Managing the Nonprofit Organization

Topic

Managing the nonprofit organization (Principles and practices) by Peter Drucker

This outline only extends to level 5 so some of the topics are not complete or self explanatory—you'll need to buy a copy of the book. Main page

Preface

NPOs are central to American society and are indeed its most distinguishing feature

America’s largest employer

2-3% of GNP. Same as 40 years ago.

NPOs “product” is a changed human being

NPO

Cured patient

A child that learns

A young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult

A changed human life altogether

Business supplies goods and services

Has discharged its task when

Government …

Has discharged its function when its policies are effective

Need management so they can concentrate on their mission

Work together on their…

mission

leadership

management

Need management because they do not have a conventional “bottom line”

Need to learn how to use management as their tool lest they be overwhelmed by it

There is a “management boom”

Little that is so far available to the NPO help them with their leadership and management has been specifically designed for them. Little of it pays any attention to the distinct characteristics of the NPO or to their specific central needs

Their mission

What are “results” in non-profit work

Strategies required to market their services and obtain the money they need to do their job

Challenge of introducing innovation and change in institutions that depend on volunteers and therefore cannot command

The specific human and organizational realities of NPO

The very different role that the board plays in the NPO

The need to attract volunteers, to develop them and to manage them for performances

Relationships with a diversity of constituencies

Fund-raising and fund development

The problem of individual burnout, which is so acute in NPOs precisely because the individual commitment to them tends to be so intense.

Need materials that are specifically developed out of their experience and focuses on their realities and concerns

Bob Buford of the Leadership Network

Get audio tapes. Leadership and Management in the Non-Profit Institutions (“The Non-Profit Drucker”) .

NPOs — America’s resounding success in the last 40 years

In many ways it is the “growth industry” of America

Health-care institutions

Community services

Fast growing pastoral churches

Hospital

Many other NPOs that have emerged as the center of effective social action in a rapidly changing and turbulent America

Has become America’s “Civil Society”

Face very big and different challenges

Convert donors into contributors

Need more money to do vital work

Giving is necessary above all so that the NPOs can discharge the one mission they all have in common

To satisfy the need of the American people for…

To make contributors out of donors means that the American people can see what they want to see—or should want to see—when each of us looks at himself or herself in the mirror in the morning:

Give community and common purpose

People no longer have exposure to community

NPOs are the American community

The mission comes first (and your role as a leader)

The commitment (of the NPO) (What we really believe in.)

Introduction

NPO exists to bring about change in individuals and in society

What missions work and what missions don’t work

How to define the mission

The ultimate test of the mission is right action

The first job of the leader is to think through and define the mission of the institution

Setting concrete action goals

Workable examples

Unworkable examples

Has to be operational, otherwise it’s just good intentions

Has to focus on what the institution really tries to do

Task of the NPO manager is to try to convert the organization’s mission statement into specifics.

Common mistake is to make the mission statement into a kind of hero sandwich of good intentions.

It has to be simple and clear

Have to think through

Constantly look at the state-of-the-art

Look at the opportunities in the community

Things that were of primary importance may become secondary or even totally irrelevant.

Watch this constantly

Three “musts” of a successful mission

Look at strength and performance

Look outside at the opportunities, the needs

What do we really believe in (committed to)

Summary

Leadership is a foul-weather job

Crisis leadership

Depend on a leader when there is a crisis.

The problems of success

Hard choices

Innovation

People who will do what the situation calls for (p15). This is effective crisis leadership.

How to pick a leader

Try to match the strengths of an individual with the needs of the institution

Look for integrity or character

Mediocrity in leadership shows up almost immediately.

Your personal leadership role

Have maybe a year to establish yourself

The role the leader takes has to fit

All of us play roles

To work the role the leader takes has to fit in three dimensions

Two things to build on

No such things as “leadership traits” or “leadership characteristics”

Never say “I.” Think “we” and say “we.”

You are visible.

