The Authentic Organization

Emotional skills are fundamental to the success of most organizational projects. Sometimes they mean the difference between nominal success and remarkable success. Sometimes they are critical to any sort of success at all. And without a doubt, they are vital to building the relationships needed for the long term.

I was reflecting earlier this evening on comments made by Asher Bey about how teachers should deal with anger and I was reminded how challenging strong emotions can be for many people in the organizations with which I’ve worked. (I have no evidence that this is any better or worse in civil society than elsewhere.) While Asher Bey’s Guru’s Handbook deals primarily with the responsibilities of the individual in regard to dealing with feelings, I concern myself here with the tight relationship between those individual emotional skills and the organizational context in which they find their expression.

That an organization is often a reflection of the emotional skills of its founders and leaders is well understood. What may not be as well understood is the role that the organization plays in bringing out the best or the worst in people, insofar as how they relate to feelings.

For purposes of exploration, I will propose five ways in which organizations can play a positive or negative role on the emotional skills of staff, leaders, and key stakeholders. These five ways are through (1) recruitment, (2) intake, (3) structure, (4) consequences, and (5) leadership.

Through recruitment, we choose the people that will renew the culture and practices of our organizations. Do we consider their emotional skills? Or do we unconsciously pick people who avoid expressions of certain feelings?

First impressions profoundly shape the attitudes and behaviors of newcomers. How we handle the intake process, both formally and informally, is what creates those first impressions. Newcomers are constantly asking: How do people in this organization handle certain things?

The structure of the workplace — the daily and weekly rhythms, the form of a meeting, the parts of a communication with a colleague — determines what there is room for and what there isn’t. Certain types of spaciousness in our social environment have a way of nurturing corresponding spaciousness inside of us. Are check-ins genuine? Does “how are you” have room for more than “fine”? Do we leverage people’s emotional skills for organizational benefit?

There are always consequences for responsible emotional expression and interaction. Although they may not be intended as such, they can function as rewards and punishments. Do people stiffen and withdraw at enthusiasm, grief, or sadness? What are the reinforcing patterns at work?

Finally, there is the role of leadership. This can also be called “example”, because although it can carry more influence if it comes from recognized leaders, that’s not a prerequisite. Do people take things personally? Do they show strong models for how to use emotions wisely?

I’ll leave you with these five areas of inquiry, along with the core concept of the organization’s role in shaping the emotional sophistication of its people. Please flesh this out, if you can, provide illustrations or counterexamples from your own experience, and suggest other dynamics that may be at work.

As we take on new projects and new objectives, very few organizations let go of old ones to make room. In some cases, we acquire new resources, although often not enough to do justice to the new endeavor. In many cases, such decisions reflect an admirable ambition or at the very least an unwillingness to say that any part of their mission is “unimportant”. Unfortunately, by refusing to choose between objectives, we end up sabotaging our commitment to our entire mission, not just parts of it. And even if we manage to give every task its due, because we have given so much that we’ve accepted living in a world we don’t like for the hope of making a world that we do, even then, we undermine our mission because we are refusing to genuinely pay its price.

There is great power in finding and choosing to pay a price for something we want. I don’t mean this in the sense of a market, only in the sense that life involves choices. When we cover up or avoid such choices, we diminish our commitment to our actions. That diminished commitment undermines everything we do.

The authentic organization makes choices and pays the price of commitment to its mission.

I’m grateful for your queries, as much as I am for your answers and your stories. Please don’t hesitate to challenge me to be more specific, to give me counterexamples, or, as a reader of Nonprofit Online News did, just ask some really good questions:

Is there a difference between being an authentic agency and offering authentic services? If there is, which is better? Is there a Socratic form of authenticity one should strive for, some idealized notion of what it means to be an authentic agency? Should we care? Should agencies focus more on their state of being than on accomplishing their goals? Is it possible in a world of political correctness, funder’s desire for the latest fad, and competitive funding sources to really be an authentic agency yet still accomplish your mission? What is the difference between authenticity and ethical action?

I am delighted by these questions. In essence, the author sets up a classic philosophical distinction between being and doing and then asks which is more important. The implication is that my theme might lead us down a road that takes us away from effective or ethical action, to some possibly fuzzy state of “authentic” existence. I share the author’s concern. If we don’t take such questions seriously, then ultimately our endeavor here will be shallow at best. Or worse yet, trite.

But first, since the author references Socrates and poses an existential question, I can’t resist responding by quoting Kurt Vonnegut (and countless college bathroom walls):

“To be is to do”–Socrates.
“To do is to be”–Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Do be do be do”–Frank Sinatra.

I confess I come down on the side of Sinatra on this one. Being and Doing emerge together, but Doing is our frame of reference. We will come to know people and organizations by their actions.

I don’t imagine that there is some idealized state of authenticity for all organizations, and probably not for a single one either. Organizational enlightenment doesn’t even seem like a useful concept, at least as compared with the day to day, real world struggle with authentic work. This is likely to be my most straightforward response to the question of an idealized notion of authenticity: No, we shouldn’t care.

