THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF TRANSFORMATIONAL STEWARDS

Transforming operations and ways of doing business is challenging and often difficult to accomplish successfully; a large number of change efforts fail. By identifying and understanding the major challenges they face prior to implementing changes, leaders will have the opportunity to strategize and adjust their plans and processes accordingly, and to develop the skills needed in their organization to navigate the perilous change course.

In an effort to capture a variety of change practices and to illustrate the concepts that we have identified as the most significant to change leaders, we examined six case studies, all involving large-scale change efforts in the public and nonprofit sectors. These cases all involved complex changes that were undertaken to transform the current state of the organization and to change the ways the organization provides goods and services. We examined the change initiatives involved in the following cases drawn from federal, state, local, charitable, and religious organizations:

• The delivery of human services in Fairfax County, Virginia

• The U.S. Coast Guard’s strategy to recapitalize and integrate its “Deepwater” assets

• The transformation of the Veterans Health Administration

• The initial stages of a significant unfunded federal mandate, REAL ID, that requires a fundamental restructuring of the states’ driver’s license systems

• The change in leadership of N Street Village in Washington, D.C., under conditions of fiscal crisis

• The restructuring of Hillel, the Jewish nonprofit that serves college students throughout the United States.

We also drew from our own experiences of changes that occurred in state government and at George Washington University. Collectively, these experiences and cases provided rich material for our analysis.

To engineer successful public and nonprofit sector change, leaders must carefully anticipate and analyze change complexity, their stakeholders, their external sociopolitical environment, and their organization’s change capacity—initiating change while managing the risks of change. Leaders must adapt and help others adapt to changing mission requirements, new requirements, or environmental forces; stay competitive with the latest innovations and technology; and continue to provide quality services to citizens.

If change is such a risky business, why engage in it? The answer, of course, is that it is often more risky not to change. In our two nonprofit cases, not changing might have led to the demise of the organizations, as they were facing significant fiscal crises brought about by poor leadership as well as internal and external forces. In the Veterans Health Administration case, the very existence of a public veterans’ health care system was in question, with political pressure to privatize it. The system was a “burning platform” that could not survive in its current configuration. With the increased pressure and new responsibilities expanding the Coast Guard’s mission of protecting our harbors and ports, not changing could have led to mission failure. Fairfax County human service systems might have been able to “muddle along” without changing, but at a high cost to servicing the county’s expanding population. Finally, REAL ID presents a change mandated by Congress, and while negotiations continue regarding its implementation, the inevitable outcome of production of national identification cards will occur, one way or another.

In Chapter 2 we develop further our notion of transformational stewardship. Then in Chapter 3 we provide a more complete discussion of our model for leading change in the public interest. Chapter 4 describes the six cases of public and nonprofit changes we researched to both inform and test our model. Each of the case studies is used throughout the remainder of the book to illustrate the model and expand our vision about the role of public and nonprofit leaders as transformational stewards.