To every leader there is a season

The balance decision

One of the key tasks is to balance long range and short range, the big picture and the pesky little details

There are always balancing problems in managing non-profits. This is only one example

Balance between concentrating resources on one goal and enough diversification

Balance between being too cautious and being rash

Timing: expect result too soon or wait too long

Opportunity and risk

The don’ts of leadership

Just announce decision and leave it to everyone else to understand

Be afraid of the strengths in your organization

Pick your successor alone

Hog the credit

Knock your subordinates

Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself

Setting new goals — interview with Frances Hesselbein (Girl Scouts)

The Daisy Scout program

Only 20% of the councils were enthusiastic about the new program. Another 10% were waiting in the wings

Summary #1

Ready but not competent

Increase in number of volunteers

Deserved and required superior learning opportunities.

Summary #2

Minority communities

Look at the population projections

Most thoughtful kind of planning and including those community leaders in that planning

Working on the target of opportunity

More than one customer

Girls

Volunteers

General conclusions

Carefully construct a marketing plan

Understand all the ways there are to reach people and use them

Need people in the marketing chain

Continuing evaluation

What the leader owes — interview with Max De Pree (Herman Miller, Inc. & Fuller Theological Seminary)

The leader is indebted to the organization

A volunteer nation

Owes certain assets

People development needs to be oriented primarily toward the person, and not primarily toward the organization.

When you take the risk of developing people, the odds are very good that the organization will get what it needs.

Building on what people are—not about changing them

Goal achievement vs. realization of our potential applies to organizations as well

A leader

Primarily future-oriented

First duty—Define reality

Have to deserve the person who works for us

They are committed to us by choice

Opportunity

Young people

Building a strong team of colleagues

Team held together by a common mission & common vision

Understand the task

Selecting people

Assign the work very clearly with a lot of interaction

Agree on what the process is going to be for getting the work done

Agree on timetables where those are appropriate

We agree on how we’re going to measure performance

The way we judge the quality of leadership by the tone of the body

Summary

Leader as the servant of the organization

Indebtness of the leader

Summary: The action implications

The mission

Comes first

If you lose sight of your mission, you begin to stumble and it shows very, very fast

Needs to be though through. Needs to be changed

The mission is always long-range. It needs short-range efforts and very often short-range results.

Leadership

First task is to make sure that everybody…

The leaders’s job

Leadership is doing

Leadership is also example

You are a leader

We are creating a society of citizens in the old sense of people who actively work, rather than just passively vote and pay taxes

Each is doing a responsible task

Tomorrow’s society of citizens. Everybody…

Mission and leadership

From mission to performance (effective strategies for marketing, innovation, and fund development)

Converting good intentions into results

Results (Until these things have happened the NPO has had no results; only good intentions)

The NPO is not merely delivering a service

It wants the end user to be not a user but a doer

It uses a service to bring about change in a human being

It creates …

It attempts to become a part of the recipient

NPOs need 4 things

Plan (part one)

Marketing (this section)

People (parts 4 & 5)

Money (this section)

Strategies that convert the plan into results

How do we get our service to the “customer,” that is to the community we exist to serve?

How do we market it?

How do we get the money we need to provide the service?

Marketing in a NPO is quite different from selling

More a matter of …

Have to know …

Selling an intangible

Basic strategy tasks

Design of the right marketing strategy

Fund development strategy

Winning strategies

Introduction

Good intentions don’t move mountains; bulldozers do

In the non-profit management, the mission and the plan—if that’s all there is—are good intentions

Strategies are the bulldozers

About Strategies. They …

Brown University (a marketing strategy)

Excellent faculty

No distinction

Question: What do we have to do to become a leader despite the tough competition?

Two focuses (goals)

Had strategies for each of these goals

Has become the “in” university for bright kids in the East

This is almost a textbook case of a successful marketing strategy

Improving what we already do well

A clear strategy for improving

To work systematically on the productivity of the institution

Need a strategy for each of the factors of production

Need productivity goals—and ambitious ones

Constant improvement also includes …

Abandoning the things that no longer work

The innovation objective

Strategy development structure

Example: How does a pastor set a strategy?

Example: Public library

Steps in strategy development

Process of strategy development

The best example of a winning strategy: The Nature Conservancy

Strategy don’ts

How to innovate

Introduction

Refocus and change the organization when you are successful

Best rule for improvement strategies is to put your efforts into your successes.

