Company and community

A robust culture.
To create this kind of atmosphere and allow the remnants of community to bloom requires a robust, compelling culture. People must know what the place is all about. Everyone at Google knows that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” A company without a compelling culture is like a person without a personality—flesh and bones but no life force, no soul. Organizations function best when committed people work in cooperative relationships based on respect. Destroy this, and the whole institution of business collapses—as is now evident in so many companies.
Leadership at the center.
A robust community requires a form of leadership quite different from the models that have it driving transformation from the top. Community leaders see themselves as being in the center, reaching out rather than down. They facilitate change, recognizing that much of it must be driven by others. At General Electric, Jeff Immelt, who wants the company to become as much renowned for innovation and organic growth as it has been for operational excellence, encourages the teams running GE’s businesses to figure out for themselves what is needed for transformation.
Developing Community
How, then, to get from the company as a collection of human resources to the institution as a community of human beings—from heroic leadership to engaged management? Some programs that colleagues and I created for the development of managers and their organizations have taught us a number of lessons:
1. Community building in an organization may best begin with small groups of committed managers. Peter Block cites evidence that small groups are more effective than great leadership or individual training in creating strong communities. Some companies bring groups together at their own training facilities, as GE does. Others, including Lufthansa and LG, send their managers to public programs such as the International Masters Program in Practicing Management that we at McGill have developed with partner schools.
If their organization does not offer such opportunities, middle managers needn’t despair; they can develop themselves. My stepson, Phil LeNir, did this when he was a director of engineering at a high-tech company. After the company laid off some people in his unit and shifted many of its programming activities to contractors in Eastern Europe, Phil had to do something to help his people—all of them first-time managers—settle down and figure out how to oversee the outsourced work. They lacked a training budget, so Phil took a leaf from our experiences in the IMPM and began to meet informally with his group every week or two over lunch. The managers’ perspective changed entirely. As Phil explained, “We stopped looking for others to tell us what to do. We stopped whining about how bad things were around us and began thinking about how we could leverage our experience to make things better.”
These “management learning meetings,” as the group called them, went on for two years. Most members of the group were subsequently promoted—a success they attributed in good part to the sessions. Their experience eventually led to the creation of CoachingOurselves.com to help other managers do the same thing.
2. The sense of community takes root as the managers in these groups reflect on the experiences they have shared in the organization. Managing is hectic, now more than ever, and the pressures of the workplace hardly encourage thoughtful action. What today’s managers need most is to do what Phil and his team did: slow down and reflect. What did that customer really mean? Why do we have so much trouble understanding the company’s strategy—and one another?