10 Things Your Org Can Do Right Now To Give the Progressive Movement a Chance to Win

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h) Leave out people who don’t prepare for the meeting. We will survive without their spontaneous insights.

3) Fire somebody. People who are not making a superior contribution to the organization are corrupting the organization’s culture. The performance standard of an organization, while most likely set by its leaders, is undermined by its weakest performers. Keeping C performers around will slowly turn your B performers into Cs (“why work any harder? Jack, over there, just does the minimum and he’s still around”) and will drive off your A performers. “As” have options. They only want to be in organizations with high standards that allow them to perform at a high level.

Progressives tend to have a hard time firing people. It seems cruel and insensitive. After all, as I’ve heard a hundred times, “We are family here.” No. You aren’t family (and you may be forgetting, as well, that half of all families break up).

And just because someone is a good person doesn’t mean he or she is a good fit in the organization. They and we would be better off if they weren’t here.

4) Hire somebody. Most of us have witnessed the effect of, as our organization's talent  management expert, Dr. Michael McGrath says, “getting the right person, in the right job, at the right time.” It is almost magic. The right person can make other people better. She brings fresh eyes and new energy, seeing thing we don’t presently see, questioning the ways things are done, imagining possibilities that the organizationally habituated can’t imagine. She is like yeast.

Think of the difference it made when Eisenhower was catapulted to power over hundreds of other generals to take the reins of World War II. Or the difference in a go-nowhere Washington Redskins football team until RGIII arrived (my apologies for another sports example). Or the difference it made when a 28-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King was picked to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association.

5) Make learning the heart of the matter.  It is arrogant to assume that the organizational structure and culture we either build or inherited is just what we need now. External conditions change (look no further than the Citizen’s United decision). Competition changes. Generational sensitivities change. Technology changes.

Therefore the only way to be doing what we need to be doing, the only way to be true to our mission, is to have mechanisms for constant learning and change. We would have a veritable revolution if progressive would honestly evaluate – everything. For the deepest learning occurs in systematic reflection after a common experience. John Dewey puts it this way: Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation or experience its own full and unique meaning.

Further, learning is for everyone.  How much more attractive would your organization be if people knew it as the place where learning occurs, everywhere, and where everyone learns and contributes what they’ve learned?  One never knows the source of great insights.  They may come from the CEO, but they may also come from the intern behind the counter in the mail room. Change consultant Alan Gregerman named it in the title to his book, Surrounded by Geniuses.

Our organization's faculty conducted a Discovery Visit to an organization, a visit characterized by individual conversations with every person on the staff. Our job was to listen carefully, to try to understand what was really going on inside the organization, and to report what we heard to the officers. We developed this practice out of our experience and deep belief that everyone holds a piece of the truth, and certainly no one or two of us hold all of it.