Nonprofits as businesses: more effectively connecting mission and vision, strategy and operations 27

This is my 27th installment to a series that I am offering here as a more detailed continuation to a stand-alone posting that I first wrote in 2010 as Nonprofits and Blue Ocean Strategies (see my directory: Nonprofits and Social Networking, postings 42 and following for Parts 1-26 of this series.)

To bring this posting up to date, I have raised and been discussing two points of detail that arguably hold crucial significance in that context:

1. Employees and even entire functional teams and their managers in a nonprofit, who work essentially entirely internally to the organization in back-office and related functions, can become detached in practice from the mission and vision side of those organizations and particularly for large nonprofits that with time have become at least somewhat bureaucratized.
2. And the importance of maintaining a clear, organizing focus on what are in fact their mission and vision statements there and on what they represent.

I began actively discussing the second of those points from a How perspective in Part 26 where I cited how well run nonprofits bring their employees together for periodic though predictably scheduled updates as to what their organizations are focusing on as holding their highest current priorities, and on how they are doing there.

I wrote there of the importance of these events having significant informal elements to them at the very least, and with them carried through upon in ways that would encourage people to mix and converse from outside of their immediate work-contact circles. This is in fact important for helping the specialist employees and managers there to look over their cubicle walls to see and to better understand the nonprofits that they work for as a whole. And that is essential if they are to maintain a sense of connection to and a sense of active participatory involvement in, and even ownership of the mission and vision statement goals in place there.

The wider ranging conversations that I write of this enabling and even actively encouraging, can keep everyone there more fully grounded in why they are there, and in ways that simply listening passively to and seeing set presentations cannot accomplish. And ultimately, that increased sense of involvement and participation is essential to the long-term success of these organizations.

I said at the end of Part 26 that I would turn here from focusing on what hands-on accounts managers do in my Accounting example, to consider the higher level management and performance issues that arise in that type of department and how they and management there fit into this narrative. I have in fact begun addressing those types of issue here, but from the perspective of the executive suite in place as a whole: their Chief Financial Officer simply included in that, as they bring these meetings together with the assistance of their own direct staffs, as strategically valuable, organization strengthening resources. But let’s shift focus here from that perspective to consider the types of issues that I have been raising here, from the perspective of the Chief Financial Officer more specifically and the managers who report to them, and certainly for more senior members of those managerial teams.

Accounting and Bookkeeping as a department functionally, supportively connects with and works with every other part and aspect of their organization. And this department is of necessity one of that organization’s key interfaces with the outside world and both for tracking and managing payments sent out and donations and other funds coming in (e.g. government and institutional grant and related funds received as well as individual and family donations.) Effective performance there depends on this department remaining effectively engaged and in ways that a deeper awareness of the nonprofit per se can only serve to improve. Who is at the greatest risk of losing track of this? The most obvious answer is hands-on employees and their lower level direct supervisors who can easily get entirely caught up in their smaller part of this larger whole as they face seemingly unending short term schedule deadlines that they have to meet, just to turn to their next account issues as soon as they finish the current ones they have in front of them.

I stress here the importance of the fiscal constraints that nonprofits face if they are to keep and maintain their tax exempt nonprofit status. This does in fact actively compel they’re maintaining minimal headcounts and in all of their functional areas. And that can easily lead to everyone being so busy that they never really have much of a chance or much of an opportunity to look up from their immediate here-and-now and their immediate work responsibilities.

• Effective departmental management addresses that by helping the people who work there to stay connected; this ultimately means their carrying out their individual tasks better too.

I am going to reconsider these issues from the perspective of the Executive Suite as a whole and from that of the Board of Directors as well, in the next installment to this series. I have only started addressing these issues from that perspective up to here with my staff meeting example. And there is more to add here.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Nonprofits and Social Networking. And also see HR and Personnel and HR and Personnel – 2 for related installments to this series.

Nonprofits as businesses: more effectively connecting mission and vision, strategy and operations 26

This is my 26th installment to a series that I am offering here as a more detailed continuation to a stand-alone posting that I first wrote in 2010 as Nonprofits and Blue Ocean Strategies (see my directory: Nonprofits and Social Networking, postings 42 and following for Parts 1-25 of this series.)

To bring this posting up to date for how it connects into this series as a whole, I raised two points of detail in Part 24 without offering much if any real explanation of them there. And I held off on directly dealing with them in Part 25 as well as I prepared to discuss them here. Those points are:

1. Employees and even entire functional teams and their managers in a nonprofit, who work essentially entirely internally to the organization in back-office and related functions, can become detached in practice from the mission and vision side of those organizations and particularly for large nonprofits that with time have become at least somewhat bureaucratized.
2. And the importance of maintaining a clear, organizing focus on what are in fact their mission and vision statements there and on what they represent.

My goal for this posting is to explicitly connect the dots between these two points, doing so in terms of the Accounting Department example that I have been discussing here and specifically in Part 25. I am going to do so in terms of optimizing how a nonprofit can function and thrive within the legally mandated constraints of it’s being a nonprofit, as briefly outlined in earlier installments to this series. And I decided to pursue this specific example here, because it is in Accounting where all of these issues most clearly come together.

