Values

By generating a fictitious organization holding the same values as themselves, members have an expectation of the real based on it and on what the real organization purports to be. This is very often the real organization’s statements with which they initially identified and to which they have formed an allegiance. Basically, members want to identify with the people and the organization that thinks and looks like them. Perhaps the members of a religious organization said it best when describing these expectations as the practices that any “Bible based congregation that is serious about its faith, friendly to each other, and those who visit” and that considers itself “a place where people genuinely love others” should, by definition of the word “church,” be engaged. My opinion is that due to the identity people derive from their transcendent values, leaders seeking to re-narrate that story, except in instances when the values are no longer adequate for their identity, may not be successful.

I took from this two points: First, that it underscores why you and those who ask you to lead their enterprise must share, at a primary level, a common identity expressed as going the same direction. Second, is the suggestion that changes in identity are more likely to be in the way members relate to the organization than in the way they view themselves. I think it possible that all members may not have transcendently held the narratives I deemed dominant: mistrust of leadership and the priority of self-care. Instead it is likely some held them as working or transactional narratives and others, particularly those oriented to power, held them transcendently. This would explain the willingness by so many to recast themselves in the new story and the departure of those who could not. It also begs the question of what changes in narrative change: the story of people about themselves, the story of people about their organization, the transcendent values, the transactional values or some of all these? Earlier I noted that I understand organizational identity as an amalgam of member’s individual narratives with the narratives and myths of the organization. If anything, this view is reinforced by my experiences. Just as change is not a neatly bound package of ideas with a checklist, neither then can our work in the nuts and bolts of a person’s identity be so simple. Rather it is both complex and is a complex of competing then conflicting ideas and emotions from which we form positions held as permanent and temporary simultaneously. The hope is that we, the leader and the led, arrive at an understanding of our joint purpose and content to accept that sublimate our differences to it.