Wednesdays are for Work (and Play)

Wednesdays will be Work or Play Day. I’ll attempt to find some bloggable material at the location where I spent the majority of my time, or from what I enjoy doing. Today, it’s all work.
A substantial reorganization was recently announced at our institution. It will involve the elimination of a few administrative positions and will rename several academic units across the campus. I don’t want to belabor the reader with the particular merits of the decision, but I do have a concern with how it was devised. The reorganization was developed by a small group of leadership and then announced to the larger campus in an email.

There are more similarities that you may think between communities of faith and academic institutions. One dysfunctional similarity is that a silo mentality can develop between leadership and the larger community. This mentality is especially strong in how leadership makes decisions and communicates ideas to the rest of the organization.

The situation plays out like this: out of a concern for negative feedback (or a feeling that feedback is unnecessary), leadership expedites the implementation process. When there is the predictable blowback after the decision is announced, leadership commends itself that it made the right decision and it was better to generate the feedback after the decision rather than before.

The primary problem with this thinking, is that it detaches the rest of the church or institution from the decision making process. Then when the organization depends upon the members of the congregation to carry it out, they often have nothing personally invested in the process and they don’t participate. By involving the congregation (or the rest of the organization) in the decision making-process, you get more buy in down the road.