Consider a large and complex business organization: any such organization, nonprofit or not. One inevitable consequence of any such scaling up in size is going to be an at-least corresponding increase in the scale and complexity of its billing system, as it is evolved so as to be able to manage ongoing cash flow requirements. A second inevitability there is that this increase in overall workload will lead to staffing increases in this department. And the combination of those two consequences, coupled with the fact that people best manage and carry out logically and functionally connected sets of tasks, means that all of the hands-on employees there who carry out portions of this overall work flow, become more and more specialized in what they individually do – and more and more disconnected from the larger picture there.

• This leads to these employees dealing with progressively smaller and smaller pieces of the overall puzzle that represents the business that they work for as a whole: here the nonprofit that they work for. And pressures to perform and to complete an ongoing day-to-day flow of such specialized and focused tasks, can make it that much more difficult for them to in effect, look over the walls of their cubicles and to the bigger picture of what their work is contributing to.

That leads to the detachment that I cited in the above Point 1, or at least to a tendency to slip into such a narrowed vision and understanding, as day-to-day decisions and actions are carried out. When the issues that these people have to manage the accounts of are abstracted for their specificity from the mission and vision of the organization as a whole, and routinely so and even effectively for all of their time at work, the type of disconnect that I write of here can become all but inevitable.

How can and in fact must this be addressed? Well run nonprofits frequently and routinely bring members of their overall organization-wide team together to keep them updated on what their organization is doing and attempting to do, and on how that is proceeding. Such events should be both informational and social in nature, where bringing people together from the diversity of their functional areas and in ways that encourage their talking with each other and across their usual table of organization boundaries, can be even more important than the broadcast sharing of a higher level understanding from the front of the room. And collectively, all of this addresses the How side of the above Point 2, as well as the Why of it.

I am going to continue this line of discussion in the next installment to this series, where I will step back from this posting’s focus on what hands-on accounts managers do in my Accounting example here, to consider higher level management and performance issues of that type of department and how they fit into this narrative.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Nonprofits and Social Networking. And also see HR and Personnel and HR and Personnel – 2 for related installments to this series.

Nonprofits as businesses: more effectively connecting mission and vision, strategy and operations 25

This is my 25th installment to a series that I am offering here as a more detailed continuation to a stand-alone posting that I first wrote in 2010 as Nonprofits and Blue Ocean Strategies (see my directory: Nonprofits and Social Networking, postings 42 and following for Parts 1-24 of this series.)

I focused in Part 24 on some of the roles that effective information development and its communication can have on a nonprofit, in keeping it more effectively, and cost-effectively focused on fulfilling its mission and vision, as statements of its organization defining long term goals. And to bring this initial orienting note up to date here, I took an abstract, generally stated approach to the issues that I raised there. And I said at the end of that posting that I would take that line of discussion at least somewhat out of the abstract here.

I begin doing so by (once again) repeating the obvious – and in this case for its value when taken out of the abstract and for when it is used as a specific organizing and even optimizing tool:

• Nonprofits, as a matter of corporate law and as a matter of generally enforced principle, are required to devote at minimum, what can only be considered to be large proportions of their overall incoming revenue streams towards fulfilling their mission and vision goals.
• For a point of comparison, they face revenue utilization and spending prioritization constraints, if they are to hold a tax exempt nonprofit status, that would put them at the extreme end of the spectrum for the proportion of revenue that true growth oriented for-profits would roll back into their business systems and their product line capabilities. But they do this and on an ongoing basis as a requirement and not simply by flexibly adaptable choice.

This calls for effective prioritization of spending and coordination of effort, so as to effectively meet all of their necessary and essential functional needs, and both cost-effectively and on time. And achieving and maintaining that, depends on having effectively validated information in the right hands where and when it is needed.

Putting this bluntly and with some of the more challenged nonprofits that I have seen up-close in mind as I do so, developing and maintaining an effective information and communications infrastructure can be one of the wisest investments that a nonprofit can make, and certainly if and when it seeks to grow in scale. This capability is important for any business: nonprofit, not for profit or for-profit; it is particularly important for nonprofits with their stringent cash flow constraints, as any error or inefficiency there would have much greater adverse impact for them.

I said that I would take this discussion at least somewhat out of the abstract here. And I begin doing so by citing a specific functional area and work flow example that cuts across the table of organization of any business: the Accounting Department and their systems in place for communicating effectively with all of the departments and services that they ultimately send funds to and pay the bills for. Any such functional area of a business with its essentially all-pervasive reach there, is going to be particularly vulnerable to what should be avoidable problems and challenges occurring in shared information and communications capabilities, if and when they arise in the organization.

As an ideal, businesses would pay their bills-due promptly and on a 30 days receivable or at longest a 60 days receivable basis. As a contrarian alternative to that point, it is sometimes argued that waiting on paying means that businesses can short-term invest what amounts to an ever-renewing pool of liquid funds, cashing in on the interest received from this floating, effectively “interest free loan” in the process. But realistically, there are not all that many short-term high yield investment options out there that can be used for this. So this mostly just leaves the downsides of longer running days receivable on bills due to contend with. Payment delays there means fewer businesses being willing to do business as product or service providers, to these later-paying business-to-business customers.

