4D1-00-Create A Vision Statement for the Organization - Please comment or make stronger the attached vision statement

Chapter Three Leadership Tasks in a Shared-Power World: Team and Organizational Leadership

[Leadership is] people taking the initiative, carrying things through, having ideas and the imagination to get something started, and exhibiting particular skills in different areas.

Charlotte Bunch

A healthy work community is key to professional happiness, to organizational loyalty, and to the level of cooperation across boundaries that is essential in the Information Age.

Gifford Pinchot

Sooner or later, those seeking to accomplish major change need to assemble and sustain productive work groups or teams and develop effective, humane organizations. They require an array of team and organizational leadership skills.

Team Leadership

A team might begin as an informal working group and progress to a more formal arrangement, examples being a task force, steering committee, planning team, or standing committee. They may come together for a relatively brief period of time to complete a specific task, or they may last for years (although the membership might change).

Teams of gay activists and health professionals organized the conferences and public demonstrations aimed at focusing the attention of medical researchers and public officials on the emerging AIDS crisis. Teams organized stakeholder consultations sponsored by the World Business Council on Sustainable Development and put together council publications. A steering committee oversaw the African American Men Project; teams prepared reports and organized events. Teams helped organize the Vital Aging Summit.

Teams may have an appointed leader or leaders, such as a coordinator, project director, or cochairs. They may choose their own coordinator, director, or chair and parcel out other leadership functions among themselves. They may also rotate leadership functions.

To create and sustain productive work groups, leaders should attend to the satisfaction of individual group members, group cohesion, and task achievement (Johnson and Johnson, 2003). Many authors refer to this work as facilitation and coaching (Bacon, 1996; Rees, 1997; Schwarz, 2002). Let's consider how leaders accomplish this through recruitment, communication, empowerment, and leadership development of team members.

Recruitment

Team members should be diverse enough to bring needed perspectives, skills, connections, and other resources to the team's work, yet they should share commitment to the team's purpose and be willing to cooperate to achieve it. An especially important skill in diverse teams is the ability to accommodate various communication and work styles (DiTomaso and Hooijberg, 1996).

When assembling a team to initiate or oversee a change effort, leaders would be wise to conduct a basic stakeholder analysis. The first step is identifying the key individuals and groups affected by proposed changes or having access to needed resources. The second is clarifying what stake these people have in the change. What exactly is their interest? What expectations might they have of any change effort? Team members can then be systematically recruited to represent, or at least connect with, those stakeholders. (Additional advice on using stakeholder analysis to organize groups involved in a change effort is in Chapter Six.)

For example, as Gary Cunningham put together his recommendations for members of the citizen group that would oversee the African American Men Project, he knew he needed African Americans who had rich connections and credibility in their own ethnic community. He needed businesspeople interested in a diverse workforce, representatives of government agencies, executives of nonprofit organizations that worked with African American families, respected academics, and people with political clout. He obtained commitment from accomplished individuals from all these categories. The result was a steering committee that had prestige in the eyes of many stakeholders and access to important networks for implementing project recommendations. As he assembled teams to work on research reports, he sought out academic partners with a reputation for sound research and a commitment to achieving better outcomes for African American men. Members of these teams could be expected to produce research seen as legitimate by many stakeholders.

Of course, leaders cannot always control the membership of their teams. Team membership may be mandated in general terms or quite specifically by law, policy, or someone with authority over the team. Even then, however, it may be possible to add members, or at least bring in consultants when their special perspectives or skills are needed. Regardless of how people are recruited for the team, the leader should take time to build a shared understanding of the group's mission and ways of working together. Sometimes it will become clear that a group member cannot agree with the others on mission or methods, and it is time to part. For example, gay activist Larry Kramer finally resigned from the Gay Men's Health Crisis board in 1983 after his prolonged and unsuccessful effort to convince other board members to be more confrontational in pressuring New York City officials to provide AIDS services.

In general, the size of a working group should be small; seven to nine members is ideal. If the group has to be larger—in order to represent all the key stakeholders, for example—subgroups are needed to carry out many of the team's tasks. Also important is bringing in new members as needed. Team leaders need to ensure that new members are brought up to speed on what the team has accomplished, how it operates, and what it plans to do. They may consciously mentor newcomers for a time.

Communication

The most essential team leadership skill is fostering communication that aligns and coordinates members' actions, builds mutual understanding and trust, and fosters creative problem solving and commitment. Such communication requires an atmosphere of openness, information sharing, and respect (see Kouzes and Posner, 2002). It combines seriousness and playfulness. It requires attention to verbal and nonverbal communication, to message sending and message receiving. We recommend several methods. Regardless of the method chosen, a team leader should be sensitive to right timing and right setting. As an example, a leader should ensure that seating arrangements facilitate free and equal exchange of ideas.

