Cultures Are Not Bumper Stickers*: Valuing Diversity and Subverting Discrimination

America has a history of cultural diversity and tension around it. Our cultures are integral to our individual and group identities – usually drawn upon identity-group lines like race, ethnicity, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. Past rhetoric refers with pride to America’s “melting pot” of cultural heritage, but today you are more likely to hear the word “implicit bias” and “disproportionate incarceration” when referring to America’s contemporary diversity policies. Officer shootings of black men have turned public attention to structural racism and how we can direct our own efforts to addressing the need for more authentic action on diversity issues.

Why should you care? Ethics and economics. Many of us react emotionally, even viscerally to these issues. As far back as the U.S. Declaration of Independence we have held the belief that everyone deserves the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and in the twentieth century many cultures around the world internalized the idea of dignity as a human right (McNett 2004). That queasy, uncomfortable feeling is our internalized values telling us discrimination is ethically wrong. But beyond ethics, simple economic logic also supports the idea that society is most productive as a whole when a diverse group is allowed to question the process and drive innovation (Robinson and Dechant 2004). We care because it’s our ethical and societal responsibility to do so and we stand to gain from acting on it. 

What needs to be done? We need to move away from the models that we have used to address diversity issues and shift paradigms to truly value different cultural and individual perspectives. Common models of encouraging diversity in the past have been affirmative action-type and legacy legitimacy-type. The first employs quotas to make groups look more like society and comply with federal programs. Women and people of color are implicitly expected to blend in to the historical organizational culture. Legacy legitimacy programs seek diversity because it’s good business; they assign diverse staff to responsibilities associated with their background to gain market insight into that identity-group. Both of these approaches perpetuate discrimination. The diversity of opinions and life learning that staff members bring to the table are not independently valued; and they are discouraged from challenging how work is done (Thomas and Ely 2004). Men and women who enter companies under such diversity programs are often assigned to unchallenging positions with little opportunity for advancement (Robinson and Dechant 2004). Both styles of diversity management fail to harness the potential of a diverse workforce and perpetuate structural disadvantages.

But what can I do? Be a leader. Recognize and value differences from cultural diversity. Brainstorm ways to foster an organizational culture that makes everyone feel valued and is open to new ideas and change. Start open discussions about how workers' identity-group membership influences their experience in the organization. Above all, work to identify forms of dominance and insubordination which are often not readily visible and actively reform to avoid replicating those structures (Thomas and Ely 2004).

While the debate about structural racism in law enforcement has been the recent focus of public attention, structural discrimination runs through almost all facets of our society. Looking at law enforcement’s role in structural discrimination alone ignores the larger systemic problem and may once again create solutions like those described above where the problem is addressed where it is most visible, but not at its roots. If every organization in America - including police forces - took responsibility for how they engage and include diverse groups in their work, we would be well on our way to a more inclusive and productive society.

*The title of this piece “Cultures are not bumper stickers” is a quote from Sowell 2004

References

McNett, Jeanne (2004) “Diversity in the Workplace: Ethics, Pragmatism, or Some of Both?” Understanding and Managing Diversity: Readings, Cases, and Exercises 3rd ed. Pearson Prentice Hall. p. 241-253.

Robinson, Gail and Kathleen Dechant (2004) “Building a Business Case for Diversity.” Understanding and Managing Diversity: Readings, Cases, and Exercises 3rd ed. Pearson Prentice Hall. p. 228-240.

Sowell, Thomas (2004) “A World View of Cultural Diversity.” Understanding and Managing Diversity: Readings, Cases, and Exercises 3rd ed. Pearson Prentice Hall. p. 27-38

Thomas, David A. & Robin J. Ely (2004) “Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity.” Understanding and Managing Diversity: Readings, Cases, and Exercises 3rd ed. Pearson Prentice Hall. p. 211-227.

The Sky's the Limit!: Collaboration and Your Organization

Nonprofit collaborations have proliferated in recent years, both in number and array of collaboration styles. Nonprofits can partner intersectorally; government, private, other nonprofits, the sky’s the limit! These collaborations can also take a huge variety of forms including co-sponsorship, federation, coalition, consortium, network, joint venture, parent-subsidiary, merger and consolidation (Yankey, Jacobus, and Koney 2001). This diversity makes it hard to prescribe best practices for collaborations, but there are some key threads that we can pull out from the experiences of various nonprofits who have undergone collaborative processes.

