Addressing tyranny of the urgent at your non-profit organization

culture3Let’s pick-up where we left off a few days ago from my post titled “Does your non-profit culture suffer from tyranny of the urgent?” In that post, I talked about an idea some experts have named the “tyranny of the urgent,” which is simply when you prioritize urgent tasks over important tasks. I extrapolated this idea to an organization-wide scale and talked about how this could become part of your organizational culture and the consequences of it occurring. Today, I will share a few suggestions on how to start addressing this organizational cancer.
Hmmmm? So, where was I? Oh right, I ended the last post by quoting Forbes’ Steve Denning who once wrote:

“… an organization’s culture comprises an interlocking set of goals, roles, processes, values, communications practices, attitudes and assumptions.”

In other words, organizational culture is complicated in and of itself.
Now you add the idea of “CHANGE” into the equation and the degree of difficulty goes up exponentially. I can confidently say this based on the following two facts:

Fact #1: If you Google the search words “how to change organizational culture,” you are showered with lots of links to stories with people talking about how they successfully changed their organization’s culture. As you start reading, you find lots of stories with lots of different approaches and very few common threads.

Fact #2: If you Google the search words “change initiative failure rate,” you will find the same thing being said over and over again. Everyone seems to agree that on average 70% of workplace change initiatives “FAIL.”

What am I trying to say here?
Simply, all of this is complicated, layered and unique. With this out in the open, I’m just going to confess that I do not have a one-size-fits-all blogosphere easy solution for you. Sorry! However . . .
I will share some of what I’ve seen help reduce/eliminate the tyranny of the urgent from my former workplaces. Hopefully, by doing so, this blog post will get you moving in the right direction or at the very least stimulate productive conversations with co-workers and volunteers on your end.
Investing in a culture of planning
franklin plannerWhen I worked for the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) in the late-1990s, there was a focused effort to stave off the tyranny of the urgent through the following strategies:

  • Every scout professional was required to use a Franklin Planner system (of which the council underwrote the cost)
  • Woven into my new employee orientation was a training on how to use the planner (e.g. setting expectations)
  • Use of the planner was integrated into staff meetings (e.g. using the tool became procedural and habitual)
  • Annual staff planning retreats were the norm (e.g. planning was structurally built into the calendar)
  • It was an expectation that every employee develop what was called a “backdating plan” for every district event (in fact, every employee was issued a tool that looked like a wheel to help with the math of backdating)
  • Employees were strongly encouraged to take an entire workday once a month, which was called a “day of planning,” to do activities like setting up next month’s meetings, tying up loose ends (e.g. catching up on writing meeting notes, completing expense reports, reviewing your performance plan and calendarizing strategic action to achieve goals, etc)
  • Employees who were not good about taking their day of planning once a month, ended up with this added to next year’s annual performance plan
  • In addition to a monthly “day of planning,” employees were encouraged to spend one hour at the start of the week (or at the end of the previous week) to review upcoming appointments, break apart big projects into smaller tasks, prioritize every task in relationship to each other, etc
  • As if all this wasn’t enough, employees were encouraged to end every day with a short exercise whereby incomplete tasks were moved forward to the next day (and subsequently re-prioritized in relation to one another)

I’ve heard some people call this experience insane. I go back and forth on it. However, I can confidently say it helped address the issue of the “tyranny of the urgent.
Yep, you heard me right . . . I didn’t say the BSA’s “culture of planning” single-handedly solved anything. (Again, I refer you back to the beginning of the post where I qualified everything up the ying-yang by saying this is complicated stuff.)
I still saw periods of time at my Boy Scout council when “tyranny of the urgent” reigned. This was usually around an annual campaign deadline, the start of camping season, or year-end membership pushes.
People, systems, plans & structural alignment
culture4Changing your organizational culture (or at the very least rooting out tyranny of the urgent) will also likely require some combination of the following:

  • modeling behavior by senior leadership (and possibly flexing leadership styles)
  • creating positive/negative reward systems
  • hiring people with skills and experiences aligned with the desired culture shift
  • redistributing financial resources into whatever is deemed transformative activities (e.g. training costs, purchasing new tools, increased pay grades to attract different people to your applicant pool, etc)
  • aligning every single plan throughout the organization with a single, shared vision and shared values
  • creating or revising certain policies or procedures
  • developing new monitoring/reporting tools and using these tools to be transparent with everyone who is connected together by organizational culture