Active Listening and Dialogue

Traditionally, leaders have been advised to concentrate on the messages they send—make them clear, consistent, positive, credible, and tailored to audience members. The advice is still important, but increasingly those who study groups and organizations advise leaders to become exemplary “active listeners” and practitioners of dialogue. Active listeners concentrate more on receiving messages. They use questions, body language, and verbal feedback to encourage others to express their ideas, feelings, and concerns. They check with the speaker to be sure their understanding is accurate. They seek out information about the person's needs, about the team's cohesion, and about the tasks the team is trying to accomplish. They seek to understand how the person's ties to various groups and cultures affect his or her participation (Stivers, 1994).

Practitioners of dialogue set up team conversations with simple ground rules (Schein, 1993; Senge and others, 1994; see also Senge, 1994). First, group members are asked to take turns presenting their ideas or proposals. Second, as an individual participant presents an idea or proposal, the other members are expected to practice suspension, hearing a speaker out instead of offering judgment or other reactions. As part of suspension, they also try to reflect on their reactions and examine the assumptions on which they are based. Third, once all the ideas have been presented, group members might be encouraged to talk about the assumptions they found themselves making and seek clarification. Finally, participants are invited to advocate a particular course of action and come to consensus on what should be done.

Joyce Fletcher and Katrin Kaüfer explain how leaders can help groups move to “generative dialogue,” in which group members cocreate ideas (Fletcher and Kaüfer, 2003, p. 24). Typically, they say, groups begin by “talking nice” to each other and then move to “talking tough,” in which members offer their perspectives and engage in debate. By practicing the skills of “self-in-relation”—empathy, listening, relational inquiry, revelation of personal vulnerability, and tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty—leaders can move the group through these stages to “reflective dialogue,” in which participants reflect on their own perspectives and begin to realize they can learn from the other group members, and then finally to generative dialogue.

The Institute of Cultural Affairs recommends a process that moves from focusing on facts about a situation to reflecting on related emotions, feelings, and associations, thence to considering the values and meaning of the subject, and finally to deciding on a response to the situation. For additional information, see www.icaworld.org and http://www.icaworld.org/usa/usa.html.

Managing Conflict

Leaders of diverse teams can expect conflict to occur within the group. Indeed, leaders will want to encourage a clash of views and ideas, with the aim of developing the most effective and synergistic problem solutions. What they don't want is personalized conflict that results in group members' discounting each other's ideas and motives and mistrusting each other. The active listening and dialogue methods presented here can help prevent such destructive conflict. Other methods include Tom Rusk's ethical persuasion process (Rusk and Miller, 1993; Crosby, 1999, p. 68), Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication process (1999), simulations and role plays (Mikolic and others, 1992), and the reconciliation process developed by the National Coalition Building Institute in Washington, D.C. (see Brown and Mazza, 1991; Crosby, 1999). The NCBI process should be especially helpful for teams that include members from social groups with widely differing power and status. Tom Fiutak, our colleague at the University of Minnesota, recommends a multistep process that begins with airing of perspectives on the source or causes of the conflict; it progresses to examination of underlying assumptions and expression of feelings about the conflict, then focuses on option building, and finally moves on to development of an action plan (Crosby, Bryson, and Anderson, 2003).

Oval Mapping

Another method of helping team members freely share and explain their ideas for accomplishing a task or resolving problems is the oval mapping technique described in Resource B. The technique can be used to help a team or organization decide on strategies, goals, missions, and action plans. It promotes effective intragroup communication through several features:

• Everyone's ideas are included.

• Linkages with other ideas are made visible.

• Consequences of pursuing the ideas are identified.

• Requirements for implementing the ideas are identified.

With the help of an able facilitator, the process allows a group to separate ideas from individuals and discuss them as part of a system of options, issues, and goals.

The methods we have introduced, when practiced with patience and honest engagement, promote equality and connection; honor thoughts, opinions, and feelings; foster mindfulness of one's own mental processes and group dynamics; and increase group creativity and learning. They are part and parcel of the empowerment work described later in this chapter. The increasingly prevalent virtual teams—that is, groups mostly linked together by electronic communication—are likely to require even more attention to communication (Antonakis and Atwater, 2002). Wherever possible, at least some face-to-face interaction should supplement electronic forms (see Kostner, 1994).

