David La Piana

Last week I spent three days facilitating a Sierra Club summit on global climate change in which 100 of the Club’s top leaders and thinkers struggled with the impending catastrophe and what to do about it.

At that meeting I was stunned by the enormity of the challenge ahead. So, you can imagine my excitement when I read in the papers that the structure of the largest leveraged buy-out in history — valued at $45B — is being driven in part by environmental concerns. The buyers, and their bankers at Goldman Sachs, are insisting on a greener company before they buy TXU, the Texas-based utility that is the subject of this deal. Eight planned new coal plants will be scrapped, and hundreds of millions will be spent on research into alternative energy.

The key to the deal, of course, was the intervention of Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which negotiated the concessions in exchange for not opposing the sale.

At least two lessons can be learned from this event:
• First, if you can make enough trouble for a corporation, they will want you as a friend.
• Second, and more important, is the long-term value of getting corporate leaders to serve on nonprofit boards. Two of the leveraged buy-out leaders are past and current board members of World Wildlife Fund. I have to believe that the experience of serving on that board made them more sensitive to the environmental issues involved in this deal and also gave them a friendly back door through which they could approach ED and NRDC.

All in all it was a good day for the planet.

Bill Coy, a senior associate with our firm, is always full of wisdom. He helps our clients with mergers, partnerships, and strategic planning, but his specialty is human resources management. His work in this area is immeasurably strengthened by the fact that he spent many years as a family therapist before getting into HR.

In this regard Bill and I were recently discussing a particularly challenging management problem a client was having. It was on Valentine’s Day, in fact; Bill summed it up: “Before every temporary restraining order, there was a Valentine’s Day card.”

It is always good to remember, when managing staff in your nonprofit, that a current good relationship with an employee, even one you might characterize as a working friendship, can quickly turn south. In fact, according to this adage of Bill’s, it’s the relationships you currently feel best about that hold the most promise for going farthest south.

I think this makes sense. If a relationship with an employee about whom you have concerns or with whom you have just never “clicked,” starts to go bad, you will not be surprised, telling yourself, “I saw this coming.” Whereas in a good strong relationship you may be surprised and dismayed by inappropriate behavior, inconsistent work where it was previously uniformly good, or an angry parting. Your own reaction may just make things worse.

The bottom line — no matter how much you like, respect, and care for your staff members — they are still your employees first and foremost. You have to maintain the ability to manage them, even to terminate them, if necessary, and to do so in a calm professional way.

One of the great strengths of our sector is our culture of caring for our staff; we often refer to them, with all sincerity, as friends. But this strength can become an equally great flaw when things head south with an employee.

Like many challenges nonprofit managers face, this one requires a tricky balance.

An article in the New York Times the other day reported on a group of Harvard physicists who have conducted an intriguing experiment. They isolated a particle of light, which in itself is no mean feat. After all, light travels at, well, the speed of light (144,000 feet per second). Then they captured the particle, moved it somewhere else and released it on its way. The effect was basically a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t trick, with the addition of: now-you-see-it-again!

This experiment reminded me of how little we really know about the world we live in. I am heavily involved in helping a client with a national initiative on global warming, another field, like physics, about which I know very little myself. Still, I am amazed by how little even the experts know. The world is complex and mysterious, and the physics of light and the warming of the planet are just two examples of how early we are in our quest to understand it.

In the February 8, 2007 issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy a full page article profiles Sarah Cohen, founder and executive Director of Hopalong Animal Rescue.

As I read the article and studied the photo, I realized that I knew this amazing nonprofit leader many years ago. The article describes her start as a social worker with emotionally disturbed young children; that job was in a program of an organization I led. I got to know Sarah back then and was very impressed by her dedication and intelligence. Also, at least two things about her were evident: we would be grateful for every month she stayed with us, but this would not be her career position: she would move on to leave her mark on the world.

Sarah loved working with people, especially vulnerable kids, but her real passion was for animals. She dreamed of combining the two in a therapeutic program using animals. Now, I learned from the story, having not had contact with her for more than ten years, she has opened a vibrant animal rescue organization, taken part in the Katrina relief effort for pets, and garnered national attention for her work.

Congratulations, Sarah!

