Managing to Change the World

by Alison Green

  CONTENTS

  List of Tools

  Chapter 1: The Job of a Manager

  Part 1: Managing the Work

  Chapter 2: Managing Specific Tasks

  Exactly How Hands-On Should You Be?

  The Components of Good Delegation

  Chapter 3: Managing Broad Responsibilities

  Creating Meaningful Roles

  Goals: Roles Played Out Over a Defined Period of Time

  Setting Smart Goals

  How To Create Goals

  Using Goals Throughout the Year: Tracking and Staying Engaged

  Assessing Performance Against Goals: Creating Accountability

  Goals at the Organizational Level

  Mission Statements

  Summing Up: Expectations, Engagement, and Accountability Writ Large

  Chapter 4: Managing the “In-Between”

  Elements of High-Performing Cultures

  Creating and Reinforcing a High-Performance, Results-Oriented Culture

  What it Looks Like in Practice

  Chapter 5: Managing the Day-to-Day Work of Your Team

  Weekly One-On-One Check-Ins

  Big Picture Step-Backs

  Observing the Work in Action

  Special Challenges

  Part 2: Managing the People

  Chapter 6: Hiring Superstars

  Figuring Out Who You’re Looking For

  Building a Strong Pool of Candidates

  Selecting the Right Person

  Making Your Decision

  Selling the Position and Making the Offer

  Training People Right From the Start

  Chapter 7: Developing People

  When to Develop People—and When Not To

  How to Develop People

  Performance Evaluations

  Chapter 8: Retaining Your Best

  Methods for Retaining High Performers

  What Not To Do, or How To Lose Your Best Employees

  Chapter 9: Addressing Performance Problems and Letting People Go

  How to Determine if You Have a Serious Performance Problem

  Progressive Discipline and Coaching Out

  Issues Surrounding Letting An Employee Go

  Part 3: Managing Yourself

  Chapter 10: Exercising Authority Without Being a Wimp or a Tyrant

  Wimps

  Tyrants

  Assertive Managers

  Just Be Normal

  Chapter 11: Managing Your Time and Staying Organized

  Five Ways For Where to Spend Your Time

  Establishing Strong Systems

  Taming the E-Mail Beast

  Chapter 12: Managing Up

  Your Sphere of Control

  Special Considerations for Second in Commands

  Conclusion: Personal Qualities of a Great Manager

  Appendix: Getting Started

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  A Note to Readers

  About the Management Center

  Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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  A Wiley Imprint

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Green, Alison.

  Managing to change the world: the nonprofit manager’s guide to getting results / Alison Green and Jerry Hauser, The Management Center. —First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-118-13761-1 (pbk.); ISBN 978-1-118-20590-7 (ebk)