Some team members—especially those from an individualistic culture that prizes quick action—may object to the patience and time required for these methods. They may have to be reassured that efforts to garner diverse ideas and align team members around a shared purpose will pay off with higher-quality group decisions and products (see Wheelan, 1999).

Matching Communication Style and Content to Group Type and Needs

Team leaders need to remember that every group is unique and full of unpredictable behavior. At the same time, leaders should be sensitive to common stages of group development.

As Susan Wheelan points out, fledgling teams with a designated leader are likely to respond best if the leader uses a somewhat directive communication style; as the team moves toward greater cohesion and shared leadership, the style should become far more participative (Wheelan, 1999). The leader also should provide basic understanding of group process and development—for example, by noting that the group should expect conflict and that conflict handled constructively helps the group become more cohesive. Some teams, however, do not have a designated leader and may choose to share leadership roles from the outset. Some groups also come together with a relatively high level of trust (on the basis of prior relationships, reputation, or long experience with teamwork). These groups may resist directive communication and explanations about group process; the challenge with these groups is to try new working habits or to welcome and educate newcomers.

Team leaders are also often responsible for communicating with groups outside the team. They may need to report to someone or a group that authorized the team in the first place. They may need to promote the group or highlight its progress to several external audiences in order to garner support and resources for the team.

Empowerment

We define empowerment as helping each group member claim and develop his or her power in service of the group's mission and promoting a sense of shared leadership in the group. To do so, team members need a shared understanding of the team's mission, goals, decision-making procedures, rules, norms, work plan, and evaluation methods. They also need to know which roles and responsibilities they are expected to carry out. They need to see leaders and followers as mutually empowering.

A team may have an assigned mission; even some goals, roles, and norms may be specified in advance. The team, however, should decide for itself how to modify, supplement, or supplant its assignments. In the case of a team established by some outside authority, a key early task of a designated team leader is to ensure that the team has enough authority to carry out its work (see Houghton, Neck, and Manz, 2003). An important leadership task is ensuring that the group begins with at least a general sense of what its mission is. Full-fledged goal setting and role clarification may be postponed until group members have worked together awhile, but “group norming” should happen early. The “snowcard” technique for establishing or revisiting group norms is offered in Exercise 3.1. In preparation for doing the exercise, a team leader may want to mention that productive work groups establish norms related to innovation, task achievement, and mutual support (Wheelan, 1999). Examples of norms related to innovation include “open to quirky ideas,” “OK to fail,” “learn from failures,” “open to different practices,” “laughter and fun encouraged.” As with methods described in the previous section, snowcards allow everyone's ideas to be considered; they give a picture of which ideas are most supported by the group. Snowcards are a quick method too for gathering and organizing team members' proposals for mission, goals, and subtasks.

When a group initially comes together, the norms are more aspirations than genuinely accepted unwritten rules. What is helpful about explicitly identifying desired norms early on is that they are likely to be constructive; almost all the groups we have facilitated, for example, identify norms related to openness, sharing of information, mutual respect, safety for risk taking and disagreement, and cooperation. Those constructive norms are a touchstone that a leader can emphasize as the group continues; importantly, they are a means whereby a leader can activate team members' self-concepts tied to openness and self-transcendence (see Lord and Brown, 2001). One of the most important leadership tasks is to consistently model the norms the group has adopted.

Team leaders should also encourage group members to agree on basic decision-making procedures. Considerable evidence supports the value of consensus as a method of ensuring that group support for a decision is high (L. Thompson, 2001; Johnson and Johnson, 2003). Since achieving full-blown consensus can be extremely time consuming, the wisest route may be reserving consensus for decisions about mission and overarching goals and strategies, and even then using methods that define consensus as the wholehearted support of the many and acquiescence of a few. For decisions that are not subject to consensus, executive decision making by one person or a small group with consultation is usually best (Johnson and Johnson, 2003).

Exercise 3.1. Using “Snowcards” to Identify and Agree on Norms.

1. Ask the group the question, What norms or standards would be good for us to establish to help us accomplish our work together? Think of the “unwritten rules” that might improve performance, inspire commitment, or enhance satisfaction.

2. Have individuals in the group brainstorm as many ideas as possible and record each idea on a separate “snowcard,” such as a Post-it note, 5″ × 7″ card, or oval or square of paper.

3. Have individuals share their ideas in round-robin fashion.

4. Tape the ideas to the wall. As a group, remove duplication and cluster similar ideas in categories. Establish subcategories as needed. The resulting clusters of cards may resemble a “blizzard” of ideas—hence the term snowcards.

