Kindle Notes & Highlights
Nonprofit leaders often end up in their roles not because they’re great managers, but because they are experts on a particular issue or excel at a specific function like communications or program design.
you may have been highly effective at getting results on your own, but you may now have hit the point in your career where your impact will be more a function of what you get done through others than what you do directly yourself.
your job as a manager is to get results.
because the work nonprofits do is so important, we need to be more hard-nosed about management than for-profit enterprises are.
you have to be clear from the start about what you expect, stay engaged enough along the way to increase the likelihood of success, and hold people accountable for whether they deliver.
Guiding more means that you may spend more time than you otherwise would in explaining a project at the start. You also might spend five minutes more than you did in the past reviewing data on progress along the way.
frustrated that the work doesn’t look like you’d envisioned it
THE FIVE W’S AND AN H
offering samples can be an incredibly useful way to give your staff a clearer idea of what you’re looking for.
MOCHA, an acronym for the different roles for a piece of work.
Staffers shouldn’t say, “I’m stuck on X. What should I do?”
we’ve been struck by how much more excitement and buy-in we’ve seen when we communicate the why of a project as staff members go from compliance to commitment.
Before ending a discussion about an assignment, you might simply say, “So, just to make sure we’re on the same page, can you tell me what you’re taking away from this?”
The ideal outcome is a plan that is better than either you or your staff member might have developed on your own.
the most common way managers fail at delegating is by not staying involved to check on progress.
There are a lot of ways to ensure your staff is making progress, but four of the most powerful are checking in with staff directly, reviewing interim work, reviewing data, and seeing the work for yourself firsthand.
your job is to ask probing questions that get beneath the surface to make sure that work is on track.
rather than simply asking, “So, is everything going okay?” and receiving a yes answer, you might ask your staff to review progress against the plan, discuss steps around a particularly tough issue (“How are you approaching the issue of diversity on the panels?”), and report on the number of confirmed attendees and speakers.
think about what could go wrong, and probe around those areas in particular.
assume your job is to look for trouble, not to assume things are proceeding smoothly.
ask to see a small sample of the whole before the person has put substantial energy into getting all the way through it.
ask to see regular reports with data indicating progress toward the desired outcome
ask your staff member, “What data can we look at along the way to make sure this is on track?”
“What do you think?” is a great question to use in ensuring you don’t inadvertently take on monkeys you have delegated.
have your staff member schedule a brief reflection meeting for the end of a project and to get it on the calendar right from the start so it doesn’t feel punitive when you suggest it at the end.
ensure there’s a solid line to one person who is fundamentally responsible for any given staff member’s performance.
a development director might have goals like these: Increase fundraising revenue from $1.2 million last year to $1.6 million this year. Because they’re key to our future growth, increase the number of individuals giving $5,000 or more from twelve to twenty-four.
when staff members are focused on reaching an ambitious goal, they rarely have time for drama.
Goals whose underlying objective is not connected in one way or another to the broad direction of the organization are not strategic and should be discarded.
Goals should not simply be predictive, laying out what the staff member would be likely to achieve that year if she simply did what she always does.
The habit of setting ambitious stretch goals is one of the key practices that distinguishes high-performing individuals and organizations.
organizations where staff members must think about how much progress is possible and set ambitious goals reflecting an aggressive sense of possibility often make dramatically more progress.
failure to meet a goal should cause reflection on what could be done differently going forward, and a pattern of failing to meet goals over time should be cause for concern.
The best goals lie just at the intersection of ambitious and realistic
When goals are not realistic, staff members do not commit themselves to meeting them.
the energy it would take to keep tabs on every member activity would be prohibitive and that a reasonable, more easily tracked proxy for total activity would be the number of members who attend meetings.
devote tracking energy appropriate to the importance of each goal,
In general, the number of goals for a person or department should be in the rough range of three to five.
having just a single, clear, overriding goal can be incredibly powerful.
Goals Makeover Take a look at how these goals were made over into SMART goals:
Once goals have been created, they can be either an incredibly powerful tool for managers or an empty bureaucratic exercise that sits on a shelf gathering dust.
instead of asking a simple, “Are things on track?” a manager might ask, “Can you review for me how you’re moving forward in getting us established in Arkansas? What indicators do we have of whether we’re on track? How many active members do we have so far? What are you worried about?”
It sounds obvious, but too few organizations put it into practice: the extent to which your staff members achieve their goals should be an important component of their performance evaluations.
By stepping back with your staff to assess their performance against goals, you can discuss why they succeeded or fell short, and you can work with them to draw lessons that will inform the pursuit of their goals in the next cycle.
Culture is the invisible force that transmits messages about “how we do things around here.”
whether you shape it deliberately or not, your team will have a culture, so the real issue is whether that culture is sending the kinds of signals you want it to.
High-performing organizations bring both elements to their work: a rigorous focus on results and positive engagement.
In teams determined to make an impact, performance standards are high. There’s often a sense that “not just anyone can work here,” and employees know that the manager expects great, not merely good, performance.
Regardless of the source, suggestions for improvement or new initiatives are subjected to rigorous examination and debate,
Because they’re determined to be successful, high-performing managers are fairly ruthless when it comes to identifying ways their teams could perform better,
