I just read a Harvard Business Review article called Stop Wasting Valuable Time, by Michael C. Mankins (Reprint number RO4O9C). It was pretty interesting.

The author did a study of how the senior managers of big corporations use their limited time together.

The sample included 187 companies with at least $1 billion in market capitalization. On average, the senior management teams spent 250 hours a year together.

By nonprofit standards that seems huge, but then he broke it down further. 27 hours were spent on crises of the moment (sound familiar?), 22 hours on personnel issues, 11 hours on team building, and so on. In the end, only 37 hours were spent on strategy—that’s just three hours a month!

Again, that seems like a luxury in the nonprofit world, where it is hard enough to grab an hour with colleagues here and there to discuss crises. However, if we use the percentage of management time spent on strategy as a benchmark, 14.8% in this sample, that might hold true in our sector as well.

For example, let’s say the average management team in a nonprofit large enough to have a management team (say $5M – $10M in revenues) spends 2 hours every other week meeting together. That is about 50 hours a year. In reality, given vacations, and competing priorities, this may be far less. Still, if we take the 14.8% corporations devote to strategy and apply it here, what you get is about 8 hours a year devoted to strategy—or about 40 minutes a month.

If my very unscientific comparison is at all close to reality—and I believe it may well be, nonprofit leaders are devoting far too little time to the real value-added activities they are charged with.

The urgent crowds out the important.

I just returned from our twice-a-year staff retreat, where we spend three days as a group devoted to professional development. The focus of this session was on diversity training/cultural competence.

We all agreed that previous experiences with didactic approaches to this topic were frustrating and sometimes counter-productive. What we wanted was to do something deeply human that would make everyone feel included and also teach us skills we could use with clients.

Shiree Teng, a member of our consulting team, led us through a powerful day-long process based on the Healing the Heart of Diversity model. For 8 hours, each of our 15 team members who were present took turns telling his or her story. There was no direction on how the story should be told, or on how long it should take, and the rest of the group simply listened in silence as we went around the room.

It was one of the most powerful experiences I have ever had. People told stories of immigration, poverty, family complexities, prejudice, and violence. When it was over, most of us had been crying on and off for hours. We were exhausted and wrung out.

Over dinner we discussed the experience and what we took away from it. The process promoted an even stronger bond among the team, but it also taught us a simple and powerful tool for bringing people together. When people tell their stories—who their family is, where they come from, and what they have experienced—they see each other more truly. They are no longer a member of a group and subject to stereotyping: they are themselves.

That is what cultural competency is really all about, seeing people for who they are, as they see themselves.