Nonprofit University Blog

Sometime after Newsweek and The Daily Beast joined forces, the last page of each issue of Newsweek is now “My Favorite Mistake.”  Each issue some bigwig—from business, entertainment, even politics,  talks about his/her favorite mistake that s/he has made along the way.

Sometimes, they have been game-changers in that person’s life, such as Paula Deen reluctantly leaving her home town of Albany, Georgia; other times, it was just a hugely embarrassing moment, such as Jeremy Irons, fixated on finding out when it would be appropriate to smoke at a luncheon at which he was sitting next to Princess Diana, lit up after getting both her permission and a chastising for doing something harmful to his health, only to realize the next day that it has been National No Smoking Day.

As the first month of the new year ends, I thought I would share some of the common mistakes that we see nonprofits make over and over, in hopes that, going forward in 2012, fewer will repeat the mistakes of others.

1. Do not use “being corporate-like” as a universal slur in the nonprofit sector.  Having a succession plan or marketing protocols or forecasting out five years is not a negative, but best practices of all sustainable organizations, for-profit or nonprofit.  There are good businesses practices that we should take from the corporate world, unapologetically, while leaving others behind.
2. Do not bury your head in the sand, or at worst, encourage, or at best, allow, your board to do the same.  The longer you ignore a problem, the more difficult it will be to resolve.  That goes for a staff or board member who needs to be removed for underperforming or that grant report that isn’t going to be as strong and positive as you had hoped, to taking a hard, honest look at the financial future for your organization.
3. Do not ignore the concept of ROI—return on investment.  In business and in personal investing, the axiom “it takes money to make money” is widely accepted as valid.  You can’t increase your money in the stock market without risking some money with which to invest.  Yes, it is a risk, yet millions of people do it every day.  Why? Because it is a calculated risk based on sound analysis.  Thus, hiring a dedicated staff person to increase raised income is a calculated risk that, if done correctly, more often than not pays off.  Engaging a development consultant to a feasibility study for a major donor campaign is more likely to lead to a successful outcome than is setting the purpose and goal for the campaign on wants, hopes and wishful thinking.
4. Do not act as a mobile phone company in building your board.  Leave connecting friends and families to the phone companies and build your board strategically, based on the expertise, connections, demographics, and personality traits that the board, and organization, need in order to be successful.  Look in places beyond your smart phone for these new board members.
5. Do not run a program, nonprofit or board as if it were Twitter and Facebook.  There you “like” people and programs for the mere sake of liking.  In running a program or organization and managing a board, performance comes first; liking comes second.  Just because you let someone go because s/he is underperforming does not mean you cannot like that person.  But liking someone is not necessary and sufficient for allowing him/her to stay in a position, paid or volunteer, if what that person needs to get done isn’t getting done in the expected and sought manner.
6. Do not assume that you are great, special and wonderful simply because you are a nonprofit and, therefore, everyone should be more than happy to help you for free!  You run a business and so do the vendors from whom you are looking for help.  Consultants, accountants, lawyers all need to run profitable businesses so that they can be there next month, next year, when you need their help again.  Profitable, however, does not always mean obscene hourly rates, but more often than not rates that cover costs and allow for a little profit for wiggle room.  Remember, you are one of almost one and a half million nonprofits in this country alone, all thinking they are special, wonderful and deserving of all of the free help they need.   There is only so much that any one individual or organization can give away for free and still survive.
7. Do not chase dollars and forsake your mission simply because we are going through tough economic times.  Nonprofits exist to serve their missions and the economy in which we operate does not change that proposition.  Rather, develop a strong business model that supports the programs that serve that mission.
8. Do not forget the people who, day in and day out, are in the trenches making sure your mission is carried out.  A tough economy is no excuse for trampling on the good will, psyche and morale of employees.  Expressions of gratitude are free and go a long way to boosting employee morale; random shortened workdays—coming in late, going in early—cost little and garner great return.

This list could go on and on, but this will do for starters.  This is not meant as criticism, but rather as a favor, hoping to allow you to see yourselves in others, learn from their mistakes and do better going forward.

Several years back, a funder introduced me to a group of her grantees as the “bad cop” in the tag team which was about to do a presentation, a persona that continues today.

Call me what you will, but I am on a crusade to help you help yourself, your organization, your group move forward so that you can maximize the delivery of your mission.

