Managing to Change the World

by Alison Green

  Goal 1: By Dec. 31, quick grassroots response created (for three major calls to action, an average of at least 6,000 grassroots supporters contact state representatives and senators).

  Goal 2: By Dec. 15, 10 percent of existing (in database as of Jan. 1) grassroots supporters are “super activists,” as defined by having forwarded each action alert to at least ten friends or having organized an in-person mobilization event such as a house party.

  PRIORITY 3: Raise profile of state health care crisis in the media

  Goal 1: By Dec. 31, at least one major national media hit (estimated viewership or readership of 1 million or more) and at least five minor (state or regional) media hits generated.

  Goal 2: By July 31, editorial support received from at least one of the three major regional daily papers.

  You should have only a few (ideally four to six) primary goals in order to focus your staff’s efforts.

  PRIORITY 4: Strengthen our financial sustainability

  Goal 1: By Dec. 31, a total of at least $1,850,000 raised, including $1,600,000 in general support.

  Goal 2: By Dec. 31, 70 percent of 2006 donors renewed at same giving level or higher.

  You should have long-term capacity-building goals in addition to programmatic ones.

  PRIORITY 5: Build strong staff and culture of performance

  Goal 1: All open positions filled by June 30.

  Goal 2: By Dec. 31, 90 percent of staff identified as high performers at start of year have committed to stay another year, and all staff identified as low or midperformers have raised performance significantly, are in the midst of performance improvement plans, or have left.

  1 Job announcements (what you use to advertise a job opening) are marketing tools to attract the right candidates, so they might be different from your internal job descriptions. Think about why your target candidate would be genuinely attracted to the role and make sure that comes across! You don’t want to sugarcoat, of course, but you should sell the position and organization, showing candidates that the job is an incredible opportunity. While you’ll of course capture the essence of the job, you might not need all of the nitty-gritty details.

  2 For the sake of space and our readers’ sanity, we’ve simplified a broader spectrum of terms that you may hear about. Most commonly, the full range goes from inputs (“spend $5,000 on publications”) to activities (“write monthly e-mail updates”) to outputs (“e-mail updates sent to 12,000 people each month”) to outcomes (“at least $25,000 in donations generated by our e-mails”) to impacts (“successful advocacy efforts in three states funded”). Of these, the most commonly used—and, we believe, the most useful—refer to activities and outcomes.

  CHAPTER 4

  MANAGING THE “IN-BETWEEN”

  Building a Culture of Excellence

  Up to now, we’ve addressed how to set and reinforce expectations so your staff can succeed on the specific tasks they take on and the broad responsibilities they are given. Along the way, though, whether as part of those assignments or just in the course of day-to-day business, your staff will perform thousands of activities that you may never see or even know about, from greeting visitors with a friendly smile rather than a curt, “Follow me,” to making sure that e-mails to important stakeholders are typo free. Just as in other areas, here too you need to make sure staff members are clear about your expectations. In this case, your expectations are as much about how people operate as about what they do. The way you set those expectations is by creating and reinforcing a strong culture.

  Culture is the invisible force that transmits messages about “how we do things around here.” If you’re wrestling with feeling that you have to tell your staff exactly how to handle every situation or aren’t confident that they’ll perform well in your absence, culture is likely the culprit—and the solution.

  Culture is the invisible force that tells people “how we do things around here.”

  Whether you’re managing a single team or an entire organization, culture is a powerful tool for shaping how staff members get work done. And whether you shape it deliberately or not, your team will have a culture, so the real issue is whether that culture is sending the kinds of signals you want it to.

  This chapter looks at the kind of culture you might aim to create, how you shape and reinforce it, and how you hold people accountable for acting in accord with it.

  ELEMENTS OF HIGH-PERFORMING CULTURES

  First, let’s talk about what you should be aiming for in your culture. Although no two cultures will be identical, we’ve been struck by how often we see the same elements on high-performing teams run by the best managers. These cultures blend a deep rigor about results with broadly shared engagement and positive energy.

  Rigor and Engagement

  Both of these elements, rigor and engagement, are essential. Cultures that emphasize rigor and accountability without positive engagement may get grudging compliance from their staff members, but they lack the spirit of possibility that can dramatically drive work forward. And because leaders in cultures that emphasize positive feelings over results don’t push people to do better than they otherwise might, don’t fire low performers, and don’t make hard decisions that might be unpopular, they miss opportunities, and their organizations grow ineffective. High-performing organizations bring both elements to their work: a rigorous focus on results and positive engagement.

  Here are some of the components that make up each of those elements:

  Rigorous Focus on Results

  Relentlessness. High-performing managers run processes smoothly, but what they care most about is concrete achievement. When they’re not getting the results they want, they persist until they do.