Responsibility of top management

The search for changes

The requirements for successful innovation

The common mistakes (In doing anything new)

Defining the market — interview with Philip Kotler (Northwestern University)

Strategic Marketing for Non-Profit Institutions 4th edition by Philip Kotler

Many institutions confuse marketing with hard selling or advertising

Most important tasks in marketing

Advertising and selling are afterthoughts

Marketing is finding needs and filling them. It produces positive value for both parties

Marketing starts with customers, or consumers, or groups you want to serve well

Selling starts with a set of products you have, and want to push them out into any market you can find

But isn’t the need the NPO serve obvious?

Many organizations are very clear about the needs they would like to serve, but they often don’t understand these needs from the perspective of the customers. They make assumptions based on their own interpretation of the needs out there

Different marketing efforts

Money raising

Recruiting students

Attracting and holding first-rate faculty

The problem marketing has to solve

How do I get the response I want?

The answer marketing gives is that you formulate an offer to put out to the group from which you want a response

The process of getting the answer is called exchange thinking

Reciprocity and exchange underlie marketing thinking

Institutional differentiation

Competition Examples

How important is it?

How do you do it?

Marketing is now thought of as a process of segmenting, targeting, and positioning (STP marketing)

As opposed to LGD marketing—lunch, golf, and dinner, which has its place

Positioning raises the question

So most organizations engage in the search for their own uniqueness, what we might call a competitive advantage or advantages

First steps in marketing

Define its markets, its publics

Before you think through the message

Church example

Market orchestration

The mission may well be universal. And yet to be successful …

the institution has to

This applies to fund-raising

Careful identification of the appropriate sources of funds and the giving motives

Why does that donor give money?

To whom does the donor give money?

Consumer research is important in the process of trying to direct your efforts

The extent to which a NPO has to mold what they are, do what they can for the market (p 78)

Church example

“Boutiques” are very successful for NPO

Translate boutiques into niches

Route of niching versus mass production

Do you want to satisfy one type of audience deeply or do you want to satisfy a number of audiences more superficially?

Museum example

More and more niching

We need product differentiation in NPO as much as we need it in business

Why does the NPO have to be interested in marketing and have to be engaged in marketing?

Is it to be sure that it really fulfills the need?

Will it satisfy the customer?

Is it to know what it should focus its energies on?

What are the real reasons for doing marketing for a non-profit institutions?

Who should really do the marketing job in the NPO?

CEO is the CMO

Yet the CEO can’t do the marketing

The work has to be delegated to someone who is skilled in handling marketing

How can we tell whether marketing is making a genuine contribution?

Marketing is supposed to build up “share of mind” and “share of heart” for the organization

The cost side

It is very hard to gauge the impact of marketing without setting objectives

Hospital example

Haven’t really gone into marketing in the right order

Do some customer research to understand the market you want to serve and its needs

Develop segmentation and be aware of different groups that you’re going to be interacting with

Develop policies, practices, and programs that are targeted to satisfy those groups

Communicate these programs

Hospital who resist to the bitter end the kind of communication their market research shows them the public wants

How many of the people who come in to have hip replacement can walk after six months. Because not everybody does. If we (see page 83)

Adopting marketing

NPO with little or no marketing takes 5 to 10 years to really install effective marketing procedures and programs if they’re fully committed to installing them. Many organizations give up after 1-2 years, especially if the early results are so good that they think they are already there.

More than a department

Everyone in the organization pursuing one goal

Getting everyone to understand…

Marketing becomes effective when the organization …

is very clear about what it wants to accomplish

has motivated everyone in the organization to …

has taken the steps to implement this vision in a way which

Marketing is …

the work—and it is work—that brings the needs and wants and values of the customer into conformity with the product and values and behavior of the supplier, of the institution

a way to harmonize the needs and wants of the outside world with the purposes and the resources and the objectives of the institution

Building the donor constituency — interview with Dudley Hafner (American Heart Association)

Fund development

Recognizing that your true potential for growth and development is the donor, is someone you want to cultivate and bring along with your program

Not simply someone to collect this year’s contribution from

Reduces the cost of getting the money, when you have a donor base that is already sold

You’re going to help them increase their support to the organization

Tools used by the local organization

Acquaint donors with what you are as an organization

What you are trying to get accomplished

So they can identify with your goals

Need a very clear mission

Very clear goals that relate to our mission

Process

Development means

Development requires a long-term strategy (rather than putting together an annual campaign to go out and collect money.)

