People Want to Help

The guests have arrived. The table isn't set, the salad vegs still need chopping, the hors d'oeuvres are yet to be set out. What to do?

Ask for help.

Usually, the guests are happy to comply, if they're given a specific task. Jane gets busy setting out cheese and crackers, Andrew starts cutting up carrots, and Nina distributes silverware among the place settings. In an instant, they're co-conspirators, part of the team making the evening happen. Though guests, they've turned from "they" into "we."

There's a lesson here for nonprofits.

I'm thinking specifically about boards, although the lesson could apply to all volunteers (and unwitting would-be/will-be volunteers.) It has to do with the comfort of specificity.

If you ask someone to help, but can't tell them a specific task, they're left on their own to figure it out. Maybe they'll realize the table has no knives, and maybe they'll guess if you're having steak that you need knives. And maybe they'll ask where the knives are and try to divine your (the host's) intentions. But that's a lot of maybes - and a lot of guesswork - on the guest's part to join the team.

The same is true in the boardroom. "Who wants to help with the gala?" is a pretty open-ended question. While you may think the response is a simple hand raised to say "me," the fact is that the hand-raiser has had to do a wild series of guesses and calculations to estimate what their "yes" actually means, and if they're up to the ill-defined job. Their "yes" might or might not refer to the same job you were thinking they were volunteering for - a miscommunication that can lead to ill-matched expectations and, in fact, failures of execution and resentment that can KO a volunteer or board member's enthusiasm for being of service to the organization overall.

The other response to the "Who wants to help with the gala?" open-ended question is...silence. Dead silence, and a changed subject. Because it sounds huge, whatever it is - or it MIGHT be huge - and nobody sane's going to take that on. Ever have that happen in a board meeting?

But "Sally, would you help publicize the gala to your women's club?" - now there's a task that Sally can agree to, knowing what she's taking on. And it's a hop, skip and jump from successful completion of that task to doing more publicity and indeed overall ticket marketing, because we all know that success breeds confidence and more success... and a greater appetite for taking things on.

Who Speaks

It matters, a lot.

Whether board members present the latest financials at the board meeting, or the CFO carries that portion of the meeting.

Whether board members discuss amongst themselves what they’re going to do to build up attendance at the annual benefit.

Whether board members feel the “message” is one they can carry to their friends – and if they don’t get it, do they speak up and say so?

We all want to avoid the “nod-and-avoid” syndrome – where you have board members who genially agree with whatever’s on the table…and simultaneously check out.

One shortcut around this is a classic middle-school technique – a presentation from a classmate. It’s the same principle, really – you listen to your peers, you snooze to the teacher.

Another middle school staple to borrow? The working group. (A committee by another name.)

And when you combine the two – the working group stands up at the lectern to lead a discussion on the agency’s new messaging – well then the room comes alive.

It’s peer-to-peer, middle school style.

Is it that we haven’t progressed?

Or is it that these techniques call upon the verities of human nature, which surface in middle school (if not before) and stick around for life…?

The Moment of Re-Think

Maybe it’s because I’ve been on vacation, but I’ve had several moments of “re-think the plan” since I’ve been back. And so I’ve been realizing how useful that can be.

One was for an organization whose development director is taking another job. Of course there’s the race-to-replace; but we spent some time on the phone talking through what kind of a development department they’d need in 3-5 years (as opposed to what they’d home-grown through the skills and contacts they had on hand). By the end of the call, the job description they were thinking through – indeed the very job of development for this organization – had shifted. The way they might most profitably spend their staff time and energy had evolved.

New possibilities had opened up.

Another was for a nonprofit – like so many others these days – approaching the end of its fiscal year with a noticeable budget gap. Instead of just re-shaking the same trees, we took the occasion to rethink the whole formula – the relationship to the board, the percentage of earned and unearned income the group was striving for, even the timing of when the group was aiming for economic independence (that holy grail when expenses equal business-as-usual income). We ended up creating a 3-year-framework to climb towards that mountain, and the group is sounding out its board to get buy-in (and start-up funding) to move towards that trajectory.

A different game plan.

The final “re-think the plan” moment was for Cause Effective ourselves. We’re coming up on celebrating our 30th Anniversary, and we’ve had trouble settling on the right space to hold our celebration. Last week we broke through our miasma around a sea of options, none of them perfect (what is?), changed the date, and signed a contract. Done! (and on to the next decision-point…)

What links these disparate occurrences is an out-of-the-weeds moment of clarity – when we pick our heads up from doggedly following the plan, and choose an alternate route.

These days, that can be a really important moment in the day-in, day-out struggle of running a nonprofit.

Summer Retreat: Joint or Solo?

It’s summer…time for the ½ day board retreat.

