Orgforward Opines

You are all doing incredible work , finding ways to continue to provide vital services AND maintain viability even when confronting the reality that the current fiscal year’s budget is gaining greater irrelevance under the extraordinarily ‘abnormal’ operating conditions of the COVID-19 response. The current reality of what predictable expenses and revenue are, is not only different, but wholly unimagined. So then, what does a healthy & realistic budget process look like given that many of you are approaching the close of your fiscal year and the demands of drafting and approving next year’s budget in a time of so much ‘unknown.’ I want to start with an observation … Your organization is not the organization’s budget. The organization is the day-to-day operations that put assets to work creating benefit in the world, not the prediction that was made several months ago about the sources and allocation of money for a given 12 month period (aka your budget) - nor are you the predictio...

"Houston, we have a problem"   While this may never have actually been said on the Apollo 13 mission, it holds a great deal of meaning in our society. It is our shorthand for expressing that things are not going as we had planned, and, in fact, our situation is dire and potentially life threatening. So, here is a statistic from BoardSource's 'Leading with Intent' research - 2021 * Only 31% of nonprofit CEOs report that their boards have a very positive impact on their organization's overall performance (Pause and re-read that) While that sinks in, let me introduce another concept: asset . Usually, we think of an asset as something of financial value. However, in our world of community benefit, we rightfully consider assets as 'anything valuable or useful' (thank you Collins English Dictionary). Specifically, assets are things that positively contribute to our ability to advance community benefit (aka achieve our mission outcomes). This lens helps cla...

Wait, did a leadership guy just say “values don’t matter?” Yes, in terms of how we generally approach values. Read on if you’re curious. You will be hard pressed to find research in the Organizational Design/Development world that doesn’t outwardly examine or at least make a strong nod towards values and culture. The general prescription we get is that values shape culture and culture shapes outputs (i.e. productivity) and outputs lead to outcomes. I am all-in on the concept that values are at the core of organizations. But (because there is always a but in a blog post) … my concern is that values get cast as a set of prescriptions, an input to the system, that, if right, will make for a healthy, productive organization. As long as people have the instructions - values posters, norms statements, principles of conduct, etc.- people should be able to “value” the way we need them to and our culture will go from icky  - toxic in the worst case - to awesome . How’s that working for you...

Previously, I wrote about leadership being about creating conditions that support others achieving outcomes. Our strength comes from identifying the beneficial conditions and our influence draws on our ability to create those conditions. All of this is premised on the assumption that we are working to create a different set of outcomes moving forward than what we have experienced so far. (BIG BIAS ALERT: If there is no vision of things being different, no leadership is required!) How we listen and subsequently engage in our conversations with people is one place where we really can exercise these core leadership constructs. I say this, because what we listen for, notice, and affirm (talk about) when relating with others is a GIANT condition that affects the other person’s behavior and our own. (Remember, our behaviors are a direct result of the conditions we are experiencing*) David Rock explores the nature of conversation in his book “Quiet Leadership.” He observes that what we talk ...

Doing more with less is a financial construct. One which community benefit organizations feel backed into as they work to manage within an increasingly difficult economic climate. Ironically, it runs against our DNA. It is a construct we have allowed others to define us by. We work to build a system on infusion. By identifying what we believe a better world is, we rally our talent to find the resources necessary to make the change possible. And we deploy those resources in pursuit of betterness. Virtually every community benefit organization came into being with a More Mentality. They started with little and found those who had capacity to give (usually time, talent, and goods, NOT MONEY); engaged them, and went to work changing the world. Somewhere along the line, money and budgets became the defining factor, not the assets that were engaged early on. We went from asking "what can we use to make this work and who has it" to fretting "where can we get the money we need t...