Yesterday I gave a talk to a group of independent philanthropists: Americans and Europeans with private or family philanthropies who come together periodically for mutual learning and perhaps to build collaborative grantmaking programs. My topic was “collaboration” and included both the grantee-grantee and funder-funder varieties. In discussing the challenges of working together, I was struck by the differences between the two types of collaboration.

For nonprofits, collaboration is often a key to leveraging funding. Funders like collaboration among their grantees; so, by working together, nonprofits can increase their chances of winning a grant. Occasionally nonprofits work together for purely programmatic reasons, but in my experience it is largely a fundraising strategy.

For funders, collaboration is about a different kind of leverage. At one end of spectrum it is about leveraging the knowledge of other, likeminded philanthropists, learning with and from them. At the other end of the spectrum it is about leveraging your money with theirs, making a smaller grant into a bigger one.

One of the greatest challenges of both spheres of collaboration is the same: building relationships.

Whether it’s a strategy engagement, staff reorganization, or merger, we seem to fall back on some key skills in our consulting work. From this toolkit we select and customize different approaches to a client’s problems.

The tools include (board, staff, customer) surveys, Internet research, interviews, focus groups, and analysis of documents and financials. Then, once we have gathered enough information, and perhaps formed some recommendations or built some possible models, we conduct face-to-face discussions, negotiations, and problem-solving sessions.

There are lots of good people who can do pieces of this work: data gathering, interviews, etc. What I think we uniquely bring to the table is first the ability to come up with creative and workable solutions and then, even more important, the ability to help people with different priorities and agendas to work together toward a successful resolution and implementation.

Sometimes we are called management consultants, other times capacity builders, and still other times: facilitators, planners, OD practitioners, TA providers, strategy consultants, or mediators. And sometimes we’re called a few names that are unprintable…

Other professions have multiple names, but they all tend to mean the same thing: for example, lawyer, attorney, or counselor; doctor or physician. But in our field what we are called by our clients, and especially by prospective clients, often tells us a lot about what they want and need, and about who they are.

Here’s a handy reference guide:

Capacity Builders: The only people who ever use this term are foundation staff and, of course, other capacity builders.

Facilitators: Use of this name typically lets us know that the client is looking for someone to facilitate a meeting, not to lead the organization through a transformative process. Sometimes, however, this term is misleading; it may be the only one the client has at his/her disposal.

Management or Strategy Consultants: These terms usually mean the client is working within a corporate context or wants us to know they know “the lingo.” They are often used by board members with corporate backgrounds.

Mediators: This name lets us know that the client has a high-conflict situation. They need a consultant to help them through it, but the only term they can think of is mediator, as if they were going to submit the organization’s difficulties to arbitration (but that’s another specialty: arbitrators).

OD practitioners: Like “capacity builders,” this is an insider’s term—”organizational development”—that is almost exclusively used by OD practitioners to describe their work.

Planners: This is the military or corporate term for the people whose formal job is to create plans. Some large corporations, and large military units, have a dedicated group of planners. They don’t tend to facilitate decisions by leaders, but rather to provide paths for implementation of decisions already made.

TA Providers: This name (technical assistance provider) is the grassroots version of “management consultant.” Community agencies, if they have any sense that our field even exists, are likely to know of it as TA.

A recent study by Grant Thornton, as reported in the January 11, 2007 Chronicle of Philanthropy, reports on a survey of nonprofit boards that asked what they see as their most important role. The sample consisted of nonprofits with budgets of under $20M, $20M- $49M, $50M — $99M, and over $100M.

In nearly every budget size the top priority was strategic planning. Only in the biggest category, groups with budgets of more than $100M, did “Management Oversight” (46%) trump strategic planning (31%), as the board’s top priority. In the other categories strategic planning ranked first; overall 40% of respondents rated strategic planning as the board’s top priority.

The question this report raises is: What do all these respondents mean by “strategic planning?” The management literature is clear: there is no agreement on the use of the term nor of its function in the organization (more on that in another post).

None-the-less, the boards of America’s nonprofits, and particularly its bigger ones with budgets of $20M or greater, think it is their responsibility to do something in the realm of leading the organization toward the future.