I love a good metaphor. They help me understand or explain difficult concepts. I am also fascinated by organizations and how they tick. They are complex things! I like to use two metaphors to help me understand them. Trees and Wheels. In this blog I’ll introduce you to the tree.
Leadership occurs within the context of community, which means complexity – the sometimes-confusing interrelationship between an array of variables and systems. It’s why I prefer to focus on overall organizational health to assess leadership effectiveness. I have observed that people who are good leaders in one context may perform poorly in others, so why is that happening?
Think of the organization as a tree. Everything that is happening above ground is the “what” of an organization. The leaves and fruit represent its results and outcomes. In a non-profit this is usually the people it serves, and the quality of its impact in their lives. The branches represent the resources that make this possible: staff, volunteers, funding, assets, partners. These branches are sustained and supported by the trunk which represents its infrastructure and systems for governing, managing, and stewarding these resources: financial, HR, governance, IT, child safeguarding, health and safety, planning, property etc.
It’s relatively easy to measure these things and make recommendations for improvement. It’s less easy to define “why” it is like that. Because what you can see is usually a result of what you can’t see.
In an organization, the roots and the soil represent character, competencies, culture, and the context in which it operates. Each of these feeds or impacts the organization in different ways. What’s above ground may look similar when comparing organizations, but why they are like that can be caused by very different factors or the relationships between them.
Like a tree, if you truly want to impact organizational health, this is where the work really needs to be done. If we don’t understand why something is happening, how can we prescribe the right solution? Poor decisions are made when we act hastily on what we see.
So, at Enhance, while we certainly assess the “what” as the evidence of a healthy tree, like good gardeners, we spend most of our time digging into the “why” and building from the ground up. It makes for a better tree.
