> Pete's communication offers an opportunity to share a radical idea which I
> am playing with. That is that leadership will occur if a person (or a
> group or team - to extend the distributed leadership idea) has _any_ four
> or five principles, values or foci and continually acts and speaks from
> those.
I thought I'd try to jump in here, since what you propose is very close to
what we do...and it neatly ties in the "culture" thread that weaves in and
out of these posts.
We define "Organizational Culture" as the "patterns of presuppositions
evident in behavior." We work with our clients to merge the available
"organizational technology" (i.e., groupware) with the culture, and shift
the culture toward something more worth having.
We use our operating definition based on "presuppositions" expressly to
avoid the problem of getting everyone to have to hold the same values or
beliefs. By labelling them *presuppositions* we allow the individuals to
hold personal beliefs or values which (ostensibly) may conflict with the
presuppositions...but the presuppositions are the criteria by which each
member of the management team is judged by their peers. So, when some
member of the management group posits a new policy or procedure that
another member of that team finds unacceptable, one of the challenges that
can be issued is "How does this (policy or procedure) comport with the
presuppositions we've agreed to operate from?" Usually, this is enough to
open a discussion toward convergence...although, occasionally it produces
revision of the presuppositions themselves.
Incidentally, we just about to embark on the process of doing this across
the boundary between two organizations...separate corporations in a deep
partnership. It should prove interesting.
--
Carol Anne Ogdin "Great minds discuss ideas,
Deep Woods Technology average minds discuss events,
CAOgdin@deepwoods.com small minds discuss people."
--Adm. Hyman G. Rickover