Do what you do

Keep your mission. Play to your strengths. Incompatible missions are a primary challenge in collaboration (Yankey and Willen 2010). Organizations have to know where they stand and what goals they hope to achieve through this partnership. A side-by-side analysis early in the exploratory process of a collaboration can often help to hash out these details (Yankey and Willen 2010). This doesn’t mean that organizations with very different missions can’t collaborate; in fact it’s sometimes successful for very different organizations to band together if they have a goal in common. An example of this occurred in Seattle in a collaborative ballot initiative between an arts museum and a low-income housing project which secured funding for facilities expansion for both groups (Fortier 1996). The shared goal of winning the vote was in line with both of their very different missions, so it worked.

Balance internal and external environments  

Many collaborations arise out of a desire to strategically address external pressures like increasing funding or service provision. A favorable political and social environment for the merger is important for success (Sharma and Missey 1998). However success also depends upon keeping staff informed and securing their buy-in. Internal organizational culture differences can be a challenge in creating a successful partnership (Yankey and Willen 2010). This was a key consideration in a case where a Hispanic community center considered taking on child abuse case management from the state protective services in Boston.  Of primary concern was how this work would negatively affect their reputation in the community and thus their ability to carry out their mission. Significant doubts among board members about the benefits of the partnership also raised red flags (Varley 1996). While this analysis doesn’t bode well for the collaboration, it is a good demonstration of how an organization should consider the full impacts of partnership beyond financial gain.

Plan, plan, PLAN

Going into a collaboration, organizations should know exactly what they hope to get out of the partnership, how they intend to go about doing it, and how these plans support the missions of the organizations and will strategically advance the position of both in their communities (Yankey, Jacobus and Koney 2001). Developing a sound process for collaboration with clear roles and policy guidelines can go a long way towards to smoothing what may otherwise be a difficult transition (Yankey and Willen 2010, Sharma and Missey 1998). The negative consequences of entering into a partnership without taking time to plan the intention and implementation the union are demonstrated in the story of collaboration between the shoe manufacturer Timberland and the community service program City Year. This partnership began well and expanded quickly, but without a plan to guide the growth and intention of the collaboration, tensions between and within the two organizations eventually ended the partnership (Elias 1996).

Because there are so many possible combinations of sectors and types of collaborations, there is no cookie cutter process for pursuing a strategic alliance. But keeping these three things in mind will help organizations choose valuable alliances and succeed in their implementation.  

References

Elias, Jaan. 1996. “Timberland and Community Involvement.” Supervisor, James Austin. Harvard Business School Publishing. Boston, MA.

Fortier, Suzanne. 1996. “Funding Seattle’s Art Museum and Low-Income Housing: The Politics of Interest Groups and Tax Levies (A).” Supervisor, Jon Brock. Cascade Center for Public Service: Public Service Curriculum Exchange.

Sharma, Janet and Amanda Missey. 1998. “How I learned to Stop Griping . . . And Love Collaboration.” From a presentation at the National Community Service Conference. June 30, 1998. New Orleans, LA.

Varley, Pamela. 1996. “Partners in Child Protection Services: The Department of Social Services and La Alianza Hispana (A).” Abridged. Kennedy School of Government. Boston, MA.

Yankey, John A., Barbara Wester Jacobus, and Kelly McNally Koney. 2001. Merging Nonprofit Organizations: The Art and Science of the Deal. Mandel center for Nonprofit Organizations: Cleveland, OH.

Yankey, John A. and Carol K. Willen. 2010. “Collaboration and Strategic Alliances.” in The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management. Renz, David O, ed. 375-400. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA. 

If Robert Burns Knew about Strategic Planning: What We Know Now that He Didn't Then

The famous Robert Burns quote says “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” and while it’s true that rigid planning often fails to cope with the unexpected, good strategic planing can actually lead an organization successfully through the challenges of its time.

So what is strategic planning? It is an essential process in guiding organizations to achieve their mission by identifying strengths and weaknesses, strategic issues for the organization, and plans for acting on and evaluating progress on these issues. This planning helps to clarify the mission and identifies fundamental issues. If effectively implemented with the aid of organizational leaders, the process can candidly confront critical issues, and create detailed roadmaps for success (Bryson).

