Stage-4: Achieve for the Firm

Applying Community-centred Principles

Now that you have established yourself and shown a capacity to lead like-minded colleagues on focused, specialized projects, you realize that a tougher challenge awaits.

Organization-wide goals such as improved quality, better customer service, increased sales or higher profits are beyond the responsibility of any single expert or department. To move ahead, you must accept these goals and desire to take on the leadership of a disparate group: disparate in regard to specialist expertise, capabilities, interests, attitudes and personalities.

The needed principles and dangers are described in detail here. However, this is the Community-centred story in a nutshell:

Entering the Impersonal Dimension

You can never abandon the struggle to reconcile conflicts of interest and accommodate different people, just as the challenges and principles of previous Stages must never be forgotten. But great success must not be expected either. Even if you determine your organization’s values, aspirations and goals in a participative way, you may find yourself virtually alone in fully identifying with the organization’s needs.

Your emerging over-riding need now is to gather about you a few high-level staff as committed and concerned as you are about the business. The sort of people you need will never free-ride or be satisfied with mediocre results. They will:

● Face conflicts with you
● Be concerned about you
● Be 100% loyal and trustworthy
● Know when to accept your word and when to argue with you
● Overall be a blessing to have around.

Q: Where do such magical people come from?

A: Wrong Question! Nothing and nobody just comes. Your key people must be discovered, nurtured and handled. But nothing up to this point indicates how such a challenge should be met. The relevant Mode to take your ambition further and move your career into a higher plane is obviously kinship-centred.

Q: How can such relationships be impersonal? 

It is a paradox. Remember that in the kinship-centred world, the individual counts for almost nothing because the family unit and its values are all-important. The equivalent here will be devotion to the organization.

It is more obvious that perspective- and reality-centred values (yet to be confronted) are impersonal. Being very high on self-development (Y-axis), they call for personal impulses and ego-desires to be put firmly to one side. So properly constructed Core Group norms will be accepted as necessary.

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• More about community-centred principles & dangers; and if it's appropriate for you, consider building your career in the Mode.

• For everyone, realize this is a watershed that forces a re-think of market-centred principles.

• After this re-think, continue your journey to Stage-5: Sustaining a core group.

Originally posted: July 2009