Nurturing organizational change

Sixteen organizations

Sixteen different missions

Sixteen different perspectives

Sixteen different sets of programs and funding sources

Sixteen different areas of expertise

Sixteen organizations willing to Lead the Change. That's one unifying theme.

“The purpose is to explore how diverse organizations can unify around a common theme to share and learn, and to use their respective areas of focus to collectively make an impact. While the unifying topic for participating in Recoding Organizational DNA is homelessness, the work that will be conducted is not an attempt to solve the homelessness issue.” 

Recoding Organizational DNA held its second session, affectionately named:  Lab 1: Leading the Change, on Aug. 8 at the Girl Scouts Gulf Coast Event and Conference Center.  The energy and camaraderie were evident as people were heavily engaged and active throughout the session.

Recall that the Recoding Organizational DNA Kickoff Session in July focused on:

1) Beginning to create the environment for these organizations to discuss, explore and share the change

2) Developing the familiarity and engagement necessary to establish trust

3) Establishing clearly defined objectives

4) Sharing the tools and resources available to each agency

With the work that occurred at the Kickoff Session and continued during the month, the group began to develop the trust and familiarity needed to share ideas, tools and resources.

During Lab 1, Ron Piccolo, Ph.D., introduced and discussed John Kotter’s Leading Change – Why Transformation Efforts Fail, an article in the Harvard Business Review, in order to give everyone a common understanding of ‘change management’.

Remember that the objectives of this initiative are to move from:

1. Enablement to engagement
2. Agency-centric to system-centric
3. Output measurements to outcome measurements

This is going to require multi-dimensional change for each organization. It is important that the leaders understand organizational change management. Change impacting employees, funders, clients, volunteers, donors, constituents, etc. is not for the faint of heart, but the “status quo” can’t remain because the results are less than optimal.

After surveying the participants, we implemented two additional features to this initiative:

1) We hosted a social media workshop to teach those organizations that wanted the opportunity to learn.   Delivered by MagnifyGood, this session was attended by about half of the participating organizations and prepared them to elevate their social media presence.

2) We assigned a liaison from The Patterson Foundation to each organization to streamline the communication process.

The work continues this month as the participating organizations are completing their homework for Lab 2 – The Objectives in Action, which will occur in early September.