Company and community

A Useful Foundation
In large, hierarchical organizations, certain conditions help to facilitate a transformation to communityship:
The remnants of community.
It is far easier to build on what remains of a community than to create one from scratch. In my experience, many companies that seem to have lost their sense of community in fact retain it somewhere, even if it is hidden from leaders who have failed to appreciate it. For example, in pharmaceutical companies that have become lumbering behemoths focused on sales and acquisitions, clusters of scientists who remain deeply dedicated to discovering remedies for disease can always be found.
Often, the place to look for the remnants of community is among middle managers. Significant numbers of these people tend to be highly knowledgeable about the enterprise and deeply committed to its survival. After studying the roles of middle managers in corporate transformations, Quy Nguyen Huy, a professor at Insead, wrote: “The intensity with which [middle] managers wanted to protect the long-term interests of the company and the welfare of their subordinates surprised me again and again” (“In Praise of Middle Managers,” HBR September 2001). Senior managers, not to mention the middle managers themselves, need to recognize the power of this dedication.
An atmosphere that promotes trust.
The way to start rebuilding community is to stop the practices that undermine it, such as treating human beings as human resources; firing them in great numbers when the company has not met performance targets (but remains profitable); tolerating obscene compensation packages for CEOs (especially ones that offer them “retention” and other bonuses for doing what they receive a salary to do); exhibiting a general disrespect for anything in the company’s past, including its culture; and in general overemphasizing leadership. In other words, the organization has to shed much of its individualist behavior and many of its short-term measures in favor of practices that promote trust, engagement, and spontaneous collaboration aimed at sustainability.