Videotape Your Next Board Meeting

Okay – I am kidding.  But wouldn’t it be interesting to watch if you did?  And instructive!

The football season is upon us.  After every game, coaches and players huddle around TV monitors to carefully review videos of the game.  “What did we do well that we need to keep doing?  What did not work as well?  How can we improve for the next game?”  These are important questions for football teams – and also for Boards.

While videotaping a Board meeting may be unrealistic, there are other things you can do to regularly evaluate how well the Board is working as a “team.”  One of my common recommendations is a Board Self-Assessment.  BoardSource, a nonprofit which provides services to help nonprofit boards work more effectively, has a great self-assessment tool (http://bit.ly/pz352d) you can purchase so that Board members can provide their confidential input on how well things are going.  The report provides summary data so that Board members can see what they think they are doing well and what they can improve upon.

If you don’t want to invest the money on a self-assessment tool (though it’s well worth it!), then at your next Board meeting ask this question of all Board members:

“What behaviors do we need to model, as Board members, so that our meetings run smoothly and we effectively carry out our responsibilities as a Board?”

Make a nice long list of those behaviors and then, importantly, pull the list out every now and then at the end of a Board meeting and take ten – fifteen minutes to ask one another:  “How are we doing?  What’s working well?  What’s not working?  How can we make what’s not working, work?”

This list of ideal Board behaviors will help you to work together more effectively and it’s a great thing to share with new Board members during orientation.

A more effective Board helps an organization run more effectively.  Try some kind of Board Self-Assessment sometime soon and help your organization make even more of a Mission Impact.

For more ideas on how you can lead breakthroughs in your organization, follow this blog and check out my web site at www.SheehanNonprofitConsulting.com   You will find free resources you can download, including a Breakthrough Strategy Workbook that you can download at no cost.  You can also check out my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, and buy it if you are interested.  And you can follow Sheehan Nonprofit Consulting on Facebook.

A Cool Tool

It’s free, it’s been out for about ten years, and yet I think it is still a tremendously underutilized resource.  It is the McKinsey/VPP Organization Capacity Assessment Tool.  To download your free copy, go to:  http://www.vppartners.org/learning/mckinsey-vpp-ocat

The OCAT was developed by consulting experts McKinsey & Company for Venture Philanthropy Partners as a diagnostic to help nonprofits review their operations and identify areas for improvement.  You can use it for:

*SWOT Analysis.  I find that SWOT analysis is often not very rigorous.  Ask your staff, board, and other stakeholders to complete the tool as part of identifying your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, & Threats.  It will give you a much more reliable way to assess your capabilities.

*General Management.  I tell people that if I was still a CEO I would keep a copy of the OCAT in my desk drawer and pull it out quarterly to monitor progress on various items.  It gives you an objective tool to monitor your progress.

*Teaching Organization Effectiveness.  Part of our job as senior leaders is to help people understand what it takes to be excellent.  I suggest using the OCAT in orientation of new employees as a way to say:  “This is a picture of excellence – and we are pursuing high scores in every area the tool assesses so we can make even more of an impact.  You have joined a team committed to excellence.”

I have used the OCAT in numerous courses I have taught for nonprofit executives and they always comment about how helpful it is.  I have also used it in many consulting engagements – both for strategic planning and for general management improvement.  The best thing about the tool is that it often uncovers weaknesses that are not obvious to senior leaders in an organization. 

One outstanding aspect of the OCAT is that it is thorough.  I was talking with a group of consultants a couple of years ago who told me that their clients complained that the OCAT was too long and time consuming.  My response was: “Organizations are complex and a thorough tool is needed to assess them.  Also, my clients aren’t wimps and don’t mind doing the hard work needed to achieve excellence!”  Okay, maybe I went a bit too far there.

Check out the OCAT, see what it tells you about your organization and the improvements you can make to enhance your Mission Impact.

For more ideas on how you can lead breakthroughs in your organization, follow this blog and check out my web site at www.SheehanNonprofitConsulting.com   You will find free resources you can download, including a Breakthrough Strategy Workbook that you can download at no cost.  You can also check out my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, and buy it if you are interested.  And you can follow Sheehan Nonprofit Consulting on Facebook.

Your Leadership Pipeline

Next week I will be teaching a two day course on Leadership Succession for NeighborWorks America (www.nw.org) in Atlanta.  A few years ago the leaders at NeighborWorks – a national network of organizations which work to provide affordable housing across the country – realized that their local organizations needed to be prepared for the inevitable retirements of Baby Boomers.  They asked me to create a course as one way to help their organizations to be prepared for this big change.

Is your organization prepared for this?  It might hit you sooner than you think.  A recent study by The Meyer Foundation and CompassPoint, entitled “Daring to Lead” (http://daringtolead.org/) found that 67% of the nonprofit CEOs surveyed said that they plan to leave their jobs within the next five years.

And this is not just an issue for CEOs.  Baby Boomer retirements will hit organizations at many senior levels.  The first Baby Boomers, born in 1946, are turning sixty-five this year.  The retirement wave will start slowly at first, and then cascade upon us.  We had about 3.4 million births in the US in 1946 – an increase of more than 20% from the year before.  That number kept growing until it hit 4 million per year in 1954 and did not fall below that until 1964 – the end of the Boom.  That is a ton of senior leadership in organizations – and vast institutional knowledge – that will be leaving the workplace.