Earlier this week, I had a 45 minute, heartbreaking conversation.  And despite that, I played the bad cop throughout.  Telling the truth, telling it directly, doesn’t have to come off as an attack.  Perhaps if we worried less about hurting people’s feelings and more about the goal that needs to be accomplished, individually and collectively, we’d all be more successful.  Of that, I’ve no doubt.

This intense conversation was with an executive director who is at the end of her two year plus rope trying to get her board to do its job.  She has educated, encouraged, nudged, pushed,  brought in outside experts.  She’s even tried leading.  All to no avail!  Nothing has moved.

After a recent attempt by an outside expert to move this board off the dime, the newest board member sent an email to the full board outlining what needed to be done, what he was willing to do and asking others to get involved.  Besides the executive director’s response, he got one other response.  He never even heard from the board president!  As a small organization, no matter how well she does her job as executive director, no matter how hard she works, the ability to maximize that mission is truly curtailed by a board that fails to do its job.

Years ago, when I was teaching undergraduates, I had a very bright young woman who was clearly struggling with an addiction of some sort.  At first, I thought it was alcohol; later decided it was drugs.  Turned out it was both.  I probed gently, then more seriously.  She responded; told me her story, her issues, her addictions.  I tried repeatedly to get into rehab, into counseling, to talk to skilled counselors and not just me.  She had no problem spilling her heart out to me, telling me all that was wrong, but never listened to my suggestions, advice.  I even offered to take her to a counselor, rehab, etc.  I turned to a friend who was an addiction specialist and she told me that I could do all the talking, all the leading, all the handholding I want, but until the addict wanted to be helped, nothing I did would make a difference.  One night, I got a 3:00 am phone call from this student; she had hit rock bottom.  I picked her up, took her to 30 day program and to her hard work and credit, she’s been clean ever since.

I have come back to addiction theory again and again in working with nonprofits—individuals, boards, organizations.  Until the individual, board, organization, etc. wants to be helped—and I mean truly wants to be helped—there is nothing anyone else can do, except go through the motions.  Or, worse, which we see all of the time, enable the addiction by doing for the addict.

The executive director who takes over the event that the board swore it was going to run is enabling.  The executive director who writes all of the handwritten notes on the solicitations and all of the handwritten thank yous because the board hasn’t stepped up to the plate is enabling.  The executive director who goes out and recruits new board members because the board simply wrings its hands, is enabling.

There are those who love the problem so much, they really aren’t interested in a solution.  They love to talk about the problem, massage the problem, look at it every which way from Sunday.  And the worst part is that in talking about it, again and again ad nauseum, people actually think they are making progress.  And calling in an outside expert to talk about the problem shows just how serious they really are.  But truly fix the problem?  But fix the problem? Don’t be ridiculous.  Who throws their love object away?

This isn’t a one-off problem.  It gets repeated again and again in my email, my phone calls, my face-to-face conversations.  Today, I talked with a wanna-be executive director whose current executive director told her board a year ago that she would be leaving the end of 2012.  For most of 2011, I heard this wanna-be talk, again and again, about the board that had done nothing to prepare, about the executive director who seems to have already “retired” and how she was doing it all.  January 2012, everyone is still in the same place as a year ago, and it now looks like the board will just “tweak” the job description to make it fit her.  And, surprisingly, she still wants the job.

I had another conversation with a member of a senior management team who is saying a year later the exact same things she said about her boss, her organization’s position, her co-workers, her potential for growth in the organization, her frustrations, her disillusion.  If you listened to a recording of our conversations we have had on a rather periodic basis throughout the year, it would be impossible to know which was first, second, third, except for the fact that my urgings and suggestions become less enthusiastic, as the neon of the signs blinked brighter and brighter.  These people are in love with their problems; they’ve yet to hit rock bottom—if they ever will.

This is a trap into which too many nonprofit employees far too easily fall.  After all, most work in the sector to help, to try to make things better.  Guilt rises quickly and furiously, like bile in the throat, at the thought of walking away leaving things unfixed.  So, people hang-in there, go back, try again—and again; soon, the dent in the wall is a full-fledged chasm and years have gone by.  Truth is, this is not helping—anyone or anything; it is only hurting.  Good people with expansive energy, first rate ideas and strong skills are wasting their assets on people and organizations that do not want to achieve greatness, let alone mediocrity.

