Joan Garry has some superb questions to ask those interviewing with you for a fundraising job, as well as what types of answers you should hope they provide.
I particularly liked Joan’s questions on their approach to philanthropy and how they would work with a board.
I recently came across a study published in Harvard Business Review that crystallized some of my own thinking about how to motivate leadership.
The article outlines the results of a study of 10,000 graduates of Westpoint (the U.S. Army officer training college) through their graduation and well into their careers. The graduates were asked questions to determine what motivates their leadership. In general, leadership motivations were classified as intrinsic (internal) or extrinsic (instrumental). An example of an intrinsic motivation is “improving people’s lives.” An example of an extrinsic motivation is “more pay” or greater status from a position of more stature. Many people demonstrated evidence of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
I was not surprised that those who were intrinsically motivated had proven over time to be more successful leaders than those extrinsically motivated. I previously posted a great video on this precise subject.
What surprised me about the study was that those who were both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated also proved inferior in leadership success compared to those whose sole motivations are intrinsic.
In the words of the study author:
“Adding external motives didn’t make leaders perform better — additional motivations reduced the selection to top leadership by more than 20%. Thus, external motivations, even atop strong internal motivations, were leadership poison.”
Personally, I’ve always been wary of organizations that consider using bonuses or other similar rewards as a means of improving employee performance. This is especially true in cause-related organizations. It creates a perverse incentive that can change how employees perceive their role.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen an organization go awry in this way. A few years back, an organization I knew hired an Executive Director who insisted that the pay for his role be increased to match what they had been receiving at the job they were vacating, even though this higher pay would be dramatically more than the organization’s traditional pay scale. In their words, they didn’t want to be taking a step backwards in pay. It didn’t surprise me that the E.D. in question flamed out in 18 months. They were more motivated by extrinsic factors (pay) than intrinsic (the desire to best fulfill the organization’s mission).
What implications does that have for nonprofits? For those doing hiring, if a candidate says or does something suggesting their personal motivation is extrinsic, I suggest you think long and hard before going down that road. Focus on candidates where the flame is burning on the inside to accomplish the mission. Skills can be trained. The fire inside cannot.
Guest blog by Sami Fournier of Element Exercise.
Faced with the prospect of submitting a grant proposal, consider what a great opportunity you have before you. Beyond being a challenge and a bit of a chore, the grant writing process can define your organization’s work in a way that also improves the leadership of your team.
A looming grant deadline can be a team-building experience.
Let’s take the example of applying to a foundation for a general support grant.
Your first instinct as Executive Director might be to sequester yourself in your office and just write it.
But consider this alternative possibility: Get your team together (on a rational, roomy timeline, if possible) and build an outline using the funder’s guidelines and requirements. Suppose you start with something like this:
Carve out assignments for your team members, knowing that each will review and edit and feed into the main narrative as well.
Whomever is drafting the narrative is not working in a vacuum. That person is hopefully starting from the organization’s strategic plan and building on the organization’s mission and goals.
The main job of the narrative writer is to organize and delve into the details of the how and each step along the path to the goals. The proposal should describe clear goals, activities and tasks you will do toward each goal, the target audience, and the intended impact. Be honest and direct about your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and make it clear how you will evaluate the success of your efforts.
Now, back to your team. Perhaps you had a lead and some other folks (board? staff?) assisting with various sections, or perhaps it was a set of reviewers providing input. No matter how you organized yourselves, the process helped each team member feel pride of ownership, and the end product gave them more guidance in their work.
That’s how you got the multiplier effect of improving and developing staff as they work through drafting and presenting your organization’s proposal to a funder. Throughout, you can be making process improvements and tweaks, and finding and developing leadership qualities in each staffer.
By this time, you have a proposal that can be submitted as a centerpiece of your group’s work. It describes a problem, but puts much more emphasis on your approach to solutions and their execution. In the process, you came away with a tighter team, and more direction and sense of purpose. The support you got from the funder went well beyond the financial benefit. You arrived with stronger leaders and greater skill than ever to go forward. No matter what, make sure to tell the funder how much you grew in the process.
