Nonprofit Teams
A learning community of six executive directors of youth development organizations in Boston has been meeting for over a year to support one another and identify promising management and leadership practices. In order to identify their core challenges and develop a common learning agenda, each leader completed the "Organizational Capacity Assessment Tool" developed for Venture Philanthropy Partners by McKinsey & Company.
Most striking to us was that the majority of EDs in the group gave their organization the lowest possible rating in response to the question of dependence of the management team on the CEO: "Very strong dependence on CEO/ED; organization would cease to exist without his/her presence."
We brought the group together in January 2004 to discuss the issues behind the self-assessment and the challenges to building teams in nonprofit organizations.
One ED related a story about the struggles to revise the organization's inclement weather policy. The old policy had caused some confusion, so several staff and management committees took up making revisions beginning last spring, which they would then recommend to the ED for implementation. The groups went back and forth for months. By the fall, the ED began asking for the recommendations for the revised policy, and in November she finally insisted on getting involved to resolve the policy, just as the first winter storm occurred.
While this may seem like a petty concern around which to build a discussion about teams, the dynamics of organizational process and decision making often reveal themselves in these small decisions. The staff teams working on the snow storm policy worked democratically, the ED felt that the group had been empowered to come to a recommendation, and yet, at the end of the day, the groups could not resolve the issues without the intervention of the ED.
In another case, an ED hired a field director to replicate a successful program in other communities. The new staff member did not initially focus on learning from the ED or other current staff the successful program elements, but instead started thinking almost "from scratch" about what might work in the new locations, even thought the original program model had worked well and there was no evidence that it would not work well in the replication sites.
There is a high premium placed on democratic process in nonprofit organizations, although this does not necessarily lead to team-based decisions. One ED remarked in describing her organization: "we have lots of democracy but little collaboration."
What's at work here? In one case, staff members are too dependent, and in another case too independent. For most nonprofit leaders, a fine balance must be struck between the democratic culture of the organization and the need to make decisions in a timely manner. Given the opportunity to pass difficult decisions up the chain of command, a team will make the pass. And for some personality profiles, the instinct to work in a collaborative manner on a team does not come naturally.
In the experience of the EDs in this discussion, building effective teams is an ongoing process that includes developing the capabilities of team members through training and mentoring. EDs who invested in building a team ethos saw changes over time. Part of that investment had to be made in themselves—many leaders had to let go of the superhero image of leaders, often developed when the organization was too lean to afford to hire a leadership team, and truly empower their teams to make decisions.
Team member's roles and responsibilities, as well as the limits of those roles, must be clearly defined. For several leaders, using tools such as Myers-Briggs or DISC to profile the psychology of individual team members was helpful in understanding how team dynamics were affected by the interplay of those profiles.
Finally, at the core, teams function as an outgrowth of an organization's culture and the values of the organization's leadership. In organizations where bad news can be shared openly, where the most junior staff member is rewarded for speaking the truth, teams work. Where the truth cannot be told, teams fail.
Nonprofit Teams
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