Donor segments

Materials / tools for creating constituency

Summary

Focus your message on what in marketing we would call the values of the potential customers

Very clear goals for a marketing campaign in which you market the American Heart Association to potential investors, to people willing to commit themselves, if only in the beginning to a token donation just to get rid of the collector

Door to door fund raising

Don’t go Sunday afternoon during pro football games

How much do you want so I can go back to my TV

Ability to answer questions I get

Leave material

Next year

That literature you left was very interesting

Last year you gave …; how about 2.5X (or a target goal based on ability) this year? 50% success rate

Appeal to the rational in the individual as well as the emotional part of the individual

In building local campaigns

Think of the person who does door-to-door

Opportunity to educate those potential donors about

Your greatest opportunity to create a long-term strategy

Competition for funds

Well ahead of inflation

Cannot afford to create a strategy that will cause one of them to do better at the expense of another NPO.

Figure out how to get new monies that have not been previously given

Have a long-term really positive impact on the good that the NPO are trying to do.

Most say “We want people who give to nobody but us”

Market research

Because we feel a commitment to the volunteers who go out as our ambassadors

We give them the best possible materials

Kind of knowledge about the market is relevant

Asking for a specific gift dramatically improves the return in our campaign

Level of income you should give so much

They are usually flattered

Once a donor has given a gift that falls into the suggested amount they should be cultivated (pay special attention): The long-term strategy of upgrading that gift

The long-term strategy of upgrading that gift

First target of opportunity

Increase the size of the gift you ask for each year form those people who have given the suggested amount. Gently nudges them to a higher level

Building the relationship

Market research tries to identify

Market segmentation

Market value expectations

Fund development

Go where the money is

Look upon fund development as an educational campaign

Justification for having a broad-based annual campaign

Larger givers, you have one strategy and one expectation

Smaller givers, another strategy and another expectation

Strategy definition

Strategy development for a segment

Information provided to fund-raisers

Emerging for the future (p 95)

Critical factors

Volunterism

Applies to all NPOs (big & small, local)

Summary

The central importance of the clear mission

The importance of knowing your market, not just in generalities, but in fine detail

Enabling those volunteers of yours to do a decent job by giving them the tools that make it almost certain that they can succeed

Don’t appeal to the heart alone, and you don’t appeal to the head alone

Do you really need volunteers? p97

Computer

Telemarketing

Many organizations facing a crisis

When you lose your volunteer base, you lose your constituency, the course of strength and growth in the organization

Technology as a way of helping the volunteers do a more effective job

Summary

Fund development is people development

Both for donors and volunteers

You are building …

That is the way …

It is based on

This applies to purely local and small organizations as well

Summary: The action implications

About strategy

Strategy converts mission and objectives into performance

Strategy ends with selling efforts

Strategy begins with knowing the market

The whole point of strategy is not to look at recipients as people who receive bounty, to whom the non-profit does good.

Three strategies

Needs a marketing strategy that integrates the customer and the mission

Needs strategies to improve all the time and to innovate

Needs a strategy to build its donor base

All three strategies begin with research and research and more research

Organized efforts to find out

The important person to research

Training your own people

Everyone in the hospital must be patient-conscious.

That’s a training job—not just preaching.

It isn’t attitude, its behavior

Behavior training. This is what you do

Train the volunteers (may be even more essential)

Need to organize itself to abandon

What no longer …

If not built in …

The question always before the non-profit executive

What should our service do for the customer that is of importance to that customer?

Think through how the service should be

Nuts and bolts

Strategy

Begins with the mission

Leads to a work plan

End with the right tools

The last thing to say about strategy that it exploits an opportunity,

Strategy

Commits the non-profit executive and the organization to action

Its essence is action

The tests of strategy are results

Begins with needs and ends with satisfaction

Managing for performance (how to define it; how to measure it)

What is the bottom line when there is no “bottom line”?