Choosing & using a change model
Creating a plan for change is not enough. If it were, then the success rate of change initiatives in the workplace would be a lot higher than 30%.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen lots of different change leadership models out there. My best suggestion is to:

  • choose a model and stick with it
  • empower your change team to run with it
  • invest in helping your team learn the model and all of the tools that come with it (e.g. workshops, materials, etc)

If you’re having a hard time wrapping your head around what I mean by a change leadership model, then you might want to check out Mitchell Nash’s blog post for Linkage Inc, which is titled “12 Steps to Organizational Change: A Checklist.”
Behind each of the 12 steps, there are tools to assist with successfully achievement. Of course, those tools aren’t in Nash’s blog. You need to pay for that training with Linkage. Having been through Linkage’s Change Leadership workshop twice while working for a former employer, I assure you that your experience will be punctuated with many “AH-HA” moments.
Have you ever worked for a non-profit where the tyranny of the urgent was part of the organization’s culture? If so, how did they try to address it? Did it work? If they did nothing, what were the consequences (or were there none)? Please use the comment box to share your thoughts and experiences. Why? Because we can all learn from each other.
Here’s to your health!
Erik Anderson
Founder & President, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC
www.thehealthynonprofit.com 
erik@thehealthynonprofit.com
http://twitter.com/#!/eanderson847
http://www.facebook.com/eanderson847
http://www.linkedin.com/in/erikanderson847

Does your non-profit culture suffer from tyranny of the urgent?

There has been lots of talk in recent years in resource development circles about whether or not your organization has a culture of philanthropy. Recently, I’ve started looking at something very different in my work with non-profits. I’ve been looking at a concept described by some experts as the “Tyranny of the Urgent,” which is what many faith-based experts seem to be discussing. While I’m not very religious, I must admit the more I learn, the more I’m concluding this idea describes many organizations’ culture. It also has me wondering if “Tyranny of the Urgent” is the enemy of a “Culture of Philanthropy.
What is “tyranny of the urgent?
urgent1Simply, this idea is rooted in the idea that urgent tasks trump important things, which results in consequences for individuals and organizations.
Charles Hummel, author of Tyranny of the Urgent, describes this phenomenon succinctly in the following passage from a 1994 whitepaper of the same title:

“When we stop long enough to think about it, we realize that our dilemma goes deeper than shortage of time; it is basically a problem of priorities. Hard work doesn’t hurt us. We all know what it is to go full speed for long hours, totally involved in an important task. The resulting weariness is matched by a sense of achievement and joy. Not hard work, but doubt and misgiving produce anxiety as we review a month or a year and become oppressed by the pile of unfinished tasks. We sense uneasily our failure to do what was really important. The winds of other people’s demands, and our own inner compulsions, have driven us onto a reef of frustration. We confess, quite apart from our sins, ‘We have done those things which we ought not to have done, and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done’.”

Can organizations suffer from this?
I’ve seen this first hand in the organizations for which I’ve worked , the organizations I’ve run and many of the organizations that I’ve worked with as a consultant.
And doesn’t it just make sense?
After all, if leadership is one of the big cogs in the big machine we call “organizational development,” then doesn’t it stand to reason … if our leaders suffer from tyranny of the urgent, then they could easily instill it in their organization’s culture through their actions (e.g. hiring, management, direction-setting, governance and procedural practices)?
I’ve seen it . . . so I believe it to be true. I’ll let you judge for yourself.
How to diagnose an organizational culture of urgency?
foxworthyI looked around for diagnostic and evaluation tools failed to find anything. Perhaps, I’m using the wrong internet search words or maybe I’m looking in the wrong places. If anyone has seen anything, please share using the comment box on this blog. I’m very interested.
After striking out, I decided to reverse engineer the question by looking at behaviors I’ve witnessed in non-profit workplaces that seem to fit the definition. The way to use the following checklist is a little bit like Jeff Foxworthy’s comedy sketch “You Might Be A Redneck If
In other words, start off by saying, “My organization might suffer from a culture of urgency if …” and then read one of the following bullets:

