Category: organizational development

collective impact, communications, leadership, messaging, organizational development

What makes for a great leader?

Every organization should be a leader – a leader of a cause and a leader of a community of supporters for that cause. Leadership is the ability to influence a group toward the achievement of a vision or a set of goals, and mission-driven organizations need to successfully bring people together to accomplish long-term impact.

But what makes for a good leader? Let’s take a look at what the research says about the traits and behaviors of individual leaders and then apply it to organizations.

Personality traits

When looking at the characteristics of leaders, there are certain personality traits that are important for their emergence and effectiveness. Extraversion is probably the most important trait, though it’s more strongly related to how leaders emerge than their effectiveness. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: extraverts enjoy talking to others, are comfortable with groups of people, and know how to assert themselves (though being too assertive can make a leader less effective). Conversely, introverts prefer to be alone and don’t like being in front of a crowd, which might make it difficult to attract, retain, and bring together followers.

Conscientiousness (self-discipline and responsibility) and openness (to new ideas and experiences) also show strong relationships to effective leadership. Leaders who are disciplined and keep commitments (conscientious) and who are creative and flexible (open) are more likely to be successful leaders.

Emotional intelligence (EI) – the ability to recognize and regulate emotions – is also an important trait. Someone may have a great vision, excellent training, fantastic ideas, and a highly analytical mind and still not make a great leader without EI. This is because a core component of EI is empathy – being sensitive to others’ needs and feelings. A leader who effectively displays and manages emotions will find it easier to connect with and influence the emotions of followers.

Charismatic leadership

Charismatic leaders are those to whom followers attribute heroic or extraordinary leadership abilities based on their behaviors. (Fun fact: the word charisma is from the Greek for “gift.”) There are four key characteristics of charismatic leaders:

  1. An articulated vision. They express a better future as an idealized goal, and they are able to state the importance of the vision in terms that others understand.
  2. Personal risk. They are willing to put themselves out there, incur high costs, and sacrifice themselves to achieve the vision.
  3. Sensitivity to followers’ needs. They are perceptive of others’ qualities and responsive to their needs and feelings.
  4. Unconventional behavior. They do things that are considered novel or even contrary to social norms.

Charismatic leaders can gather followers by presenting a clear and compelling vision, standing by their values, and being attuned to the needs and feelings of others. Of course, there are charismatic leaders who aren’t effective – the ones who are so larger than life that they pursue their own personal agendas – and the effectiveness of a charismatic leader can depend on the context and the vision itself. (After all, Hitler was a charismatic leader who convinced others to pursue a disastrous vision…)

Transformational leadership

There’s a whole body of research dedicated to differentiating between transactional leaders – those who guide followers towards goals by clarifying roles, tasks, and rewards – and transformational leaders – those who inspire followers to transcend their self-interests for the good of the organization.

It is important to note that these two modes of leadership are not in conflict. Transformational leadership builds on transactional leadership, producing levels of effort and performance beyond what transactional leadership can do.

So what characterizes transformational leaders? How do leaders get their followers to go above and beyond for the cause? There are four key qualities:

  1. Individualized consideration. They give personal attention to each follower and treats them individually.
  2. Intellectual stimulation. They promote intelligence, rational thinking, and careful problem solving.
  3. Inspirational motivation. They set high expectations, use metaphors to focus others’ efforts, and express important values in simple ways.
  4. Idealized influence. They provide a sense of purpose, instill pride, gain respect, and build trust.

Like charismatic leaders, transformational leaders present a clear vision, but they also work to build consensus, increase follower self-efficacy (that “can do” spirit), and engage followers in taking on the responsibility of achieving the mission. Organizations with transformational leaders have more decentralized management and give followers a greater sense of autonomy.

Organizational Leadership

So what can organizations learn from all this? How can an organization as a whole serve as an effective leader that rallies support for its cause and its work? Since a list of fours seems to be the theme in this post, here’s another:

  1. Present a clear vision and purpose. In your communications work, be sure to articulate your idealized version of the world and how it’s better than the current situation. Explain why it’s important, what the benefits are, and what it means for your audiences and what they care about.
  2. Be sensitive to your audiences. Whether it’s your constituents, your partners, your funders, your donors, or your supporters, always be empathetic, understanding, responsive, and open-minded. Keep the lines of communication open, seek out feedback, ask what you can do for others, give personal attention, and make time for people. Trusting relationships are how we get things done, but they must be built and maintained with compassion and authenticity.
  3. Set a good example. There’s truth in the adage, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” As a leader in the field, you should stand by your values, stay true to your word, and follow through on your promises and commitments. You should also be grounded, reasonable, rational, evidence-based, and level-headed – qualities that earn respect from people on all sides of an issue.
  4. Instill greatness. If you want people to follow you, it’s not enough to just show them the path towards your vision. You want to be transformational and inspire others to walk that path. Stay positive about the road ahead so people believe change can happen, but also be realistic about the challenges. Empower others to take action by talking about their role in creating change and giving them opportunities to do something concrete. Make your supporters feel connected and involved in the organization, and let them take some responsibility for the organization’s progress. Followers want to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves, something important and meaningful.

