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Bright Ideas Change the World

Management Practices

Looking Out for the Youngins

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Photo by flickr user wisze.
A local fencing coach, I learned yesterday, keeps an eye out for kids with a lot of potential. He assists their parents in finding good tournaments, helps them imagine what it might be like to attend college on a fencing scholarship (starting with, I presume, pointing out that such a thing is possible in the first place), and makes sure to introduce them to people that might be useful down the line (like the people associated with the colleges that offer those scholarships).

It seems so obvious and so natural, yet in the nonprofit world it seems so rare. Executive directors that go out of their way to identify and then help cultivate the folks with the most potential are surprisingly difficult to find. It’s even tougher to find nonprofit folks that are looking out for high-potential newcomers across other organizations in their larger nonprofit community, and then making a point of giving them extra encouragement and support.

It’s not the skill set, not really, because the skills themselves aren’t complicated: bringing your high-potential junior folks to higher-level meetings (even if all they do is listen), introducing them to important contacts and potential mentors, deliberately escalating their responsibilities, finding new ways to challenge them, ensuring that they are exposed to a wide range of strategies and styles and projects. It’s a lack of imagination, perhaps, or more likely a nonprofit culture blind spot.

The bad news is that it leaves our bench thinner and weaker than it should be, and it puts people into positions of authority with a lot less experience and skill than they could or should have. I’ll bet we lose a lot of people, as well, who could grow into powerful advocates and champions but who bail early because they grow bored or frustrated with the lack of attention. The good news is that it’s not hard to fix.

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.

Bridging Cultures Within Nonprofit Organizations

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Bridge over Tagus river, Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by flickr user F H Mira.
I’m a fan of Ethan Zuckerman’s research on bridging across cultures and the ways in which our communication and networking systems can either encourage interactions across cultural divides or impede them. But what happens when the cultural bridging that needs to happen is within a single organization?

Here’s a scenario:

A nonprofit has a team of folks who focus on technology, the web, social media, and perhaps even a mobile strategy. Those folks are smart, committed, and capable, and they come up with great ideas for deploying the tools and technologies, but the organizational decision-makers nix the ideas one after another. The easy explanation is that the folks in positions of authority are too old school, or too conventional, or too set in their 20th century ways. Communication channels that we don’t control! Letting other people talk about us – say whatever they want! – on our own website? Giving up control over the message?

No doubt this sort of risk intolerance, command and control mentality, and generational divide are all part of the problem sometimes. But I wonder if sometimes that’s just too convenient of an answer. After all, if that’s the explanation, then there isn’t much you can do about it. But I wonder if, at least sometimes, the answer has as much to do with the political savvy of the techies and with the depth of the cultural divide that separates them from others in their organizations. Even with good, dedicated activists on both sides of that conversation, if the techies don’t understand the politics of direction-shifting within their organization, or if they aren’t able to effectively explain their vision and its value even when they do understand the politics, they are going to get stuck – great ideas and no ability to implement. And that sounds very much like the sort of bridging problem that Ethan describes.

If this diagnosis is right at least some of the time, the remedy may look a lot like the sort of remedy that Ethan describes: people who bridge those two cultures (i.e., people who get both the techie world and the world of internal nonprofit politics), and communication and social structures that foster unexpectedly delightful interactions between folks on both sides of that divide. I don’t much care for the thought of adding more layers, especially within the larger nonprofits that often seem overly layered already, but if improving internal organizational dynamics and the willingness of those organizations to evolve and experiment is tied to people who can help bridge intra-organizational cultural differences, it might well be worthwhile.

The Nonprofit Dashboard Roadmap

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Photo by Flickr user istargazer.
Dashboards have been used heavily in parts of the private sector for a long time, but they seem to be making inroads in the nonprofit and government worlds as well. The premise: just as with a car or airplane dashboard, a nonprofit staffer can quickly glance at the gauges and clearly understand the real-time status of key systems and indicators across the organization. The understanding won’t be deep – they may need to probe more thoroughly to fully understand anything they are seeing on the dashboard – but they can very quickly get a sense of how well the organization is functioning and if any problems are emerging.

In our view, dashboards have the following characteristics:

  • They are dynamic. They display information that is changing on a regular basis.
  • They rely heavily on gauges or other data visualization displays to convey information in readily understandable formats.
  • They allow for quick status assessments, although they may enable deeper inquiry

Even with these criteria, however, the dashboard concept is used to describe a diverse range of displays, each distinct in function and design from the next. As the dashboard concept takes great hold among nonprofits we are encountering some confusion among our clients about which is which and what people mean when they use the term.

We took at stab at delineating five distinct types of dashboards:

1) Business Intelligence Dashboards
These display detailed information about a particular area of an organization’s operations. Many customer relationship management systems, for example, like Salesforce and Raiser’s Edge, include dashboards to make it easier for the development staff to track fundraising activities, donations, and other performance measures. Fundraising and advocacy management tools like Convio use dashboards to display campaign status. Google Analytics, with its robust dashboard system displaying key web site metrics, is another example. Technical dashboards help specialized staff keep a close watch on what’s happening within their organizational purview. Technical dashboards are typically inward facing, so that only staff and perhaps board members can view them, but they can be outward facing as well. The Indianapolis Museum of Art’s dashboard is an oft-cited example.

2) Status Dashboards
Organizational status dashboards, like the one the software company Panic described on their blog, are another variant. In contrast to technical dashboards, which tend to focus on a single functional area within an organization, status dashboards display less information from a wider range of functional areas across an organization. A status dashboard is the answer to the question: what is the critical information everyone in the organization should be able to view all the time? Rather than probing deeply into any one area of an organization’s operations, they offer a broader overview of value to everyone.

3) Accountability Dashboards
Increasingly, we are seeing dashboards used in external accountability contexts: a nonprofit or local government that wants to share its real-time performance data with its donors and its community. The Town of Oro Valley in Arizona maintains a financial dashboard displaying the town’s financial performance compared to past trends. It’s not a great example in that it is only updated monthly, and not in real-time, but it’s at least in the ballpark. Over at PlaceMatters (where I spend part of my week), we’ve been doing a lot of work on sustainability dashboards, web-based tools that openly share a community’s performance against its sustainability goals. Incidentally, we described the Indianapolis Museum of Art dashboard as a Technical Dashboard because of its depth, but it really serves as an Accountability Dashboard as well.

4) Tracking Dashboards
These can be inward or outward facing, and typically show visualizations of unfolding data streams in real-time. These aren’t organizational in nature but, rather, are tracking events that are taking place outside the organization. The data stream may have implications for an organization, but it isn’t specific to that organization. Al Jazeera’s “Region in Turmoil” dashboard shows the volume of Twitter traffic by country in the Middle East as a proxy for the level of political activity.

5) Scenario Comparison Dashboards
These are typically designed to compare likely outcomes of a range of future scenarios across a range of key metrics. For instance, MetroQuest uses dashboards to compare multiple regional development scenarios across factors. CommunityViz, a GIS-based data visualization and decision support tool, allows user to analyze the environmental and other community outcomes from a range of land use scenarios, and it uses dashboards to display those outcomes across a range of factors.

We shouldn’t entirely neglect the category of “Displays That Are Called Dashboards But Aren’t.” It probably isn’t useful to use ‘dashboard’ to refer to web pages full of relatively static narrative information, for example. One example is the recycling portion of the Emory University Sustainability Dashboard.

We would welcome your thoughts. Does this seem like the right breakdown? Are we missing anything? What are the terrific examples of each category?