  • … staff keep coming to your office and asking you to stop what you’re doing and help them with their issue (Some people have described this phenomenon as stop-drop-roll. It has also been characterized as the flavor of the month.)
  • … board members keep calling/emailing about something upsetting that they just learned about
  • … your to-do-list and your staff’s task lists are not prioritized and appear to be never-ending (you might also have a sinking feeling that the organization is spinning its wheels and getting nowhere fast)
  • … your organization’s employee turnover rate is high
  • … your donor retention rate is low
  • … staff constantly talk about workplace stress or even worse the organization’s work doesn’t seem to be fulfilling to them as individuals
  • … senior leadership talks about being unable to sleep at night and keep waking up to panic stricken thoughts that they forgot to do something at work
  • … people are constantly checking their smart phones throughout the work day and at home as well as responding to phone/email late at night and on weekends
  • … fundraising staff and volunteers appear to frantically run from one event/campaign to the next without taking time to evaluate and celebrate
  • … donors are telling you, your staff and volunteers something like: “every time I see you, you’re asking me for money
  • … fundraising staff are making lots of errors (e.g. incomplete/inaccurate donor database records, issues with gift acknowledgement letters, etc)
  • … board meeting and committee agendas/materials are going out a day or two before the meeting (or perhaps just being handed out at the meeting)
  • … organizational policies don’t seem to match up with organizational practices (e.g. fundraising policy may say gift acknowledgement letters are mailed within 24 hours but the practice is actually that letters are mailed at various intervals depending on workload)

Hmmm … it only took me five minutes to assemble this list. I suspect there are MANY more examples. If you want to add to this list, please do so by using the comment box.
So, what’s the big deal?
urgent2Again, I go back to what Hummel tells us in his writings. The consequence is simple … “We have done those things which we ought not to have done, and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done.
When this happens for individuals, the result is typically stress, sleeplessness, lack of fulfillment, sense of loss, anger, frustration, helplessness, etc.
When this dynamic is ingrained in an organization’s culture, results can vary, but I’ve personally seen the following:

  • poor staff morale
  • unfulfilled strategic plans (in fact any plans)
  • disengaged boards
  • falling revenue
  • bankruptcy and dissolution

I’m not making this list up. I’ve seen all of these things happen and the common thread has been an organizational culture with “tyranny of the urgent” at its core.
So, how do we change culture?
Well, this is where the announcer comes on and says, “Stay tuned for our next episode.”  😉
My next post in a few days will attempt to offer a few suggestions, but in the meantime I will leave you to think about this quote from Steve Denning who wrote in a 2011 article for Forbes:

“… an organization’s culture comprises an interlocking set of goals, roles, processes, values, communications practices, attitudes and assumptions.”

Hmmmm, sounds like a complicated fix to me. Stay tuned and let’s see where this goes.
Here’s to your health!
Erik Anderson
Founder & President, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC
www.thehealthynonprofit.com 
erik@thehealthynonprofit.com
http://twitter.com/#!/eanderson847
http://www.facebook.com/eanderson847
http://www.linkedin.com/in/erikanderson847

What would #RetentionWednesday really look like?

RetentionWednesdayI sometimes get freaked out by how much tech companies seem to know about me. I get a glimpse into that reality when I look at the ads being targeting at me on my computer screen. However, this topic isn’t what I want to talk about this morning and needs to be put in the parking lot for another time. What I really want to blog about today is one of those Facebook (or maybe it was Google) ads that caught my attention a few weeks ago. It was an ad from DonorPath advertising its “free” #GivingTuesday companion consultation service that they branded “#RetentionWednesday“. Once I got past the genius business move by Brian Lauterbach, my mind started spinning on what that Wednesday might actually look like.
As I started conceptualizing a day of stewardship activities, all of the typical tactical things came to mind such as:

  • Organizing a thank-a-thon
  • Hosting a “handwritten thank you note writing” party for volunteers
  • Email (or snail-mail) an impact report to your donors
  • Launching a YouTube channel packed full of alumni or client testimonials
  • Hosting a donor reception (patterned after a tradition chamber of commerce business after-hours)
  • Hosting a town hall meeting on a subject related to your agency’s mission
  • Launching a monthly coffee klatch for donors who want to talk with your CEO, board president or any number of people associated with your non-profit