Sami Fournier has a Bend, Oregon-based consulting company called “Element Exercise,” which sounds like a personal training outfit, but actually specializes in grant writing in the field of alternative transportation. She formerly directed the League of American Bicyclists’ Education programs. Sami can be reached at elementexercise@gmail.com. http://www.Elementexercise.com
I recently published a guest article for 501Commons on the importance of building a fiscal management system that connects with strategic decision-making.
The main point: you should track revenues and expenses by categories that provide information useful for strategic decision-making. That means moving away from an exclusive focus on a “line item” approach that focuses on things like printing, postage, and salaries and also layers in a way of tracking by functional categories that represent your programs.
Check out the full article on 501Commons website and then let me know what you think.
One of the trickier challenges facing a nonprofit Executive Director with supervisory responsibilities is leaning to let things go “wrong.”
If you are to empower your staff to have areas of responsibilities and for them to flex their own leadership, they must be allowed to make mistakes. That means giving them authority to make some decisions without prior authorization.
After the decision with which you disagree, usually that means just accepting it and moving on. Sometimes, the situation may be repeated, so you’ll want to discuss the decision and find out what the staff person being supervised was thinking. This should be done by asking questions designed to understand their thinking rather than starting with: “that was a mistake.”
Even if they come to you for advice, sometimes the right answer is: “here’s my initial instinct, but I haven’t thought about it much and its your area of responsibility, so the call is yours.”
The benefit of this approach isn’t just that it gives junior staff a positive work environment in which they’ll develop more leadership skills. And it isn’t just that highly competent staff are less likely to leave your organization if they are given responsibility.
The benefit of this approach is also about how much time the Executive Director can put into their other duties. If the Executive Director is weighing in on matters that are really the province of someone else on staff, that means the Executive Director is taking time away from their core responsibilities. Every minute debating some minor potential “mistake” is a minute taken away from fundraising and other core Executive Director job duties.
Of course, sometimes you do need to intervene — on mistakes that would be serious. And serious is a subjective term.
But all in all, I’ve experienced more examples of Executive Directors who over-manage to ensure everything is perfect than the opposite problem of just letting everything slide. Bottom line: Executive Directors need to learn to let things go “wrong.”
A friend was recently describing to me a challenge he faced as a new board member of a relatively healthy organization, but one that seemed to have a frenetic culture.
He said the situation reminded him of an allegory a colleague once told him and I liked the story so much I’m repeating it here. (If anyone knows the source of this allegory, please let me know).
Once upon a time, there was a logger who made their living cutting logs into firewood. People kept coming to requesting work, so he got very busy. He complained to his neighbor about how busy he was.
The next day, when he had a lot of wood to cut, the neighbor came by to observe his work and asked him why he didn’t stop to sharpen his axe.
The woodsman replied: “Can’t you see I’m too busy to sharpen my axe?”
Of course, the moral of the story is that the woodsman would actually cut more wood in less time with a sharper axe.
This lesson applies to organizations and not just individuals.
I’ve known many nonprofit organizations with a culture of “getting it done” that are constantly overwhelmed with “stuff to do” so they never take the time to “sharpen their axe.”
In the organizational context, sharpening the axe can mean many things:
So organizational leaders out there as you plot the year ahead, don’t forget to build in multiple ways in which you’re sharpening the axe and not just swinging it.
A recent Huffington Post blog article focused on the importance of the nonprofit sector investing in professional development. As a whole, the sector has a poor track record in training its employees on effective leadership. That needs to change.
What I particularly liked about this blog post is it didn’t stop there. Rather, it included some practical tips for how nonprofit employees can take some steps on their own to improve their leaderhip/management skills.
I won’t repeat their recommendations — best for you to read it for yourself.
One of my pet peeves when talking to those doing hiring for nonprofit organizations is an overemphasis on finding people with the right existing skills.
A recent article suggests the same problem exists in the for-profit world. In 5 Keys to Recruiting the Best of the Best, Langley Steinert writes about best hiring practices from the perspective of the high-tech world.