NPOs tend not to give priority to performance and results

Yet performance and results are far more… than in a business

important

difficult

In a business, there is a financial bottom line

Profit and loss are not enough by themselves to judge performance

but at least they are something concrete

A NPO E faces a risk-taking decision when you try to think through your performance

First think through the desired result

Then the means of measuring performance and results can be determined

How is performance for this institution to be defined?

Examples

Not enough to say we serve a need. Really good ones create a want.

As NPO E begin to define the performance that makes the mission of their institution operational two common temptations have to be resisted

Planning for performance

Performance in the NPO must be planned

This starts with the mission

Then one asks: Who are our constituencies, and what are the results for each of them?

Integrating constituency goals into the institution’s mission is almost an architectural process, a structural process.

Moral vs. economic causes

Illustration

Thinking through what results will be demanded of the non-profit institution can protect it from squandering resources because of confusion between moral and economic causes.

NPO — almost impossible to abandon anything

Have to distinguish between moral causes and economic causes

Have a duty toward its … to allocate its scarce resources for results rather than to squander them on being righteous.

NPO are human-change agents

Their results are therefore always a change in people—in their…

The NPO has to judge itself by its performance in creating

NPO need to set specific goals in terms of its service to people

NPO needs to constantly raise these goals—or its performance will go down

Don’t’s and Do’s — The basic rules (Disregarding them will damage and may even impair performance)

The Don’t’s

Seeing the institution as an end in itself

Feuding and bickering

Tolerate discourtesy

Build the organization around information and communication instead of around hierarchy

Delegation

Standard setting, placement, appraisal

Standards

Placement

Appraisal

The outside focus

Force you people, and especially your executives, to be on the outside often enough to know what the institution exists for

Get out in the field and actually work there again and again

Try to simulate being a customer

Don’t let people stay forever in a staff position in the office

The effective decision

Everything comes together in the decision

Make or break point of the organization

Either make decisions effectively or render themselves ineffective

On decisions

What is the decision really about?

The most important part of the effective decision

Very rarely is a decision about what it seems to be about. That’s usually a symptom

Examples

Opportunity and risk

Opportunity: If this works, what will it do for us?

Risk

The need for dissent

They should be controversial

Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework

What is right? Not who is right?

Each see a different reality

Instead of arguing what is right, assume that each faction has the right answer. But which question is each trying to answer?

Creates mutual respect

Honest disagreement

Any organization needs a nonconformist

Enables NPO to brush aside the unnecessary, the meaningless, the trivial conflict

Enable concentration on the real issues

Conflict resolution

You use dissent and disagreement to resolve conflict

Ask the two most vocal opponents to sit down and work out a common approach

Defusing the argument

From decision to action

Causes for decisions that remain pious intentions

Follow up

Decisions will turn out to be wrong more often than right. At least they will have to be adjusted

How to make the schools accountable — interview with Albert Shanker (American Federation of Teachers)

A leader in the crusade to

improve performance in the classroom

make teachers and schools accountable for performance

build the school around the classroom teacher

Performance in the school

What kind of human being are we trying to produce?

Performance dimensions

Assess achievement

longer range

Learning

Not memorization & instant forgetting

Something that becomes part of you

Teaching

Should be done on an adult level

Public may have given up on many of our public institutions

The employees have

They are just doing … whether it works or not

Summary: the action implications

Performance is the ultimate test of any institution

Exists for the sake of performance in changing people and society

The temptation to downplay results

To say … is not enough

Wasting resources on non-results

Results

How well are you doing in terms of the resource you spent?

What return do you get?

Parable of the Talents in the New Testament: Our job is to invest the resources we have — people and money — where the results are manifold. And that’s quantitative term

Kinds of results

Defining results in such a way that one can ask

Results are always outside the organization, not inside

The right allocation of resources to the mission, to goals, to results

Start with the mission (That is exceedingly important)

What do you want to be remembered for as an organization—but also as an individual?

The mission transcends today, but guides today, informs today

From the mission, one goes to very concrete goals

Only when a non-profits’s key performance areas are defined can it really set goals

In a non-profit institution, where people want to serve a cause, you always have the challenge of getting people to perform so that they grow on their own terms. They are then accomplished and fulfilled, and that makes its way down to the performance of the organization.