Small and even midsized businesses often find it a lot more difficult for them to balance their books and maintain a steady reliable cash flow for meeting their own needs when their income providing customers push their payment dates to 90 days receivable or in some cases even longer. Fewer options for late paying businesses to purchase needed resources, as a consequence of this type of dynamic, means less room for anything like competitive bidding as a means to limit their expenses. And even when that form of cost control is not specifically possible this type of late payment behavior can still lead to higher costs due and increased cash flow problems.

Essentially built-in, in-house delays in being able to settle and pay off bills-due may not be the only factor that can lead to delays there. But streamlining and improving in-house communications, and information development and sharing between Accounting and other departments and services that are in-house clients of them, can only help there. Note: I draw a distinction in this discussion between the largely executive level tactical decisions in play that might lead to systematically late payments, and providing those decision makers with the wherewithal to bring the business to purchase and pay more quickly if they so choose.

As a final thought for this posting, I raised two points in Part 24 without much if any real explanation. One was that employees and even entire functional teams and their managers in a nonprofit, who work essentially entirely internally to the organization, in back-office and related functions, can become detached in practice from the mission and vision side of those organizations, and particularly for large nonprofits that with time have become at least somewhat bureaucratized. The second point, and one that ran throughout Part 24, was the importance of maintaining a clear, organizing focus on those mission and vision statements and on what they represent. I am going to more explicitly connect the dots between these two points in the next installment to this series, doing so in terms of the Accounting Department example that I have been discussing here. And I am going to do so in terms of optimizing how a nonprofit can function and thrive within the legally mandated constraints of it’s being a nonprofit, as briefly outlined at the start of this posting.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Nonprofits and Social Networking. And also see HR and Personnel and HR and Personnel – 2 for related installments to this series.

Nonprofits as businesses: more effectively connecting mission and vision, strategy and operations 24

This is my 24th installment to a series that I am offering here as a more detailed continuation to a stand-alone posting that I first wrote in 2010 as Nonprofits and Blue Ocean Strategies (see my directory: Nonprofits and Social Networking, postings 42 and following for Parts 1-23.)

I have been focusing on change: both disruptive and evolutionary in recent installments to this series, and on seeing, understanding and acting upon it more effectively. In keeping with the broad outline narrative lines of this blog as a whole as I have been developing them here, this has brought me back to the issues of information development and communications, and the roles that they play in enabling this. And to bring this initial orienting note up to date here as I continue this specific narrative line, I ended Part 23 by stating that I would focus here on developing and instilling effective information and communications practices, and systems of them that can effectively address changing business contexts and circumstances. More specifically, I said that I would address this in terms of my Part 21 discussion. And that means setting aside the search for perfect, as an optimized good, reliable and effective is sought out.

That as a whole is way too large a topic to encompass in any one series, let alone any one posting. It is, as stated above, one of the major organizing framework narrative lines of this blog as a whole. So I will focus here on one aspect of it: coordinately developing and maintaining effective, flexible information development and communications systems both within the organization and for connecting outside of it too. And I begin addressing that two sided challenge by stating that there is and there has to be a lot more to that than simply having Marketing and Communications develop and enforce a single consistent nonprofit brand that would be employed both in-house and in internal communications, and when reaching out to and connecting with its surrounding community.

Effective coordination of message there, is one of the key ways of keeping the people who work at a nonprofit, and even strictly in its more internal operations, connected with their mission and vision and engaged with the people who they seek to serve in attempting to fulfill those long-term goals. This keeps their efforts and their thinking about them focused on the human side of what they do and on why they are working there. And ultimately, this is the best if not the only real way to limit if not prevent what can become a dehumanizing bureaucratization of a nonprofit’s inner workings from taking hold, and certainly when a nonprofit grows in scale and its inner office personnel: hands-on and managerial can lose track of a mission and vision they never directly face, for their focus on where they are needed there.

Effective information development and communications as envisioned here as a deeply interconnected within-business and community engaging duality, creates organizational cohesion that centers on why that nonprofit is there for in the first place. This can improve morale and create supportive enthusiasm within the organization by keeping everyone there focused on the good that they are doing and seeking to do. And this can serve one other vitally important function too.

I have repeatedly noted in this blog that nonprofits, by legally constrained incorporation requirements, have to expend what at minimum are very large proportions of their overall incoming revenue towards fulfilling their mission and vision goals. Keeping a closely connecting and engaging focus on mission and vision and throughout the organization can facilitate this, from the influence that that can have on what people seek to do there and with what priorities, that would call for direct monetary support and purchased resources.

This does not mean ending any possible debate over tasks, goals or priorities. But it does mean being able to bring such discussion into agreed to focus and more easily, and more often and more consistently.

I have been discussing these issues in general and even abstract terms here. I am going to at least begin to take this posting out of the abstract and in more actionable terms, starting in the next installment to this series. Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Nonprofits and Social Networking. And also see HR and Personnel and HR and Personnel – 2 for related installments to this series.

