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How to Grow a Decisive Organization
By Forrest C. Greenslade, Ph.D.
From
The Simple-Minded Manager, Cutting Through Your Work-Life Chaos
"We need to be able to
trust that something as simple as a clear core of values and vision,
Kept in motion through continuing dialogue, can lead to order."From
Margaret J. Wheatley's
Leadership and the New Science: Learning About Organizations from
an Orderly Universe, 1992
WE LIVE AND WORK IN CHAOTIC TIMES.
Strategic decision-making in such times requires seemingly
contradictory premises: dogged adherence to continuous management
process and openness to complex changes in the environments in which
organizations function. Factors inside and outside our organizations
produce cross-valent winds that buffet us in many directions every
day. Growing more decisive management structures is the most
daunting task facing leaders at all levels of governmental, civil
and commercial organizations.
I use the word "growing" purposefully. Agrarian
metaphors like "nurturing" and "shepherding"
more accurately describe the strategic decision-making process to me
than "constructing" and "building" architectural
images or "manufacturing" and "assembling"
industrial icons that are usually used. Based on my own experiences
in commercial and not-for-profit corporations, I offer ten thoughts
on how you might grow a more decisive organization where you work.
- Don't bother starting unless you are prepared to commit the
entire organization to an all-consuming process.
Having an
expert in strategic planning sitting somewhere, even in the office
next to the President, won't work. Even a strategic planning
committee won't work. Every person in the organization will see
this for the tokenism that it is. To even have a chance of success
everyone, starting with the CEO and actively involving the folks
on the production line, must be committed to a long-term process.
- Take a look backward. You cannot decide where to go in the
future without a real understanding of where you have been. Few
organizations start this process de novo. Even start-ups have a
past in the previous lives of their key stakeholders. Write an
organizational history. Carefully examine the accomplishments,
failures, traditions and culture of the organization's past.
- Ask every person in the organization four questions: Who are
we? What do we do? How do we do it? What do we believe? The
answers to these questions, taken together and projected into the
future, form the best Mission Statement that an organization can
script.
- Seed this Mission Statement throughout the organization and
use it as everyone's primary decision-making tool. Stress to
each person that every decision, no matter how small, should be
judged as to whether it serves to advance the mission.
"The
greatest challenge for the informational age manager is to
create an organization that can share knowledge."
From Thomas A. Stewart's Intellectual Capital: The New
Wealth of Organizations |
- Explore individual values that, taken in the aggregate,
define the corporate culture. I want to emphasize the fourth
of the above questions -- What do we believe? I think that it is
crucial to invest the time and process to learn what is valuable
in the work and work environment to people at all levels. This
will make stakeholders of people who otherwise would only be
employees. From this process you want to be able to craft the
following sentence, "This organization's mission is
anchored in the belief that ...", and have most people in
the organization feel authorship of the statement. By the way,
the vision and values of the CEO, top management, and the Board
of Directors are critical focal points of this process.
- Define the principles and practices that guide the
organization, based on the values exercises. These
constitute your internal environment.
- Take an objective look at your strengths and weaknesses.
Don't delude yourself. An organization's weaknesses may well
present its greatest opportunities for productive change. Also
look outside your organization to the opportunities and
challenges that you must confront. This is your external
environment.
- Define initiatives that will pursue the mission, growing
from strengths, strengthening weaknesses, while remaining true
to the values that underpin the organization. Keep the list
of initiatives small and focused. Be confident in the your
organization's advantages. These initiatives will define the
needed institutional capacities, the products and services that
are your competitive advantage and will manifest your mission.
They also define the changes in structure and management
function needed.
- Consider stakeholders outside the organization as potential
clients, capable of furthering your mission. Whether they
are investors, funders, collaborators or competitors, they are
potential customers of your products and services. Other
organizations, and key individuals in them, are as important
resources as those in your own. Sell them on your mission and
understand theirs. Learn their strengths and weakness. Search
for common values and goals. Negotiate alliances that support
your mission.
"Cycles
are the heartbeats of understanding. A thing perceived is
just an event. Repeated it opens up to the instruments of
science, the ruminations of philosophers, the imaginations
of shamans."
From Tyler Volk's Metapatterns: Across Time, Space and
Mind, 1995 |
- Collect data on performance, feed it back to all levels,
ensure improvement, and start all over again. There are
numerous cycles in every organization's life. Annually, goals
must be defined and monitored, budgets must be set and met. In
my experience, the strategic decision-making process works best
on an approximately three-year cycle. Assessing the progress
made in accomplishing the initiatives, rethinking the mission,
probing values, and articulating new initiatives, capacities,
and needed organizational development will produce a
continuously a self-informing and constantly decisive
organization.
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The Simple-Minded Manager online from Amazon.com!
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