“Is it better to be effective or authentic?” It is the refusal to choose, I submit, that makes this all so interesting. To insist that this is a false dichotomy is what will put us, and our organizations, on a lifetime path of growth. Life is not about means versus ends; it’s about both. To say that ends should be at the service of means can lead to process oriented inaction. To say that means should be at the service of ends can lead to … Well, actually, it can lead to horrors, as any student of history knows.

“What is the difference between authenticity and ethical action?” Some critics called the existentialists morally adrift because of their focus on authenticity. Frankly, that strikes me as a terribly pessimistic view of human nature. Great evils are committed by people cut off from their own pain and by institutions cut off from the human consequences of their actions. The call for authenticity is fundamentally a call for integrity.

“Is it possible in a world of political correctness, funder’s desire for the latest fad, and competitive funding sources to really be an authentic agency yet still accomplish your mission?” I certainly think it’s possible to accomplish an organizational mission authentically. But the author raises a practical question to which there is no easy answer. Although I’m not sure what “political correctness” means in this context, I do think that funding dynamics play a large role in pulling organization’s off kilter. But do such pressures preclude authenticity? No more so than all the other serious challenges that constitute the landscape of organizational life.

How would you answer these questions?

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 for privacy):

I was hired as the only paid employee of a co-op artist gallery. I report to a board rather than one person. However, the president of the organization believes that I should report only to her and gets into screaming rages when I do something she doesn’t like. She wants to micromanage and complain about how she has to do everything herself.

We have a vibrant arts community, including and driven by the local art school. The president constantly and loudly proclaims to anyone in earshot that the ‘patriarchal good old boy system’ has a strangle hold on the arts scene, and follows these speeches with a recitation of all of the incidents of her exclusion, people not saying hello to her, being derisive towards student work from local arts college, and taking opportunities to publicly confront college artists and alumni at adjacent galleries.

While her behavior places an easy target for finger pointing, the attention that it draws pulls the eyes of the organization away from some of the other problems. Members of the gallery can blame her for the failure rather than take responsibility as a co-op for failing to address fundamental issues like budgeting and planning, meeting deadlines, and public relations.

When I have tried to bring up the issues not directly related to her behavior, I get responses like ‘oh you’re so right, we’re so glad to have you here’ (how is that addressing the problem? stroking my ego doesn’t pay my wages), or ‘ yes but I don’t have time to help’ (then why did you join the gallery?), or ‘but we’ve never done it that way before’ (my dr. Phil voice kicks in, thinking ‘yeah, and how’s that working for you?’) or ‘but we don’t want to be like such-and-such gallery’ (how is adopting successful business strategies being a copy-cat? We still maintain the kinds of work we accept and the image of our gallery) or ’something always happens to help us out” (what happens if our bail-out person gets hit by a car? or just plain decides we’re not worth it anymore? you can’t milk the same cow forever).

I’m so frustrated because I can see the potential for success. We have a great space, in a fantastic location, in an excellent community. There is no reason why we can’t be successful in this city. At this point, I am also concerned that my affiliation with this gallery will hurt me professionally, as their reputation is falling so low so fast. This is definitely a case where one person’s fears and a group of people’s denial is bringing an organization to its knees. I plan to resign at the end of this month as I feel that my efforts are wasted here.

It’s true that a single person can cripple an organization. It’s not even necessary for that person to occupy a position of titular power, as is the case in this story. I’ve seen a single board member paralyze an organization for more than a year and then proceed to drive the best people out, sending the organization on into a destructive spiral. All that is needed is that there be no mechanisms in place for the organization to respond to that person’s damaging influence.

What is to be done, after something has gone this far? The author is taking measures to protect herself, by resigning. Could she use the threat of her resignation as leverage? That might be the final test of whether the rest of the organization is functional enough to make a healthy choice, but not many people like that kind of brinksmanship. Are there any other single leverage points like that? Maybe two or three key members of the gallery?

What could have prevented things from getting this bad? The president’s behavior isn’t dysfunctional in a vacuum. The author describes a scenario where members and donors cooperate in patterns at work here. Would better structures for sharing of responsibility and authority have helped? Leadership and board rotation or limited terms? Hard wired governance processes?

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 of an organization that trades in goods or services in support of a social objective. Social enterprises are uniquely vulnerable to a certain kind of mission drift, as the organization’s operations are dragged along by the revenue model and stakeholders are left with a sense of alienation.

One of my readers wrote of such a situation (edited for privacy):

I have recently left an organization that uses the title of non-profit to profit from federal inmates. The organization provides half-way houses for federal inmates transitioning back into the community. They are paid well for these services. The concept is grand, it can and has provided a needed service for those folks coming out of prisons, but now it is just business with no regard for the inmates.

They hire staff and require them to work one year before being eligible for benefits, there is no succession planning, leadership is by tyranny. The passion has been lost, the vision blurred and the need to help others obscured. I was asked to falsify official documents to the bureau of prisons, which I refused. And I resigned my position.