5. Clarify ideas.

6. Once all the ideas are on the wall and included in categories, rearrange and tinker with the categories until they make the most sense. Place a card giving the category name above each cluster.

7. If needed, help the group decide which clusters or individual norms have strong group support (for example, by giving each person a certain number of sticky dots to apply to the norms he or she deems most important).

8. As a group, decide how to monitor and reinforce the norms.

9. After the exercise, distribute a copy of the norms listed by categories to all members of the group.

Although it's certainly logical that groups would clarify their mission and set achievable goals before they agree on strategies, they may actually be able to agree more easily on strategies and action plans. Often people do not fully know what their mission and goals ought to be until they create viable strategies and actions (Eden and Ackermann, 1998; Huxham, 2003). Regardless of the sequencing of these decisions, an action plan is needed. An action plan should include attention to stakeholders, the means of acquiring needed resources, assignment of team member roles and responsibilities, a timeline for task completion, and evaluation methods. Assigned roles and responsibilities should relate to individual team members' skills and other resources; they should be challenging, but not so challenging that team members feel overwhelmed. Cooperative work (by the entire team or subgroup) should be built into the plan to foster creativity, synergy, and mutual support. If team members are representing stakeholder groups, the timelines should include time for consulting stakeholders and apprising the team of stakeholder feedback. In many cases, the team needs a strategy for relating to other teams and to a larger organization of which it is a part (Zaccaro, Rittman, and Marks, 2001).

Often a team realizes that members need to upgrade their skills or develop new ones. The action plan then should include opportunities for training, including training in group process skills. Evaluation of the team's work should be ongoing through built-in opportunities for constructive feedback on individual and group performance. Many experts on group dynamics recommend taking time at the end of every group meeting to review how well the group observed its own norms and offer ideas for improvement (Wheelan, 1999). It may be helpful to appoint at least one team member to monitor the group's communication patterns to report on how closely the team approaches optimal interaction, in which about two-thirds of verbal comments focus on task achievement and most of the remaining third on support of group members (see Wheelan, 1999). To be constructive, both individual and group feedback should focus on specific behavior, highlight accomplishment as well as failure, avoid blaming and personal attacks, be tied to group tasks, and emphasize specific remedies for problems.

Groups undertaking complex, long-term projects are likely to benefit from one or more retreats to help focus on their mission, vision of success, and action plan (see, for example, Weisman, 2003). These groups should also schedule celebrations to mark attainment of milestones.

Leadership Development

To maximize the contributions of team members, the team leader(s) should seek to develop leadership capacity in everyone, so that leadership tasks such as recruiting new team members, modeling active listening, and reinforcing norms of openness and self-transcendence can be taken on by many if not all group members. Tasks such as planning and conducting meetings or coordinating specific projects can be rotated among group members. Task sharing fosters a more egalitarian atmosphere, allows people to contribute particular expertise, and enables everyone to be in a supportive follower role at least part of the time. Sharing leadership tasks may also help a diverse group become more cohesive, since members from differing cultures have a chance for prominence (Chen and Van Velsor, 1996). Building leadership capacity among team members is also a means of grooming successors for the time when those who have had prominent leadership roles in the team move on to other responsibilities. A team that is expected to last for some time may benefit from crafting a leadership development plan for itself.

To foster shared leadership, Fletcher and Kaüfer emphasize the importance of developing relational skills. They suggest building on the skills team members have learned through family or community involvement, examples being “a welcoming stance toward change; an ability to focus long-term versus short-term goals; and an ability to integrate thinking, feeling, and acting into practice” (Fletcher and Kaüfer, 2003, p. 33). Charles Manz and his colleagues offer techniques of self-leadership that foster shared leadership (Manz and Sims, 2001; Houghton, Neck, and Manz, 2003). Of course, it is also important to remember that more egalitarian societal cultures are more supportive of shared leadership than other cultures.

Trust and Spirit

The recruitment, communication, empowerment, and leadership development methods discussed so far all contribute to the trust building that so many team leadership analysts identify as one of the most important ingredients of a productive team (Useem, 1998; Kouzes and Posner, 2002). When a group first comes together, trust may hardly exist among the group members unless they have previous connections. (In some cases, of course, previous connections might actually undermine trust!) Team leaders should constantly assess the level of trust in a group and tailor communication and other activities accordingly. James Kouzes and Barry Posner suggest a number of ways in which leaders build trust:

• Making their values, ethics, and standards clear, and then living by them

• Keeping their commitments and promises

• Trusting those from whom they seek trust

• Going first

• Being open and sensitive to the needs of others

• Demonstrating competence

Team spirit grows in the medium of trust, but it also refers to a shared enthusiasm for the group's mission and a belief that the team can accomplish great things together. Leaders foster team spirit by ensuring that the team has challenging tasks that can be competently performed (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). They also let every individual shine as well as celebrate the team, blend challenge and support, help team members learn from defeat and difficulty, remind everyone of why the team's work is important, and help the group laugh at itself.

