RUN WELL
Every organization can run better than it does today. It can run well. Here’s what I mean by that.
The work of social sector organizations is difficult. It is complex and often faces a great deal of resistance. It is urgent, even as it is almost always under-resourced. The people who work side by side at it are different from one another – they have different personalities, different backgrounds, different strengths, and different things that drive them. This combination of difficult work and differing people is a natural cause of friction — stress, anxiety, frustration, conflict. This friction reduces the impact an organization achieves.
But within all this, every organization can run well. I prefer to say “run well” because it is something every individual makes happen, rather to say “well run” which implies something only leaders do. I reached out to a few managers whose approach I admire with a few simple questions to try to better understand some of the ingredients for a run-well organization. I asked them what the best people they have worked for, or who have worked for them, do that makes them particularly productive. And I asked how they have applied this.
As we spoke, they grew increasingly animated in articulating what distinguishes running “well” from “not so well.” I took away from these conversations three things that everyone can do to help their organization run well: Communicate, Delegate, and Be accountable.
COMMUNICATE:
- Communicate in all directions – With peers, teammates, and those you report to.
- Communicate frequently – Over-communication is no hazard; under-communication is.
- Don’t assume — You do not know what others are thinking; they probably don’t know your mind either. Check with others. Share with others.
- Do affirm — Give positive feedback and recognition.
- Treat people right – It lubricates communication.
DELEGATE
- No one can do everything – Good delegation embraces a healthy dependency on others.
- Delegate in all directions —To those who work for you, of course, and to peers, and even to those you report to.
- Do the hard work to clarify and agree on tasks and timing – Be frank, be open, be respectful.
- Be self-aware as you talk tasks – Share who you are, say what you need and why.
- Follow-up with those you have delegated to — Think before you ask. Intervening unnecessarily degrades skill and progress. But not intervening when needed also undermines these things.
BE ACCOUNTABLE:
- Take responsibility for the task – Be in command of what’s needed to accomplish it, put your self on the hook for results, do the work to get it done.
- Organize and prioritize – Review your personal task list regularly; make the tough calls on what to focus on.
- Be proactive – Bring issues and problems to the fore early and address them.
- Don’t avoid disappointing others – Manage relationships to the task (gently), rather than the other way around.
With everyone communicating, delegating, and being accountable, trust builds, skill and confidence strengthen, efficiency and the power of teams increase, the organization brings more to bear on the work, and impact grows.
CHOOSING (an allegory of sorts)
Back in late March, the community garden’s first sprouts appeared, and with them choices. In what seemed like no time, the New York aster was everywhere. Perhaps over the prior summer, perhaps over winter, it sent long, stem-like shoots through the soil as much as a few feet. The these shoots, called rhizomes, are a means of propagation tested and proven over millennia. From them new plants had begun to emerge.
The choice-challenge the industrious plant posed was that, if left to its natural course, the aster would take over the area in which I was cultivating a number of mid-summer bloomers. This was part of the strategy I settled on, after study, much trial and error, and reflection, to grow patches of spring, summer, and fall-blooming native plants in different parts of the garden. My purpose was to foster the age-long interactions between these plants and the insects that depend on them, and, as well, to delight the people who visit the garden.
But this New York aster, which arrived in my place uninvited (though, of course, I arrived in its place uninvited as well.…), was posing a rhizonic challenge to my strategy and my purpose. It forced me to revisit and reflect on my approach, my aim. The mix of plants I installed have a wide range of flower shapes, providing food for many different insects. They bloom for a longer period than the aster. They have an important mid-summer place in my overall plan. And so, weeks before the other plants stir, I chose.
I slid the long, narrow blade of a weeding trowel into the ground by one rising aster, and as I loosened the soil, I pulled gently on the base of the stem until its roots released their hold. Instead of pulling straight out, the plant moved laterally, toward another plant sprung from the same threading root. I pulled up more strings of asters and followed one rhizome back to its source. But as I poised to dig the big plant out and compost it, I felt unexpected admiration for this mother plant, which had so cleverly woven her tendrils (and offspring) across the bed. Care engulfed reason. I considered how much aster we already had removed from all around the garden. And then I adapted. I removed much of the source plant, but left a handful of stems in place.
From even these limited beginnings, over summer the plant thrived and I must spend some time trimming its thicket of branches and making ample room for its neighbors. Now it is dense with flowers, and especially on sunny days, which seem to amplify the flow of nectar, it is busy with insects that alight and flit.
IS STRATEGIC PLANNING DEAD?
