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Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Mosaic

 

IDEAS SPOTLIGHT: BEST NEW THINKING IN
NONPROFIT LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT

By Leslie Bonner, Senior Consultant, DEWEY & KAYE, a McCrory & McDowell company


Dewey & Kaye is committed to bringing you the latest thinking and newest ideas relevant to nonprofit management. In light of our upcoming Manager Training workshops, Dewey & Kaye Senior Consultant Leslie Bonner turns a spotlight on recent articles, research, and ideas on leadership and management to keep your thinking sharp.


BUILD A BETTER BOSS. The New York Times recently ran an article called "Google's Quest to Build a Better Boss." Google decided that it wanted to build better bosses, and as only a data-mining giant like Google can do, it began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards. Later that year, the "people analytics" teams at the company produced what might be called the "Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers." The results, which may seem obvious to some managers, were ranked in importance:

  1. Be a good coach.
  2. Empower your team and don't micromanage.
  3. Express interest in your team member's success and well-being.
  4. Don't be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.
  5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team.
  6. Help your employees with career development.
  7. Have a clear vision and strategy for your team.
  8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team.

According to Laszlo Bock, vice president of people operations for Google, manager training based on these eight findings resulted in "a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers." To read the article, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html

ZOOM IN, ZOOM OUT. Here is a great article from the Harvard Business Review on the need for multiple perspectives – both looking at the big picture and focusing on the details – that has applications to nonprofits, leadership, and strategy: http://hbr.org/2011/03/managing-yourself-zoom-in-zoom-out/ar/1#

This is a concept I've been talking about with leaders since I did the healthy leadership team study, which found that often the senior teams lack the "view from afar." Here is an excerpt:

"The lens through which leaders view the world can help or hinder their ability to make good strategic decisions, especially during crises. Zoom in, and get a close look at select details – perhaps too close to make sense of them. Zoom out, and see the big picture – but perhaps miss some subtleties and nuances.

Zoom buttons on digital devices let us examine images from many viewpoints. They also provide an apt metaphor for modes of strategic thinking. Some people prefer to see things up close, others from afar. Both perspectives – worm's-eye and bird's-eye – have virtues and pathologies. But they should be vantage points, not fixed positions. Leaders need multiple perspectives to get a complete picture. Effective leaders zoom in and zoom out."

GOOD INFOGRAPHICS AND THE FEDERAL BUDGET. This one does double duty. For leaders who are watching how the federal budget cuts will affect their organization, it provides a surprising perspective on the proposed federal budget. And for anyone who is looking for a better way to present complex information, the infographic is an excellent model – a beautiful visual that conveys a huge amount of information in a single chart or graph. This comes from one of my very favorite online magazines with information relevant to nonprofits: GOOD (www.good.is). Check out this graphic on the 2012 proposed federal budget. The thesis of this graphic goes like this: The proposed cuts that Congress is currently fighting over tooth and nail will only begin to scratch the surface of our true need for budget reform. Something big has to change. As the infographic says: "Hard choices lie ahead, and they only get harder the longer we ignore them."
http://www.good.is/post/infographic-proposed-house-cuts-are-tiny-slice-of-the-budget-pie/ and for many other informative graphics visit: http://www.good.is/infographics

STOP BLAMING YOUR CULTURE. In strategy+business magazine, authors Jon Katzenbach and Ashley Harshak suggest that you need to stop blaming your organization's culture and start using it instead to reinforce and build the new behaviors that will give you the high-performance organization you want. Numerous principles for changing culture through behavior have become evident through ongoing practice. Here are just a few described in the article:

  • Start pragmatically. Don't try to change everything at once. Focus on a few critical behaviors that resonate with your current culture, but that will raise your organization's performance. Explicitly identify the target group – the employees whose behavior needs to change – and bring the necessary changes to life by demonstrating them.
    • Reinforce the new behaviors through formal and informal means. Provide formal metrics, incentives, and process guidance that lead people to practice these new behaviors again and again, until they experience their value. For example, set up appraisals, salary reviews, and training to reinforce and reward the new behaviors you seek. At the same time, develop informal connections that foster the responsiveness and emotional commitment needed to deal with the unexpected. When there's a challenging situation … cultivate support networks of people who can assess it and put in place actions not prescribed by process and procedure.
      • Seek out role models for the new behavior. Start with the most effective practitioners, the people who distinguish themselves by the way they act. We often call these individuals pride builders because their example helps instill pride about the behavior change. They can also help you find ways to get others to adopt the same behavior. This work is sometimes known as looking for positive deviance.

      GROUP IQ. Here is an interesting (and local) study that supports much of what I found in the healthy team study: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11010/1116833-115.stm As you read this, think about your internal team, as well as your Board of Directors. Below, I have excerpted my favorite part:

      Surprisingly to Dr. Woolley, the average IQ of a group had almost no impact on its collective intelligence. It also didn't matter whether a group had one high-IQ individual. There were three factors that did make a difference, though.

      1. One was the social sensitivity of group members – how much they paid attention to each other and asked questions.
      2. The second was turn-taking. Groups that shared the floor had much better results. "When you had someone really dominating the conversations in these groups, the group did not perform well," she said.
      3. Finally, in general, the more women in a group, the smarter it was. As they analyzed that result, she said, it didn't mean the women had higher IQs than the men, but that they were more socially sensitive and less likely to dominate discussions.

      YOUR TURN. What do you think about the topics above? Have an article that is relevant to other nonprofit leaders? Send it to me, and we'll publish the links in an upcoming Mosaic.

       

      Leslie Bonner (lbonner@deweykaye.com) is a senior consultant whose areas of expertise include organization, team, board and leadership development, strategy development and execution, change leadership, and performance improvement. View her profile and connect with her on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lesliebonner

       

       

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