Nonprofits as businesses: more effectively connecting mission and vision, strategy and operations 23

This is my 23rd installment to a series that I am offering here as a more detailed continuation to a stand-alone posting that I first wrote in 2010 as Nonprofits and Blue Ocean Strategies (see my directory: Nonprofits and Social Networking, postings 42 and following for Parts 1-22 of this series.)

I focused in Part 21 on information development and communications, and on business systems friction as it challenges them in nonprofit organization contexts. I more specifically focused on how they might better respond to the disruptively unexpected and sudden in this context in Part 22, where deep financial reserves are not going to be available for course correction but where effective processes for using the resources that are available, can be. And my goal for this installment is to consider longer-term change and its shaping pressures here. And I will address those issues and Part 22’s from a more explicitly information and communications perspective as I do so.

And I begin addressing these issues here by noting that very few nonprofits take on short-term only mission and vision goals. Most set out to address, and are incorporated to fulfill larger more open ended objectives, such as significantly helping to cure cancer or solve world hunger. And while this means that with time it will become inevitable that they face the disruptively unexpected at least occasionally, they will always find themselves facing slow, ongoing change and its imperatives and as a core part of their ongoing realities.

Focusing on the inexorable slow and steady of that here, this means they’re having to recurringly review their strategic planning and its priorities. But just as importantly, if perhaps less visibly so they need to keep reviewing their explicitly tactical and operational sides too – and their mission and vision facing and fulfilling endeavors in particular for this.

And yes, bringing both the disruptive and sudden and the slow and steady of this into this narrative together, both can come to all but compel at least periodic reassessments of their underlying mission and vision statements and goals too.

• How should a cancer fighting nonprofit respond and adaptively change as part of that, if a disruptively new biomedical and clinical breakthrough were to suddenly make a widely faced and until-now inexorably deadly form of cancer into a chronic medical condition that could be lived with and long-term? Should it reallocate its supportive efforts and its mission focused spending towards other, still more problematical forms of this overall disease?
• But what if this treatment is so expensive that only a tiny percentage of those who desperately need it could afford it, and certainly long-term where it would offer this value? Should they shift focus, allocating more of their funds and effort towards finding ways to make this breakthrough more widely available?

That is obviously a disruptive change oriented example. But it calls for new ongoing long-term normals for such nonprofits too, where change would have to continue and on an ongoing basis, coming out of this type of a disruptive inflection point. And change that comes in small increments can cumulatively lead to what amount to disruptive change too – and certainly if a nonprofit only carries out its periodically scheduled strategic reviews as pro forma exercises.

Or for a less positive disruptive change possibility, consider the impact that people on Medicaid health insurance are facing in the United States as I write this, as politically partisan changes are effectively forcing large numbers of Americans out of that program – severely limiting and even ending key aspects of their healthcare coverage – ongoing treatment of long-term chronic medical conditions included. Think of this as an opposite of my above cancer cure example as a disruptive event. But the longer-term follow-through of trying to bring more people toward receiving healthcare is the same here.

I have written Part 22, and this posting as well in terms of decisions and actions carried out. I am going to turn in the next installment to consider these same basic issues from an information and communications perspective as pointed to in Part 21. Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Nonprofits and Social Networking. And also see HR and Personnel and HR and Personnel – 2 for related installments to this series.

Nonprofits as businesses: more effectively connecting mission and vision, strategy and operations 22

This is my 22nd installment to a series that I am offering here as a more detailed continuation to a stand-alone posting that I first wrote in 2010 as Nonprofits and Blue Ocean Strategies (see my directory: Nonprofits and Social Networking, postings 42 and following for Parts 1-21 of this series.)

I have been discussing nonprofit mergers in this series since Part 14, and both in more abstract and generally stated terms and in terms of a specific case study example that I went through first-hand. But while my most recent installments to this series apply to that context, they hold equal significance in a much wider range of business contexts than just that too. And to bring this initial orienting note up to date as I continue that narrative, I focused in Part 21 on information development and communications, and on business systems friction as it challenges them. And my goal for this continuation of that is to address the issues of agility and resiliency in nonprofits, where deep financial reserves are not going to be available for course correction but where effective processes for using the resources that are available, can be.

Are there nonprofits with deep financial pockets? Yes and particularly when you consider mission and vision driven organizations that are founded by the incredibly wealthy, as they seek to make positive marks upon the world, and who fund them accordingly. But few nonprofits are founded by or significantly funded by billionaires. Most start out locally and on the basis of modest starting funds, and with a goal of addressing pressing focused needs that have directly and significantly impacted upon their founders and early supporters. And most stay small in scale and in financial strength too – an all but inevitability given the legal restraints as far as the minimum levels of mission and vision driven spending that are required, for them to qualify as being nonprofits at all.

I have made most of these points on a number of occasions when discussing what nonprofits are, as opposed to not-for-profits and for profit enterprises and what they are. I repeat and stress this here as these nonprofit defining constraints shape what agility and resiliency can even mean in their context.

Think of those terms as having two fundamentally distinct forms of meaning, each. For businesses that follow a not-for-profit or for-profit model approach and where it can be easier to build up reserves, agility and resiliency can mean a capacity for changing and adapting where funds held in reserve can provide flexibility there, in and of themselves and both for what could be done and for the time frame allowed for carrying that out. Frugally planned and executed change, and certainly at the operational and tactical levels are always going to be important. But this becomes essentially necessary for nonprofits if they are to enter into change and effectively pass through it.