Organizations must connect with others and bring them together for a common goal. Just as individual leaders do, organizations must exhibit the right traits and behaviors to rally support and earn the respect, trust, and admiration of others. If you want your organization to succeed, invest in becoming a leading organization – one that inspires others to join your cause and helps you in achieving your mission.

leadership, management, organizational development, productivity

5 keys to successful teamwork

It’s a common assumption that teams are more productive than individuals working independently. It’s a fair assumption: we would think that a team is more than the sum of its parts, that each person can benefit from an extra pair of hands, that more can be achieved with more combined effort. The whole “two heads are better than one” idea.

In reality, most teams are actually less effective than we think they are. According to J. Richard Hackman, a professor of social and organizational psychology at Harvard University and a leading expert on teams, research on teams consistently shows that teams underperform their potential, despite all the extra resources they have. He notes that teams typically have problems with coordination and motivation, and they are often in competition with other teams, all of which puts them at a disadvantage right from the start. Ironically, organizations with the best human resource departments sometimes have less effective teams because HR tends to focus on improving individual behavior rather than team behavior.

So what can help enable teams to produce the magic they aspire to? What needs to be in place to improve a team’s chances of success? Here I break it down into five components:

Context. First things first, a team won’t succeed if certain fundamental elements aren’t in place. These include adequate resources to do their work, a clear leader and structure for the group, a climate of trust within the organization, and a system of performance evaluation that measures and rewards individual contributions and team achievements.

Composition. Often teams are formed by pulling in people who are interested, available, and whose roles are relevant to the group objective. But there are far more important variables to consider in building a team if you want the team to succeed:

  • Abilities. A team is not just the sum of its individual members’ abilities, but those abilities can also set limits on the team’s performance. In building a team for a specific purpose, you should consider what abilities are required to achieve success. Working on a strategic plan? Make sure you have people who can think critically and strategically. Need a group to help put together a large mailing? Consider people who are detail-oriented and like repetitive tasks. Matching tasks to abilities can make or break a team.
  • Personalities. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the personalities of individuals can make a huge difference for the performance of a team. Reviews of literature on the subject reveal that higher levels of conscientiousness and openness to experience contribute to higher team performance, as does a minimum level of team member agreeableness. Conscientious individuals are good at backing up others and sensing when support is needed, while those open to experiences communicate better. And no one likes working with disagreeable people – they can make the experience unpleasant for everyone on the team, and that can reduce motivation and engagement.
  • Roles. Teams have different needs that need to be filled appropriately. There is all sorts of research on different team roles, from advisers and controllers to promoters and deviants, and the nature of the work will dictate what roles are required. Teams don’t always need a leader (self-managed teams have dispersed leadership) but they do benefit from effective leaders and positive deviants (those who help the team by challenging the status quo or groupthink). But all of the team’s roles should be filled with the right people, who bring the right skills, experience, and ways of thinking. When assembling a team, think about bringing together people who can contribute not only to the team’s goals but also to its meetings and work flow.
  • Diversity. A diversity in the demographics, experience, and skills of a team can be a real asset, though this depends on a few factors. The overall demographics of an organization can come into play, making minorities in the organization feel less welcome to contribute ideas. Similarly, those who are less experienced may feel intimidated to contribute if outnumbered by others with far more experience and camaraderie. A team leader plays an important role in setting the tone and providing a common goal for the group (see below), which can bring more cohesion and openness to a diverse group. If the group’s diversity is imbalanced or not managed effectively, it can actually lead to lower performance than working separately.
  • Size. Most experts agree that keeping group size small improves effectiveness. The magic number is seven (plus or minus two). If the team is too large, it is cumbersome to coordinate and contribute, and if it is too small, the group objective can be overwhelming or lack the diversity of perspectives needed for new ideas, perspectives, and solutions.
  • Preferences. Not everyone is a team player, and that’s okay. Forcing someone to be on a team they don’t want to be a part of threatens the team’s morale and the individual members’ satisfaction. When putting together a team, managers should consider individual preferences along with abilities, personalities, skills, and roles.

Common purpose. One of the biggest failures of teams is a lack of a clear and common goal. Not knowing what needs to get done – and how to get it done – leads to members becoming disengaged from the team. A good leader will help the team to define clear objectives and the processes for achieving them. When a team knows, understands, and accepts the group’s goals, they take more ownership over them and more responsibility for achieving them. When they collectively believe they can achieve those goals (what we call group efficacy) then they are more likely to succeed in their pursuit of those goals.