OK, OK, OK . . . I could go on and on and on with stewardship activities and the list would be endless. I suspect you could do the same thing.
However, the thing nagging me was that stewardship and retention need to be more than just a handful of tactical activities done on the Wednesday after #GivingTuesday. I suspect that DonorPath’s branded service, which is likely just sampling of their more holistic fundraising consultancy services, addresses this issue and helps clients create a larger stewardship/retention plan for the upcoming year that uses #RetentionWednesday as a springboard.
2015 graphicSo, I guess I’m feeling a little bah-humbug about the entire idea of #RetentionWednesday. If I were king for a day (a scary thought), I would decree 2015 “The Year of Retention“.
Oh heck, if I were king for a day, I could do better than that. Right?
I would decree “donor-centered culture” as something mandatory before the IRS bestows non-profit status on any organization.
Ahhhhh, that is much more authoritarian and king-like. LOL  I suspect that I might be able to get used to being king.  😉
If achieving a donor-centered culture of philanthropy sounds hard to some of my DonorDreams subscribers, the truth is that “Donor Retention” is becoming a bit of a cottage industry in the non-profit sector in recent years.
For example, my company — The Healthy Non-Profit LLC — would give its left arm to work with your non-profit organization on cultivating and growing its culture of philanthropy.
In addition to my consulting practice and Brian Lauterbach’s DonorPath firm, there is Jay Love’s Bloomerang donor database service, Penelope Burk’s Cygnus Applied Research, Roger Craver’s DonorVoice, and a ton of others. As I said earlier, it is a burgeoning cottage industry that feels like it is getting bigger every day. I suspect this is likely a testament to the growing donor retention crisis in the non-profit industry.
What are you doing to increase retention of your donors? At its core, does your agency have a culture of philanthropy? If not, then what are you doing to change that culture? Please scroll down and use the comment box below to share your thoughts and experiences. We don’t have to re-invent the wheel because we can all learn from each other!
Are you a little lost with the entire “culture of philanthropy” thing? No worries. I’m embedding a wonderful YouTube video of Tony Martignetti (of the famed Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio show) speaking to the New York City chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals about “Creating a Culture of Philanthropy Throughout Your Nonprofit“. It is an hour-long video, but definitely worth the click!

Here’s to your health!
Erik Anderson
Founder & President, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC
www.thehealthynonprofit.com 
erik@thehealthynonprofit.com
http://twitter.com/#!/eanderson847
http://www.facebook.com/eanderson847
http://www.linkedin.com/in/erikanderson847

Is your non-profit organization failing enough?

beth kanter_Movie MondaysWelcome to O.D. Fridays at DonorDreams blog. Every Friday for the foreseeable future we will be looking more closely at a recent post from John Greco’s blog called “johnponders ~ about life at work, mostly” and applying his organizational development messages to the non-profit community.

Yesterday, I started cleaning out my email inbox, which is when I came across a whole bunch of old emails from my friends at 501Videos.com. They are the folks who publish those amazing FREE “Movie Mondays for Fundraising Professionals“.  I came across Episode #237 featuring one of my favorite social media bloggers Beth Kanter. With a title like “How smart nonprofits are using failures to become more successful,” I couldn’t help but click the link and watch.

At the end of the video, my AH-HA moment was “This will make an amazing ‘O.D. Fridays’ post. All I have to do is pair this video with a post from John’s blog, add a little bit of my non-profit thoughts and PRESTO it will be another great Friday post.” Unfortunately, it hasn’t been that easy. After spending an hour combing through “johnponders ~ about life at work, mostly,” I was hard pressed to find many posts that speak to the idea of failure.

So, I’ve decided to turn this Friday’s post into three segments:

  1. The challenge
  2. The summary
  3. Additional resources

The challenge

I think organizational development is fascinating subject matter, which is why I dedicate my Friday posts to echoing John’s blog or bringing a non-profit flare to his posts. As I wrote in last Friday’s post, non-profits tend to get caught in a starvation cycle, which in my opinion is nothing more than a blatant disregard for investing in organizational development.

However, I find it hard to believe that there aren’t more posts by John about failure and the great things that can come from celebrating it and fighting the stigma associated with it.

So, here is the challenge, John . . . “Your mission if you choose to accept it is: a) how about writing a post or multiple posts about failure and/or b) highlighting successful people or organizations who embraced the idea of failing.

The summary

Beth Kanter shares some incredibly interesting things in the Episode #237 video. For example, people tend to have three typical reactions to failure:

  1. Blame someone else
  2. Blame yourself
  3. Deny it

It is for these three reasons non-profit organizations (and probably all of us) tend to avoid taking risks because the costs associated with failure are huge.

However, Beth is a great storyteller and she is masterful at highlighting examples of where agencies took risks, failed and amazingly great things came from doing so. She speaks to the idea of changing your organizational culture to celebrate failure, which changes the risk/reward calculation and stimulates innovation in your workplace.