  A high bar for performance. In teams determined to make an impact, performance standards are high. There’s often a sense that “not just anyone can work here,” and employees know that the manager expects great, not merely good, performance.

  Scrutiny of ideas. That same high bar is brought to scrutiny of ideas. Regardless of the source, suggestions for improvement or new initiatives are subjected to rigorous examination and debate, rather than being allowed to take effect simply because the boss, or a junior staffer, brings them up.

  Accountability. On high-performing teams, staffers know that they need to follow through on commitments (that is, nothing just disappears) and that they’ll be held accountable for their work. If they do a mediocre job on a project, they’ll need to redo it.

  Transparency and commitment to continuous improvement. Because they’re determined to be successful, high-performing managers are fairly ruthless when it comes to identifying ways their teams could perform better, and they put a premium on being open about their flaws so they can search for ways to improve. They’re generally obsessive about learning from experience, incorporating lessons into practice, and adapting their approach to make it as effective as possible.

  Mission integrity. Leaders are focused on the actual impact of their work, not appearances. Their goals represent what they truly believe would be meaningful progress rather than just predicting results that would have come about regardless of the organization’s actions. For instance, one high-performing organization we know had a goal of recruiting progressive candidates for local office. It wouldn’t permit itself to count toward that goal candidates who likely would have emerged on their own, even though listing them might impress funders.

  Positive Engagement

  A shared sense of ownership. Staff members feel deeply invested in the direction of the organization and assume responsibility for helping it succeed. They suggest ideas for how the organization could improve and serve as effective ambassadors for the organization because they feel it is partly theirs.

  Positive energy. Staff members are enthusiastic about their work and genuinely enjoy tackling the challenges that come with it. The overall mood in the organization is positive.

  Teamwork and low drama. There’s a sense that everyone is working to
ward a common goal. People operate with cooperation and goodwill toward their colleagues, and unconstructive interpersonal conflict is discouraged. We love this story from Alyssa Mastromonaco, who was the director of scheduling and advance on the 2008 Obama campaign, which was well known for having relatively low drama. Shortly after she started working on the campaign, she became noticeably irritated at a colleague on a conference call. Right afterward, a campaign leader dropped by her office and told her, “This is a campaign where you need to respect other people’s opinions.” She says she quickly realized, “Oh, my God, these guys are serious!”1

  Deep belief in mission. Staff members genuinely believe their work is making the world a better place and their jobs are about much more than collecting a paycheck.

  Trust in leadership. Staff members trust that the organization’s leaders care deeply about acting in the best interests of the organization. Staffers may not always agree with every decision, but they give leaders the benefit of the doubt, confident that they are acting out of the right motives and will exercise good judgment.

  Authenticity

  We can’t say enough about the importance of all of these elements being authentic, because cultures are only as powerful as they are genuine. Although some organizations pay lip service to these concepts, on high-performing teams what we describe here is truly how things work.

  “A lot of the best organizations that I see are organizations where the role of the manager is primarily to reproduce the culture, because if people have that basic understanding of what the effort is about and how it’s appropriate to pursue it, they can be freed up to make all kinds of decisions and take all kinds of initiative. There’s a less intensive management workload with a higher return on investment.”

  RICKEN PATEL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AVAAZ

  CREATING AND REINFORCING A HIGH-PERFORMANCE, RESULTS-ORIENTED CULTURE

  If these elements don’t already exist on your team, how can you establish a culture where these are the defining characteristics? As with delegating tasks or using goals to assign broad responsibilities, the best approaches blend being clear from the start about what you expect, remaining engaged along the way, and holding people accountable to meeting those expectations. Here are some of the most effective ways we’ve seen managers do this.

  Modeling

  First and foremost, lead by example. Whether you’re creating a culture from scratch or trying to turn one around, modeling by leaders is easily the most powerful way to transmit the cultural values and behaviors you want your staff to demonstrate, such as “always follow up on things” and “treat constituents with respect.” In fact, your culture will reflect what you believe and how you act. For instance, if you mention in a meeting that you’re going to e-mail a document afterward to everyone and then don’t, your staff won’t take their own next steps seriously either. But if in this case you send an explanatory e-mail—for instance, “I know I said I’d get this document out today, but I realized I should wait for input from our board chair, so it’ll be tomorrow instead”—your staff will know they must demonstrate a similar sense of responsibility.