In a team with a high level of trust and spirit, each member knows he or she can rely on the others to fulfill their roles competently and reliably, verbal and nonverbal cues are easily deciphered, and productivity amazes observers and even the members. These teams achieve what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called a state of flow (1990).

The importance of trust and spirit was evident in two teams connected to the African American Men Project and the Vital Aging Initiative. Gary Cunningham asked one of us (John) to use various stakeholder analyses to help devise a viable political strategy for the African American Men Project. John and Gary had worked together before at the University of Minnesota and remained friends, supporters, and admirers after Gary left to become head of planning for Hennepin County. Neither Gary nor John knew exactly how to use stakeholder analyses for the purpose at hand (several new techniques actually had to be invented to help with the effort), but Gary had faith in John's ability to come up with something useful, and John had faith in Gary's ability to manage key stakeholder input, expectations, and commitments. John then recruited Karen Lokkesmoe, a doctoral student at the university, to help, and Gary created a team with whom John and Karen could work. The team consisted of Hennepin County staff members (one was also a former student of John's) and community activists. The team of Euro-Americans and African Americans became a high-performing team, in part by directly confronting racial tensions in the group; it did create a political strategy that won the day with the steering group and the county commissioners. The group was justifiably proud of its accomplishments.

In the Vital Aging case, one of us (Barbara) agreed to work with Jan Hively and two other women to explore how the Humphrey Institute of Public affairs might contribute to the Vital Aging Initiative. The other two women were Sharon Anderson, the institute's director of professional development, and Shelby Andress, an alumnus of a Humphrey Institute seminar and a retired senior member of a Minneapolis research organization. Barbara and Sharon had teamed up many times over the preceding twenty years, and all four women knew each other well and had great respect for each other's skills. In an initial meeting, the women engaged in free-flowing information exchange about the initiative, possible connections with Humphrey programs, and personal perceptions of vital aging. In subsequent meetings, we agreed to take on a specific project: organizing focus groups in preparation for the Vital Aging Summit. We parceled out roles and responsibilities and agreed on timelines. We stayed in touch between meetings via e-mail, phone calls, and face-to-face conversations. The focus groups were completed, and results were compiled and submitted to the summit organizers.

Team meetings were not perfect by group process standards; not everyone was able to be on time, and we seldom reviewed the quality of each meeting. The group did, however, coalesce around a task, laid groundwork for future work together on the challenging Vital Aging project, and supported each other in actually carrying out the task. We checked periodically on how satisfied each person was with the group's progress. We laughed a lot, sympathized with each other, and celebrated by having tea together at a local restaurant. The team rated high on individual satisfaction, cohesion, and task accomplishment. We fit Susan Wheelan's profile of a high-performing work group (Wheelan, 1999).

There is a wealth of guidance on developing and sustaining productive work groups. Among the best are Facilitation Resources (Anderson and others, 1999), developed by a team at the University of Minnesota; the classic Joining Together (Johnson and Johnson, 2003); The Skilled Facilitator (Schwarz, 2002); Creating Effective Teams (Wheelan, 1999); Super-Leadership (Manz and Sims, 1989); The Leadership Challenge (Kouzes and Posner, 2002); Encouraging the Heart (Kouzes and Posner, 1999); and The Change Handbook: Group Methods for Shaping the Future (Holman and Devane, 1999). The books by Wheelan and Johnson and Johnson are especially helpful in tailoring leadership style and activities to the stages of a group's development. Several chapters in Shared Leadership, by Craig Pearce and Jay Conger (2003), highlight the benefits of shared leadership in teams and the environmental and task conditions that promote shared leadership (Houghton, Neck, and Manz, 2003; see also Hooker and Csikszentmihalyi, 2003). You can also use the team assessment in Exercise 3.2 to highlight leadership tasks that need attention.

By building a productive work group, change advocates are able to harness individual energies to accomplish much more than team members could achieve separately. The power of a team, however, is often constrained by the organization to which it is connected. An organization is a means of coordinating individual and group efforts around some purpose, such as producing a set of goods or services or promoting an innovation. Organizations are typically larger, more formal, more enduring, and more powerful than teams. They become even more powerful by linking with other organizations in networks. The next section focuses on the main tasks of organizational leadership.