Steinert’s second point hit home for me:
“Companies often put too much emphasis on finding employees with “relevant experience.” Your top performers will end up being smart, resourceful, and innovative–three elements that have nothing to do with prior experience.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Time after time in my own work, both as an Executive Director, as a board member, and as a consultant, I’ve found that the best leaders are those who are adept at thinking strategically, motivating those around them, and are driven to succeed.
These are, of course, harder to evaluate in a traditional hiring practice — by looking at resumes and cover letters.
But it’s worth taking the time to figure out who will most thrive in a role.
Once, when hiring somebody to lead Oregon LCV’s political program, I had the two finalists spend an hour reviewing a scenario and then writing a memo with advice on how to spend political resources.
One of them emerged from the office where he had been working and said “that was hard.” When the other emerged on the day of his final interview, he said, “that was fun.”
It wasn’t my only clue, but it was big final clue that led me to hire the one who thought puzzling through political challenges was “fun.” And time proved it to be the correct hire.
So don’t be afraid when hiring to be creative in how you evaluate candidates.
The question I keep asking myself after repeatedly re-watching this video is: what are the implications for nonprofit organizations?
Some implications are fairly straightforward:
For example, with very few exceptions, nonprofits tend to eschew the use of financial performance bonuses as a means to spur better future results. The video suggests nonprofits are right to avoid financial bonuses.
Also, nonprofits have an inherent advantage over for-profit entities, in that their “purpose” is hard-wired into their reason for existence, unlike the “purpose” examples Pink cites from the for-profit world.
But how about mastery and autonomy? I think one of the deeper meanings of the video is that nonprofits can’t simply play the “purpose” trump card as a way to motivate volunteers and staff, if there is no effort to take into account the other two motivators.
If purpose, mastery, and autonomy are three legs of a stool, the nonprofit can’t survive on just one leg.
Another way of putting it is: if you strip away autonomy and mastery as a way to motivate your nonprofit team, what will result?
A nonprofit I’ve known for some time recently changed its decision-making structure to remove a great deal of authority (e.g. autonomy) from volunteers, even as the nonprofit continues to tout volunteers as a critical part of its strategy. Over time, what will that mean for the nonprofit’s ability to attract high quality volunteers? My prediction (which hasn’t yet had time to be born out) is that it will have a significant negative impact.
Aside from giving decision-making control to volunteers, are there other ways to meet their needs for autonomy and mastery?
What about employees? Are there lessons for how to engage them beyond the usual generalities about not micromanaging them?
Your feedback is encouraged.
I sometimes feel like there’s two types of people, those who talk about doing things and those that do them.
Talkers tend to talk a good game at first, but then remain remarkably passive in actual implementation of their ideas. Often, when you ask them why something hasn’t happened, they revert to the passive voice.
“My board wasn’t engaged.”
“The donors weren’t enthusiastic.”
When you poke behind the surface, it’s often because the passive voiced talker sat on their buns expecting everyone but them to get it done.
I remember talking to one Executive Director who complained about their board’s lack of engagement and quizzing him about it.
Me: “Have you sat down with your board members one-on-one to talk about what they want to get out of service and to get to know then?”
ED: “No.”
Me: “Why not?”
ED: “I don’t know. I guess I was waiting for my board members to call me”
Likewise, I recently engaged with a fundraiser who was great at building relationships, but it was never the right time to make an ask.
Fundraiser: “I spent the last year building relationships with these people. If I ask them for money this year, they’ll think fundraising is all it was about.”
Now I’m all for relationship-based fundraising — indeed, it’s at the heart of what I train. But you build the relationships as you ask for money, not as an alternative to asking for money.
In the end, the people who have get it done mentalities tend to do a bit less talking, and more time setting up clear plans, clear objectives, and then engage actively to get things done.
So one question I’ve come to ponder is this: how do you identify the talkers versus the “get it done” mentality in the hiring process? Let me know if you have any ideas.
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