Tired of hearing how the for-profit sector has all the answers? Me too.
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Why question sustainability, accountability and best practices? Because they each embody specific value choices and requires trade-offs that you may not even be aware of. Let’s take a harder look at each of these nonprofit icons.
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Amidst the crises of last fall, many nonprofits took a break both from performance reviews and from thinking much about salary increases. But there's no putting these off this year. Nonprofit leaders are realizing that how they approach reviews and raises can either strengthen organizational culture and retention—or exacerbate staff turnover.
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Bad judgment puts managers in a tough position. If you don't have confidence in the decisions of a team member, you can’t delegate. Which means the team member is unable to perform their job. Do they have to go or is there something you can do. . .
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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.
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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.
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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…
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You and your team were not sent home to telework; you were sent home to avoid spreading a virus, to take care of loved ones, to teach children and to physically distance from everyone else in your communities. As a manager, the work that your team is able to accomplish under these circumstances depends primarily on your ability to recognize these challenges and to adapt. Here's what you can do…
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Among other things, being well-managed by your team means that your engagement is treated as valuable; meetings are shorter, rarer and more efficient; and you’re actually able to spend less time managing others and more time on your own work. Here’s how to make that happen. . .
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Many nonprofit leaders equate financial decision-making with passing an annual budget. The idea is that once the budget is passed, their job is just to implement. Unfortunately, this breaks down when the expectations and assumptions underlying the budget turn out to be inaccurate or incomplete. Ongoing financial choices requires another tool—the Monthly Cash Flow Projection.
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Here are a few of the most important features of the model Monthly Cash Flow Projection.
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December is a veritable obstacle course for business as usual. The holidays, vacations, school performances, parties and more all make it nearly impossible to stay on schedule and get things done.
So don’t fight it. Lean into the season. Whether you like it or not, things are slowing down, so you might as well like it. The change of pace might do everyone some good. Take advantage of the slower speed to focus on yourself, your team and getting ready for the new year.
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I’ve been reading Ron Friedman’s The Best Place to Work. The book applies insights from a variety of fields—psychology, neuroscience, economics, anthropology, etc.—to the work place. The evidence Friedman presents affirms many things that I thought must be true (natural light is a good thing!), but it’s also caused me to reconsider some of my assumptions. I wish I’d read this book years ago.
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This is the third (and final) in a series of posts about how to use problems that have arisen in the past to shape improved future performance. Not by focusing on accountability, but through a learning process that centers on asking five basic questions. This post introduced the subject, and this one focused on how best to use “What happened?” Here, I’m going to move quickly through the final four questions.
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Most managers and leaders I know like to talk about how important learning is. And they mean it! But often they don't know how. This post and the following two are intended to give you both an overview of the subject and then a very simple approach, involving five basic questions. I'll walk you through each of the questions so that you know why you're asking it and what you should be trying to get out of it.
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Pity the perfectionist manager! How can she delegate to staff knowing that they won’t do nearly as good a job as she could? She expects nothing more of her team than she does of herself and yet, time and again, they disappoint. Not surprisingly, she finds managing to be frustrating and stressful. Sometimes she acts out. Pity her team as well! They aren’t oblivious. They know they’re being micromanaged and underappreciated. Sometimes they act out.
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“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” There are a host of nuanced explanations for what that actually means, but the basic point is pretty straightforward—if you want to have an impact (through your strategies), you need to pay attention to your culture.
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Having recently joined an organization as COO, I also took on the responsibilities of interim Development Director. One day, a draft solicitation was sent to me for approval. I found one sentence confusing and edited it accordingly. When asked if I wanted to see it again before it went out, I replied that as long as the edit was made, it was good to go.
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It's taken me longer than it should to accept that many people have an aversion to the idea of managing their bosses--and to start to understand why. As a COO, managing up is practically part of the job description. But as I tried to get my staff to better manage me and I supported others in their challenges with difficult bosses, I came to accept that my view isn't as widespread as (I think) it should be.
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