Organizational Leadership

Advocates of major policy change must ensure that effective and humane organizations are created, maintained, or restructured as needed. In the AIDS case, gay activists, concerned physicians and 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.

Exercise 3.2. Assessing Your Team.

Rate your team.

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.

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 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).

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). 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/aboutus/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 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).

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.)

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.

Step 4. The group should discuss the implications of the analysis for the organization's mission.

Step 5. The small groups should assemble in plenary session to report to each other.

  Based on Bryson, J. M., and Alston, F. K. Creating and Implementing Your Strategic Plan: A Workbook for Public and Nonprofit Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.

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 Post-it 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.

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 (www.wbcsd.org/aboutus/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.

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 full-fledged 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 employee-development 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 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).

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?

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 resources 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 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).

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; 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 establishing 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 Uhl-Bien 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 organizations”—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

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). 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 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 eco-efficient 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).

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 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 become receptive to change (Bridges, 1980; Bridges and Mitchell, 2002).

British businesswoman Anita Roddick is the founder of the Body Shop, a business that exemplifies the attention to social and environmental impact that the World Business Council for Sustainable Development promotes. She reports on her company's collaborative approach to change. When the company had to restructure, “we talked to everyone in the organization…. For people who could not continue with the organization, or who didn't want to, we offered retraining packages for the entire family…. We set up an Entrepreneur's Club; we provided money to seed people's own ventures, to work with the community, to come back as a consultant to the company. And we worked with everyone in the community—health care workers, social workers, police, psychologists—so they understood the process” (Hesselbein and Johnston, 2002a, p. 25).

Leaders may need to overcome the expectation that power should be concentrated in positional leaders. Raymond Gordon reminds advocates of shared leadership that this expectation is often deeply embedded in the culture of a traditionally hierarchical organization (Gordon, 2002; Drath, 2001). In such a culture, leaders are likely to have to blend directive and shared styles, at least for a time. Furthermore, if the culture places the highest value on individual achievement, then leaders need to communicate the value of collective achievement and combat devaluation of relational leadership styles. As Fletcher and Kaüfer (2003) note, this may be difficult when relational styles are associated with those people (for instance, women) who are less powerful in the organization.

Leaders need to think strategically about how and when to involve external stakeholders in a change effort. Despite pressure from San Francisco health professionals in the early years of the U.S. AIDS crisis, the director of the San Francisco health department deferred launching a crackdown on unsafe sexual practices in bathhouses until he could achieve consensus among the main stakeholder groups on that course of action. The result was a stalemate that contributed to the spread of HIV.

Key stakeholders don't always have to be involved directly. Useful information can be gathered through individual interviews, surveys, and role plays. Forming strategic alliances with like-minded external stakeholders can be a way to develop a shared pool of information and other resources for coping with change (Nanus and Dobbs, 1999).

Planning for Succession

Among the changes that organizational leaders should expect is the likelihood of people in leadership roles moving on to other assignments, retiring, becoming disabled, or dying. Replacement leaders must be mentored and developed if they are to assume additional responsibilities (Dalton and Thompson, 1986; Charan, Drotter, and Noel, 2001). In addition to training programs, an organization may need specific policies aimed at facilitating leadership turnover (Taylor, 1987). The transition from one leader or a group of leaders who founded an organization is likely to be especially difficult; a process such as strategic planning may be required to review the organization's mission and accomplishments, focus on strategic issues, and develop new strategies. A key strategy may well be hiring or promoting a set of leaders who have skills and orientations different from those of the old leaders. Ann Howard (2001) offers advice specifically for identifying, assessing, and selecting senior leaders; it is mainly aimed at the corporate world but applies as well to public and nonprofit organizations.

Jan Hively has a personal policy of moving on from an organizational leadership position when she feels “that a different style of leadership is needed to reinforce the organization's capacity for follow through” (personal communication, July 2003). In 2002, she pressed for electing a formal VAN leadership group that could oversee VAN, and she worked to raise funds to pay for a permanent coordinator and other staff. She also made sure that the relationship of VAN to the University of Minnesota was clarified. She moved out of the role of coordinator and became senior adviser and vice-chair of the leadership group.