If you have six or seven minutes, I strongly encourage you to click-through and listen to what Beth has to say.

Additional resources

As I searched my blog and John’s blog archives for posts about failure, I did find a few things that are related. If you have a few minutes, you may want to click-through the following links and contemplate how your agency’s culture helps or hinders programmatic, fundraising, board governance innovation or limits an individual from reaching their full potential:

Does your non-profit organization celebrate failure? If so, how? If not, why not? Do you have an example of where your failure blossomed into a triumphant success? Please scroll down and share your thoughts and experiences in the comment box. We can all learn from each other.

Here’s to your health!

Erik Anderson
Founder & President, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC
www.thehealthynonprofit.com 
erik@thehealthynonprofit.com
http://twitter.com/#!/eanderson847
http://www.facebook.com/eanderson847
http://www.linkedin.com/in/erikanderson847

The Chicago Cubs Convention through non-profit eyes: Part Two

cubs way3This last weekend I attended the Chicago Cubs Convention with my family.  As we drifted from session to session, I couldn’t help but see all sorts of blog themes and things that non-profit organizations could learn from this major league franchise. I will use the next few days to share a few of these observations and hopefully stimulate a few new ideas for you and your agency. In yesterday’s post, we talked about stewardship. Today, I thought we could talk about shared vision, values, and culture.

In many of the sessions, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to reference something called “The Cubs Way Guide“. They always described this guide as an organizational manual that describes what they believe and how they do things.  Here is how President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein described “The Cubs Way Guide” in February 2012 on the Cubs’ website:

“The Cubs’ way really boils down to the people — the players, obviously, but everyone, all the scouts and all the people in uniform in the Minor Leagues and the big leagues. For us to teach the game the right way, it’s more than words on the page. It comes down to how deep we dig to get connected to players to teach the game the right way, how much we care, how committed we are, how hard we work. There’s a lot that goes into this and building an organization.”

At Saturday’s convention, here are some of the phrases I heard people use to describe this manual and organizational resource:

  • It is a document that is a few inches thick.
  • It is what we believe as an organization.
  • It embodied the organization’s philosophy and approach.
  • It spells out how to prepare players for the big leagues.
  • It lays out for coaches at every level of the minor league and major league how to teach players how to play the game. Instruction can get as detailed as which foot hits the bag when players make a turn on the bases.
  • It lays out a vision and plan.

I walked away from each of these sessions wondering the same thing: “I wonder what such a manual might look like for a non-profit organization?

cubs way1After a few days of day dreaming about this topic, here are a few of my thoughts on what your organizational guide might contain:

  • Shared values
  • Shared vision
  • Code of ethics
  • Conflict of interest policies
  • Protocol on how to recruit community volunteers and prepare/position them for joining the board some day. (e.g. getting them involved in a committee, working a few pledge cards, etc)
  • Procedures on how to identify, cultivate, recruit, orient, train, rotate, recognize, and evaluate board volunteers.
  • Steps on how to hire new staff.
  • Rules on how to conduct outreach/recruitment of clients.
  • Etiquette on how to prepare for board meetings and committee meetings (e.g. agendas sent out a certain number of days before the meeting, meeting notes and action item memos going out a certain number of days after a meeting, elements of a productive board meeting, etc)
  • Code of behavior regarding how to engage, solicit and communicate with donors (e.g. Donor Bill of rights)

I suspect that I could make this list go on and on and on if I wanted.

If you started thinking to yourself when reading my list that you already have some of this in place at your organization, I suspect you are probably on to something. Some of this might already be included in your strategic plan, board development plan, resource development plan, stewardship plan, etc.

However, the genius of “The Cubs Way Guide” is:

  • It is all in one place, not in a series of documents sitting on a number of different book shelves.
  • It creates a central focus. It becomes the heartbeat of your organizational culture.
  • It is easy to reference.
  • It is easy to create training opportunities around it.

cubs way2

What are your thoughts about creating an organizational “How To Manual” for your non-profit organization? What would you include? Who would you involve in this project? What elements already exist that you might fold into such a manual? How would you use it to transform your organizational culture? Please use the comment box below to share your thoughts because there is nothing new under the sun and we can all learn from each other.

Here’s to your health!

Erik Anderson
Founder & President, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC
www.thehealthynonprofit.com 
erik@thehealthynonprofit.com
http://twitter.com/#!/eanderson847
http://www.facebook.com/eanderson847
http://www.linkedin.com/in/erikanderson847