There was a discussion recently on the ARNOVA mailing list about mission drift and whether large organizations are more susceptible than small ones. No clear conclusions were drawn. I think it’s clear, from both the ARNOVA examples and my reader’s story, that a successful and scalable revenue model is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.

Although we can’t know for sure without much more information, some of which may be lost in time, I can imagine a combination of factors at work here. It is likely that both the leadership and the management techniques were set up to reinforce the revenue model only. Key operational tools such as metrics and reports most likely kept that revenue model at the center of everyday assessment, rather than the mission that the model was meant to serve. Of course, money is easier to measure than mission, in most cases.

What else might have contributed to such a drift? What could have been done to prevent it?

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 should necessarily become places where individuals cry and wail. That is all very culturally dependent and any particular behavior that comes to mind when you hear the word “grief” may or may not have any bearing on the behavior and norms of an authentic organization.

We use the word “grief” to refer to both the interpersonal and the psychological processes for dealing with loss. Organizational life, like life in general, is full of loss, ranging from the ordinary to the extreme. Even if we eventually choose another word to represent the organizational response to such loss, we can learn something from the more personal process that we call “grief”.

Healthy grieving serves to create enduring and functional understanding of a loss. Whether that loss is construed as a failure, as I perviously explored, or just a transition, or whether the loss is personal or broadly experienced in the organization, an environment that supports the healthy integration of the experience is an environment that will foster learning and authenticity.

One common experience I have had with this is in the world of nonprofit change management, particularly technological change. There are losses that come with change, of course, but often leaders and evangelists will create an environment that doesn’t acknowledge those losses, either before or after the fact. The single most common outcome of this environment is inexplicable (or poorly explained) resistance. No doubt many of you have had this experience as well.

So, the question that’s on my mind is: What can we learn, from what we know about the structures of healthy grieving, that can help us improve and enrich the processes of organizational change?

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 yet to be done, a habit of gratitude can certainly help return a little balance. Gratitude for what we have accomplished and for what others have accomplished can be grounding. At the same time it can keep us on track by focusing our mind on the purpose behind our accomplishments.

Gratitude can be seen as a specialized kind of Observing and Reflecting. As you will recall, those are the two neglected parts of the Action Learning cycle. By consciously dedicating time to see what we’ve done right, every day, we bring our attention back to the real world, and away from the imaginary future.

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 is useful in the pursuit of an authentic organization.

In common use, the word “work” has taken on meaning that can prevent us from facing the challenge of transforming the workplace. Rather than simply referring to labor and its products, it refers to the things we get paid for. It has come to mean the opposite of play or even the opposite of life itself. One of my least favorite examples of this is in the phrase “life-work balance”, which expresses our desire for meaning in dualistic terms that are sadly destructive of our chances of making that meaning real.

The distortion of this word is understandable. Having our food and shelter held hostage to our work is part of what distorts our thinking. (Note that the making of food and the making of shelter can be entirely authentic work, although in our economy it mostly isn’t.) Our alienation from the workplace and its power relationships makes us want to think of the more pleasant parts of our life as “not that”.

For me, work is just what we do when we make something. Maybe we make dinner. Maybe we make people laugh. Maybe we make a tool for people to use.

In this book, I would like to reclaim the word, at least a bit.

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:

How does being denied Making as an expression of our creativity encourage us to turn to a degraded form of creativity in consumerism? Sometimes consumerism is indeed transformed into something more by the force of creative attention, but most often it is numbing and banal.

What role do the various institutions (school, family, media, work, culture, technology) in our lives play in denying us our expression as Makers?

How utterly transformed would our world be if we were less malleable and refused to accept the boxes we’ve been given for our creativity? I can hardly think of anything that wouldn’t have to change.

How would communities change if they were based on bonds of common cause rather than on common consumption?

How does so-called consumer culture fit into this picture? How does it reflect and reinforce the anxieties that keep us separated from our nature? How does the downplay of work in everyday language support this?

Do the post-scarcity visions of the Greens, the Social Ecologists, the Hackers, and others have something to offer in the way of a solution? Must we wait for a post-scarcity world or can we create it?

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 an author they have never met, as a result of reading an evocative passage. These are both well understood illusions, however compelling they may be in the moment.

But to know that you are known: Does that state even exist? I don’t think it does. I think that it is an experience that is continually renewing, a trajectory of sorts, rather than a state. There is an edge that we live on, when we are growing, either in our self-knowledge or in being known by others. That edge has an element of risk to it, risk that is subsequently rewarded.

Despite my earlier remark about projection, that is a bit like the feeling of being in love, isn’t it? The way you take a little risk and it turns out fine and then you take another and that turns our fine too. There is something similar in a group where you can explore the edge of your self-knowledge, where you can safely become, not just be.

So, let me see if I can take this topic away from my tendency toward abstract musing toward a practical direction instead. What does it take for an organizational environment to support this dynamic? What does it take for people to have the experience of being known? What does it take for that to persist over time, so people can explore the edges of their own self-knowledge?

What is required is an environment in which we can take risks of self-discovery and self-disclosure and have those risks rewarded. What would it take to manage an organization toward that goal (among others, of course)?