Conscience. As more research comes out on the importance of emotional intelligence, it is also being researched at the group level. According to experts Vanessa Druskat and Steven Wolff, building a team’s emotional intelligence means recognizing and regulating emotions at both the individual level and the group level. Effective teams consist of individuals who are aware of and regulate their own feelings and can recognize and appropriately respond to the emotions of others. To realize this, the group should establish norms that allow for positive confrontation (openly identifying another’s emotions in a supportive way) and caring (showing appreciation and respect through support, validation, and compassion). Similarly, a team should collectively recognize the group dynamic and establish norms that enable the team to work with emotions, foster a positive environment, and encourage proactive problem solving. This helps groups avoid growing stale, burning out, or getting negative. Finally, a group should also be aware of how it behaves relative to those outside the group, particularly when its work requires the cooperation or acceptance of others. Having liaisons to important constituencies or setting up mechanisms for input and feedback can help ensure that a team’s work is relevant and adopted by those it will impact. Without emotional intelligence, a group can create a negative experience for individual members, it can underperform or even fail in its objectives, and it can fail in getting its results adopted by others.

Communication. Related to the team’s conscience, communications plays a critical role in the success of teams. In fact, according to research conducted by Sociometric Solutions (now Humanyze), patterns of communications are the most important predictor of a team’s success. The three aspects of communication they identified as affecting team performance most were energy (the number and nature of exchanges between team members), engagement (distribution of energy among team members), and exploration (communication that members engage in outside the team). Effective teams communicate often with positive exchanges, ideally face-to-face, with every member communicating equally to all others, and with frequent communications outside the team as well. This latter aspect reflects the point above about understanding outside perspectives, and also the value of seeking outside inputs for the team’s work. Of course, communication outside the team comes at the expense to communication within the team, so these must be balanced, but successful teams oscillate between exploration of new ideas outside the team and engagement within the team to integrate those ideas.

Teams do have the potential for greatness – greater effectiveness, greater creativity, and greater efficiencies. However, achieving that greatness takes thoughtful effort to define, build, and manage that team. Consider how you put together a team and guide it towards success, and you can be the one who creates a great team experience for your organization.

fundraising, leadership, management, organizational development, planning

Are you growing or dying?

All living things have certain things in common, and one of those is growth. Living things develop and mature as they age. Sometimes this is an actual increase in mass and sometimes a change in features and functions. But growth and development are key characteristics of life. As retired football coach and motivational speaker Lou Holtz once said, “In this world you’re either growing or you’re dying, so get in motion and grow.”

Organizations are like living things. They are made up of individuals that work together. They have different functions that work in concert to help them be productive. They have inputs, produce outputs, and consume energy. They respond – and hopefully adapt – to their environments. And like living things, organizations should grow and develop.

Unfortunately, once organizations get going, they sometimes stop growing. Many end up adopting a status quo and don’t continue developing their work or their organizations. Sometimes this is the result of poor leadership, sometimes it’s the result of comfort, and sometimes it’s what happens when organizations get used to operating under sustained conditions of limited resources. They grow stagnant and repetitive, doing the same thing day in and day out, without looking or moving forward.

You may wonder what’s wrong with this. I mean, if an organization is doing good work, then what’s the need to keep growing?

The bottom line is that there’s always more that can be done to further the mission. An organization is not done until the problem is solved, and if you are continuously doing the same work day after day, with no end in sight, then you’re probably not solving the problem. The work can always be improved, in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness. The work can be advanced to reach more people, tackle other facets of the problem, or do more to serve your constituents. The people doing the work can always benefit from development – of their knowledge, their skills, their teamwork, their behaviors. And your work would be easier and more successful if you had a bigger network of support, from donors and funders to partners and volunteers.

So how do you know if your organization has stopped growing? Ask yourself these questions:

  • Is your base of support stagnant? Do you have difficulty acquiring new donors every year? Do you reach out to the same institutional funders for grants each year? Do you rely on the same volunteers for events? Do you feel like you’ve tapped out your sources of revenue?
  • Is your impact expanding? Are you making measurable gains towards your strategic goals each year? Are you expanding your programs? Do your annual objectives push your programs to do more than the year before? Are you reaching more constituents? Are you forming more partnerships each year?
  • Is your organizational capacity developing? Are you hiring more staff to achieve more? Do you have professional development opportunities for staff? Are staff getting better at their jobs over time? Are there opportunities for advancement and greater responsibility for staff? Are there less organizational issues to tackle year after year, or are you still facing the same ones again and again?

Your organization should be growing over time – in impact, in support, and in capacity. Without growth in these areas, you will not get closer to achieving your mission (or if you do get closer, it’s not fast enough for those who are affected by the problem every day).

Growth is essential for organizations. If you’re not growing, you’re dying.