the Travis Manion Foundation
Please put together 1 page of content regards an in-class discussion regards the Travis Manion Foundation. This is not an overview of the Travis Manion Foundation and NO BACKGROUND INFORMATION is needed.
The style of this paper should look like this: “In our class discussion about TMF’s change we talked about …”
Please reference the below already written paper while using the bulleted notes below to discuss the conversation/analysis held in class. Focus on discussion points that you disagreed or agreed with during the group analysis or further build out ideas shared in the group analysis.
- Professor Leary: example of values:
- Christian: difference in the organization
- Mission and programs didn’t change,
- Andrea: organization structure
- Utilizes machine model; has hierarchical structure coming from alot of staff that are former military because its easier for them
- Not as much collaboration; decisions made in smaller teams
- Catalysts for success:
- Less hand-holding, autonomy to volunteers to grow, quality of programs decreased. Focused on curriculum
- Top down change, executive chief was on the change
- Volunteer appreciates the growth to have more room for purpose and redefine meaning; allowed volunteers to take the ability to open chapters in regional areas
- Communication within organization:
- Top-down, emails, word of mouth, figuring it out, still growing from it.
- Biggest tension we had was first order or second order: we leaned into uncertainty
- Was the approach top-down or bottom-up in how the change was put into place? What was your experience as an employee with how the leadership handled this expansion?
- Top-down, staff on board, resistance to change in minority. Volunteer perspective: Local chapters opening allowed volunteers to focus on specific missions.
TMF enables veterans and groups of fallen legends to flourish in their post-military lives. TMF’s Veteran Transition Workshops give individualized instruments and assets that guide administration individuals in utilizing their qualities and interests to flourish actually and expertly in both their profession and the manner by which they keep on serving. Notwithstanding quarterly workshops and courses, TMF offers professional training blenders and systems administration occasions to changing veterans. Groups of fallen legends are engaged to thrive in their own excursions of mending through assistance-based endeavors. Endeavors are multi-day ventures for groups of the tumbled to serve networks out of luck, to pay tribute to their lost friends and family. They give brotherhood, support, and recharged reasons for enduring relatives. Veterans and survivors keep on creating solid connections and feel a feeling of direction past change workshops and campaigns by being included individuals and taking an interest in TMF occasions consistently.
In class our team discussed the possibility of categorizing the change as both first order change and second order change. We classified the organization change as first order because we saw that the espoused values and missions stayed strong throughout the change and that the culture of the company was still there despite the shifts in leadership. Additionally, the core purpose of the change was still consistent in centering around serving the community as a whole. Another reason we thought this organization change was first order was because it followed a machine-like change process where it was hierarchical and relied on top-down leadership for change.
Some ways that we thought the organizational change was a second order change is because of the “Grow or Die” motto that the organization had to follow in order to shift from regional to national. This included doubling the staff and increasing the number of veterans served. Additionally there was a cultural shift to focus on quality after the change because they had originally compromised quality over quantity because they needed to grow. The creation of the TMF values were utilized to influence the hiring processes and managing expectations. There was also a shift in generations to adapting to a new population. This was a transformational approach to having more resources for new generations that were more applicable to the population. With this change, TMF needed to shift their management to influence more volunteers similar to the brain metaphor that we have discussed in class. There was less collaboration with the growth of the organization that led to different experiences for past volunteers, so the organization had to make a shift to adapt to the growing needs of the community.
TMF and the change they experienced as an organization can be understood using the organism, culture, brain and machine metaphors. As we discussed these metaphors in class, we prompted our fellow peers to consider the social justice principles at play in their analysis. Diving into each metaphor, we will discuss how TMF resembles the principles of each metaphor and how we can better understand the change that occurred through the metaphor. When applicable, we will intertwine into our discussion social justice and critical theory principles to enrich our understanding of the case.
TMF quickly had to grow in scale, with a “grow or die” mentality. As an organism that is interconnected and ever changing, TMF staff and volunteers played an integral part in the non-profit’s identity through their stories and ideas. However, they faced social justice issues that continue to be an area of concern for them. The military is a diverse grouping of people and TMF wants that to be reflected within their own staff and volunteer population. They strive to challenge and support volunteer’s ideas to serve their community, but that comes with it’s own limitations such as compromising the quality of their programs because of their scale. The familial atmosphere that volunteers rave about has created strong bonds between Spartans who have been there the longest. Sometimes volunteers may feel that they cannot break in and belong within the set of cultures that are deeply rooted beneath the surface. People swear by TMF’s values and take pride in them, but this pride comes with it’s own limitations. Sometimes it becomes a question of whether those values could deter talent from joining TMF or push people away with their aggressive stand.
Although the organism and culture metaphor provide a similar framework for understanding organizational change, we’ll focus on understanding the culture of TMF as it plays a big role in how they sustained their success despite their expansion. TMF’s culture is centered around giving back for those who have served and their families. It’s very familial oriented, creating a new sense of community for veterans who naturally feel disconnected from the bonds they created during their service. The transition into civilian life is not an easy one and TMF is there to help people in that process because they provide a new family for people to be a part of. They pride themselves in the value of courageous living, with the mantra of “If Not Me, Then Who”. Through the lense of the culture metaphor we can see that TMF’s change happened quickly, yet preserved their core “self”, their culture, in order to maintain the success they have as an organization.
