David La Piana

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.

The rise of the Chinese economy and geopolitical power over the past decade is a fascinating phenomenon in itself, with much to make the United States, Japan, and the EU take pause. It is also instructive for the US nonprofit sector. Here is how.

Imagine an organization that, by its sheer size, holds great potential for enlarging its power; an organization that controls natural and human resources of surprising magnitude; an organization whose rightful place in the world has never been realized due to an inability to mobilize as one and its own conflicting feelings about the very act of taking greater power.

This description fits the Chinese dilemma for the past half-century under communism.

It also fits the nonprofit sector for the same period in the United States. Collectively, we are a huge employer, and our organizations control billions in assets. Yet we have been overlooked as a party to national debates. We are rarely noticed in this sphere of influence except when someone in Congress decides to make a name for himself by attacking the “waste and corruption” of a miniscule proportion of our sector; situations that pale in comparison to notable examples in the other sectors.

However, we ourselves must accept responsibility for our current lack of influence; we do not view ourselves as a unified whole so much as a collection of organizations sharing a tax code designation; in sum, we do not mobilize as one entity.

Again, the example of China is instructive. The Chinese have begun to pull together the country’s vast economic power. Even while the communist leadership in Beijing clings to old style command-and-control, its economy is inexorably hurtling the country toward the open market and democracy. It is only a matter of time until China becomes fully aware of its economic power.

We in the US nonprofit sector must also come together, embrace the power we hold, and make it felt in Washington. Initially we may fight for more favorable charitable deduction provisions to spur increased giving. We may also campaign for a high level of appropriate oversight and oppose the uninformed and potentially harmful restrictions that are conceived in Congress.

Eventually, speaking with one voice, the voice of the dispossessed, the unloved, the unprotected, and the abandoned—the voice of our clients—we must shift the public debate, and eventually public policy, toward more humane, effective, and affordable solutions to the problems facing the nation and the world. Only then can we all win.

I recently re-read Chapter 6 of Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting Fieldbook, a companion to his Flawless Consulting, the bible of the consulting industry. At the outset of this chapter he makes a remarkable claim: “The way to change a culture is to change the conversations.”

This statement strikes me as both true and profound. How many times do we, as consultants, try to help a client change a clearly dysfunctional pattern—even one the client admits is problematic—only to find the conversation drifts back to familiar ground? We try to refocus the conversation, but to no avail, and we all leave the meeting frustrated.

Block’s suggestion is to engage the group in a conversation about what matters to the members of the group—to view them as participants in the discussion, not as recipients of information.

When I have taken this approach, perhaps inadvertently or out of frustration, I have found that the conversation can indeed change. Since people make their own sense of their work life, asking them what matters to them and challenging them to go deeper than the usual complaints—to get personal, to take a risk—can be powerful. Of course, the conversation must be two-way, and so the consultant must go deeper with them.

The result can be the beginning of a more lasting change in the conversation and, subsequently, in the group’s views of their work and organizational life together.

In the film, Thank you For Smoking, the fictional Senator Finistierre of Vermont, discussing upcoming testimony on a bill he is sponsoring to label all cigarettes with a skull and cross bones and the word “poison,” is told by an aide that an adversary is aligned with a lung organization.

His response: “Damned Nonprofits!” struck me. For one thing, I could not recall ever before hearing the word “nonprofit” spoken in a movie. (If any of you knows of such an instance, please send it along and I’ll post it.)

Of course, I would have preferred if this mention of our sector had been couched in more positive terms, but we have to start somewhere. By using the term we in the sector all take for granted, the director has decided that the viewing audience—the public at large—will be familiar with it.

This could be because of the particular appeal of this movie—many of us probably thought it was going to be a documentary on smoking—but still, it’s progress. Usually nonprofits are referred to in media and film as “charities,” or as “the foundation,” or by their made-up organizational names, so this is an improvement.

Alana Conner Snibbe recently wrote an interesting article, “Drowning in Data,” published in the fall issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. She argues that foundations have gotten so consumed with the desire to “measure outcomes” that they have forgotten just how difficult and expensive it is to do so.

It is refreshing to read an article urging a reality check on this trend.

How often has a nonprofit received a modest grant and then been asked to provide outcome data in an effort that would consume more time and money than is available to conduct the project for which funding was granted?

I am the last person to argue against trying to measure the impact of our work, but I agree with Snibbe that the effort needs to be scaled to the resources available and to the ability to measure the outcomes.

For example, it is a lot easier to measure the outcome of cataract surgery, than to assess the real impact of a delinquency prevention program.

In the first case, every patient who regains full vision is counted as a success, and the measurement of full vision is pretty simple.

In the second example there are many variables in an at-risk youth’s life that can impact the outcome it is striving to achieve (that is: staying out of trouble). The program may only be designed to address a few of these variables, and cannot be held accountable for all the other variables involved. While it is not impossible to measure the result of a particular delinquency prevention intervention, it is often very difficult and relatively expensive.

The struggle goes on. Somehow we must balance the nonprofit’s need to focus on its programs with the legitimate need of all involved — the nonprofit, its funders, those it serves, and its many other stakeholders — to know if its programs are effective.

Please share your thoughts on how the sector can achieve this outcome.