Community and Organization

Is an organization a community? According to CSI Founder, Arthur Morgan, the answer is no.

Recently we had an opportunity to re-consider this when one of our staff members wrote a letter to our Executive Committee, stating that the staff member did not feel the organization was living up to its stated commitment to community. Specifically, the person wanted more communication and involvement with the Board Strategy Committee. The person felt that a “true” community organization would function in a manner where any staff members that desired could be part of the strategy committee.

This was not the first time such a situation had arisen. Two years ago another staff member of CSI disagreed with the direction of the board and said that the board was not being true to “community”. As things progressed through, we became aware that in the heat of passion, most disagreements led to criticism and then the final insult: “You are not being true to community.”

The strategy committee asked themselves two questions. First, did we suggest something to this new employee about community at the time of hiring, such that now the staff person might have a legitimate complaint, in that the elements of community that we had discussed during the interview were not present in the actual job? And secondly, could we articulate in detail how we perceive our organizational structure and processes within the values of community that we espouse?

It is immediately apparent that CSI is a hierarchical organization. First, it has a board of directors. At the board level, no person can become a board member by request only. They must be qualified in some way. So in that sense we are exclusionary - only some members can join the board. Next, we have an Executive Director. This person is selected from a field of candidates, only one of whom will be the director. The director reports to the board. The director cannot fire the board or any of its members. Yet, the board can fire the director. Thus the board has power over the director that is not reciprocal. The director hires managers or staff members. The director has the decision-making power to hire and fire people with certain restrictions from the board to insure fairness.

Within CSI, the board and the director have different responsibilities. The board can take certain actions with which the director may not agree, such as cutting the budget. The director may take certain actions with which the board may not agree, such as different kinds of publications or meetings. These differing roles and responsibilities are set at the beginning of a board/director relationship and typically are modified based on actual day-to-day conditions and experiences. Hopefully, the roles and responsibilities, as well as the standards of performance, are sufficiently flexible to allow for differences of opinion. If the relationship reaches a point that this cannot be accommodated, then the director leaves the organization.

Non-Profit hierarchical organizations are more or less similar to businesses, government organizations, or educational institutions. In such institutions, power is not equally distributed to all members of the organization. Also, they are not egalitarian in many ways. People at the same hierarchical level are differentiated by experience, competency and attitude. Pay scales also differ based on the same criteria.

Arthur Morgan was intrigued by the work of Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backwards, admired him greatly and wrote a biography on the man. Bellamy advocated a single wage for all people. Yet Morgan himself was a senior executive both in private business, as the owner of an engineering company; in education, as the president of Antioch College; and in government, as the head of the TVA. In one of his books, The Long Road, Morgan once listed the different forms of organizations in America, pointing out that there were examples of communism (fire departments, schools, and highways), socialism (water storage and irrigation projects), autocratic and aristocratic systems (university),  and despotic systems (large companies owned by executives). His final paragraph in this discourse says:

“America has recognized that, in certain places, autocracy has seemed to have a higher degree of effectiveness than have democratic methods. We have been ready to let many forms of social organization live and thrive among us. We have judged them by their service to our society, and not by any abstract theory of social organization.”

Morgan most of all was a pragmatist. He was interested in getting results, rather than selecting some organizational model and attempting to follow it. When Morgan took on the TVA, his first major contribution was not to reorganize the approaches to building dams, but rather to eliminate the popular political patronage that existed at the time, where people were given positions based on their contributions or work for their political party. Morgan insisted that people be selected based on ability and Franklin Roosevelt gave him that power. A member of the “patronage” community might well have accused Morgan of being “anti-community” and hypocritical. Another major change made by Morgan was to set up permanent towns for the workers on the dam projects. This was contrary to the practice, current at that time, of creating tent cities where men lived without their families for months or years at a time. Certainly, for the workers, having permanent dwellings with their families present was a major change in terms of “community”.  Yet Morgan did this all within the structure of the hierarchical bureaucracy of government.  

There are many styles of management in an organization and there is no one agreed-upon way of listing these styles. Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, in an article in the Harvard Business Review of March-April 2000 offers a list of styles which include:

Coercive  Authoritative  Affiliative  Democratic  Pacesetting  Coaching

CSI’s leadership style, which is reflected in its organizational approach, is a combination of Affiliative and Democratic. The modus operendi of the Affiliative style is to create harmony and build emotional bonds. That of the Democratic Style is to forge consensus through participation. The Coercive style demands immediate compliance, the Authoritative style mobilizes people toward a vision, the Pacesetting style sets high standards for performance and the Coaching style develops people for the future. All six styles can be useful in different circumstances and in many organizations all will be used at some time. Some of the limitations in CSI’s organizational style are that we do not deliberately set high standards of performance and we do not make a strong effort to develop people for the future. And sometimes, we may limit the organization by choosing to create harmony rather than striving to be effective. Fortunately, Morgan’s work gives examples of pragmatism – of being flexible and doing what works.

We discussed this with the staff person in question and asked how this might define this vague word “community” in practical terms within the work place. The response was: “To be able to give one’s opinion on almost anything in a friendly way.” We liked that as a beginning definition. It implies a degree of openness that we want at CSI.

It is probable that during the interview process we spoke of community in very positive terms and emphasized our commitment to community in our work process. However, we never explained how that fit into the work environment or considered what limitations we might place on the concept of community, which is sometimes extremely broad and vague. We took this as an action to be undertaken for subsequent interviews.

We feel fortunate that our staff person spoke up and challenged us on how community fits in the work place. We have recently made a great effort to describe what we mean by “community” and it is important what we do in our organization to communicate that to the world. This gave us an opportunity to see how we talk about our mission to our potential employees, volunteers, and board members, and how we implement it in our daily operations at CSI.