Looking at this in terms of planning and its follow through and in any of these business model contexts, strategic and tactical would both help to determine and guide the meaningful and beneficial in change under consideration. Prudently cost effective there, always offers positive value, assuming prudent and necessary are actually addressed there. And for a nonprofit, or at least for a large enough proportion of them so as to qualify as a basic general rule for nonprofits per se, prudent frugal change at operational, tactical and strategic levels that support the organization for its being able to maintain continuity of its core services and functions is everything there. And agility and resiliency have to be defined with these constraining parameters in mind.

Yes, this leaves out change supportive, outside sourced, additional funding and its possibilities and that can at least situationally become available. And if a nonprofit that has been actively striving to achieve its mission and vision goals faces a crisis and outside donated support is offered specifically to help it keep its doors open, and in the face of challenges that arose outside of its control, then a strong case can be made for its continuing to claim nonprofit status through that – where keeping those doors open would support its mission and vision efforts. But as a matter of long term planning and preparedness, this cannot be assumed. So nonprofits need to have as much of a pre-adapted capacity to find and switch to a Plan B and even to a Plan C if needed, as part of their basic organizational structures, in order to sustain a frugal agility and resiliency.

I wrote of this need in a 9/11/2001 context, when the discretionary spending of a seeming majority of the people in the United States who had routinely been supporting favorite ongoing service and needs oriented nonprofits of all types, were suddenly redirecting those monies to help those affected by those terrorist attacks. Something similar happened as donation support was redirected in large amounts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. So a sudden need for planning and executing Plan B and beyond change can and does happen.

I am going to continue this narrative in the next installment to this series where I will discuss change and continuity over time, as mission and vision needs change and evolve and as responses to them do too, as new options and possibilities become possible. And this means my discussing how nonprofits change and evolve over time and even without having to face specific disruptive events and their sudden necessities.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Nonprofits and Social Networking. And also see HR and Personnel and HR and Personnel – 2 for related installments to this series.

Nonprofits as businesses: more effectively connecting mission and vision, strategy and operations 21

This is my 21st installment to a series that I am offering here as a more detailed continuation to a stand-alone posting that I first wrote in 2010 as Nonprofits and Blue Ocean Strategies (see my directory: Nonprofits and Social Networking, postings 42 and following for Parts 1-20 of this series.)

I have been discussing nonprofit mergers in this series since Part 14, and both in more abstract and generally stated terms and in terms of a specific case study example that I went through first-hand. And as a key part of that I have been discussing what is euphemistically called staffing rightsizing there, as a newly emerging now-combined nonprofit coming out of such an event finds itself with staffing duplications and similar personnel challenges: staffing bloat that it cannot sustain and still meet its legal requirements for how it is required to expend from its overall incoming cash flow, specifically towards its mission and vision goals.

And as a part of that I offered two divergently different scenarios in Part 20 for how this would be carried out, that I referred to there as Scenarios A and B, and which I identified as:

A. One in which downsizings and other merger compelled disruptions are largely just backed into, and
B. One that is carefully planned out and carried out with likely and possible challenges in mind, and with a goal of minimizing their more negative impacts. And I will address possible positives that might be arrived at there too.

I focused in Part 20 on Scenario A and its variations as they are all too common, and certainly where unplanned for and unconsidered gaps in the planning that is carried out, come to haunt all concerned. And in this, I add is a defining feature of Scenario A mergers and related anticipatable disruptions in general – that the people leading those organizations plan but with what turn out to have been blinders on of one form or other.

To be more precise here, I focused in Part 20 on Scenario A mergers (and other change demanding business challenges) where rightsizings – large organized layoffs and staff reductions are found to be needed. And I focused there, on scenarios where those staff reductions were at the heart of the planning and preparation gaps that made these business transitions fit a Scenario A model.

I said in Part 20 that I have a lot more experience dealing with Scenario A transitions than I do with the more ideal Scenario B ones, and that is true. I have however, seen, dealt with and worked for some very good nonprofits, and with some really good businesses in general. So I base what I offer here in a Scenario B context on that. And I begin doing so by addressing the limitations and the strengths of “good” in this description here.

• Perfect and a striving for it as an only acceptable state of being, really is an enemy of the good. Perfect is an illusory, always moving goal; any better and seeming best achieved can always become a starting point for better still. And the search for perfection can be used as an excuse for accepting the less than good now, in exchange for some illusory much, much better later on when ….

So Scenario B is all about good and with an ongoing effort to both maintain that and to improve upon it – with better but still just good.

Think of what I offer here as summarizing in a way, all that I have offered in this series as to better strategic, tactical and operational functions and activities in a business, and with a particular focus on nonprofits for that here. What would explicitly enter into good here and in the context of this posting, that I would add to that? My goal in this step to this series long narrative is to offer some thoughts on that. And I begin with business systems friction: with miscommunications and failed communications, and with faulty and gap-ridden data and processed information as they collectively bring about disconnects and inefficiencies, and failures in a business.