Results are achieved by concentration, not by splintering

The courage to say (strength concentration analysis)

Need alone does not justify our moving in. We must match our strength, our mission, our concentration, our value

Good intentions, good policies, good decisions must turn into effective actions

This is what we are here for

This is how we do it

This is the time span in which we do it

This is who is accountable

This is the work for which we are responsible

The ultimate question, people in NPO should ask again and again, and again (major feedbacks)

What should I hold myself accountable for by way of contribution and results?

What should this institution hold itself accountable for by way of contribution and results?

What should both this institution and I be remembered for?

People and relationships (your staff, your board, your volunteers, your community)

People decisions (hire, fire, place, promote, develop, teams, personal effectiveness)

Introduction

People decisions are the ultimate—perhaps the only—control of an organization

People determine the performance capacity of an organization

No organization can do better than the people it has

Can only hope to recruit and hold the common run of humanity (unless it is a very small organization—a string quartet)

Effective NPO E must try to get more out of the people he or she has.

The yield from the human resource really determines the organizations performance

That’s decided by the basic people decisions

The quality of these human decisions largely determines whether … rather than just public relations and rhetoric

Rules for making good people decisions (Objective: To place people who perform in assignments that match their strengths)

See measuring “Management Performance”

Not judges of people

A diagnostic process

The selection process

90 days later (A reminder)

How to develop people

Introduction

Developing people

Building the team

The more successful an organization becomes, the more it needs to build teams

Teams don’t develop themselves—they require systematic hard work. They require a team approach to management

Team Building Process

Personal effectiveness on the job

Once the right match is made between key activities and strengths.

Enable

As the organization grows

The tough decision

A competent staff wherever performance is needed

Repotting the bored executive

The succession decision (at the top)

Most critical, hardest to undo

What not to do

Positive ways

The key relationships

NPOs have a multitude of constituencies and has to work out the relationship with each of them

The board

To be effective, a NPO needs a strong board, but a board that does the board’s work

Board duties

Board must

CEO

A nominating process is the best way to get people on the board. See p 158

Membership on this board in not power, it is responsibility

Age limit

The badly split board

Two-way relationships

Only two way relationships work

Bringing out problems into the open

Relations with the community

NPOs serve one specific community interest

Have to maintain relations with

Not PR (but you need good PR). Requires the service organization live its mission

From volunteers to unpaid staff — interview with Father Leo Bartel (Social ministry of the Catholic Diocese)

From “helpers” to “colleagues” or “unpaid staff”

Now in leadership positions in the Church and in Church work

Formal training program

Quality control

The biggest difficulty in asking people to serve is that they are painfully aware of their lack of experience and lack of preparation

We must

Management and development of people

Inspiration. How to excite and motivate folks who are apathetic

Organization: Getting board and council members to do the sort of paperwork, the sort of planning work, they really must do in order to be effective in their roles on councils or boards?

Guiding principle you have in managing a heterogeneous group of volunteers, and a rapidly growing one?

The effective board — Interview with Dr. David Hubbard (Fuller Theological Seminary)

The functions of the board

A partnership between the board and the professional staff

Organization chart

Board’s role

Active board members

Time commitment

Creating the partnership

The way the mission of the institution is stated

Need people who are open to that mission

The investment of the CEO and the staff in servicing the trustees

Making the board effective and keeping it effective: A priority task

CEO’s two primary areas of service

Care for the vice-presidents

Care for the trustees

Balancing board involvement with the possibility of board meddling

Meddling

Playing games with the board

Don’t

Share the bad news first at 110 percent

Share the good news at 90 percent

No surprises

Getting the board to change its position

To adopt a change in an old, outmoded, but cherished policy

Work for a win situation

Try to help the trustees change their minds or to expand their vision without feeling that they are letting go of their cherished goals.

Avoiding the board splitting into factions (p 176)

Working with outside boards

Don’t try to be clever & outsmart them

What do we all have in common

Summary

It is to the benefit of an institution to have a strong board

Summary: The action implications

Complexity of relationships

Paid staff and “volunteers”

Donors

Board

People (volunteers, board, employed staff) need clear assignments for which they themselves take responsibility

Need to know what the institution expects of them

The responsibility for developing the work plan, the job description, and the assignment should always be on the people who do the work

Think through their contribution

Evolve by joint discussion

Must be information based

Structured around information

Learning organization?

