Mary Henton's List: NPO management, growth, and development

• Simply put, effective organizations deliver results
• to be fully effective an organization must demonstrate strength in each of the following areas: leadership, decision making and structure, people, work processes and systems, and culture.
• While many nonprofits owe their initial success to visionary leadership, only systematic development of each of these five areas will lead to the managerial strength required to sustain growth and outcomes
• Organizations need to establish and communicate clear priorities, make roles and responsibilities explicit, create clear connections across organizational silos, and develop the talented people they attract
• The lessons emerging from Bain's research are clear: effective organizations deliver results, and strength across all five elements is required. Our experience working with nonprofit organizations has borne this out repeatedly.
• link between organizational effectiveness and results
• Leadership: Nonprofit leaders tend to establish strong visions and build strong teams. These same leaders, however, seem to be less effective at translating a compelling vision into a set of explicit goals and corresponding priorities. They're even less effective at communicating priorities throughout their organizations.
• organizations on average have some difficulty evaluating, developing, and rewarding staff consistent with the organizations' priorities.
• nonprofits in general do not appear to prepare adequately for leadership transitions and succession
• work processes are not well defined and resources are scarce.
• Culture is a clear strength. Interestingly, however, ability to execute change is a weakness
• Nonprofit leaders cannot effectively change the direction of their organizations if they do not know what their priorities are and what they want the change to accomplish.
• Many nonprofits have inspirational and visionary leaders who attract hard-working people with great passion for the cause at hand. However, these same leaders often find it difficult to implement and codify the kinds of mechanisms that would help these highly motivated people be as productive as possible. Good managers know how to bring discipline, structure, and process to bear, and this is where nonprofits seem to be most lacking.
• nonprofits need to take a holistic approach towards improving effectiveness, shoring up management capabilities across the board.
• following five sets of questions can help an organization's leadership team assess those areas and set a purposeful course towards improvement
• 1. Are we clear on the strategic priorities that will enable our organization to achieve our desired impact over the next several years? Have we communicated our strategy clearly enough that everyone within the organization understands where we are going, why, and how we will get there?
• One way to determine if your organization has clear priorities is to ask each member of the senior management team to make a list of its top five priorities for the next one to three years.
• determine whether the priorities are well communicated throughout the organization
• 2. Given the organization's priorities, what decisions are truly critical?
• 3. Who in our organization must work closely together to achieve these priorities, and does our structure enable them to do so?
• "grouping and linking" of work
• work is grouped: around geographies, for example, or product lines or functional areas such as finance or human resources
• how people need to work together across these groups
• 4. Do we have the right people and capabilities to achieve our priorities
• their goals and measures align with these priorities?
• For each priority, identify who is working on it and compare it to items that are of lower priority.
• enough people against things that matter?
• best people allocated against the things that matter the most?
• 5. Have we defined the work processes and tools
• Consider the experience of KIPP, a charter management organization currently operating schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia. In 2000, when KIPP had only two schools (both high performing), the organization received a large grant to replicate its efforts across the country. KIPP's small leadership team recognized that in order to grow successfully, they would need to articulate the work processes—both programmatic and administrative—that had made the model so effective in the first place. These processes included, for example, how to build a strong local board, budget for a new school, and hire the right teachers. To codify these processes, the organization's leaders documented the steps they had taken to set up their first two schools. By doing this, they ensured that the principals in each new KIPP school did not have to spend time reinventing the fundamentals of the model and could, therefore, spend more time focusing on educating the students.

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• Wise words for us at CI - Mary Henton on 2011-10-04
• Grouping and linking. hmmm...issues for us? - Mary Henton on 2011-10-04
• Excellent example. Processes in place when we're small so that as we grow big we can continue successes? - Mary Henton on 2011-10-04

• connect the dots between mission and programs
• specify the resources that will be required to deliver those programs, and to establish performance measures that allow everyone to understand whether the desired results are being achieved
• know the right questions to ask when evaluating new opportunities,
• four distinct components:
• GAINING STRATEGIC CLARITY
• Who or what
• specific outcomes for which we want to be held accountable?
• activities
• programs or activities align with our mission and intended impact?
• full costs
• cost per outcome or positive result?
• develop milestones that will help them check their progress and determine whether they’re on track as implementation ensues. A more focused set of milestones, sometimes called a dashboard, can be given to the board, so that they can help the management team monitor high-level progress. Many organizations also use a version of the milestones when communicating with funders and other supporters, in order to demonstrate their commitment to the new strategic direction and their progress in implementing it.
• milestones across three categories: program, operations, and finance.
• Systematically collecting this type of data is critical to knowing on an ongoing basis whether your organization is doing the work it intends and if that work is translating to the desired results.
• Business planning requires getting crystal clear about your mission, target beneficiaries, and goals and considering how each of your programs and activities affects your impact and financial sustainability.

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  Like many nonprofits, Teach For America focused solely on its mission and short-term financing
• nonprofit leaders can pursue their visions while building enduring organizations. The lesson: the mission and organizational capacity must go hand in hand.
• For a while, the energy and success of the early years masked the start-up’s organizational deficiencies. But these could not be kept at bay indefinitely. One problem was an inadequate organizational structure.
• Organization should matter to nonprofit groups and profit-making businesses alike. But though nonprofit leaders zealously build programs and raise money, they often neglect the organizational structures and management processes that form the base of enduring institutions.² Part of the problem lies in the funding environment.
• Instead of calculating the organization’s expenses and then trying to raise enough money, as in the early years, Kopp and her team now started by figuring out how much money they could raise sustainably and then trimmed the budget to fit.
• concrete fund-raising goals
• solid, quantifiable performance goals

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• It has replaced the traditional nonprofit focus on internal activities such as fundraising, staff recruitment, and program development with an external focus on building its network.
• HFHE’s national director, Yousry Makar, asked himself what other resources his organization needed to reduce homelessness
• By mobilizing resources outside their immediate control, networked nonprofits achieve their missions far more efficiently, effectively, and sustainably than they could have by working alone.
• networked nonprofits forge long-term partnerships with trusted peers to tackle their missions on multiple fronts
• networked nonprofit leaders think of their organizations as nodes within a broad constellation that revolves around shared missions and values.
• focus on their mission
• , not their organization; on trust, not control; and on being a node, not a hub.
• put their missions rather than their organizations at the center of their operations
• They see themselves as nodes within a constellation of equal, interconnected partners, rather than as hubs at the center of their nonprofit universes

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