NYNP blog post 3-19-09

Trainers as both leaders and managers

As nonprofit trainers in these tumultuous times, we have the opportunity to help our organizations both manage and lead our staff. Both functions are essential.

Yesterday, I was at the March session of Community Resource Exchange's 2009 Leadership Caucus (http://www.crenyc.org/consult/consult_leadershipcaucus.php), where we spent the morning discussing the differences between leadership and management. The jumping off point for the discussion was John P. Kotter's 1990 Harvard Business Review article "What Leaders Really Do," in which he argues that management and leadership are complementary but distinct.

To sum up the article, Kotter describes managers as promoting stability, which includes putting hierarchies, processes, and policies in place. These systems organize and monitor people's efficiency and accuracy as they work on their organization's plans. Kotter describes leaders, on the other hand, as pushing for and supporting change. This includes aligning people so that everyone moves towards the same target, which is done by communicating a motivating vision of the future, and then convincing and empowering people to make that vision happen.

Applying these ideas specifically to trainers, when trainers work in service of management, we make sure that staff know how to do things like fill out paperwork correctly, follow procedures properly, and comply with regulations. When we work in service of leadership, we make sure that staff understand our organizations' missions, visions, and values, and we inspire staff to bring these to life. For training to have an impact on participants' behavior on the job, we as trainers need to do both.

This is especially true in the nonprofit world, where organizations strive for success on a double bottom line -- we measure success in both revenue and in progress toward our missions. In other words, we need to succeed with our heads as well as our hearts. A nonprofit organization could make huge amounts of money, but if that happened while making no progress toward its mission, the nonprofit's work would be deemed a failure. Conversely, a nonprofit could make wonderful progress toward its mission, but if that happened while losing huge amounts money, the nonprofit would cease to exist.

These issues of management vs. leadership and revenue vs. mission come to life for nonprofit trainers in that we need to address both our participants' skills and their motivation. We must provide staff with the tools they need to implement our organizations' program models, and we must also provide staff with the inspiration they will need to overcome challenges and strive towards the mission and vision.

Right now, with staff roles changing as nonprofits' budgets decrease and tough decisions being made that impact organizations' visions of the future, nonprofit trainers can be an overlooked resource. Many nonprofit trainers are adept at integrating the issues I described, as many of us have balanced the needs of management and leadership, skills and motivation in our workshops for years. This means that right now, we can be of great service to our organizations.

So the question for us becomes: how can each of us, in our own situations in our own nonprofits, step up to help with managing and leading our organizations through the crisis we face today?