An organization has one immediate goal: To communicate the message to the target audience! That is the number one organizational goal. All organizational investments and actions should be directed towards the fulfillment of that goal. Everything in the organization – from the top down and from the bottom up – revolves around the successful execution of this goal. That said, it should be noted that this goal is actually founded upon organizational presuppositions that assume 1.) An Organizational Message and 2.) An Audience. If an organization has neither, then the very idea of organization is a contextual oxymoron and the following will be totally inapplicable if not completely useless. You need a message and you need an audience. If you have neither, then stop reading now and hit reset.
Those who are leading an organization that is oriented around this ultimate goal (i.e., your organization has a message and it has a clear audience in mind to whom it will be regularly delivered) need to be reminded of one very, very important truth that can and will effect the proper execution of the goal, the trajectory of the organization’s growth, and the overall health of the organization. What is this simple truth? It is this: “You Can’t Make Everyone Happy And You Shouldn’t Try To Do So!”
That’s an organizational mantra if there ever was one! Let’s repeat that again, for posterity’s sake: “You Can’t Make Everyone Happy And You Shouldn’t Try To Do So!”
Those who do try to make everyone happy or appeal to everyone have neither a clear message, nor do they have a specific audience in mind. These organizations instead take a shotgun approach and fire at everything and anything that moves or looks remotely interested. The result is a lame organization that has very little – if any – real influence within its overall social sphere (e.g., business, religious, education, non-profit, etc.). These vague organizations will fail in the long term in spite of their good intentions. Sure it sounds good to say things like, “We don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable or angry,” but the truth of the matter is that there will always be someone who is uncomfortable and/or angry! That’s the reality we live in today! We can’t make everyone happy! So, to bend an organization’s overall trajectory towards a group of people who will sooner or later take serious issue with the bigger organizational message is terribly unwise. It’s unwise because 1.) The people you are bending towards will never join your organization anyway, because the overall organizational message is not something with which they can jive, and 2.) You are succumbing to things that result in deviations from the script (i.e., the organization’s ultimate goal is to communicate the organization’s message to the target audience).
Here’s a real-time example: Our church plant in Lancaster is ultimately a progressive thinking group of people wholeheartedly dedicated to Jesus’ Kingdom of God. Our message is “The Kingdom of God” and our audience is “all of those who aren’t living within it but could be!” They (the people not living within the Kingdom presently) have been invited by God to enter and we have been called to deliver those invitations to them personally. That’s what our organization is all about, ultimately. Now, as we work towards that ultimate goal we will invest into and act upon everything and anything that helps us achieve it. We will most definitely invest into and act upon things that make people who don’t really “get” what we are doing more than a bit uncomfortable, but we will move forward anyway because they are not the intended audience. They may become agitated as a result of our message, but the ultimate goal has less to do with them and everything to do with the intended audience. Besides, those who are agitated at our organizational message and ethos will never join our organization anyway. So, why bend and divert from the script? We don’t. We stick to the ultimate goal by communicating our message to our intended audience.
So, to summarize, let me simply say this:
1. Your organization has one ultimate goal: Communicate its message to its intended audience.
2. Your organization must have a communicable message and an intended audience in mind.
3. You can’t and should not even try to make everyone happy.
4. There will always be people who will be angry and uncomfortable with your organization.
6. Organizations that take the shotgun approach are vague and have little if any influence.
7. Stick to your organization’s script.
You can’t make everyone happy and you will have to endure the anger that some will direct your way. That’s OK. It’s to be expected. If you do, however, honestly believe in your organization’s message and the mission to communicate it to your audience then those little fiery darts that some will toss your way will have very, very little effect, if they have any real effect at all.
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