What should you do to prepare?  I suggest you do two important things: 

*Talking about the possible departure of a CEO or any leader can be a touchy subject.  I recommend that organizations dip their toes in the water on this topic by making sure they have a well thought out “Emergency Transition” plan what would be implemented when any senior leader unexpectedly cannot perform their duties – either for the short term or long term.  This will get the organization thinking about succession and is simply good business practice.  The people at Transition Guides have a nice template I recommend in their Emergency Succession Planning Workbook (http://www.transitionguides.com/publications).

*Next, and most importantly, invest in the development of your staff team!  This is a difficult thing for some organizations to justify when budgets are so tight, but I will suggest that there has never been a more important time to make sure that you are developing your leadership pipeline.  The younger people on your staff are going to be called upon sooner than you think to step up – and they need developmental opportunities now to help prepare them.

Make sure that your organization will have the leadership it needs to make a Mission Impact in the future by preparing for change and investing in Your Leadership Pipeline.

For more ideas on how you can lead breakthroughs in your organization, follow this blog and check out my web site at www.SheehanNonprofitConsulting.com   You will find free resources you can download, including a Breakthrough Strategy Workbook that you can download at no cost.  You can also check out my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, and buy it if you are interested.  And you can follow Sheehan Nonprofit Consulting on Facebook.

Mission, Vision, Money

Last week I was asked to serve as the opening speaker for the Major Gifts track at a nonprofit fundraising conference.  In summary, I said that an aspirational Mission & Vision are the pathways to Money.  In fact, this is the most important path to take if you want to raise BIG money for your nonprofit.

Mission.  The aspect of Mission I encourage nonprofits to focus on is identifying their Mission Gap.  Mission Gap is essentially a statement of unmet mission needs.  It compares the current reality of those you serve with what their ideal condition would be.  For example, if your mission was to eliminate illiteracy in your county, then you would want to know your current reality – how many people are currently not literate.  You would compare that to your ideal of everyone being literate.  If your county matches the national average, then 20% of the adults there are not literate.  If you had a county of 100,000 adults, then your Mission Gap would be 20,000 people.  Mission Gap gives you a clear way to communicate the stark challenges your organization faces.  Instead of asking for incremental improvements in funding to help a few more people read, you can say “We have 20,000 people in our county who cannot read.  It’s a big number and we need your big time support to close the gap.”

Vision.  Create a Vision – an ideal picture of what your organization would be like – if you could have it any way you wanted it, so you could close the Mission Gap as effectively as possible.  In the literacy example above, we would want to know what kind of capacity the organization would need in order to close the Mission Gap.  What would your programs, staffing, budget, etc. look like if you were ideally positioned to close that gap most effectively?

Money.  Put a price tag on the Vision.  “We have excellent programs that teach people how to read – but we need more programs to reach many, many more people.  Here’s what we think it is going to take, ideally, to close the illiteracy gap in our community as effectively as we can.  (Describe Vision & Price Tag.)  Will you help us close the illiteracy gap by making a $10,000 gift to our annual fund today?”  

Mission Gap helps articulate the problem your organization is working to solve and an aspirational Vision can inspire donors to make major gifts which contribute to the solution.  Money feeds the Vision and that helps close the Mission Gap.  Share your Mission Gap & Vision with others and make even more of a Mission Impact.

For more ideas on how you can lead breakthroughs in your organization, follow this blog and check out my web site at www.SheehanNonprofitConsulting.com   You will find free resources you can download, including a Breakthrough Strategy Workbook that you can download at no cost.  You can also check out my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, and buy it if you are interested.  And you can follow Sheehan Nonprofit Consulting on Facebook.

“We’re Lost But Making Good Time”

This is the title of Chapter One of Mario Morino’s new book, Leap of Reason.  I know that most of you don’t have the time to read a blog much less a book, but I strongly recommend it.  He makes a compelling case for the urgency, now, for nonprofits to change the way most operate.  As he states:  “Here’s the problem in a nutshell:  We don’t manage to outcomes, thus greatly diminishing our collective impact.”

“We’re Lost But Making Good Time.”  What a great chapter title – and it is fitting.  So many nonprofits are filled with dedicated, smart, and hard-working people – staff and volunteers – and yet they do not have metrics which objectively tell them how well they are accomplishing their mission.  They know they are busy – making good time – but what kind of progress are they making?  If you have attended one of my workshops or read my book you know that I make the same case of the importance of metrics to determine your Mission Impact.

Many of you reading this know who Mario Morino is – a generous philanthropist and co-founder of Venture Philanthropy Partners (www.vppartners.org), which provides funding for organizations serving the needs of children from low income families in the Washington, DC area.  So he is a person who knows of what he speaks. 

If you are someone who believes that your organization needs to do a better job establishing outcomes, then this is the book for you.  It will help you rally others to help with this and it will give you excellent resources to do the hard work of setting your outcomes.

To get the book, go to http://www.vppartners.org/leapofreason/getit

When I checked the other day, Amazon was out of print copies, but you can buy the Kindle version for $1.00 (that’s not a typo).  Even better, it is available as an iBook or a PDF at no charge.

Full disclosure – Mr. Morino lists my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, as one of six “resources that address how to drive change, improve effectiveness, and achieve greatness.”  I am pleased to have my book listed along with resources by Jim Collins and John Kotter.

Get yourself a copy of Leap of Reason today and learn how your organization can make even more of a Mission Impact.

For more ideas on how you can lead breakthroughs in your organization, follow this blog and check out my web site at www.SheehanNonprofitConsulting.com   You will find free resources you can download, including a Breakthrough Strategy Workbook that you can download at no cost.  You can also check out my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, and buy it if you are interested.  And you can follow Sheehan Nonprofit Consulting on Facebook.