Inside the Black Box - Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago

given as the reason organizations display the innovation they do—innovation that is necessary to many of
their operations. Many organizations credited leadership with the important role of guiding organizational
philosophy and direction.
We’ve talked an awful lot about innovation—it’s one of our core values and …we’ve been very
innovative and got [sic] a social enterprise that we started. I think we have the luxury of doing that for
two reasons. Number one, because of the board we have, it’s still a founder’s board…He’s the chair
and the founder. His presence is very large within the organization….
Management and Staff Rely on Each Other
Several organizations mentioned the importance of having leadership staff that works as a team. Two
referenced frequent and regularly scheduled leadership or directors’ team meetings that keep all of them
in communication with each other. One explained,
…[t]he idea of course [for these meetings] is so that all of us as a part of a leadership team understand
what’s going on across the company. So there’s some sharing that has to be done. Sharing and
decision making, sharing of resources to the extent that we can…All of us need to know what
resources we can share, what resources we cannot share and everybody needs to know what’s going
on.
Leadership staff interact with their employees in productive and necessary ways, while trying to limit
micromanaging and bureaucratic impediments on staff as much as possible. This can be difficult when
there are multiple levels of the organizational hierarchy; however, organizations recognize that limiting
vertical bureaucracy empowers supporting staff to use their judgment and make decisions that are
beneficial to the organization as a whole. One staff member described their organization as having an
incredibly hands-off type of environment that we work in, so there is very little micromanaging, if
any, that goes on here. And so we really kind of empower the staff to make decisions and to use their
judgment, which I think is different from some of the workforce agencies, where they’re kind of
bound to this like, “Well, it's gotta be this way, and this is the rule and the policy on this.”
The opportunity for staff to grow and maintain autonomy in various levels of decision making was
important to most staff interviewed. One interviewee said of the president of the organization,
He’s always giving us space to innovate and to make decisions and to use our talents to achieve the
particular goals.
An interviewee at another organization said the leadership
…allow a lot of room for people to grow into their positions and to be creative about how they
accomplish their goals.
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