behavior with the principles and values that the organization professes. It is essential to what Kim Cameron and Arran Caza (2002) call “organizational virtuousness,” discussed later in this section. To foster a culture of integrity, leaders:

•Make a public commitment to ethical principles

•Emphasize mission and stewardship

•Emphasize personal responsibility

•Help people in the organization analyze ethical implications of their work and make plans for resolving ethical conflicts

•Make hard decisions supporting ethical principles

•Reward ethical behavior

•Model ethical behavior (Wallace and White, 1988)

Other leadership skills that promote a culture of integrity are included in the ethical leadership section of the next chapter.

In the early years of the AIDS crisis in the United States, a stronger culture of integrity would have helped blood banks respond more quickly to warnings that the AIDS virus had contaminated blood supplies. Nonprofit blood banks objected to the high cost of donor screening and blood testing, and government regulators hesitated to require it. Interestingly, commercial manufacturers of blood products decided early on to screen donors, because they realized that competitors could offer a safer product and therefore lure away their customers. An estimated twelve thousand people became infected with HIV as a result of contaminated blood transfusions administered during the two years that U.S. blood banks and government regulators were dragging their feet over screening and testing (Shilts, 1988, p. 599).

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A culture of inclusion rests on the assumption that people from diverse backgrounds are valued and supported in the organization. Leaders who seek to build such a culture need to recognize that the organizational culture is strongly influenced by the dominant culture in which it is embedded. As these leaders seek to employ and work with people from diverse cultures (co-cultures within the society, or cultures outside the society), they must understand how the dominant culture operates, and how it influences the organizational culture. They need a comprehensive view of diversity that embraces gender, ethnicity, religion, physical, ability, class, sexual orientation, age, and possibly other characteristics. They require awareness of which cultural competencies organizational members may need and ensure those competencies are developed. Douglas Hicks (2002) suggests that leaders establish an environment of “respectful pluralism” that allows members to negotiate diversity and engage in diverse forms of expression, so long as coworkers do not feel coerced or degraded as a result. Diversity training programs should be selected with care. A promising approach is “diversity self-efficacy” training, which helps people in an organization develop and use strategies for promoting “positive diversity climates” (Combs, 2002). The training emphasizes mastery, modeling, and observational learning.

If diverse people are to be recruited to work in an organization, it must tailor recruitment efforts to different groups—for example, by placing advertisements in media that serve a particular community or using personal connections with a specific group. Leaders also should ensure that those who are a minority within the organization are given the challenging assignments, support, and rewards for achievement that will enable them to perform well (Morrison, 1992). Leaders must work to break down the stereotypes and traditional personnel practices that prevent people in an organizational minority from achieving senior positions.

Advocates of inclusion sometimes argue for special efforts to hire and retain women and members of minority groups on the grounds that these people manage or lead differently from men belonging to the majority culture (Rosener, 1995). Studies of actual managerial and leadership behavior in organizations, however, show only a small difference between men and women;

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fewer studies have measured differences other than gender, but there is evidence that management and leadership behavior is affected far more by organizational culture and the nature of the work to be done than by one’s gender or minority status (DiTomaso and Hooijberg, 1996; Freeman, 2001; Vecchio, 2002). The case for inclusion rests more soundly on justice and legal grounds and on contribution to organizational image, learning, and networking. Women and members of minority groups can be expected to bring their own experiences and perspectives to bear on the organization’s work, and they will have ties to stakeholder groups that may be important to accomplishing the organization’s goals.

A learning culture prompts people in an organization to undertake the inquiry and analysis that indicate how well activities are advancing the mission and how to improve those activities. A culture of productivity prompts members to use this learning efficiently to achieve improvement. In a culture of learning and productivity, people share the assumption that change is to be expected and embraced. Everyone is expected to be a problem solver and learner; experimentation and learning from failure are valued. Current practices are critiqued in order to achieve improvement.

Edgar Schein highlights several additional practices and assumptions that support a culture of learning and productivity (Schein, 1992):

•Viewing the environment as manageable, though not controllable.

•Viewing truth as arrived at, or approximated, through a pragmatic discovery process. The discovery process should aim at discovering tacit knowledge as well as recorded information (Tsoukas, 1996).

•Viewing the world as complex and interconnected.

•Focusing on individuals and groups, tasks and relationships.

•Creating multiple communication channels. In a hierarchical organization, leaders have to pay special attention to opening channels across organizational levels (Crossan, Lane, and White, 1999). Also important is creating means of integrating the learning that comes from these multiple channels—for example, by es-

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tablishing cross-functional teams or using tools such as dialogue and cognitive mapping, which were described earlier in this chapter (Crossan, Lane, and White, 1999; Allen and Cherrey, 2000).

•Emphasizing diversity and unity (which is also important for fostering a culture of inclusion).

•Focusing on the midterm: long enough to “test whether or not a proposed solution is working but not so much time that one persists with a proposed solution that is clearly not working” (Schein, 1992, p. 369).