  1. Nonprofit organizations—Management. I. Hauser, Jerry. II. Title.

  HD62.6.G74 2012

  658’.048—dc23

  2011052644

  FIRST EDITION

  LIST OF TOOLS

  Tool 2.1: Delegation Worksheet

  Tool 2.2: Sample Project Plan

  Tool 3.1: Sample Goal Development Process

  Tool 3.2: Sample Success Sheet: Setting Goals

  Tool 3.3: Sample Organizational Goals

  Tool 4.1: Sample Statement of Core Values

  Tool 5.1: Sample Check-In Meeting Agenda

  Tool 5.2: Sample Check-In Success Sheet

  Tool 6.1: Sample Job Posting

  Tool 6.2: Sample Talent List

  Tool 6.3: Sample Worksheet for Building the Applicant Pool

  Tool 6.4: Sample Rejection E-Mails

  Tool 6.5: Sample Job Simulation Exercises

  Tool 6.6: Sample Interview Preparation E-Mail

  Tool 6.7: Sample Interview Questions

  Tool 6.8: Sample Interview Outline

  Tool 6.9: Sample Reference Check Questions

  Tool 6.10: Sample Orientation Outline

  Tool 7.1: Feedback Worksheet

  Tool 7.2: Sample 2 × 2 Feedback Form

  Tool 7.3: Sample Completed Evaluation Form for a Corrective Assessment

  Tool 7.4: Sample Completed Evaluation Form for a Strong Assessment

  Tool 8.1: Sample Retention Chart

  Tool 9.1: Sample Progressive Discipline Policy

  Tool 9.2: Sample Script for Informal Performance Warning

  Tool 9.3: Sample Formal Performance Warning in Writing

  Tool 9.4: Sample Firing Script

  Tool 9.5: Sample Coaching-Out Script

  Tool 11.1: Sample Daily List

  Tool 11.2: Sample Weekly-Plus List

  T
ool 12.1: Sample Division of Labor Plan

  CHAPTER 1

  THE JOB OF A MANAGER

  We bet you had trouble finding the time to read this book. If so, it’s probably because you’re feeling serious stress, like many of the nonprofit leaders with whom we work. You’re under pressure from funders, your staff, constituents, perhaps your boss, and ultimately yourself, to be getting more done. Too much of the burden of making things happen is falling on you.

  Effective management—how you get things done through other people—could help you accomplish more with less stress, but you may not know where to start. And if that’s the case, you’re not alone. Nonprofit leaders often end up in their roles not because they’re great managers, but because they are experts on a particular issue or excel at a specific function like communications or program design. If you’re one of these talented, committed people, you may have been highly effective at getting results on your own, but you may now have hit the point in your career where your impact will be more a function of what you get done through others than what you do directly yourself.

  Fortunately, good management is pretty straightforward. Our goal in writing this book was to create an easy-to-use manual with hands-on, practical advice and tools that will help nonprofit managers get better results in their work. We’ll cover a range of skills, representing what we think are the most important areas for managers to master—from delegating tasks, to setting and holding people accountable to clear goals, to hiring and firing, to staying organized and using your own time effectively. Exercised properly, these practices will make your life much easier.

  Most important, though, not only does good management make your life easier, but it also makes it easier for you to get great results.

  Although this probably sounds obvious, as managers ourselves we didn’t automatically grasp it from the start. Jerry’s first real management experience came at Teach For America, a large, national nonprofit where, as the second in command, he was responsible for managing the day-to-day work of the organization. A former teacher, he had been drawn to management partly because he liked seeing people learn and develop to their full potential. He wanted staff members to be happy and fulfilled in their work, and he viewed it as his job to mentor them so that they grew and developed.

  That was fine as far as it went, but Teach For America had ambitious aspirations: it was trying to triple in size, raise the quality of its teachers, strengthen its alumni network, raise more money, and build a stronger organization to make it all happen. Early in Jerry’s tenure, when he was more focused on mentoring and viewing his staff members’ satisfaction as an end goal, he wasn’t always producing the kind of progress that was needed. Most of his staff members worked extremely hard, but not everyone did. And many excelled at their jobs, but in several critical cases, the organization’s needs had outgrown his staff members’ skills.

  One day Jerry was complaining to a friend about how much pressure he was under and how difficult it was to get things done without making people hate him. She looked at him and said, “Well, if you’re doing your job, you might just be the least popular person there.” With those not-so-reassuring words, Jerry’s friend helped him realize that he was thinking about his job in the wrong way. The organization was never going to achieve its aims if he didn’t make some people unhappy. He needed to hold people to more ambitious goals, be clearer with people when they weren’t meeting expectations, and, ultimately, tell some of his staff members that they weren’t the right people for the job.

  And that brings us to the fundamental premise of this book: your job as a manager is to get results.

  Through this stage in his work, Jerry came to appreciate more fully what his true job was as a manager. Yes, it was good to develop people, empower them, help them be fulfilled at work, and mentor them. Those things helped make his job enjoyable, and in some cases they helped make his people better at what they did, but ultimately, they were means to an end. Fundamentally his job was to make sure the organization got the results it aspired to. That’s why it existed as an organization, and that’s what Jerry was getting paid to do. Teach For America’s donors funded it to help expand opportunities for students in low-income communities, the students whom Teach For America served needed it to deliver, and that’s what his job was about, not to make the staff happy. If Jerry wasn’t doing what it took to make Teach For America as effective as possible in pursuing its mission, then he wasn’t doing his job.

  As it happens, we believe you can get things done and be well liked, at least most of the time. In fact, by being clear about what you expect, helping people meet your expectations, ensuring people are in roles in which they excel, and getting everyone aligned around a common purpose, you’ll build your staff’s morale in the long run. Treating people well also happens to be the best way to sustain your results over the long haul, because you’ll never get good people to work for you otherwise. Time and time again, though, we’ve found that managers confuse being “supportive” bosses who “empower” their people with being effective managers who actually get things done. And in the short term, getting things done sometimes requires you to make others unhappy with you.

