NYNP blog post 3-1-10

Sermier's ten steps for managing and leading

During last week's Leadership and Strategy class, Professor Sermier shared his sequential ten-point framework for managing and leading an organization:
1) Know yourself
2) Know your boss or bosses
3) Know your key executives and staff
4) Terminate non-productive executives
5) Identify your key stakeholders and what each wants
6) Identify your five major problems
7) Identify your five major goals
8) Communicate your major goals
9) Actively pursue your goals
10) Celebrate your successes

The first step is to know yourself, because until you can manage yourself and get comfortable with yourself, you won't be able to manage anything else.

Additional dimensions: focusing on clients and motivating teams via respect
Sermier shared a perspective of leadership as essentially including everything involved in management, with an added dimension of doing the right thing. In nonprofits, doing the right thing means keeping your clients in focus at all times, and making sure that the focus on clients guides decision-making.

For many nonprofit staff, that focus on clients will be inspiring. However, that's not all that's needed to motivate and lead a team. To motivate people, you must show them respect, and because that's a vague concept, Sermier clarified what it looks like to do so:
* Learn and remember names
* Never complain
* Make your team members look good
* Publicly support your team when the stakes are high
* Publicly take the heat for the team's mistakes
* Use "we" when talking about problems, to signal that you see solving problems as a team effort
* Be hopeful within reason; give your team a sense that there's a better future
* Accomplish things together, then celebrate together
* Encourage dissent
* Hold yourself accountable, and admit mistakes
* Give credit and praise
* Be guided by a moral compass

NYNP blog post 2-3-10

"Doing things right" versus "Doing the right thing"
A simple differentiation between management and leadership

Tonight was the first night of Ed Sermier's Leadership and Strategy course at Baruch College's School of Public Affairs, which I'm excited to be taking this semester with many of the United Way Senior Fellows from my cohort in 2008. The course will be examining the concepts of leadership, management, and strategy in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Since a lot of trainings focus on leadership development, I'll share some of the insights from this semester here in this blog, as there will be many relevant takeaways for nonprofit trainers.

One thought-provoking takeaway from tonight's class was Sermier's description of the difference between management and leadership: management is about doing things right, and leadership is about doing the right thing. This means that managers focus on efficiency, which is essentially about making existing processes better, whereas leaders focus on effectiveness, which includes thinking about the existing picture and making changes if something should be different in order to be right. Because leaders need to understand the existing picture in order to think critically about it, they need to have a strong understanding of management.

Sermier asked the class to remember that in nonprofits, an important part of being a leader and doing the right thing is helping people who have the least power -- our clients -- especially when the people who do have power lose sight of them.

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?