These practices and assumptions are nurtured by norms of mutual support and appreciation, openness, humor, inclusion, high expectations, and attention to core values (Fairholm, 1994). Also important (and especially so in a fast-paced dot com environment) is a climate of empowerment, in which frontline employees and teams have the information and flexibility they need to do their jobs well (Quinn, Faerman, Thompson, and Mcgrath, 1996; Brown and Gioia, 2002). Leaders should be especially attentive to the “margin”—a part of the organization that is “renegade,” or at least unusual. Edgar Schein argues that vital learning may be occurring in these fringe areas precisely because they are less constrained by organizational norms (Schein, 1992). Russ Marion and Mary UhlBien offer important insights about how to distribute intelligence throughout an organization. They advise leaders to cultivate interdependencies within and outside, to catalyze bottom-up network construction, to seed good ideas in receptive parts of the organization, and to think systematically (Marion and Uhl-Bien, 2001).

Karl Weick, Kathleen Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld offer guidance for creating a learning culture in “high-reliability organiza- tions”—those operating effectively in a high-pressure, high-stakes environment. Their research indicates that these organizations emphasize five practices:

1.Preoccupation with failure; intense scrutiny of errors and weaknesses

2.Reluctance to simplify interpretation

3.Sensitivity to operations; people have an “integrated picture” of what is going on

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4.Commitment to resilience—for example, through use of improvisation

5.Fluidity of decision making (Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld, 2002)

Stakeholder analysis and involvement can be an especially helpful method of promoting organizational learning. As people listen to diverse stakeholders, they build a much richer understanding of the organization’s performance, ideas for improvement, and understanding of the relationships among stakeholders.

The World Business Council on Sustainable Development, for example, has convened focus groups consisting of diverse stakeholders to learn how they view the relationship between business and the environment and to gather ideas for WBCSD projects. The Hennepin County planning office asked diverse stakeholders to participate in the task forces and working groups that developed reports and recommendations for the African American Men Project. The Vital Aging Initiative was a means of connecting the University of Minnesota to a group of stakeholders—the “young old,” who had not previously been high on the university’s agenda. The initiative has prompted parts of the university to learn about this group and begin incorporating this learning into their programs. When the Vital Aging Initiative became the Vital Aging Network in 2000, the organizers began holding monthly topic meetings (focusing, for example, on financial security or creativity), which attract a variety of people with a stake in vital aging: service providers, children of aging parents, and people going through a midlife or retirement transition, as well as older adults.

Mary Crossan, Henry Lane, and Roderick White also recommend using Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “creative destruction” to stop institutionalized learning from hampering new learning. At times, leaders must set aside established procedures so as “to enact variations that allow intuition, insights and actions to surface and be pursued” (Crossan, Lane, and White, 1999, p. 533). In the monthly VAN meetings, for example, at the beginning—before any experts speak—participants are asked to reveal something about their own experiences and hopes in connection with the meeting topic. Susan Annunzio advises leaders interested in culture change to ask the unaskable and speak the unspeakable (Annunzio, 2001).

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Edgar Schein’s recommendations for revealing culture are noted in our Chapter Two. Manfred Kets de Vries suggests using exercises that are based on these questions: If your organization were an animal, what would it be? If it were a person, what would it look like? Management scholars Stephen Osborne and Kate McLaughlin ask groups to draw cartoons depicting their current organizational culture and outlining the desired culture.

One important method of shaping culture is ensuring that critical decisions (such as budget allocations, hiring and promotion, and program priorities) support desired principles, norms, and styles. Attention to critical decisions may be especially important in the difficult work of changing a preexisting culture. Whereas people in an organization may discount exhortations and even persuasion, they pay attention to where the money goes and who’s being hired, fired, or promoted. Additional advice for shaping culture can be found in Edgar Schein’s Organizational Leadership and Culture (Schein, 2004), Anne Khademian’s Working with Culture (Feldman and Khademian, 2002), and Gareth Morgan’s Creative Organizational Theory: A Resourcebook (Morgan, 1989).

Being a Politician and Role Model

Perhaps the most effective tool a leader can wield for accomplishing an organization’s mission is his or her own behavior. Many leadership analysts (prominently, Kouzes and Posner, 2002) note that effective leaders are exemplars of the organization’s mission and values. They manifest the behavior they seek from others; they tell stories that reinforce desired norms; they communicate excitement and confidence about the organization and the people in it. They convey a sense of what’s important by what they pay attention to (Osborn, Hunt, and Jauch, 2002). As Margaret Wheatley says, they become broadcasters of the organization’s vision (Wheatley, 1999).

Leaders also need to stay in touch with other people in the organization (by showing concern or interest in them) to ensure that their efforts to be an exemplar do not turn them into a distant, idealized figure (De Pree, 1992; Sosik, Avolio, and Jung, 2002). It’s important to remember that the people being led may have preferences in leadership style; however, three “transformational” leadership styles—charismatic influence, intellectual stimulation, and

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individual consideration—seem to be generally effective (Zaccaro and Banks, 2001). When cultural change is required, leaders also need to undo old, dysfunctional organizational values and commitments through their behavior. They have to exercise the political skills described in the next chapter so as to achieve adoption and implementation of desirable policies. Jean Lipman-Blumen (1996) urges leaders to deploy every resource they’ve got, from social skills to positional power on behalf of the organization’s mission.