This framework helps us connect this organizational change to the brain metaphor. The brain metaphor helps us understand that learning in an organization happens in a similar way as the learning that we undergo on an individual level. Unconscious mental models influence the seemingly shared meanings and language that the organization establishes. The culture and brain metaphor connect in the way that the individual influences the organization as a whole. TMF’s grant of more freedom and authority to volunteers, lead to the development of an internal ability to let things emerge through their own initiative and training. This inevitably created a culture of learning and growth that stemmed from an individual level and spread to a national level. With this change in tactic, giving up control for the staff wasn’t easy as they had to sacrifice quality over quantity. Their adaptation to an 80% perfection level allowed them to do more with less resources, which is critical for a non-profit organization. The constant training and growing that volunteers and veterans went through to be shaped into a true Spartan, meant that flexibility and adaptability became the norm. These changes inevitably meant that a lot of things as they knew them became obsolete on the national level.
The machine metaphor provides a way of understanding TMF as an organizational structure. TMF is very hierarchical which would threaten their potential for growth as traditional structures tend to limit initiative and creativity. It makes it more difficult to expand and grow organically and for staff within the organization to move around and gain more knowledge and expertise. This metaphor helps us see the change in more technical terms, how they physically and operationally went about expanding on a national level. In retrospect, we believe that their machine-like systems could have been the reasons why they successfully scaled their organization.
When any organization undergoes growth at the scale and speed that TMF did, they are bound to experience some growing pains. In this case, one significant impact that the growth has had on staff has been related to communication. The organization has shifted largely to a top-down communication system in which directives from the higher leadership roles are disseminated out through middle managers to individual teams. While these individual teams are all assigned their own regions and separate projects, the loss of communication flow across teams has an impact on the individual teams’ abilities to collaborate or improve upon each other’s work.
The core values of the organization are shared across all teams but the sense of connectedness and teamwork does not appear to extend further than that. This growing pain can be attributed to the incorporation of new machine-like behaviors and structures. TMF’s core values were reinforced and growth was stabilized through a copy-and-paste method and procedural training steps that preserved the original mission of the organization, but this appears to have come at the cost of losing some of the creativity and quality of programming that the original format of the organization provided. Since the goal of the organizational change was to increase scale and preserve original values, this seems to be a predictable outcome of a successful change process. But how can the organization continue to improve now that it has accomplished this?
Employing Heifetz’s distinction between technical and adaptive problems, we can view these growing pains in a new light. He writes that adaptive problems require a different relationship with authority, one in which we do not depend solely on authority for the solution. Technical solutions rely on existing procedures and knowns, while adaptive solutions require the ability to think critically and complexly, engaging with authority in an entirely different way. A top-down communication approach and new rigidities in hierarchy may aid TMF’s volunteers and staff with many of their technical problems – but it cannot hope to engage them powerfully when working to resolve their adaptive problems. TMF will need to work to incorporate new patterns of behavior in order to do this, and expand on current efforts to train and develop members of their organization. Other metaphors can give us insight into how to accomplish this.
For example, a critical aspect of the Brain metaphor is the concept of double-loop learning, in which an organization is not only solving its current problems but also learning and improving upon its ability to recognize and solve future ones. Continuing to embrace opportunities for double-loop learning in TMF’s case may look like continual investment and development of volunteers’ and staff’s abilities and skills. By promoting more collaboration efforts across its siloed teams, TMF has the opportunity to develop stronger capacities in all of the lower hierarchies of the organization so that they have the ability and knowledge needed to recognize and solve their own problems.
TMF postulates that as per Positive Psychology, the more included somebody is with TMF the better their prosperity and overall flourishing. Be that as it may, there are various ways one could characterize “progressively included.” Involvement could be the amount of commitment with TMF over a specific period or could be characterized as member inclusion in exercises requiring higher duty (for example an undertaking rather than a run), it could be member association in a decent variety of TMF projects, or it could be a composite of any of those previously mentioned. The initial two require TMF authoritative information, which was resolved to be presently lacking for investigation in view of information quality concerns being tended to in their information model update and change.
Loss of internal workplace culture also plays a critical role in TMF’s change story. The original familial nature and closeness of community were an initial strength that has been reduced now that the organization sprawls across the entire country. What approaches could be taken to strengthen this? It is possible that physical distance is not the only cause for this loss of organizational culture. It is entirely possible that the first problem of communication and structure is linked to the second problem, as communication changes could be impacting employees’ and volunteers’ experiences with company culture. Softening the rigidness of communication and chain of command could potentially lead to cross-hierarchical feedback and a return to the familial characteristics of the original structure of the organization. Identifying new ways to increase engagement between members at differing levels of the organization, and then investing in and supporting those efforts across the whole organization would send a strong message that this is a priority for TMF. Examples of this could be an employee mentorship program that connects people at different levels of the organization, or special projects that require work from members of various teams.