  Two examples from clients of ours might help illustrate what happens when managers do, or don’t, fully feel the weight of responsibility for getting results in their realms. In the first case, the manager oversaw the field operations for her organization. When the organization realized that it needed to shift resources from one part of the field program to another in order to improve its results, this manager made only incremental changes in staffing levels to meet that need—changes that would certainly not suffice to generate the results needed. At a meeting with the head of the organization, the field manager explained her plan, saying, “Imagine the uproar if I had proposed really shifting people around.” Her explanation made it clear that she was weighing the potential staff reaction to changes (or, perhaps more accurately, her own discomfort with that reaction) more heavily than the important results that the organization needed her to generate. Fortunately, the field director’s own manager caught the issue before it was too late and insisted on more dramatic changes.

  In contrast with this approach, our client in the second case did what it took to get results. This client is the executive director of an organization whose work gets carried out through multiple state offices, with those offices overseen directly by a regional director. The executive director and the regional director had agreed on ambitious, critically important goals for what each state office would produce over the coming four months, before the organization’s next fundraising cycle began. But after only a couple of weeks, it was painfully clear that the regional director was proceeding under business as usual and that the state offices were nowhere near on track to producing the results they needed.

  In this kind of situation, many managers would continue to work through the regional director, checking in periodically, hoping the regional director would deliver in the end, and perhaps blaming him if he didn’t come through. In this case, though, the executive director understood that if the hoped-for results did not materialize, he himself was ultimately responsible. He was not simply a passive overseer of the results the team generated, but was ultimately responsible for those results himself. He also understood that in this case, the results had to happen: the organization would not fulfill its mission without them, and it would not be able to raise funds to keep supporting itself. Given that, the executive director took a much more hands-on approach, one that many management books might suggest was micromanaging. Among other things, he insisted that he and the regional director conduct daily calls with each of the state offices to discuss what steps the states were taking to produce the results. After just a few days, the energy at the state level changed, and within a couple of weeks, dramatically different results began to appear. The regional director, who was initially not thrilled with what he viewed as the executive director’s heavy-handed approach, lea
rned a valuable lesson about how to generate results. And once the new plans were on track, the executive director was able to step back and take a more normal approach to managing by working through his regional director.

  When we highlight examples like these and stress the importance of being results oriented, people sometimes ask us whether that means we think nonprofits should be run like hard-nosed businesses. Our answer is that because the work nonprofits do is so important, we need to be more hard-nosed about management than for-profit enterprises are. Given what nonprofits do, we have a moral imperative to commit to strong, effective management practices because what’s at stake is much more important than a business’s bottom line.

  And that’s the main reason we wrote this book. We want to see more strong, effective nonprofits that are changing the world.

  This book contains the tools you need to make it easier for you to get results. We intend for this book to be helpful to new managers as well as to those who have experience and need a refresher, and to managers of individual teams or departments as well as to executive directors of entire organizations. You won’t find information on fundraising or working with the media or other topics on specific functions already covered by myriad other books. Instead, you’ll find step-by-step guidance on how to manage any single area or an organization as a whole.

  As we noted earlier, management is how you get things done through other people. (When you’re doing it yourself, it’s called “work”!) There are three components to that definition of management: getting things done, the other people, and you. We’ve divided the book along the lines of those three pieces, covering in each part the practices in which the best managers we’ve seen excel:

  Managing the work. We begin with the things you’re getting done because this is what most people think of when they think of management, and it’s the most immediate challenge that most new managers face. We’ll start with the most specific level of things you might want to get done, which is looking at how you delegate a discrete task or project. We’ll then look at how you can assign bigger pieces of work and broader responsibilities by using meaningful roles and clear goals with concrete measures of success. Then knowing that beyond the things you discuss explicitly with your staff, there are thousands of tiny actions that people take every day within your organization, we’ll examine how you can use culture to guide your staff members on those items. Finally, we’ll bring it all together by looking at a couple of easy-to-implement management systems that help you stay on top of it all.