How
can we engage members in our work if association employees are leaving
the better part of themselves at home? For all the lip service given
to "engagement" these days, I am amazed by the lack of engagement among
association employees.
Recently, I was hitting a brick wall of stony indifference with the senior management of a well known association, so I peeled them off for personal interviews. One on one, I was impressed with each exec's energy and ideas, but when restored to the group, everyone shut down and spoke like robots.
The behavior was not a product of the recession--fear of losing one's job--this was the culture, engineered by the CEO to maintain an illusion of control. The result was a senior team that quit long ago, but are still on the job.
There is an alternative, one neatly articulated by Henry Mintzberg in the July-August Harvard Business Review on "Rebuilding Companies as Communities."
Mintzberg argues for an alternative form of leadership, "a more modest form of leadership that might be called engaged and distributed management," what he calls communityship. "A community leader is personally engaged in order to engage others, so that anyone and everyone can exercise initiative."
To create community at work, Mintzberg recommends that you:
- Start with small groups of committed managers.
- Take time to reflect on shared experiences.
- Use insights from these reflections to trigger small initiatives with potential to become big strategies.
- Model behavior for others in the organization.
- "(C)ommunityship is firmly established when the members reach out in socially active, responsible, and mutually beneficial ways to the broader community."
"(H)ealthy organizations take corporate social responsibility seriously and gain significant benefits in return. Employees of a company that barely functions as a community can hardly be expected to care about any other community. But members of a company that has a robust sense of community realize how much their organization depends for sustained success on constructive engagement with the communities around it."
Do less. Be more. Engage members through opportunities to learn and grow, professionally and personally, reflecting on shared experiences in a community of practice, pursuing social justice while making a living. And do it in every single activity you offer.
That's engagement. The rest is empty promises of features and benefits in a brochure.
Okay, I personally hate words like "communityship," but I completely dig everything else in this post. It resonates with what Gary Hamel wrote in terms of "less hierarchy and more community." Also with Senge's definition of leadership as a system capacity, rather than an individual attribute. Nice post.