Years ago I did a lot of strategic planning. Then evaluation predominated. Now strategic planning is back. Like a traveler returning to his home after a long journey, I find some things sure have changed.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I was beginning in solo practice, there was more pomp and circumstance to strategic planning. The process was more subjugated to widely accepted frameworks and toolkits, “what you’re supposed to do” kinds of things like SWOT analysis, scenarios, and industry analysis. Plans were more elegant, more logically consistent — they were rooted in action clearly linked to goals that would (on paper at least) produce significant progress toward the success of an organization’s mission.
The work of developing a plan was more open to the thoughts and critiques of outsiders, and on the whole more analytically rigorous. There was more high-stakes choosing, that is, priority setting. At the end of the day, was there less staff-wide ownership of the plan and its implementation? Maybe. Certainly more consultants were involved (and more $$$).
Of course, this is broad-brush generalizing. And from my country-doctor-scale vantage point I do not pretend to see everything that is going on. Still, it seems to me that these days strategic planning tends to be less formulaic, little rooted in standard models and frameworks, more tailored to the nature of the institution, to how it works and thinks, to what it sees as most needed (often intuitively and semi-consciously).
The work tends to be more pragmatic, with more inward-facing effort at articulation, plus perhaps a few external reference points or discussions with supporters or collaborators to help shape it. The product tends to be more doable, as it tends to remain within what the organization is already doing. There is far less choosing and prioritizing — to say nothing of “high stakes” — but plan development, more often than in the past I’d say, is more boldly led by the executive director. Leaders seem to take the opportunity to articulate the direction they want to take their organization in more seriously. Because of this, and because of their greater pragmatism, I think strategic plans may well be more deeply held — with more commitment, more alignment, and, as I just said, more leadership. Because the whole undertaking is much more DIY, there is much less consultant involvement — generally higher level thought partnership, perhaps some process design — and, therefore, less cost.
No, strategic planning is not dead. But are organizations and their supporters better off with the new way? In so much as it takes in fewer facts and involves less analysis, it is more difficult to ground strategic direction in reason. On the other hand, without committed leadership, the chance of success at whatever direction may be set is largely diminished.
GROWING OLDER
On Saturdays, many children visit the community garden. They scamper about the paths and play with pebbles. They look for potato bugs and slugs under rocks. With their toy watering cans, they water plants at the edges of beds that may or may not need it. As they grow, a few of them continue to come regularly. They weed, plant, or mulch with increasing independence. They get their hands dirty. And then, with the winds of adolescence still at some remove, they leave. There is a parallel dynamic with students from the nearby college. Some come to meet a volunteer-day assignment. A few continue irregularly on their own. They trickle away.
The garden has maybe a half-dozen doers. By this I mean people who come at least a few hours a week and do the planting, raking, weeding, pruning, and bagging and disposing of the clippings. An even smaller subset handles things like writing grant applications, pricing and managing the occasional project. Of these doers, half are 60-somethings, the other half within reach of either side of 80.
The situation brings to mind conservation groups that look at their aging supporters and wring their hands nervously. We need to attract more younger people, they say, again and again. For certain things, this may be true, but I think these groups are missing something exceptionally valuable right under their noses.
Mostly, I work with land and wildlife conservation nonprofits. Recently, however, I had the delightful experience of working with a church, helping them consider ways to foster greater vitality and growth. At the start of this work, I spoke with two dozen mainline Protestant pastors around the country about how they wrestled with these challenges.
I’ll never forget a conversation with a pastor in the Northwest. He talked passionately about the opportunity to attract more older people. Older people show up, he said — they have time, they have more solidly formed and deeply held passions. With so much life experience, they understand what commitments mean and they are prepared to make them.
The pastor’s pitch to prospective 60-something congregation members goes something like this: “If God was saying to you, ‘You’ve worked many years. And though you may have 20 years or more to go, you’re done, and I’m done with you,’ wouldn’t that be a callous God?” And then he continues. “Rather, I think God is loving and passionate. I think what he says is this: ‘You’ve worked and lived many years. You have many to go. I have prepared you to do the best work of your life.’ ”
How our little garden group will replace our irreplaceable 80-somethings I do not know. Recruitment campaigns? Posters have their place, but the results often don’t last. Maybe the best we can do is exude a sense of welcome, resist the accreting exclusiveness tight cultures often produce, offer multiple ways in – different tasks, different ends — and foster opportunities to connect with others. In the end, our efforts must respect the reality that each of us who has committed did so for deeply personal reasons.
I do not know how or when our newest regular will show up, but I’ll be on the lookout for the next 60-somethings looking to do the best work of their life.