Bill asks two questions which are opposite sides of the same coin.
> How can individuals acting independently also act in a manner which fits
> with what the organization wants?
>
> How can leaders and managers ensure that individual employee behavior and
> decisions will always reflect the organization's values?
The questions contain an unclarity that is common. Are the "leaders
and managers" being considered as separate from the organisation?
The formulation of the second question implies that they are.
What "the organisation wants" and "the organisation's values" are not
determined by managers. What leaders want may be determined by
leaders. What the organisation wants is determined by the
organisation.
Let's consider the questions separately:
> How can individuals acting independently also act in a manner which
> fits with what the organization wants?
I submit that the organisation makes its wants known and that each
individual knows what these are by being aware, by communicating, by
being rewarded or not, by seeing impact from their actions, etc.
That is, the mechanisms are largely the same as for society in
general and any of the many human institutions that we are part of.
We always act independently and we generally do it in a manner that
more or less fits with the particular organisation involved. We had
to master this ability to grow into our culture.
The processes are emergence and structure which influence but do not
control individual expression.
The second question:
> How can leaders and managers ensure that individual employee
> behavior and decisions will always reflect the organization's
> values?
They can't "always ensure" anything of the kind. That, thank
goodness, is the nature of independent agents in complex adaptive
systems. What can be "reasonably ensured" is that the patterns of
such individual behaviours will reflect the organisation's values.
That is done by focussing on the values which are most important in
combination with each other as "attractors" or "selection criteria".
These support independent intelligence it decision making and tend to
pull for similar kinds of responses without force or absolute
consistency but with sufficient power to produce reliable patterns.
Here is a major leadership challenge. Some will rise to the
challenge by bringing their own values and attempting to have those
influence the whole. If these values are sufficiently connected and
grounded, this approach can be powerful and rewarding. If not, the
values will not be influencers and the leader will be ineffective.
Others will take the challenge by a process of dialogue and discovery
and allow the existing best and most important combination of values
to emerge from the existing organisation. This will produce values
solidly grounded in the history of the corporation and the
communities in which they exist. Here the job of the leader is to
listen, interpret and feedback in an iterative process until some
powerful selection criteria have emerged.
--
Michael McMaster : Michael@kbdworld.com
web:http://www.vision-nest.com/BTBookCafe/TIA/TIAmap.html
"I don't give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity
but I'd die for the simplicity on the other side of complexity."
attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations
For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>