Networked Collaborative Community: The New Organization?

 Post by James V. Toscano

Leadership in organizations has traditionally been thought of as the ability to inspire, influence, motivate, persuade and/or compel behaviors and actions in others through decisions made by individuals at the top of the organization.

Traditional leadership in nonprofits has been exercised in this model of power from the top down for many years. Yet, in today’s organization, where communication travels at the speed of light and all employees and those beyond are plugged in, everyone needs to be a leader on a scale appropriate for the best decisions to be made.

Reams have been written about formal and informal leadership. From typologies to behavioral traits, from Strengths-Finder to Meyer-Briggs, leadership has been sliced and diced thousand of ways.

Social Organizations

Historically, successful organizations operated on rules, structures and processes that maximized quality by reducing variation in product or performance. Understanding of the workings of an organization came through knowledge of structure, process, hierarchy, formal decision-making and a whole host of procedural variables.

In this digital age, does this work anymore? Probably not. Hierarchical structure no longer maximizes organizational function nor makes best use of its people, especially potential collaborators who are not part of the formal organization. It is clear that leadership is rarely top-down, and formal leadership is often rivaled by informal channels.

In the last ten years, the characteristics of social organizations have been described as a new archetype in the organizational pantheon. Useful descriptive information about organizations employing electronic communication to achieve goals has been developed and shared. We all know the limitations of chain of command, so attention has been paid to analyses of empowered employees.

More than five years ago, I wrote “Leadership at any level involves formal and informal empowerment and does no longer stop with those in the organization.” I went on to say,” In fact, those outside the traditional constituency, e.g. socially networked collaborators, hold the key to significant success.” These words are even more applicable today.

First Steps

We are discovering that communication networks are more important in organization decision-making than chains of command and that collaboration is more necessary than span of control.

Human interaction networks, especially more and more digital networking, are prevalent. Think about all of those PCs, IPads, I Phones, Androids, Mobiles and other electronic ways to communicate and network.

The dilemma: when decisions need to be made on the spot, when every permutation and combination of decision outcome can now be preprogrammed or templated, what do we do? Which do we choose?

The first step is to think of everyone as a leader and to empower them to make decisions that contribute to the achievement of a clearly stated, operationalized mission.

Simplistically, think of the waitress giving a customer a free dessert when there is some type of complaint or delay. Or, in my field, we see this when a medical receptionist overrides a physician’s schedule and works in a patient.

Empowerment of front-line staff to make decisions, to override processes and to make exceptions on the spot, if done well, is an early, first step in the transformation of an organization.

Empowerment

Empowerment is not a random process. This first step is total buy-in by those at the top followed by intensive training in mission, values, and desired outcomes, short-term and long-term. Within empowerment comes encouragement, training and opportunity for personal and professional growth.

One of the best examples of this organizational strategy is the way Toyota front-line employees are trained. Workers on a Toyota auto assembly line are empowered to stop the line, to make corrections to the product there and then, to suggest improvements and to teach colleagues about their innovations.

What would be the functional equivalent of stopping the line in nonprofit organizations? In your organization?

Such empowerment needs to be defined in terms of scale: program, finances, personnel, service, and geography. Where overlaps occur, and they will often, negotiation determines decisions, not hierarchy.

The scope of such decision-making is determined by training and expertise, with overlap requiring cooperative decision-making, and should be seen as an opportunity for new ideas and innovation to emerge.

Leadership from the Bottom Up

Organizations then emerge as very complex Networked Collaborative Communities (NCCs). Communication replaces power as the operative norm, network replaces lines of authority and decisions are made collaboratively. NCCs are characterized by power and decision-making which is pushed downward as far as possible and outward beyond organizational boundaries.

Ideally, leadership can be from the bottom up and the top down, given the “operational code”of the group.

Scale and scope are kept as flat as possible with a skeletal, default hierarchy used infrequently. Networks of individuals, groups, and/or whole departments work cooperatively to achieve mission with leadership and decision-making exhibited wherever and by whomever is in the nexus of place, the required expertise and training, and a vision of the desired outcome.

Organically, such NCCs operate within a consensus on rules, regulations and processes that is determined by a value system which is open-ended and continuously examined. In fact, this then becomes one of the most important tasks for a Board or Boards of Directors and the employees who must be part of the decision network.

Given constituency beyond organizational boundaries, and given the NCC may be the collaboration among organizations rather than a single group, the role of governance may be to articulate values, then listen, communicate, energize, support, embrace, enable and empower.

Managers, as extensions of the Board, will focus on reinforcement of mission and values, training, mentorship, empowerment, sharing and delegating, co-creation, finding talent, and continuous improvement.

I’m always reminded that, as a boy, long after the death of conductor Arturo Toscanini, I listened to the NBC Symphony playing brilliantly without a conductor.

Might NCCs make as beautiful a sound and contribution?

Copyright 2011, The Good Counsel, division of Toscano Advisors, LLC. May be duplicated with citation.

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