There is no way to absolutely, completely end friction, bringing about perfect communications of always complete and timely information, where it is needed and in forms that make it most useful. But effective communications can and do bring error correction capabilities with them with opportunities to ask for and receive timely clarifications and even complete repetitions of information shared. And when people in a business can and do actively communicate as needed, and as a matter of standard practice, and when these types of corrective capabilities are in place to limit the impact of friction there, and when they are effectively used, that challenge can be significantly controlled.

I am going to continue this Scenario B discussion in a next installment to this series where I will more fully address the issues of agility and resiliency in nonprofits, where deep financial reserves are not going to be available for course correction but where effective processes for using the resources that are available, can be.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Nonprofits and Social Networking. And also see HR and Personnel and HR and Personnel – 2 for this and related installments to this series.

Nonprofits as businesses: more effectively connecting mission and vision, strategy and operations 20

This is my 20th installment to a series that I am offering here as a more detailed continuation to a stand-alone posting that I first wrote in 2010 as Nonprofits and Blue Ocean Strategies (see my directory: Nonprofits and Social Networking, postings 42 and following for Parts 1-19 of this series.)

I have been discussing nonprofit mergers in this series since Part 14, and both in more abstract and generally stated terms and in terms of a specific case study example that I went through first-hand. And as a key part of that I have been discussing what is euphemistically called staffing rightsizing there, as a newly emerging now-combined nonprofit coming out of such an event finds itself with staffing duplications and similar personnel challenges: staffing bloat that it cannot sustain and still meet its legal requirements for how it is required to expend from its overall incoming cash flow, specifically towards its mission and vision goals.

I focused in Part 19 on a need for best practices approaches in this that would be as supportive of the people caught up in this as possible, while meeting essential business needs from this too. And I wrote there of trust and of maintaining a sense of it through this process so a now combined nonprofit coming out of such a merger does not find its staff distrustful of that organization and with scarred relationships among themselves – and with their best employees who they most need to keep on, too likely to be incentivized from all of this to start looking for new opportunities elsewhere.

Just touching on the last of those issues, I have seen this happen. Remember, nonprofits are essentially required to limit their headcounts and payroll and related expenses to a minimum, in order to meet their legally mandated spending requirements if they are to retain a nonprofit, tax exempt status. They have to expend at least a legally set minimum percentage of their overall incoming revenue towards their mission and vision goals and that minimum is always set high. So these are the least likely types of businesses to have opportunity within them for employees: hands-on or managerial to advance up through the ranks within them. So moving on to work at another nonprofit that has an appropriate opening can be the only way for those most valued employees to move up in their careers anyway. Bad feelings and concern, and even anger that can come from a downsizing and particularly from a badly considered and executed one, can force that issue and in effect drive a nonprofit’s best to decide to look for new and better work opportunities elsewhere, or even just similar positions but in nonprofits that are not so stressed. And this here-expanded background discussion brings me directly to the issues that I said that I would begin addressing here, where I said that I would turn here to explicitly discuss two specific possible post-merger scenarios, in order to take this out of the abstract:

A. One in which downsizings and other merger compelled disruptions are largely just backed into, and
B. One that is carefully planned out and carried out with likely and possible challenges in mind, and with a goal of minimizing their more negative impacts. And I will address possible positives that might be arrived at there too.

And I begin addressing these possibilities by acknowledging that I have more direct experience with Scenario A merger-driven downsizings than I do with their more positive Scenario B alternatives.

No such event can be perfect; any downsizing and however necessary and however carefully planned and executed is going to leave at least some people damaged. The question here is one of how best to limit that for how many of the people who worked at the pre-merger nonprofits of this are harmed. And as a part of that, this means limiting the damage and harm faced by those who are adversely impacted upon from this.

For my perhaps worst-case Scenario A example, I find myself thinking of a large organization that decided to right size itself even without the compelling impetus of a merger, due to a fiscal crunch they were facing. But importantly, this was a cash flow and funding challenge that they saw coming so they did in fact have time to prepare for it – which they did for their executives and for the organization as a whole, but which they did not do for their mid-level and lower level managers or for their hands-on employees.

Perhaps they did not want to face that with its messy details, because it would be difficult and create problems and for many who found themselves in an exit interview as a result. But postponing and looking away from a challenge like this can only make it worse.

Finally they brought in an outside consultant who was supposed to be an expert at all of this, who would work with their Human Resources people and who would help organize and manage this process. But they made this move late and they looked for their lowest cost option when doing so. They found a downsizing and career counseling professional who could carry out exit interviews and in a way that would bring employees being let go to sign indemnification wavers that would block them from suing their now former employer, in exchange for a benefits package that went beyond the legally mandated minimum required there. And this same person was offered as a career coach, at least for those middle managers who were let go as well.

I met him. He was really nice as a person. But at a time when online was already crucially important to job searches, to job applications and to actually going through the process of getting interviewed and hired, he was still living entirely in a pre-internet world. He focused entirely on jobs listings in newspapers and perhaps, in trade journals or other specialty publications. He did not know anything about online job search engines, and even the major ones that his competitors were all already turning to and training clients to use more effectively. He dismissively downplayed them as being unnecessary, because the approach that he followed was tried and true. And this entire downsizing process followed the pattern exemplified in that sad post-employment support detail of it as that was promised as part of at least select now-former employees’ separation packages there.