Building Inclusive Community Inside and Outside an Organization

As innovation consultant Gifford Pinchot points out, creating a sense of community in the workplace has personal and organizational benefits (2002). Community within an organization resides in the network of supportive, synergistic relationships. Leaders nurture internal community by:

• Caring for self and others. Ultimately, leadership is a matter of the heart. Successful leaders are “in love with leading, with the people who do the work, with what their organizations produce, and with those who honor the organization by using its work” (Kouzes and Posner, 2002, p. 399). This does not mean, however, that they must do all the caring themselves; instead, they should establish social networks and supportive programs (such as health and fitness services, mentoring or coaching programs, grief counseling, outplacement services, or annual celebrations) that institutionalize the work of caring and compassion (see Dutton and others, 2002). Roddick urges leaders to give meaningful praise; she would include the amount of joy in the workplace in any measure of organizational success (Hesselbein and Johnston, 2002a).

• Promoting a shared mission and a culture of integrity, inclusion, learning, and productivity.

• Shaking up the hierarchy. Make people on the periphery more central; reduce markers of rank and privilege.

• Developing a “gift economy” and internal markets. As Pinchot (2002) describes it, this combination rewards people and units for giving resources away and encourages them to offer the best services to other parts of the organization.

• Providing resources, including knowledge of group process and organizational dynamics, to help people work together.

• Starting leadership development programs that are appropriate to the type of organization and to people's roles in it.

Leaders build external community by joining other members of the community in solving common problems and contributing to community well-being. This interorganizational leadership is discussed more fully in Part Two; in general it involves building supportive and synergistic relations with allies and partial supporters, wooing neutrals, and struggling respectfully with opponents in particular issue areas.

Roddick explained earlier in this chapter how her company has fostered internal and external community. Conflict between units of the National Institutes of Health during the early years of the AIDS crisis in the United States demonstrates the harm engendered by lack of communal problem solving. By mid-1983 CDC researchers had gathered considerable specimens and other evidence about the incidence and effects of AIDS, and they needed the help of the National Cancer Institute to analyze specimens for clues to the nature of the retrovirus that was causing AIDS. A leading retrovirologist at NCI was far more interested in protecting his own turf, however, than in cooperating with CDC researchers. Additionally, he undermined external community (and impeded progress on identifying the AIDS virus) by hampering the promising research of AIDS researchers at France's Pasteur Institute (Shilts, 1988).

Helpful Tools for Organizational Leaders

Exercise 3.6 can help you assess how well leadership tasks are being performed. To be most useful, the assessment should be completed and discussed by people from all levels and parts of the organization. The assessment can help you identify and understand strengths and weaknesses that leaders need to keep in mind as they use the tools about to be described.

Strategic planning (Bryson, 2004b) and scenario planning (Van der Heijden and others, 2002) are helpful processes for accomplishing the main tasks of organizational leadership. Both help people reframe change so that it is consistent with (or clearly connected to) the organization's history (Bryson, 1995; Burt, 2002). Both can contribute to community building, by involving people from throughout the organization and from outside. John Kotter (1996) offers a useful process of organizational change consisting of eight stages:

1. Establishing a sense of urgency

2. Creating a guiding coalition

3. Developing a vision and strategy

4. Communicating the change vision

5. Empowering employees

6. Generating short-term wins

7. Consolidating gains and producing more change

8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture

Exercise 3.6. Assessing Your Organization.

Respond to these questions by checking one of the three boxes after each:

When you are done with the ratings:

1. Develop a list of organizational strengths on the basis of the items ranked good/well. Note a few of the reasons these items were ranked highly.

2. Develop a list of organizational weaknesses on the basis of the items ranked poor/poorly. Note a few of the reasons these items were given a low ranking.

3. You might also note which aspects of the items rated OK/acceptably need improvement.

4. Referring to the lists can be helpful as people in the organization undertake strategic planning or any other change process.

Ronald Heifetz has developed an approach called “adaptive work,” in which leaders help constituents understand and deal with the “adaptive challenges” they face. He offers advice for managing distress, keeping people focused on the challenges, giving the work to the people involved, and protecting “voices of leadership from below” (Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz and Laurie, 1997). The “quality movement” also offers guidance for improving organizational effectiveness (see Cohen and Brand, 1993).

Several organizational leadership analysts recommend using multiple “lenses” or “frames” to diagnose problems and foster creative solutions (Morgan, 1997; Quinn, 1988; Terry 1993; Bolman and Deal, 2003). For example, Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal (2003) suggest four main frames for making sense of an organization: structural, human resource, political, and symbolic. They offer guidance for integrating the four frames and applying them to particular situations. In his Seven Zones for Leadership (2001), Terry recommends that the leadership approach depend on the degree to which an organization's environment is “fixable and knowable.” His typology is described more fully in Resource C.