Becoming Adept at Dealing with Internal and External Change

Organizations must change if they are to survive, but they can choose how to cope with change. They might even choose to shape the changes rather than just adapting to them (Terry, 2001). The World Business Council for Sustainable Development is not involved in helping businesses adapt to global warming; the council is trying to help people become more adept in developing ecoefficient businesses. The Vital Aging Network is involving educational institutions, along with older adults and service providers, in redefining a major demographic change.

To help their organizations become adept at dealing with change, leaders:

•Constantly monitor internal and external environments

•Emphasize operating values appropriate to the stage of the organization’s life cycle

•Are entrepreneurial and experimental

•Concentrate on team building and collaboration

•Plan for succession

Monitoring Internal and External Environments

Ongoing stakeholder analysis and involvement is an important source of information about developments inside and outside the organization. Information also comes from opinion polls, news media, and expert reports. Leaders may need to set up a continuous formal process of tracking change, but they are also well advised to draw on informal relationships with stakeholders and others who are well situated to observe or predict changes (Osborn, Hunt, and Jauch, 2002).

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Emphasizing Operating Values According to the Life-Cycle Stage

In the beginning, an organization is fueled by passion, inspiration, and determination; key values are likely to be initiative, creativity, and all-out effort. At the outset, efficient and reliable systems may not be needed or even possible, but as time goes on people in and outside the organization expect some stability to set in. Thus efficiency and reliability become key values. In maturity, the organization may need shaking up again, and so renewal should become a key value.

For example, in launching the Business Council for Sustainable Development, Schmidheiny didn’t waste time trying to establish a permanent organization; he even contributed his own money to pay for convening participants. When physicians and gay activists joined in organizing the Kaposi’s Sarcoma Education and Research Foundation in California, several of the physicians themselves initially paid the rent for the foundation office. In both cases, as the organizations grew they needed more formal structures and systems.

For more insight about values and organizational life cycles, see Robert Quinn’s Beyond Rational Management (1988). For advice about leading and managing in a crisis, see Ian Mitroff and Gus Anagnos’s Managing Crises Before They Happen (2000) and Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe’s Managing the Unexpected (2001).

Being Entrepreneurial and Experimental

Entrepreneurialism and experimentation are likely to come naturally at the beginning of an organization. As the organization stabilizes, leaders may need to make a special effort to sustain some of the same zeal and creativity that contributed to initial success. Developing and sustaining a learning culture is vital, of course. Dedicating resources for experimental projects has been found to be effective in public and nonprofit as well as business organizations (Light, 1998). Preventing management routine from becoming cumbersome and rigid is important. Leaders should be ready to discard routine, and even “core” competencies that are no longer core (Kouzes and Posner, 2002; Leonard and Swap, 2002). Studies conducted by Andrew Van de Ven and his colleagues indicate the importance of involving sponsors, mentors, critics, and “institutional leaders” in innovative projects. (An institutional leader is a top-level power broker who can be counted on

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to emphasize the interests of the organization as a whole.) The researchers urge organizers of innovative projects to build in various ways to capture learning from the projects and to guard against overselling the likelihood of success (Brown, 1991; Van de Ven, Polley, Garud, and Venkataraman, 1999). Entrepreneurs also take advantage of new technologies. The Vital Aging Network developed its electronic listserv and Website to help manage the network, link older adults to opportunities for learning and service, and furnish tools for vital aging advocates (social workers, employers, and educators).

Emphasizing Collaboration and Team Building

As the degree of change and instability rises, centralized authority and control become increasingly less functional for organizations. Leaders have to work even harder to be sure that leadership is developed throughout the organization and that teamwork and collaboration are emphasized. They should seek to develop a “constellation of co-stars,” rather than a small cadre of top positional leaders (Heenan and Bennis, 1999). They should recognize that power most often resides in “sharing, in compromising and negotiating, in helping and seeking help, in working together, in entrusting others, in altruism and self-sacrifice” (Lipman-Blumen, 1996, p. 241). They may also need to allow some productive individuals to work on their own (Locke, 2003).

In developing collaborative responses to change, leaders help people in the organization focus on what will stay the same as well as what needs changing. Robert Terry (2001) and Peter Drucker (Hesselbein and Johnston, 2002b) urge leaders to emphasize stability of core purpose and values in order to facilitate organizational change. Other analysts note, however, that even the mission may need revising in light of a changed environment; core values may stay the same, but how they are expressed might be altered. As members of the organization focus on needed change, they need the opportunity to express their concern and to participate in shaping the change (O’Toole, 1995). Leaders should recognize the need for a “neutral zone” (Bridges and Mitchell, 2002) between old and new ways of operating. The neutral zone is a place of fluidity and ambiguity where people can come to terms with the loss of old certainties, reassess what is truly important, and be-