Leading by Design

I'M A NEW BOARD MEMBER.  I figured after all these years of working with and for boards, and writing about them, too, it might be useful to experience nonprofit life from the other side of the table.  In five short months, the pressures of the duties of care, loyalty and obedience have firmly taken hold.    At a recent board meeting, staff members presented two unbudgeted funding requests for approval.  Both were completely out-of-the-blue, so far as I could tell -- at least I wasn't aware of them.  Just minutes earlier, the board had reviewed and approved the year-to-date operating statement, which already contains an vague amount "to be raised" to cover capital projects beyond normal maintenance.  Acknowledging that these proposals were outside of the approved budget, the staff pressed their cases for the urgency of the two expenditures. Many board members -- myself included -- sat in disbelief that they were being asked to find $50K out of ...

ONE OF THE CONTRIBUTING FACTORS TO MY decision to leave full-time nonprofit organizational life was the amount of time I spent in meetings. Board meetings, staff meetings, committee meetings, community meetings....you name it (and you know it, I'm sure). A day at the office wasn't complete without one....or two....or.... Given the fact that nonprofits are all about people means that there's a ton of communication that must take place in order to nurture and maintain them, and service the constituents who need them. In the communication quiver is one arrow that gets readily used: the meeting. Trying to contain meeting virus is a serious management tool. With so much written about it, it’s a wonder that many organizations still haven’t been able to master it very well or at all. Here’s one more bit of advice – by Harvard Business blogger Gina Trapini, Extreme Ways to Shorten and Reduce Meetings . Among her suggestions: Start and end on time. Basic stuff, but it’s...

Action Learning/Research is an approach to problem-solving that was pioneered more than 60 years ago by social-psychologists, and it offers pathways for the 21st century nonprofit to explore issues more deeply and implement decisions based on the findings of these explorations. One pathway for problem-solving involves seven steps that require 1) an understanding and differentiating of information types; 2) delving through symptoms to get at root causes, which may then lead to important discussions of organizational values; and 3) developing criteria for impartial evaluation of potential solutions. The seven steps are: 1.  Identify the problem or issue. 2.  Analyze the problem:  is it an isolated issue or is it related to other problems?  Who is affected by it?  How is it handled now? 3.  Describe the problem in measurable, impartial terms. 4.  Look for root causes and causal relationships by asking "why?" at least five times. 5.  Develop alternative solutions, evaluating each...