The “living systems” frame has received increasing attention from analysts trying to help leaders guide an organization through a chaotic environment (Senge, 1990; Senge and others, 1994, 1999; Eoyang, 1997; Youngblood, 1997; Wheatley, 1999; Allen and Cherrey, 2000; Marion and Uhl-Bien, 2001). Much of their advice is included in our sections on learning culture and adapting to change. Kanter's Evolve! and Annunzio's eLeadership offer advice for organizations seeking to thrive in the digital age (Kanter, 2001; Annunzio, 2001; see also Brown and Gioia, 2002).

Cameron and Caza promote a “virtues” frame, drawing on research that identifies extraordinary organizations that downsize with “caring and compassion”; recover from crisis with “maturity, wisdom and forgiveness”; and that seek “to do good as well as to do well” (2002, p. 34). These organizations adopt (and exceed) moral codes, establish a values-based culture, perform effectively, and focus on the highest human potential. An especially important virtue in these organizations is forgiveness, the “capacity to foster collective abandonment of justified resentment, bitterness and blame” and adopt in their stead “positive, forward-looking approaches in response to harm or damage” (p. 39). Barbara Nelson, Linda Kaboolian, and Kathryn Carver describe “concord organizations” that can work across diverse communities to be “incubators for larger political settlements or social changes” but that primarily maintain social and political changes in the wake of agreements to settle longstanding conflicts (Nelson, Kaboolian, and Carver, 2003, p. 8).

Many leadership analysts (see, for instance, Zaccaro and Klimoski, 2001; Kets de Vries, 1995) offer advice geared to the demands on people at the top of an organization. Several authors give helpful guidance for leaders in nonprofit organizations (Letts, Ryan, and Grossman, 1998; Nanus and Dobbs, 1999; Brinckerhoff, 1998; Riggio and Orr, 2004). Also helpful are Mark Moore's Creating Public Value (1995) for leaders in government and his article “Managing for Value: Organizational Strategy in For-Profit, Nonprofit, and Governmental Organizations” (Moore, 2000). Martin Krieger (1996) offers an intricate model of entrepreneurial leadership that draws on religious notions of creation, tragedy, heroism, virtue, covenant, character, errancy, vision, revelation, and redemption. David Heenan and Warren Bennis (1999) offer advice for people who are second-in-command or a supporting partner of a highly visible leader. Craig Pearce and Jay Conger's Shared Leadership offers guidance about when and where shared leadership is appropriate in a team or organization (Pearce and Conger, 2003). David Peterson and Mary Dee Hicks (1996) present strategies for coaching and developing the people in an organization. Robert Kelley's advice in The Power of Followership is useful for people who are trying to promote organizational well-being from a less powerful position (Kelley, 1992). Wherever the leaders are in an organization, they must understand the opportunities and constraints that their position entails. As their positional power diminishes, they may need to give more attention to building a broad coalition to champion change efforts. Visa founder Dee Hock directs his leadership advice to managers, wherever they are in an organization. The first responsibility, he says, is to manage oneself, “one's own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts. It is a complex, unending, incredibly difficult, often-shunned task.” The second responsibility is “to manage those who have authority over us: bosses, supervisors, directors, regulators, ad infinitum.” The third is managing one's peers: associates, competitors, suppliers, customers. The fourth and final is managing people over whom one has authority. This last task need receive only minimal attention if the manager has hired the right people for the job and given them adequate support (Hock, 2002, pp. 67–68). Terry (1993) advises everyone who seeks to lead courageously in an organization to develop a set of “exit cards” that outline options for leaving a current position if necessary.

Summary

Team leadership focuses on recruitment, effective communication, empowerment, and leadership development of team members. The main tasks of organizational leadership are paying attention to purpose and design, becoming adept at dealing with internal and external change, and building inclusive community inside and outside the organization. These leadership tasks track with researchers' attention to transformational and transactional leadership. They have found that effective leaders engage in transformational behavior (being a role model in the service of an inspiring cause; promoting a challenging, meaningful vision; providing intellectual stimulation and individualized attention for followers) along with transactional behavior (specifically rewarding follower productivity; Avolio, 1999).

The next chapter explores how leaders work with individuals, teams, and organizations to create and communicate shared meaning (visionary leadership); to make and implement executive, legislative, and administrative decisions (political leadership); and to adjudicate disputes and sanction conduct (ethical leadership). Considerable attention is given to designing and using forums, arenas, and courts—the shared-power settings for visionary, political, and ethical leadership, respectively.

(Crosby 64)

Crosby, Barbara C., John Bryson. Leadership for the Common Good: Tackling Public Problems in a Shared-Power World, 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons P&T, 08/2006. VitalBook file.

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