All of us in the nonprofit sector—from staff to board to other volunteers—must practice loving the solutions more than we love the problems.  Or, we must succumb to our own addiction.

There’s a happy face on the cover of the current issue of the Harvard Business Review.  Never, ever thought I’d see that!  It’s the come-on for the issue’s theme:  happiness.  Here is HBR, in many people’s minds one of the premiere business journals, doing a whole on happiness in the workplace:  what makes people happy on the job, how happy employees work better, how happiness can increase the odds of being successful, how happy employees make for more profits, and more.

The idea is such a no-brainer, you have to wonder why people haven’t embraced it sooner.  Perhaps they were waiting for the data, which is now here in bulk.  Daniel Gilbert, social psychologist on Harvard’s faculty and author of Stumbling on Happiness, is interviewed in this issue of HBR.  He says, “I know of no data showing that anxious, fearful employees are more creative or productive.  … people are happiest when they’re appropriately challenged—when they’re trying to achieve goals that are difficult but not out of reach.”

Again, and not to impugn any of the scientists working to prove these statements true, as I always prefer to have scientific knowledge to back up my behavior and thinking, this is a “Duh!” moment and not an “Ah ha!” one.  Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath, from the University of Michigan and Georgetown University respectively, have an article in this issue entitled, “Creating Sustainable Performance.”  They write,”Happy employees produce more than unhappy ones over the long term.  They routinely show up at work, they’re less likely to quit, they go above and beyond the call of duty, and they attract people who are just as committed to the job.”

So, why are so many nonprofit employees unhappy?  Because they work in environments that, and for bosses and with colleagues, who squelch “happiness.”  I don’t need to list or describe what this looks like; you know it.  You know it because either you’ve been unlucky enough to either have worked in or are currently experiencing such a workplace environment or you have a friend or family member who has experienced this lack of luck.  It is a work environment where it simply is not possible to thrive.

Spreitzer and Porath point out that happy employees are, in fact, thriving:  they are satisfied, productive and “engaged in creating the future.”  What employee wouldn’t want to feel satisfied, productive (because then you must be valued) and responsible not just for what has already been but for what has yet to occur?  In their vision of vitality, there are two components working simultaneously:  vitality and learning.  They point out four things that an employer can do to create a thriving work environment—and not one costs a dime!

1. Give employees the discretion to make decisions.  Too tight a rein and you dampen vitality.  Uncomfortable with this seemingly open-ended invitation? There are tools for that!
2. Share information throughout your organization, rather than dispensing it as if were something that needed to be earned to know.
3. Love this one:  “minimize incivility.”  Truly, did we need scholars to tell us that working in an uncivil workplace isn’t a recipe for happy workers?
4. Provide performance feedback.  Not the stuff formal stuff that comes with paperwork and formal meetings and is all too frequently, and wrongly, tied to compensation, but the small stuff, the good stuff—and the bad.

The trouble, too often, is that the folks who foster the type of workplace where employees cannot thrive—and be happy—are the very same people who lack self-awareness and objectivity, those who cannot take a step back and ask of themselves, let alone others, “How am I doing?” And, far too often again, these are the very same leaders whose boards do not do performance evaluations—and I am talking about the formal kind here.  These are the boards that have no to little clue as to what is happening in the workplace, the status of morale, the rate of turnover, etc.  And yet, these are the very same board members who have been, for the last three years, making decisions about whether to freeze or cut salaries, reduce hours, put programs on the shelf, and more.

To be honest, I am not terribly hopeful about the number of unaware rulers of their roosts waking up, board members suddenly seizing their rightful responsibilities.  So, let me complete the cycle and pass on Spreitzer’s and Porath’s tips that any and all of us should do to take control of and improve the quality of our worklives.

1. Take breaks for renewal.  Not talking long, but long enough to break out of the mire, breath and come back a bit refreshed.  So, take a stroll, meditate, read something relaxing, do a crossword.  Heck, tweetfor five minutes or so!
2. Take it into your own hands to make your work more meaningful; don’t sit around waiting for something to fall into your lap.
3. Look for and seize those learning, growth opportunities.  Even in flat, small nonprofits, there are opportunities to step out of your comfort zone and do something different.
4. Stick with the satisfying, energizing relationships at work; ditch the ones that take you down

I’ve written before about the body of research showing that a simple thank you or a small acknowledgement of a job done well rewards so many of us more than money.  I’ve written about Daniel Pink’s work revealing all of the research that shows that other things that have nothing to do with money—flexibility, the ability to be creative, independence—make for happier, more productive employees.  And yet, things don’t seem to change.