People talk. That organization was left a smoking crater as far as employee trust was concerned, and it needed a variety of business management remediation and other forms of help to put itself out of that. And too many businesses, nonprofit, not for profit and for profit, make variations of these same mistakes and to their longer term harm and well as to the harm of the people caught up in these should-be avoidable challenges. Nonprofits, and certainly ones that face challenges to they’re being able to meet necessary revenue allocation requirements for remaining nonprofits legally, are simply more likely to face this.

And with this cautionary note Scenario A example in place I am going to turn to the possibilities of the above more positive Scenario B, starting in the next installment to this series.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Nonprofits and Social Networking. And also see HR and Personnel and HR and Personnel – 2 for this and related installments to this series.

Nonprofits as businesses: more effectively connecting mission and vision, strategy and operations 19

This is my 19th installment to a series that I am offering here as a more detailed continuation to a stand-alone posting that I first wrote in 2010 as Nonprofits and Blue Ocean Strategies (see my directory: Nonprofits and Social Networking, postings 42 and following for Parts 1-18 of this series.)

I started to develop a case study in Part 14, in which two nonprofits that shared what have been essentially the same mission and vision in common, merge. And to bring this posting up to date, I have more recently focused in that line of discussion on the issues of merging staffs there, and from their wide ranging hands-on employees on up along their table of organization. And that, of necessity led me to consider downsizings as the newly emerging now-combined nonprofit coming out of this, finds itself with staffing duplications and similar personnel challenges that it cannot afford to maintain and still meet its legal requirements in how it expends its incoming cash flow towards its mission and vision goals. See Part 16, Part 17 and Part 18 for my discussion up to here of this stressful type of event.

How can this be done better? There are no resolutions to anything like a downsizing that can lead to positive good for all, and certainly – to add a real world outside complication to this, where older employees who are let go in a downsizing might never be able to find anything like comparable work with comparable salary and benefits again because of their age. Ageism is very real and even when and where it is nominally illegal, as it is easy to perpetrate and difficult to prove.

So a nonprofit that dumps, to put this bluntly, older long-term loyal members of their now combined staff, and regardless of reason or justification offered, can be throwing them to an uncertain and unkindly fate. And there, “older” can simply mean any of them over 50.

How can this be done better? As a start to my response to that question, the possibility of and the scale and nature of any downsizing that might become necessary as a result of a merger here, should be addressed from the beginning when that merger is first being considered as a real possibility. What would come of it if all proceeds as desired and expected in carrying out that business change?

Any more comprehensive answer to that post-merger oriented question has to include in it, consideration of the people who work at the nonprofits that would merge, just as it has to consider the emerging now larger organization itself. At least in my experience, essentially all of this attention and certainly until late in this process, is on the organizations that would merge and on the organization per se that would emerge from that. Then the impact on personnel is added in and at times even seemingly as more of an afterthought.

Why is this important? Addressing dislocations and disruptions in personnel, and in the lives of the people who comprise that early, can lead to smoother mergers with less work position reductions and fewer jobs lost and people let go. It can mean the newly merged larger nonprofit coming out of this, offering better and more complete resources to those who are let go and with that including more effective resources for helping them to find new, good employment again. And longer planning there can be cost effective with that business offering better, but at lower per-former employee cost from they’re putting more time and effort into being cost-effective there.

Those are important considerations but I would focus on another set of issues here that in fact can be among the most important of them all, and both for employees who are let go and for those who stay on. And addressing this is something that would not cost nonprofits monetarily at all, while offering them value for making them look more positive and supportive to the outside communities that they serve.

• One of the worst, most painful aspects of a downsizing, and particularly where it is carried out in waves, is in how it leaves everyone there feeling vulnerable and unappreciated and at even imminent risk. And as a complication this can and does lead to me-versus-you concerns and the breaking of trusts and of friendships.
• If the combining leadership of a nonprofit entering a merger, and the now combined leadership of the merged business entity coming out of that make a concerted, ongoing effort to build and maintain trust and a sense of workplace security and safety for all who work there,
• This might not prevent the deep-set wariness and distrust of “who is going to be let go next?”, “is it me or them?”, “what will I do?”, and “can I even afford to be nice to someone who I see as painted with a dismissal bulls eye on their back, least I get one too?”
• But supportive messaging and effort from the top and from those who make the ultimate decisions there can lessen the harm and the damage from this. It can lessen the disruptive distrust breaking damage that unconsidered, badly managed downsizings can bring to a corporate culture in place and to all who work within it.
• Nonprofits survive and thrive at least in part, and even significantly so because the people who work there believe in their missions and visions, and because they are willing to make that extra effort and even at lower salaries than they could receive from working at a for profit, in support of that perceived good.
• But when a nonprofit shows by its decisions and actions that this respect and consideration is not reciprocated, that bond of loyalty can break and disillusionment can set in.

