Are sustainability, accountability and best practices holding you back?
Sustainability, accountability and best practices—three of the most exalted terms in the nonprofit lexicon. Each is powerful and compelling. But each also embodies specific value choices and requires trade-offs that are not immediately obvious. When we tacitly accept their preeminence, we necessarily undermine other important values and inhibit the abilities of our nonprofits to reach their potentials and meet their missions.
Sustainability is a nonprofit’s capacity to endure over time. Concerns about sustainability are rampant today as demands for higher pay threaten to drive up expenses, but such worries are always present. As important as securing the future may be, sustainability carries significant costs:
It prioritizes the future over the present. Nonprofits that emphasize sustainability set aside resources that might otherwise increase their present day impact. Sustainability is an argument for putting off until tomorrow, just in case.
It elevates the institution over its work and staff. The concern is for organizational continuity even if it comes at the expense of staff or mission.
It turns good things into threats. Innovation is a threat since it allocates resources that might be set aside for the future to experiments that may or may not work. Growth increases costs which is a burden on the future organization. Opportunities become risks that might go bad.
Boards are notoriously susceptible to the siren call of sustainability. They assume the responsibility of long term organizational continuity falls on them. This is exacerbated when Boards lack either a good understanding of organizational risks and opportunities or a comfort with financial data and projections. Defaulting to sustainability is an obvious choice.
The question is not whether sustainability is desirable, but at what costs? How do we balance this fundamentally conservative value—preserving the present into the future—with innovation, impact, growth and other values? Sustainability should be a choice, not a default.
Accountability. An accountability culture is one in which expectations for performance and behavior are well-defined and adherence to those expectations is enforced.
As a value, accountability is irreproachable. But in practice, accountability is enormously difficult. In addition to the challenges discussed below, accountability systems invariably struggle with fairness, equity, and the limitations of managers tasked with implementation. These difficulties and the extraordinary lengths nonprofits go to address them compel a far more careful analysis about the relative costs and benefits of accountability.
Outstanding managers are able to inculcate accountability while simultaneously nurturing collaboration, innovation and learning. But outstanding managers are few and far between. Most nonprofits are best off acknowledging that accountability comes with substantial trade-offs. For example, accountability . . .
Looks backwards. It tells us What happened? Who messed up? Since managing is intrinsically focused on making things happen in the future, this can be, at best, a distraction. The behaviors accountability encourages—excessive documentation, lots of cc-ing, blame-shifting—drain resources and energy that could be focused on future success.
Subordinates learning. Accountability makes it more difficult to learn lessons from the past. An after-action analysis that seeks to pin blame for what went wrong is very different from one that seeks to answer the question of how we can do better next time. Learning requires owning mistakes while accountability and its consequences motivate people to play defense and deflect them.
Breeds caution. Anticipating that you will be held accountable to an expectation is strong incentive to set that expectation as low as possible. Those diminished expectations can make a huge difference. Holding a Development Director accountable to revenue targets will invariably mean conservative projections which then translate into a cautious budget—and less impact than might otherwise have been possible.
Elevates individual performance. Because it’s easier to measure discrete work product and individual behavior, accountability cultures tend to overvalue these. Further, since individuals usually must collaborate to achieve an outcome, accountability metrics tend to focus on process; after all, no one can be held personally accountable for results.
For some nonprofits and for certain staff roles, prioritizing accountability over collaboration, maximizing learning, boldness and focusing on the future is the right course. Accountability is indispensable when well-defined individual performances are necessary to achieve a specific output or to provide a service. An intake specialist gathers relevant client information, an IT associate makes sure Zoom is up and running before a presentation, a bookkeeper codes expenses properly. Not everyone needs to be a bold, future-focused, learning collaborator.
While accountability requires difficult compromises, responsibility may offer a better fit.
The difference isn’t just semantic. Responsibility is appropriately shared, requires constant learning, and is ambitious—we admire those who take on more. There’s a moral aspect to responsibility that resonates with our commitment to mission, in contrast to accountability and its bean-counter connotations. Responsibility is harder to measure than accountability, but maybe that’s OK.
Best practices. A true best practice is one that suits your nonprofit’s need perfectly, requiring no more time and energy than absolutely necessary and easily implemented by your team. What we call best practices almost never meet this standard. How could they? This would be like claiming off-the-rack clothes will fit you better than custom-tailored. There are plenty of good reasons for buying off the rack, but optimal fit isn’t one of them.
Best practices (“BPs”) offer general approaches to generic issues and allow nonprofit leaders to spend their time instead on harder challenges that require customized solutions. BPs are also similar to legal safe harbors—ways of behaving that insulate you from blame if something goes wrong. These can be particularly compelling in areas where staff leaders have the least competence—such as accounting, HR or IT—or have the least agency—Board behavior.
BPs make the most sense in situations where:
Internal expertise is lacking.
External pressure to conform—from auditors, funders, etc.— is strong.
Leaders have bigger—and more important—fish to fry.
When the “best practice” approach is not overly burdensome.
Given all these benefits, the problem of BPs may seem to just be mislabeling. But it’s more than that. The term connotes authority and undermines alternatives that may be more appropriate for a particular individual organization. BPs carry with them assessments of risks—particularly when it comes to HR and financial “best practices”—that may not match the real risks of a nonprofit. By calling them what they are—common practices—we enable a more nuanced discussion about the trade-offs that BPs embody.
Truly best practices are customized to individual organizations because appropriate approaches require balancing of competing objectives, of organizational strengths and weaknesses and thoughtful evolution over time. That’s pretty hard to find off the rack.
If there’s a common theme here, it’s that each of these concepts is centered on the institution—not on its work. They implicitly—and often unintentionally—reinforce the idea that a successful nonprofit can be defined by anything other than the impact of its work. Nonprofits that center their mission will sometimes find that sustainability, accountability and best practices to be very helpful. And sometimes not.