Making Strategy Work in Nonprofits

David Pelligrini
 

tGCP Points of View

David Pellegrini, tGCP Director

“Both the history of our firm and the value system we operate from closely synchs with the way a nonprofit engages with the world. We automatically think about and consult around fundamental principles like mission, meaning, impact, contribution, and social covenants. Because of this compatibility of world views, we feel very much at home within nonprofits.”

 

Institutional Culture As a Critical Driver of Nonprofit Performance: Our Firm’s Point of View

In all types of organizations, not just nonprofits, culture is almost always an under-rated/-utilized driver of performance. Yet, if a NP wants to attract the best and the brightest; groom them to their full potential; and retain them, then NP leadership will miss a huge opportunity if they’re not dialed into the extraordinary impact of a well designed culture.

Here’s a telling thought experiment. Can you design an unattractive and demotivating culture? Absolutely! Here are some of the key ingredients:

  1. Focus solely on budgets
  2. Set murky expectations and goals
  3. Prize activity over purpose and contribution
  4. Rule by rules
  5. Criticize and play politics
  6. Exhibit behaviors and attitudes that are more indicative of an entitlement-based or a seniority-based culture than of a meritocratic one.

Just add water, stir, warm and, voila, you’ve got an NP culture tuned for under-performance and turnover. This is a surefire way to create plenty of disillusioned professionals, morale problems, and program breakdowns.

Now, after that thought experiment, it’s less difficult to visualize the winning NP culture:

  1. Infuse the culture with an inspiring mission and strategy…and day-to-day behavior.
  2. Cultivate a strong institutional identity.
  3. Walk the talk of best-in-class NP.
  4. Pay tribute to strong team play and downplay elitism.
  5. Honor a strong work ethic, creative and resourceful contributions, and delivering solutions that matter.
  6. Invest in your balance sheet, in your people…build capacity!

Because NPs are only as successful as the quality of their intellectual capital, they rise and fall on how astutely they manage their investment in human capital, their people. In its work with nonprofits, tGCP brings solutions to bear that focus on people and the institutional cultures in which they perform.

We like the 25-year track record our solutions have in nonprofits. If we can assist, we’d like to.

 

Thought Leadership: Nonprofits
 

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