Consider the challenges that I raise here a partly inevitable, but still largely avoidable long-term cost of business mergings – and certainly, as noted above, when they are entered into and carried out essentially entirely in terms of the organizations involved and not in terms of the people who give them substance and who can be very adversely impacted upon by how this is done.

I am going to continue this narrative in the next installment to this series where I will pursue two possible post-merger scenarios:

• One in which downsizings and other merger compelled disruptions are largely just backed into, and
• One that is carefully planned out and carried out with likely and possible challenges in mind, and with a goal of minimizing their more negative impacts. And I will address possible positives that might be arrived at here too.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Nonprofits and Social Networking. And also see HR and Personnel and HR and Personnel – 2 for this and related installments to this series.

Nonprofits as businesses: more effectively connecting mission and vision, strategy and operations 18

This is my 18th installment to a series that I am offering here as a more detailed continuation to a stand-alone posting that I first wrote in 2010 as Nonprofits and Blue Ocean Strategies (see my directory: Nonprofits and Social Networking, postings 42 and following for Parts 1-17 of this series.)

I started to develop a case study in Part 14, Part 15 and Part 16 as a continuation of that overall narrative, in which two nonprofits that shared what have been essentially the same mission and vision in common, merged. And to bring this posting up to date, I focused on the issues of merging staffs there, and from their wide ranging hands-on employees on up along their table of organization. See Part 16 and Part 17 for that.

I ended Part 17 with a cautionary note example-based sentiment that I expressed in (here compressed) bullet point format as:

• For any “hardnosed, business first” nonprofit executive who might find themselves reading this, and wondering if such a discussion is needed, ask yourself this question. “Do I want to risk putting my nonprofit with its compassionate mission and vision in a position where it is seen as a business that screws its loyal and hardworking employees?” So this is about business ethics, but it is also about protecting a nonprofit by actively seeking to take care of its people too. And that is more than just a matter of marketing.

And as a second point of detail from this blog that I would begin this posting from, I also repeat a snippet here from a reply that I offered to a reader comment at: Don’t Invest in Ideas, Invest in People with Ideas 61:

• If you value others at all, and value them for the positive that they create and bring forth, then you make an effort to see to it that they gain benefit from their creative, hard working excellence too. And that makes as much sense as a best practice whether you arrive at it from taking a longer term, more sustained-value approach where you would support and protect sources of wealth, as it does if you simply start out seeking to do the right thing. This is important. Good can come from an awareness of longer term value and opportunity here, where that means taking care of and supporting those who make longer-term positive possible. And this can in fact support an ethical and moral decision here and even make it more sustainably possible; good practices here can operationalize and help to sustain moral decisions and actions.

So two nonprofits have merged here: two businesses that can create real value increasing-synergies from they’re coming together. And they have merged in a way that would make them more effective and better positioned in their business sector together, than either could ever have been alone. And in order to realize this potential they have to lean-down and right size and …. They have to let people go, and from the perspective of someone caught up in the wrong side of a downsizing this always looks like being fired.

Set aside the justifications and the rationalizations; I simply assume here that a merger related downsizing is actually needed now, and even though it is the last thing that most anyone there in this new larger nonprofit would want. How should this be handled, and from both the business side and with an awareness of and a sensitivity towards those who will have to leave?

I begin addressing that question by stating an unpleasant truth. I have seen this type of merger forced downsizing happen a number of times now, over the course of my work life. I was even been caught up in such a nonprofit downsizing once, so I write this from both outside observer and direct hands-on experience. I have never seen this done well, or at least anywhere near as well as it could have been. My goal here in this series, as I seek to address this sensitive complex of issues is to offer some thoughts on how to do this better, where no resolution can fully satisfy the needs and desires of all involved and where a goal here should be to find a best resolution for all so caught up: that business as an ongoing whole, and those individuals who stay on there, and for those who are let go too.

I chose this type of ethics and best practices example here because it is contentious, and because it does arise and fairly commonly so, and because there are no perfect answers to any of the how and when, or to-whom questions that arise in it. I chose this because it is messy and that is where the broader issues that it raises become most important. And with that noted, I divide this overall topic area into two parts that are more usually thought of in confrontational terms, or at least conflict of interests terms:

• The business: here this newly merging nonprofit that seeks to maintain itself and its public image as a source of compassionate good
• While protecting itself financially and legally among other ways as it goes through a complex and still ongoing birth as such,
• And its employees and managers: caught up in downsizings or not, who all find themselves wondering if they might be next – and who can easily become caught up in us versus them thinking and actions as a result of all of this.
• Downsizings and certainly multi-step ones with rounds of layoffs create lasting wounds in the cultures and in the overall networks of trust that remain among employees who saw others leave, but who managed to dodge that – that time.
• And like every other part of the basic, core business culture in place, those wounds and the understandings that come from them are almost never openly discussed by anyone there. They are just there and as part of the basic understanding of that business and of working there. They and their history become part of the corporate culture there.

I am going to begin addressing all of this in the next installment to this series, and with a goal of offering some possible best practices approaches that might lead to better resolutions and for all of involved: the business and those there who have to decide and act through all of this, and all others who are in one way or other caught up in it.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Nonprofits and Social Networking. And also see HR and Personnel and HR and Personnel – 2 for this and related installments to this series.