Time and Organizational Change

Except for nine years as a Director, then VP of Sales and Marketing, the rest of my leadership work has been in volunteer staffed organizations. This has caused me to conclude that while employee and volunteer staffed organizations share many similarities, they differ in their ordering of profit to purpose and this from the value each assigns time. Usually, the employee-staffed organization must be concerned with generating profit and that where the timing of market forces dictate the response. The volunteer staffed organization, not too concerned with market forces, concentrates on accomplishing the purpose of its founding. Although neither organization takes profit or purpose to the exclusion of the other, it seems that in the former profit tends to precede purpose (although certain non-profits, such as health care, have struggled to change their ordering) while in the latter, purpose is first. In both, the ordering of profit and purpose provides the organization a base for the grounding of values, its sense of priority, the impetus for mission, and a value of time.

What I think matters in this discussion are two things: First, how do leaders reverse the state of affairs when the organization’s sense of itself is misplaced: when profits aren’t pursued or the sense of purpose is misstated? Second, while attempting to lead a correction, are leaders given adequate time? For solutions to these questions, either part or whole, the form of leading referred to as narrative leadership seems the most complete. Narrative leadership concerns itself with an appreciation of the stories of organization members, how these become a locus of power, form identity that members adopt, and coalesce into practices for which the organization is known. It holds that effective organizational change occurs when people are led to rewrite the story about themselves thereby changing what they identify with and in the process gaining a new sense of mission. Narrative leadership is about people change first and organizational change as its result. With its emphasis solidly on people, leading narratively is less a quick fix than wholesale firings or forced downsizing but people losses do happen. Finally, changing a story can occur among as few as one or as many as hundreds. The difference is time.