Most resources list ten steps to this process. It has been adapted for all kinds of environments like entrepreneurs and foundations, and the order of the steps often changes to meet the needs of the group. Here’s my version, synthesized from Bryson and United Way:

1. Align Stakeholders: Begin conversations with relevant stakeholders and agree on a strategic planning process. There are a lot of different versions; pick one that will suit your organization best.
2. Mission, Internal Assessment, External Assessment: Take stock of your current environment and goals. Start with the internal. What is the mission of your organization? How do your operations function? What are the organizational mandates you must work within? Then, think about the external environment in which your organization exists. Be careful at this stage to simply describe what is, we’re not critiquing yet!
3. (Vision: Taking into account the information you outlined in step one, identify the long-term vision for the organization. Where do you hope to be in five, ten, twenty years? If you are a brand new organization it’s often overwhelming to think about long term goals so early in the process, skip it for now and come back when you have more organizational capacity to consider the vision.)
4. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats or SWOTS: In this stage we begin to critique the information that we’ve gathered. Strengths and weaknesses assess internal pros and cons of the organization, while opportunities and threats highlight the external pressures that may require change from your organization.
5. Strategic Issues: From your SWOTS, identify issues that are urgent and are likely to have a large impact on your organization. These are strategic issues, defined as: “Internal or external development[s] which could impact the organization’s performance, to which the organization must respond in an orderly fashion and over which the organization may reasonably expect to exert some influence” (United Way p. 3). Draft statements of strategic issues that include a definition, list of factors that make it fundamental, and outcomes that would result from different scenarios involving the issue.
6. Formulate Strategies and Plans: What do you need to do and how will you do it?
7. Do it:  Development an effective implementation process and get formal approval for the plan. Then get to work.
8. Evaluate!!! The successful strategic plan requires regular reassessment of the organization’s success at addressing the strategic issues you’ve worked hard to identify.

And when that’s all done, start thinking about what will happen when the current strategic plan comes to an end (Tregoe). Strategic planning is an ongoing process that needs to be revisited frequently to keep programming relevant within its environment (Bryson). While Burns was a skeptic in 1785 when he coined a popular proverb about planning, I think he might have whistled a different tune if he knew about  the strategic planning process today. 

References:

Bryson, John M. 2010. “Strategic Planning and the Strategy Change Cycle” in The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management. Renz, David O, ed. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA. 

Tregoe, Benjamin. 1983. “The Challenges of Strategic Management.” In Top Management Strategy. Benjamin B. Tregoe and John W. Zimmerman. New York: Simon and Schuster.

United Way of Dane County. No date. “Strategic Planning Process.”

Is Your Organization Ready for Change?

Change is hard. I think most of us would agree that sudden disruptions to our routine make us uncomfortable, and require more than our normal workload to simply adapt to the new state of affairs. These changes throw us off; they make us question our own competence because of the loss of familiarity associated with the old routine (Moss Kanter). As a leader of an organization, you must grapple with aversion to change to improve systems and keep the organization current with external pressures. Change is made particularly difficult by cumbersome or inflexible management practices that are unable to move quickly and adapt to change (Charan and Tichy). For nonprofits, an added difficulty is that funders favor established, proven methods over exploration of uncharted waters (Gowdy et al), perversely, innovation may actually limit resources.

So, what can we do to make change easier, faster, and funded? The answers lie in the development of a strategic plan with strong core principals and regular reevaluations along with improved management practices such as eliminating unneeded managerial layers, employing self-confident managerial skills, and involving relevant stakeholders. These five measures will help prepare an organization for change and ease tensions during the process. How you ask? Let’s get into it.

1.             Develop a strategic plan with strong core principals. Planning to outline goals and strategies for achieving those goals is the key to organizational success (Renz Ch. 9).  It also sets a baseline; leaders have a solid communal definition of the organization’s essence. Moving forward on major organizational changes will be easier if you have clear core concepts that you can keep common throughout changes that the organization undergoes (Cameron).
2.       Regularly evaluate your strategic plan. Regular reconsideration of this strategic plan then helps to insure that the strategies are proper and effective at achieving goals within the current environment. Constantly thinking about external changes that may impact the efficacy of your strategy and the future beyond the current strategic plan helps organizations see changes coming and preempt them (Tregoe).  
3.       Limit managerial levels to those that are truly required. When supervisors are closer to the action they are more accessible to employees to hear complaints and suggestions and are thus directly connected to feedback loops within the organization. Streamlined management can also respond more quickly to change because they are not bogged down by complex hierarchical procedures (Charan and Tichy).
4.       Be a self-confident manager. According to Charan and Tichy, this is a manager who is self-assured enough to accept feedback – good and bad – and incorporate improvements to their management style graciously. They challenge processes to make sure that performance is efficient and effective and take ownership over creating the simplified hierarchical structure discussed in #3, though it may involve difficult decisions. This style of leadership creates a flexible, responsive structure, more able to adjust to the demands of change.
5.       Involve stakeholders and reward their adaptability. While asking for an inclusive decision making process slows down organizational response time, the key to successful change is to secure the buy-in of stakeholders, including funders. If stakeholders can’t give input before a change, make sure that they are informed of it and are presented a solid, evidence-based case for why it was pursued. Internally, rewarding exemplary adaptability and adoption of the new policies among staff and providing them with training opportunities builds support for change (Cameron).