Or, in some cases, the all-day staff retreat.

And (least usually), the joint board-staff extended session.

We facilitate a bunch of these each year. As a result we’ve become reflective about how this partnership works best.

It’s tricky. On the one hand the board needs to bond – to gel as a group and not depend on staff to prop them up. Looking at each other in the room without staff present can open up the space for board members to ask questions they feel inhibited about voicing with staff present – but which may, in fact, be inhibiting not just their curiosity but also their whole-hearted participation in being an advocate for the organization (with all that means).

And staff, for their part, need a space to get into extended implementation mapping – i.e. developing a marketing strategy for a new initiative and drafting outcomes, brainstorming partners, assigning tasks. A space in which board member input is needed for selected segments, but not to dwell in the weeds that are necessary to get the job done with accountability.

Yet there’s also an extraordinary synergy when board and staff members come together to bring their varied perspectives to bear on an institutional challenge/opportunity.

We worked on a retreat last week in which they managed to combine all three.

The first half was board (with the ED in the room). The focus was general, on looking at the overall board responsibilities, what this board was doing well, what it’d put in progress over the past year, and what they knew was yet to come. And, of course, what that meant for the individual board members and for new board member recruitment.

Then the group had lunch – and kicked out the staff. There’s nothing like eating to bring a group together socially, but the meal conversation veered naturally from kids and vacations into more substantial questions that some of the newer board members had – which actually opened up space for some of the more long-serving folks to also voice their concerns. There was definitely a different tone in the room, with only the board members (and me as facilitator) there – not one of criticism, but one of “we” – as in “we” as a group need to make sure “we” are exercising our responsibility since “we” are entrusted with holding this gem of a mission in “our” hands.

Simultaneously, the senior staff was upstairs getting briefed on the earlier session’s results and talking about their own concerns.

The day ended with a board staff partnership – in committees. Each committee chair was paired with a staff member in that area, and an additional board member or two, to create a map. On the table: what the committee’s general mandate was, what the coming year’s most urgent areas of focus were, and naming the next three action steps that the committee needed to undertake after walking out of this room. (We also asked them to brainstorm on who they might also need at the table, to the end of recruiting additional committee members to help get the job they’d just defined done.)

It was a nice mixture of all three forms of leadership – and a productive use of a lovely summer day...

What Happened

"He Said-She Said."

I've read board minutes where my brain goes into whiplash trying to keep up with the back and forth.

"Decisions Were Made."

I've read other sets of minutes where I'm left scratching my head, trying to figure out how a meeting in which two decisions were made took two hours.

The answer is somewhere in between.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that minutes should not only reflect core decisions, but should also serve to keep board members who couldn't attend in the loop.  There's always someone who couldn't make the meeting and the notes should serve to bring them along, both so they don't drop off the face of the earth and also so they don't come to the next meeting trying to reinvent the wheel (i.e., remake the same decision again because they weren't part of the process of thinking it through).  Minutes can bring the process to those who weren't in the room, and keep them involved.

But minutes are also public documents and so shouldn't reveal individual viewpoints or every last sordid detail.  In other words, due diligence but not bickering.  They should be clear and transparent – and should reveal reflection, consideration, and solid, thoughtful decision-making. 

Good minutes are teaching documents, creating coherence out of a group of disparate individuals.  There's a craft – beyond the tape recorder – to transforming notes into minutes that move an organization forward.

Mission and Means

I’ve been thinking about where money and mission coincide.  Or don’t.

We’ve been working with a client that is wrestling with finance questions around its business model.

But, really, these are mission-based questions – who do they serve, what’s their core expertise, and what is the meaning of why they’re here on God’s green earth.

Or something like that.

It’s not just about who they charge for what.

And it’s been the board pushing the staff – to look beyond – that’s forced the issue.

To look beyond the budget numbers, this year’s and next.  To look beyond the profit and loss, the cash flow knot in the stomach, the accounting tricks that make them look stable.

And to look towards mission.

“It’s not about the market – it’s about the mission.”  I listened to the board chair say that to the executive director, and I was once again reminded of the power and necessity of the board’s point of view.

But how does this come up for “fundraising consultants”?

We’re often called in to help an organization fundraise around program assumptions.  But sometimes, a lack of financial support for a program is, in fact, a sign of larger mission drift.  Programs that might have been started because there was a ready financial market, are now orphaned without funding and without a strong enough tie to mission.

And it takes a board member – who’s not bound to the day-to-day grindstone – to point it out.

Is it mission?  Or is it means?

If it’s mission, a fundraiser can find a way to sell it.  But if it’s means, it may not have the significance, the weight, to be carried.  It may, paradoxically, be too “light-weight” – too far from the core – to be saleable from a fundraising point of view.