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Bright Ideas Change the World

Leadership

Do You Need a Vertical Org Chart to Cultivate Your Staff?

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Photo by flickr user MattHurst.
I wrote a little yesterday about Jason Fried’s column in Inc. magazine about their efforts at 37signals to keep the organizational structure flat. He relates the story of an employee that moved on to another organization because she had more ambition “than we could use,” by which he meant she wanted a promotion to a more managerial role while they have steadfastly resisted creating those roles in the first place. The thing that struck me most about Fried’s column was his notion of vertical vs. horizontal ambition. For one thing, I don’t think “horizontal” is quite the right word for what he’s describing, although I get his point . . . maybe vertical vs. deeper works better at the cost of a mixed metaphor. More importantly, though, I think there is another kind of vertical ambition that’s worth teasing out of his definition. It’s more of an introspective sort of vertical (vs. the org chart vertical that Fried seems especially focused on).

In our research at the Nooru Foundation a few years ago, we found that many nonprofits in Colorado do well at recruiting strong newcomers, but then aren’t very good at giving them a professional development trajectory. A common type of explanation: there isn’t a lot of turnover at the higher levels, so there isn’t any place to promote people to. That’s one type of vertical ambition (the type Fried seems to be mostly talking about), and it may well be true that a lack of high-level turnover makes it difficult to give newcomers organizational chart promotion opportunities. But it’s a weak excuse for not helping your staff grow and develop professionally over time. It’s very possible to deliberately and thoughtfully give your staff increasing responsibility and more demanding challenges, to push them to the sort of deeper understanding and increasing performance that Fried mentions, to expand the sophistication of their understanding and the expectations of their contributions, to include them in increasingly high-level discussions and introduce them to a wider and higher level range of contacts, and to give them access to training, conferences, coaching, and other professional development resources without ever touching the organizational chart or expanding managerial responsibilities.

Curiously enough, I first saw this in sharp relief in the public sector, as I watched my own city manager and his senior staff do this with their younger staff: give them responsibility for managing a small process, then a larger short-term group, then a standing board. Give them small parts in City Council presentations and then increasingly expand the scope of their presentation responsibility. Set them up to play support on projects, then run small projects, then grow into becoming the point person on bigger projects.

I’ve never worked in a software shop like 37signals, so maybe the model doesn’t work where the output is more about providing high-quality customer service and producing high-quality code, but some version of this approach does make a ton of sense in most of the nonprofits I’ve worked with and seen over the years, and provides a powerful way of thinking about growing your staff that doesn’t rely on charts and titles (though sometimes titles are pretty useful, also).

I think Fried is on to something important when exploring less vertical organizational hierarchies, in other words, but it’s not new territory for nonprofits (and the private sector could probably learn a lot by paying more attention to how many nonprofits do this). And I think he’s on to something when he pushes back against conventional org chart vertical ambition. If the goal is to give our employees the room and opportunity to grow professionally, and it probably should be in most cases, we have a lot to work with regardless of vertical promotion opportunities.

Be More Like a Business!

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Nonprofit or for-profit, this organization's revenue trend has a problem.
Nonprofits hear the “be more like a business” refrain a lot, despite plenty of evidence that being like a business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I’m persuaded by Jim Collins’ analysis, which more or less argues that within the business community you’ll find the entire spectrum, from extremely effective organizations to highly dysfunctional ones, and the issue is ferreting out the practices that make the good ones good. He extends this to the social sector, and essentially makes the same argument: the challenge isn’t for social sector organizations to be like businesses but to adopt the practices of the really well run businesses, as well as the really well organizations from whatever sector. I don’t think he’s ever evaluated the public sector, but I suspect his argument would be the same . . . learn what we can from the practices of the organizations that really kick ass (and I’ll bet there’s more of this than you might think, but that’s a post for another day).

In other words, conversations that focus on how the nonprofit sector can be more like the business sector are asking the wrong question. A better question: how can nonprofits learn from the best practices of highly impactful organizations within their own sector and across the business and public sectors?

Our frequent insistence on asking the wrong question leads to two kinds of problems. On the other hand, the nonprofit sector is often so allergic to the very idea of the business sector that it runs away from it, and eschews anything that smells like it might have come from the business world (the “we don’t do things that way” reaction). The problem is that there are a bunch of practices you find among the best-run private sector organizations that nonprofits would benefit from using. It’s not “be like a business,” but “adopt the applicable practices of the best businesses.” The most successful of the private sector organizations are often strong at things nonprofits are often weak at: capacity investments, staff cultivation, and staff management among them.

And then there are nonprofits that run in the other direction, thinking that salvation lies in being like a business, and they adopt private sector practices in seemingly wholesale and indiscriminate fashion, which often produces some of the weirdest and worst dysfunctions, since it involves the hybridization of worst practices from both the nonprofit and private sectors.

Nonprofits really are, at root, businesses. They are different in some important ways from traditional profit-oriented businesses, but they are similar in many more ways. Nonprofits live and die on cash flow, for example, and they have to offer a sufficient and appropriate value proposition to their supporters. But the implication isn’t “do whatever private sector businesses do,” since that would be dumb, but rather that the laws of business physics really do apply even if you are serving a social good of some kind. The sense of nonprofit exceptionalism that pervades much of the nonprofit world, the notion that we are special and different because we are a nonprofit, is harmfully misguided. If you apply a discriminating eye toward the private sector, however strong your allergy may be, you’ll find a ton of practices and accumulated wisdom that will help your nonprofit do good, better.

Leadership-as-Verb

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This drum major has positional authority, but is she necessarily a 'leader'? Photo by Flickr user e_cathedra.
The leadership question is as vexing as it is interesting and important. Rosetta Thurman relates the story of an older gentleman asking his version of the classic leader-follower question: “What happens if you have too many leaders and not enough followers?’ (although his version was more interesting, asking about increasing competition within an organization as the number of people trying to lead grows).

Rosetta rightly challenges that positional notion of leadership and instead suggests leadership might be a behavior, but she doesn’t entirely let go of the idea that some people might qualify as ‘leaders’ while others might not.

I want to go a step further. The idea of leadership becomes even more interesting and robust, and more useful as well, if we think of it as a verb rather than a noun (with acknowledgments to Marty Linksy and Linda Kaboolian). One isn’t ‘a leader’ but instead you can – at any given time – exercise leadership. The shift to leadership-as-verb much more sharply distinguishes between people in positions of authority and people exercising leadership, it avoids the thorny question of just how frequently you have to exercise leadership in order to earn that exalted status (is five minutes a day enough? an hour? every waking moment?), and it morphs the notion from being a status you earn to being a behavior you can elect to exercise or not at any given time. It also – importantly – allows for leadership to happen anywhere in an organization, in any direction (an idea Rosetta describes as well).

The Three Great Virtues of Social Change Advocates

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Photo by Flickr user nstop.
Larry Wall, a well-known computer programmer, famously said that the three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. Perhaps these qualities apply to great nonprofit folks as well.

Laziness is the virtue, according to Wall, that leads folks to figure out how to be more effective and efficient, to “go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure.” Laziness, properly applied, means you do more with less effort, which is useful for those folks who aim to balance their nonprofit lives with, say, anything else at all.

Impatience is the virtue that leads people to anticipate future needs and opportunities instead of simply reacting to their current situation, and the quality that can lead folks to leap and ship instead of waiting for the perfect moment when everything is ready to go.

And hubris is the sort of pride that drives you to want to earn the respect of your colleagues by doing great work. Hubris is the virtue that enables the best advocates to believe they are capable of making great things happen, and that helps them be willing to take the risks that great things depend on.