  Explicit Articulation

  Articulating the values you expect all staffers to live up to is a simple, worthwhile process that can send strong messages about how people should approach their work. However, in order to be worth doing, this must be authentic: we’ve all seen well-intentioned but laughable posters listing the alleged values of a poorly run business, often claiming that “customers come first” even as we’re facing clear evidence that their customers decidedly don’t come first. But if your core values are genuine, explicitly articulating them can help assimilate newcomers into your culture and reinforce the behaviors you want to see in your employees.

  While this is most typically done at the organizational level, managers of departments or teams can do this as well. For instance, if you’re an information technology director, your team might have a value around “Shockingly Good Customer Service” to describe what you provide to the rest of the organization.

  Once you’ve established values you want staff members to aspire to, you can reinforce them through ongoing explicit discussions—for instance:

  When you’re orienting new employees, discuss each of the values and what they mean in practice. You could even develop hypothetical scenarios and how the values would play out in them.

  Give feedback the moment that you see someone acting in a way that isn’t consistent with your values. The same applies when you see someone exemplifying your values: praise people for strong examples of, say, persistence or commitment to improvement.

  Consider posting a list of core values in the office, and provide the list to your staff members.

  Periodically review and edit your list of values with your entire team or your most senior people. It’s a great way to reinforce the meaning behind the words.

  Tool 4.1 provides the core values for our organization.

  Reinforcement During Hiring

  You begin sending messages about your culture from the moment a job applicant contacts you: How responsive are you? Do you ask thoughtful, rigorous questions rather than typical interview fare? Do you convey a warm, positive tone during the interview, and maybe even make the candidate laugh? The hiring process is a microcosm of your culture, and smart candidates—exactly the people you want to hire—will be picking up loads of messages about how you do things.

  In addition, we recommend including a discussion of your organization or team’s culture as part of the interviewing process. You might also ask some of your staff members who best exemplify your culture to speak with top candidates to give them a better sense of your culture and to get input from your cultural stars about their sense of a candidate’s fit.

  Rituals

  Rituals can be another powerful way to reach and reinforce shared values. A ritual might be a way you regularly share information, the ways you celebrate progress, or how you welcome new staff. For instance, one organization we know sends new staff members flowers when they’re hired, which sends strong signals about culture (“we’re a positive group and we value you!”).

  Any shared, regular, and positive experience can become a ritual, including something as simple as a champagne toast after major victories. We especially like rituals that have a substantive component tied to your work. For instance, the IT director whose team is committed to “Shockingly Good Customer Service” might present a monthly “Above and Beyond” award to a staff member who has received unsolicited praise from the team’s clients. On a slightly different track, one group we know asks all staff members to read a particular article each week and then convenes a weekly hour-long meeting to discuss it. Not only do good ideas usually emerge from that discussion, but the ritual itself sends a message that new ideas are important to the organization.

  Performance Evaluations and Consequences

  One of the most powerful ways to reinforce values that you have articulated is to incorporate an assessment of how well staff members are demonstrating those values as part of your performance evaluations. You might list each of your values, and explicitly rate each staff member against them (in addition to measuring the extent to which the staffer met her goals).

  If you’re not in charge of the performance evaluation form you’ll be using, this may be harder to do, but you can try to weave these elements in on your own. Or you can show this chapter to your executive director or head of HR and convince her that she should do it.

  Having real consequences for performance (in terms of fit with your culture, as well as the results a staff member generates) sends strong messages about what is and isn’t expected from staff members. High performers should see their behavior reinforced through positive consequences like promotion, additional responsibilities, lavish praise, extra pay, or some combination of these, and low performers should see consequences like serious warnings and terminations.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE

 
; Apart from the specific methods we’ve discussed, most fundamentally your culture is shaped by hundreds of daily interactions. Here are some examples of what the type of culture we’ve described here looks like in the day-to-day course of work:

  You’re the head of fundraising. You met your total revenue goal this year but missed your target for new high-net-worth donors. You celebrate hitting the big target, but you also hold a series of meetings with your team and your boss to brainstorm how your approach can be different going forward.

  A junior staff member proposes printing new T-shirts with a funny slogan on them. Although you like the staff member’s creativity, you worry that the T-shirts don’t reflect your organization’s branding. It feels like a small thing to let slide in the name of encouraging staff initiative, but you don’t shield this staff member from the rigor that is brought to decisions about the organization’s image. You explain the constraints and why you’re not going to run with the suggestion. You end by encouraging your staff member to come up with something that better fits the organization’s brand.

  You’re wrestling with whether to expand your program to a new state, which could lead to greater impact but might strain your resources. Rather than puzzling through it on your own or with several top leaders behind closed doors, you throw the question out to your staff members and offer them the chance to consider it and give you their thoughts while still being clear that the final decision rests with you.

  KEY POINTS