Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Manager's Guide to Getting Results
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cultures are only as powerful as they are genuine. Although some organizations pay lip service to these concepts, on high-performing teams what we describe here is truly how things work.
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modeling by leaders is easily the most powerful way to transmit the cultural values and behaviors you want your staff to demonstrate,
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if your core values are genuine, explicitly articulating them can help assimilate newcomers into your culture and reinforce the behaviors you want to see in your employees.
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develop hypothetical scenarios and how the values would play out in them.
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Give feedback the moment that you see someone acting in a way that isn’t consistent with your values. The same applies when you see someone exemplifying your values:
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Rituals can be another powerful way to reach and reinforce shared values. A ritual might be a way you regularly share information, the ways you celebrate progress, or how you welcome new staff.
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One of the most powerful ways to reinforce values that you have articulated is to incorporate an assessment of how well staff members are demonstrating those values as part of your performance evaluations.
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High performers should see their behavior reinforced through positive consequences like promotion, additional responsibilities, lavish praise, extra pay, or some combination of these,
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Here are some questions that can help you get beneath the surface:
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Here are more examples of the kinds of questions you might ask when managing other managers:
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high performers outperform lower performers by five times or more.
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the key determinant of success for most hiring processes is the quality of the candidates a manager has to choose from.
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the key to success lies in proactively building a strong pool of candidates.
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in many cases, organizations overvalue specific skills or content knowledge and don’t put enough weight on underlying qualities that are harder to develop.
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we’ve seen no correlation between visible passion and effectiveness.
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Ultimately, what you most want is a candidate who is passionate about getting results.
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invite them out for a cup of coffee to talk about their future plans. This sort of personal interest is usually far more compelling than a quickly e-mailed job posting.
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connector sources—people who aren’t right for the job themselves but might know others who are.
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You will be surprised how many more names you get when you spend a few minutes on the phone with these people. (This is why professional headhunters almost always want to speak to you on the phone rather than simply e-mail you an announcement.)
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if you don’t have diverse networks of your own, reach out to others who do by finding sources who might be more likely to know of diverse candidates.
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how you handle rejections will give them an impression, good or bad, of your organization.
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Focus on depth over breadth in your questions, because you will learn more by getting into the details of a few experiences than by covering every job listed on a résumé.
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get beneath the surface of general descriptions and into the nitty-gritty of how a candidate actually operated.
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if one of the key traits you are seeking is an ability to stay on top of a large volume of work, your line of questioning might go like this:
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Pushing as much as it takes to get into the details is key to making an accurate assessment, and good candidates actually appreciate challenging questions.
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you wouldn’t ask a player whether he could make a tackle; you’d ask to see him do it.
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Try questions like, “What drives you crazy at work?” and, “What was your favorite work environment and why?
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You can also ask candidates to put you in touch with specific people from their past.
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Since references may feel disloyal or guilty providing negative information, your job is to make it easier for them to tell you what you need to hear. You can do this by making it easy for the person to tell you negative things as well as positives.
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You can also provide options where there is no obviously wrong choice that would make the candidate look bad and ask the reference to select the choice that sounds more like the candidate:
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If you’re uncertain and think more information would help, modify the process to gather what you need.
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You may never be 100 percent certain, but you should gather the information you feel you need to make the best decision possible.
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In the long run, you will spend far more time and energy dealing with the consequences of a bad hiring decision than you will save by filling a vacancy with the wrong person.
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Word-of-mouth about what it is like to work at the organization, and for you as a manager, may be the most important determinant of candidates’ interest in the position (one of the many reasons not to be a tyrant,
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other benefits (including vacation time, which might be slightly more affordable than salary or other perks), and titles (which are cheap).
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Create a sense of excitement. Let your enthusiasm show when you make the offer.
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Don’t low-ball people on salary. Open with your strongest or close-to-strongest salary offer to show the candidate that you really want her.
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serious learning and development happen when staff members pursue ambitious goals, are held to high standards, and reflect and receive candid feedback about what is and is not working along the way.
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you should spend time developing people because it will get you better results: your staff will become more effective
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Paradoxically, your best staff members are usually the ones who will grow the most. Strong performers are often more driven than weaker ones, and so their desire to take advantage of development opportunities is higher.
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talents (like good writing, critical thinking, or being able to connect well with other people) and inclinations (like having a strong sense of responsibility or pursuing goals relentlessly) build up over a lifetime and tend to be deeply rooted and difficult to develop.
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generally the best learning comes when employees stretch themselves in the pursuit of meaningful goals and when managers coach them through the process.
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we’ve grown skeptical about the value of separate development plans, in part because those plans can distract staff members’ attention from pursuit of their substantive goals.
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Assigning a staff member a responsibility that requires her to apply new skills or old skills at a higher level (such as going from managing two people to managing eight) often produces significant growth. Because people learn by doing, you might produce more learning by asking your strongest staff members to do more.
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“I do, we do, you do.”
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One of the best ways to shape your staff’s behavior is to give positive feedback.
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When you spot ways that a good employee could do even better, sharing these suggestions can help her take her performance to a higher level.
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The longer you wait to give corrective feedback, the more the problem will take root, so get in the habit of giving this sort of feedback as soon as you can.
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Don’t get so caught up in trying to be tactful that your message gets diluted or lost.
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there’s nothing worse for a manager than having a stellar employee tell you that she has accepted another offer.