We don’t need money to make our employees happy.  (It doesn’t hurt, but there is so much more we can and should be doing.)  Gilbert, in his interview, notes the work of psychologist Ed Diener that has demonstrated that frequency of positive experiences is a better predictor of happiness than the intensity of those experiences.  So, how about we all just start being nicer to one another? 

Here’s a new year’s resolution that doesn’t show up on the routine list  of working out more, spending less , being a better person.  But it should be one of the ones that you don’t break—ever.

Everyone must adopt a code of ethics and live by it, no ifs, ands or buts.  I’m almost embarrassed to be writing this, to be suggesting that people in the nonprofit sector don’t routinely operate from an ethical base.  After all, we are supposed to be the “good guys,” the decent ones, the ones who are good because we do good.  All too often, though, this seems to happen while lying through our teeth, sidestepping the truth, telling only what we think others want to hear while deciding for them what they don’t need to know.  Turns my stomach, actually.

Over the holidays, I was introduced to a television show that is currently in its fourth season.  (That tells you something about my television watching habits.)  The show is “Leverage,” where a group of four criminals lead by a mastermind non-criminal use hacking, fighting, grifting, and thievery to avenge the wrongs done by greedy, ruthless, unethical people to give back to their victims who are without redress—or where the only redress is an iffy one through a system that will take way too long to review their grievances.

They are modern day Robin Hoods who use criminal behavior to avenge others’ criminal and unethical behavior in order to make things right for the victims!  Yup, here two wrongs do seem to make a right.  The characters of Leverage have a very clear code of ethics; when they stray or start to stray, the others in the group quickly call them on it.  (It may come as a surprise to some, but criminals most definitely have a code of ethics of their own; it may not be yours or mine, but it is theirs.  Some codes say never use guns, or victimize the elderly; all have child molesters as the scum of the scum who deserve whatever they get).

Regrettably, it seems that those of us in the nonprofit sector have to be reminded that we, too, must have a code of ethics by which we live our professional lives (and, I would hope, personal lives, as well, but that’s not my purview in this blog); and our peers, and bosses, must call us on it should we start to stray.  So, if the shoe fits, consider yourself called!  Perhaps we have enjoyed, a little too heartily, pointing the fingers of one hand at the greedy, dishonest, manipulative bankers who many believe brought down the economy while all too frenetically patting ourselves on our backs with the other hand.  All as we walk into the board meeting knowing we will distort reality “a tad” so the board won’t know, or agreeing to do what a client wants even though best practices say that what is wanted is far from the right thing to be doing, or saying your board member donation is truly a stretch gift while we give to another charity three times as much, or chasing money instead of chasing mission, or telling a grantee to go left when center is really what is “right” and best.  Too often I see individuals’ end goals trumping organization good and–ethics.

Somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost sight of professionalism, favoring doing what is best for me at all costs over being a professional.  A somewhat fungible concept, I, and apparently quite a few others, think that David Maister hits a key element of professionalism when he says it is “never compromising your standards and values.”  This, of course, assumes first and foremost that you have a clearly defined set of standards and values and that your organization does, as well (its core values, is a good place to start).  It might include such basic things as honesty, integrity, doing no harm, bringing no shame to more complicated things such as protecting the dignity of all, courage and walking the walk.  And then, of course, it requires that we hold ourselves accountable to those standards and values.  Not compromising.  Strong language, that!

In 2012, let’s see the sector that does good truly do so by being good, ethical and professional.  It would be terrific if all involved, from mission-driven organizations and their employees to funders to consultants and vendors, agreed to commit to being truthful and candid, as opposed to expedient and self-serving; courageous, and follow the perhaps more difficult, yet right and less convenient path rather than the easy one;  risk-takers and say no when saying yes would compromise integrity, best practices, the best interest of others rather than enhance self-interest; and respectful, such that we value the importance of bringing benefit to others (and organizations) even if it means we, ourselves, do not benefit.  And my list could go on and on.

The important thing is that we all have such lists, such values and standards which we do not bend, no matter what.