      Good organizational planning and adept management practices together form an agile organization in tune with prevailing winds that can create successful change despite our individual and organizational aversion to it.

References:

- Cameron, Kim. 1991. “Transformational Leadership.” In Developing Management Skills. David A. Whetton and Kim S. Cameron. New York: Harper Collins.

- Charan, Ram and Noel Tichy. 1989. “Speed, Simplicity, Self-Confidence: An Interview with Jack Welch.” Harvard Business Review. No. 89513:110-120.

- Gowdy, Heather, Alex Hildebrand, David La Piana, and Melissa Mendes Campos. 2009. Convergence: How Five Trends will Reshape the Social Sector. La Piana Consulting.

- Moss Kanter, Rosabeth. 2012. “Ten Reasons People Resist Change.” Harvard Business Review: Change Management. Web. Accessed February 16, 2015. https://hbr.org/2012/09/ten-reasons-people-resist-chang/

- Renz, David O, ed. 2010. The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA. 

- Tregoe, Benjamin. 1983. “The Challenges of Strategic Management.” In Top Management Strategy. Benjamin B. Tregoe and John W. Zimmerman. New York: Simon and Schuster. 

What is a Sector Anyway?

The term “nonprofit sector” has become something of a buzzword in our modern society, but what does it mean? How is a nonprofit different than any other business? To begin with the most superficial definition, nonprofits are a varied group of corporations that straddle the divide between the government and for-profit sectors. Nonprofits, by definition, perform work in the interest of societal good (like government) but are privately operated (like for-profit businesses), but they are distinct from each sector in important ways too.

Let’s consider first how they are distinct from for-profit businesses. Two important characteristics distinguish these groups: ownership or governance and the goal of the corporation’s activities. For-profit corporations are owned by a group of individuals who purchased shares in the company. Their goal as an organization is to make as much money as possible for those shareholders or owners. Nonprofits, in contrast, are prohibited by law from generating profit for individuals that are associated with the organization. Instead of owners, nonprofits are governed by a board of directors that are often dedicated to the cause that the nonprofit serves and are not compensated for their leadership in the organization (Renz 42-3). None of this is to say that nonprofits and for-profits can’t hold the same values, indeed, businesses are becoming more vocal advocates of social issues and nonprofit and for-profit partnerships sometimes provide advantageous vessels for problem solving in the name of public good.

While nonprofits and for-profits tend to be as different as night and day in their core missions, nonprofits and public sector entities have more in common there. Both public and nonprofit actors work towards the betterment of society. Again, ownership or governance is the key difference between public and nonprofit sectors. Because government entities are funded by tax-payer money they are subject to the desires of their owners – voters. The activities of the bureau or office are dependent upon the prevailing direction of the political winds and how public opinion favors government involvement in societal affairs (Berman 6).

Nonprofit funding, on the other hand, comes from a myriad of sources: grants from private foundations, grants from government, donations from individuals, donations from companies, membership dues, the sale of goods and services, the list goes on. The distinction between the public and nonprofit sector here is that nonprofit donors are not compelled to give money as a nation’s citizens are compelled to pay taxes. While it may be wise for a nonprofit to please its donors in order to continue to secure funds from those sources, they are not legally obliged to do so.

Government and nonprofits often work together to provide public goods for society to an even greater extent than nonprofits and for-profits. A classic case for government intervention in economic and societal affairs is the market failure or situations where it’s impossible to make money by providing a good so the government steps in to do so. Likewise, nonprofits address market failures by providing goods or services of public benefit that others cannot provide for economic or political reasons (Renz 186). Due to this, partnership between government and nonprofits often arises naturally because they seek to address the same societal problems.

Nonprofits today take a multitude of forms in terms of funding sources, services they provide, labor structure, and organizational culture, but they all seek to fill important gaps in public service that elude government and for-profit actors. In a world with increasing social consciousness, nonprofits have more opportunities to work collaboratively with all sorts of other groups and organizations and reinvent what it means to work in the nonprofit sector.

References: 

Renz, David O, ed. 2010. The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA. 

Berman, Howard J. 2002. Doing "Good" vs. Doing "Well": The Role of Nonprofits in Society. Inquiry 39: 5-11.