Category: productivity

leadership, management, organizational development, planning, productivity, strategy

Take care of yourself first

There’s a concept in Judaism called tikkun olam that describes acts of kindness to perfect or repair the world. Though it has religious underpinnings, the idea is often more broadly applied to social policy and social justice issues. Tikkun olam is about healing the world, but the process begins with the individual: you must heal yourself first before you can heal your family, your community, your state, and eventually the world. The first step to fixing societal problems is to look inward and make sure you have the strength, well-being, and capacity to help others.

This concept is helpful for individuals (particularly those who push themselves to their limits and forget about their own self-care) but it is also useful for organizations.

When organizations look at their goals, they tend to be focused on the external ones – what sort of impact the organization wants to have on the world and the strategies needed to achieve that impact. Organizations like to think big and work hard to make a real difference and have a lasting impact.

But in order to achieve those big goals, it’s important to also look inward and think about what the organization needs in order to be successful. What capacity does the organization need to have to implement its plans and what capacity will it need to create? What are the resources – human, financial, technological, and institutional – that must be in place if the organization is to succeed and remain resilient? Are you growing the organization to meet the coming challenges or are you pushing its limits and reducing its effectiveness?

As you strategize for external change, think about strategies for organizational growth and development to achieve those goals. This is done at the strategic plan level, but also at the level of annual planning, team planning, and individual objectives. How are resources being acquired and allocated? How are teams structured and managed for greater productivity? How are individuals developing their own competencies to achieve their objectives?

The first step to helping others is to take care of yourself. Make sure your organization has the strength, resources, and resilience it needs to achieve great things.

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leadership, management, nonprofit sector, organizational development, productivity

How do we define organizational success?

I work with many organizations that successfully use their limited resources to achieve significant impact. They manage to deliver on goals and take on more work with minimal staff and minimal capacity.

One could say these organizations are successful – they are highly efficient, effective, and growing. Surely donors and funders would remark upon how these organizations are able to achieve so much given they have so little. Heck, I’m amazed at what they can do despite so few staff.

But the question is: at what cost?

I end up working with these organizations because they need help, and usually that help is behind the curtain, so to speak. Sure, the organizations are running programs with some success, but they are also struggling. Struggling to crank out the work, struggling to cultivate and maintain relationships with donors and funders, struggling to communicate with their audiences, struggling to get everyone on the same page, struggling to keep the organization moving forward. On the surface, everything may seem fine and dandy, but look within and there may be a lot of stress, anxiety, and tension.

This isn’t to say every organization is like this, but in my experience, even in the best-run organizations, I’ve found there is always at least a little discontent among staff with some aspect of how the organization is managed, whether it be in their individual role or at the organizational level.

Nonprofit organizations are notorious for overworking and underpaying their staff, all in an effort to appear efficient to donors and funders. They focus all their efforts on delivering on programs at the expense of strengthening the business behind their program work. As a result, they often suffer from management issues, lack of strategic planning and focus, lack of clear messaging, and lack of the human capacity to do all the work. This in turn causes stress, dissatisfaction, disengagement, a reduction in organizational commitment, and oftentimes a higher turnover in staff.

Perhaps the most dangerous part is that organizations accept this is as the status quo – that struggling and being stressed is just the nature of the job and how things are done. But should it be?

In my high school science class, the teacher had posted a banner with a well-known expression: “What is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular.” I think the same could be said of this stressful state of organizations. Just because doing things that way is getting you results does not mean that it is right, sustainable, or even acceptable.

We often measure success in terms of dollars earned and results produced, but not in how those things get done. In evaluation terms, we focus on performance metrics – achievement of set goals and objectives – but not on process metrics – measures of how well those goals and objectives were achieved. It is great to achieve your goals and objectives, but if staff are unhappy, stressed, overworked, and disconnected from each other and the organization, how sustainable is your success?

At the end of the day, organizations are groups of people, and if those people are not doing well, the organization will suffer as a result. When we value the organization not just for what it can produce but also for how it produces it, we begin to take better care of the organization and its staff. We invest in better leadership and management. We take time for thoughtful planning that clarifies and unites staff behind a common goal and imbues them with a sense of purpose. We step back to articulate the work in ways that energize staff and excite your audiences. We make sure that staff are taken care of, supported, and valued for the amazing contributions they make to achieving our goals and objectives.

Many organizations are merely surviving when they could be living and even thriving. It is a matter of how we define success and how we value the people who drive the organization’s success. If we invest in them, we can achieve programmatic success while ensuring our organizations are more resilient and sustainable.

 

leadership, management, organizational development, productivity

Why managers often fail… and how to fix it

Managing an organization is no easy feat, but it is critically important. Management is the organization and coordination of several interlocking activities in order to achieve a defined set of objectives. Like leadership, it requires essential skills that go beyond technical know-how or content expertise. It requires people skills – emotional intelligence, empathy, and insight – as well as decision-making skills and different ways of thinking. These “soft” skills enable a manager to successfully work with a team of people so that not only are the group’s goals met, but also each individual feels satisfied, engaged, and motivated by the work.

Unfortunately, most managers are promoted to positions of authority not because of their managerial skills, but because they have some technical or content expertise. They excelled in some role that probably required specific subject knowledge and the ability to deliver on projects that focused on a particular type of work. If they do well, they get promoted, and then they are in a position where they have to manage other people. And yet they may not have developed the skills needed to do that well. As the saying goes, “People rise to their level of incompetence.”

As another saying goes, “People quit their bosses, not their job.” Bosses who do not know how to manage their direct reports will wind up with employees that are unhappy in their roles, do not feel supported or valued, and do not feel connected or committed to the organization. And who wants to stay in a job when you feel like that?

So what can be done to ensure that people put into management positions have the skills they need to be successful managers?

There are three fundamental ways to promote better management:

  • Recruitment. When looking to promote from within or hire from outside the organization, the hiring manager should seek candidates who demonstrate some competency in the skills needed for successful management.
  • Development. Training and development opportunities should be offered for managers to help them continuously develop their skill set. These may be formal trainings or informal opportunities, such as learning on the job or mentoring.
  • Modeling. The organization’s leadership should demonstrate the kind of behaviors they want to see in other managers. The organization’s values, norms, and expectations (the core of culture) are set by those at the top.

Organizations are institutions of people, and being able to effectively manage those people is fundamental to an organization’s success. It is important that managers are developed into the kind of people who can improve the satisfaction, engagement, and performance of their employees. With the right support and leadership for its managers, an organization can boost its effectiveness and really thrive.