Monthly Archives: November 2008

Doing Good Work

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I am fascinated by the conditions under which people successfully perform “good work” — and I’ll unashamedly steal the definition of good work as “a calling that combines excellent performance, expresses one’s ethics and offers a pleasing sense of engagement” [taken from the Donald Goleman article in the Sunday Business section of this past week's New York Times].

Goleman’s piece pays homage to the work of Howard Gardner and peers in the Good Works Project, a collaboration of several great minds tackling an issue worthy of their capabilities:

“The GoodWork® Project is a large scale effort to identify individuals and institutions that
exemplify good work—work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningfulto its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society.”

Goleman is the author of Emotional Intelligence and, through that effort and his subsequent work, a significant voice in the understanding of work, practice, cognition and emotion. And if you doubt the connection and power behind the integration of those elements, just Google “Obama.”

In any event, Goleman’s piece in the NY Times tells the story of Govan Brown, an New York bus driver and Deacon of a local Baptist church who elegantly (and with an astonishingly large dose of American ingenuity) combined his personal ethics with his “job” transporting people along a bus route in midtown Manhattan. His story is — once again — the story of the possible. The context is different, but the underlying concepts are the same, I think, as the story of Jan Blittersdorf and NRG Systems of Vermont (or pick any one of the employees of NRG Systems).

It is the same story I heard from Colleen Barrett, the President of Southwest Airlines who spoke at a recent Winning Workplaces conference. Colleen talked a lot about living by the principle of the Golden Rule — a common element of her upbringing that she shared with Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher. What they believed — and executed — is a vision based on positive possibilities.

None of these stories are exactly the same in the way they play out. The protagonists draw their inspiration and guidance from different sources. But the underlying spirit shares common ground — a strong belief in the power of positive actions, executed in innovative fashion.

NRG Systems (Yet another reason to love Vermont)

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I had the opportunity to hear Jan Blittersdorf, CEO of NRG Systems, speak at a recent Winning Workplaces conference honoring this year’s Top Small Workplaces (a joint effort between Winning Workplaces and the Wall Street Journal).

Small, successful workplaces can be tremendous examples of what’s possible — and the impact of consistently improving on a theme through innovative thinking. In NRG’s case, an example is how they live the value of “environmental stewardship.”

Read the interview with Jan Blittersdorf from a recent issue of Wind Energy News and watch this piece produced by Seven Days. You’ll begin to get a sense of the inspiration that can be found in such organizations.

Translating mission into practice

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It starts with language, persistence and patience.

Over coffee this past Friday with one of the founders of The Talking Farm I found myself repeating this point-of-view as we were discussing what it would take to make a state-wide change toward more sustainable practices in growing, processing, distributing and consuming food.

There are of course many skills and capabilities that contribute to an entrepreneur’s or leader’s ability to successfully translate mission into practice (“practice” meaning what people actually do — and changing practices to achieve some new desirable outcome is usually the object of the mission). But there is a line of thinking in the study of learning and organizational change that language, persistence and patience pay off for some very good reasons.

Take the example of a very successful, mission-oriented community bank. In his narrative of the bank’s success in actually delivering on its mission, one of the founders told me how they consistently pressed to follow the simple guideline of “every loan we make must have a community development benefit.” The language is clear. It’s not some loans, it’s every loan. And the judgment of success rests primarily on community benefit.

This guideline did not eliminate or undermine the importance of other attributes of successful loans (acceptable risk, profitability, regulatory compliance, etc.). What the guideline did was set up a “both/and” challenge to the bank’s staff — at the practice level (what they did day-to-day). We need to write really good loans that also have a community development payoff.

So part one of the success was doing a good job of translating mission (“successful socially conscious community bank”) into a practice that can begin to impact individual’s mental models of good day-to-day practice. Part two was the persistence and patience. What many leaders often fail to adequately grasp is that change doesn’t happen when the leaders “get it” and have figured out the new way of thinking and doing; change happens when the organization gets it. The bigger the organization (or system) you are trying to change, the more patience you need to allow the organization to learn and accept new practices.

The study of learning and organizational change provides one point-of-view on the logic behind this. I’d argue it this way. “Practice” — what we actually do to get something done — is based in large part on people’s mental models of the activity. If you want a banker to change their way of thinking about loans from being primarily about “make the most money” or “make it the lowest risk” to “achieve community benefit” the you need to help each individual banker adapt that new way of thinking into their own existing mental model. That’s both an individual and social process; people develop meaning and understanding in the context of the social nature of practice. Banker A goes to Banker B and says, “hey, I’ve got this loan I’m looking at…do you think it meets the mark for community benefit?” A conversation happens. Meaning develops.

And all of this takes time. It seems that effective leaders are those who know how to develop guidelines that help frame these conversations and practiced-based interactions around the right topics. But they also know they need to stick with it; reinforce the development of meaning that fits with the mission by constantly challenging people to think and develop their own expertise in the new practices.

For me, the test of whether all of this is working is whether the organization is taking the leader’s guidelines and doing something with it in practice that is both positive and something that the leader never would have envisioned on their own.