Emphasis on managing people should always be on performance (They owe performance, and the executive owes them compassion.)

Must also be compassionate (People work for non-profits because they believe in the cause)

Learning and teaching responsibilities

Learning (CEO only?)

Aspirations, opportunities, threats, good & bad performance, improvements (for executives)

How I help or hamper you? (for executives)

May need clear information about the results of your organization’s work

Take responsibility for making it easy for people to…

Do their work

Have results

Enjoy their work

Make sure that people get results.

Developing yourself (as a person, as an executive, as a leader)

You are responsible

First priority for the NPO executive is to strive for excellence

Brings satisfaction & self-respect

Workmanship counts

Without craftsmanship there is neither

Be remembered for being a first-rate … (occupation)

Avoid the temptation to just get by and hope nobody notices

Self-development

Deeply meshed in with…

Pay serious attention to self-development — your own and that of everyone in the organization (is not a luxury for NPO executive)

Well-run, results-oriented organization

The key to building an organization with such a spirit is organizing work so everyone feels essential to a goal they believe in

Goal is that everyone work at the equivalent level of a minister in the church

The letter

To make a difference

The person with the most responsibility for an individual’s development is the person himself.

Encourage everyone to ask themselves:

Creating a record of performance

Review what you have done once or twice a year

PFD’s review. Focusing on where he can make a difference

Making Personal Vision productive

Self-development summary

Setting an example

A constant relationship between the performance and achievement of the leaders, the record setters, and the rest

Executives lead by example

What do you want to be remembered for?

To develop yourself, you have to be doing the right work in the right kind of organization.

Where do I belong as a person?

“Repotting” yourself

Sometimes a change—a big change or a small change—is essential in order to stimulate yourself again.

10-12 years with one organization is enough for many volunteers

The switch

When you begin to fall into a pleasant routine, its time to force yourself to do something different.

“Burnout” often is just boredom

Perhaps all that is needed is a small shift

The excitement is not the job—it is the result

To build learning into your work, and keep it there, build in organized feedback from results to expectations.

Summary to this point. It’s up to you to:

Manage your job and your career.

Doing the right things well

Effectiveness

Self-renewal

Work on your own self-renewal

Create the excitement, the challenge, the transformation that makes an old job enriching over and over again

Three most common forcing tools for sustaining the process of self-renewal

Focus efforts to have the greatest ability for self-renewal.

What do you want to be remembered for?

Early exposure to the question will make all the difference, although you aren’t likely to really understand that until you are in your forties

At age 25, some began trying to answer it, foolishly

If you still can’t answer it by the time you’re fifty, you will have wasted your life

Keep asking the question over and over

Pushes you to see yourself as a different person—the person you can become

Non-profits: the second career — interview with Robert Buford (Leadership network & PFD Foundation for Non-Profit Management)

Learning required to make the transition from business to NPO

Reallocate sense of identity

Same values. But major change in proportions and behavior

Real sense of clarity about mission and goals and about what comes first

Do same things but to a different purpose and to a different drummer

Need self-knowledge

Experiences that helped you either to do the right things or avoid doing the wrong ones?

An outside interest

Avoid becoming a victim of own organization

Self-development

Stay in touch with your constituency

The woman executive in the non-profit institution — interview with Roxanne Spitzer-Lehmann (St. Joseph Health System)

Keeping track of progress

List major undertakings that I have to do

List things that are in process

Differences between NPO & business

Bottom line oriented

Self-development

Developing others

Summary: The action implications

Joshua Abrams

Start all over again

I don’t learn anything anymore

I’ve done all I can do

I’m still young enough so that I understand … and old enough to have experience with most of the things they are going through.

I’m no longer young enough…

Decide then act two years later

You are responsible for allocating your life. Nobody else will do it for you

Self development means two things & two quite different tasks: Developing the person. Developing the skill, competence, and ability to contribute.

What will you do tomorrow as a result of reading this book? And what will you stop doing?