The worst thing about being a manager is firing someone. But if you handle the situation well, you can minimize the pain to all concerned and construct a healthy path forward. In this first of a series on terminations, I talk about how and why to use a Severance Agreement to help make the best of a bad situation.

For nonprofit managers, performance reviews present a paradox. They primarily focus on the past, tallying accomplishments and disappointments, goals met and goals deferred. But isn’t the whole point of management is to successfully influence the future? Here’s how to resolve the paradox.

Looking ahead at 2021, income uncertainty is off the charts. The pandemic, recession, stock market volatility, government shortfalls, election and evolving foundation and donor priorities are combining to create as unpredictable a funding environment as we’ve ever seen. With budget planning season fast approaching, many nonprofits have an extraordinary challenge on their hands. Here's what you can do:

As the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly remakes our world, nonprofits are grappling with the financial turmoil. Unfortunately, many Boards of Directors are poorly positioned to collaborate with staff leadership in guiding their organizations forward. Often, the only time Boards are accustomed to focusing on the future is when they approve a budget. The rest of the year, they look backwards, receiving financial reports for past periods and comparing them to an ever more dated budget. This reinforce a deep divide between what the Board is paying attention to and what is important. Here’s how you can narrow the gap. 

As a manager, your working relationship with each of your team members strengthen or weaken over time depending on your interactions with each other. Great managers are very deliberate about these interactions, appreciating that their cumulative impact can make the difference between a healthy, effective relationship and a dysfunctional one. The forced teleworking environment may be an opportunity to improve your skills in these  interactions—and to become a better manager. 

Most nonprofits did not decide for themselves to shut down, but each will have to choose for itself when and how best to reopen. While this may feel like an enormous decision, it doesn’t have to. The question of whether to reopen can be reduced to a set of much smaller choices, with proportionately smaller risks and uncertainties. Here’s how…

Your annual plan probably didn’t factor in the likelihood of a global pandemic, did it? And yet, here we are. Here’s how you can successfully lead your organization through these next few months…

Being onboarded into a nonprofit isn’t always pleasant.  Usually it means a gauntlet of briefings, a pile of forms, a bunch of reading.  And lunch.  

If the onboarding was unpleasant but useful, then you could consider it a necessary evil. But all too often, it fails the utility test as well.  How could providing so much information not be useful?  When it’s not in service of accomplishing clear objectives.  The path to better onboarding starts by asking what you are hoping for the new employee to accomplish through it. 

When staff complain about a lack of transparency, nonprofit leaders commonly respond by promising more.  This rarely works because the perceived lack of transparency is usually obscuring a more significant problem—a lack of trust.  The understandable inclination to increase transparency without confronting the underlying challenge around trust is the essence of the transparency trap.