The Authentic Organization

Leaders set the tone for an organization, serve as its public face, and through their power, set in motion all sorts of dynamics. When a leader acts out their own fears and denial in the context of their role in an organization, it can poison everything.
One of my readers wrote with an example (edited [...]

As I embarked on this project, I invited readers of Nonprofit Online News to share stories of authenticity and it absence. In most cases, I will obscure the identifying information about the people or the organizations involved.
Although it’s not my favorite perspective, the conventional definition of a “social enterprise” is an organization or a program [...]

Most of the nearly 1000 organizations with which I’ve worked would object profoundly to the idea that grieving is even a legitimate organizational ability and many others would be merely puzzled. What the hell is Michael talking about now?
I’m not talking about an organizational version of crying and wailing. Nor am I saying that organizations [...]

In The To Do Addiction, I described our focus on the unfinished as a kind of brutal lack of gratitude. What would it mean to turn that around? Does gratitude play a role in creating an authentic environment?
To the extent that we distort our thinking by obsessing about the unfinished, by noticing only what is [...]

In the early Nineties, I used to teach a workshop called Making a Living, Making a Difference. One of the things I explored in that workshop is the perverse relationship we have to the word “work”. I’m not going to debate here what the word truly means or doesn’t mean. Rather, I’m interested in what [...]

Human beings are Makers by nature, but our society deprives us of much expression of that role. That we strive toward creative endeavors despite our schooling, media, and employment is a sign of how strong that nature is within us. The authentic organization would build on that strength.
There are so many interesting questions about this: [...]

In the authentic organization, a person knows that they are understood, knows that they are known. But what does this fundamentally subjective experience actually mean?
It’s easy to come up with examples where people feel known but aren’t. Romantic love, has its moments of projection and other collapsing of boundaries. A person may feel known by [...]

In the Eighties, I was involved in what was then called Peace Conversion work. We’ve moved so far in the other direction under the current U.S. regime that this might seem somewhat quaint, but the idea was to look for ways to repurpose the skills and resources previously used in the arms race, in order [...]

I want to explore a particular dynamic that emerges as a result of our focus on plans and to do lists in our work life, a dynamic that leads to delusion of perception and distortion of motivation:
If you were to judge your tasks by how much attention and emotional investment they get, you would [...]

A lot of the language that we learn serves the purpose of offering us plausible deniability or the protection of vagueness or ambiguity. There is a good reason that communities of practice that focus on authenticity, from Buddhism and contemporary psychotherapy to commercial self-actualization businesses, develop their own vocabulary to help people with responsible communication [...]