Diversity: The Utilitarian Kaleidoscope

Why should we care?

In an increasingly stratified and globalized world, our working definition of diversity shifts alongside sociopolitical trends. While diversity has grown from a race-based term to include a kaleidoscope of identities including sex, gender, religion, nationality, income, educational attainment, and many other labels, it continues to lack definition in many ways. In understanding that the term is sociopolitical and will continue to evolve, leaders must operationalize the term in context to their work.

Jeanne McNett writes that an economic argument for diversity is one that recognizes the shifted and globalized pool of consumers. Businesses, in building relationships with consumers and other business leaders, must engage a diverse workforce because they will speak to a larger consumer base and promote creativity, particularly culturally competent creativity that businesses traditionally did not engage.

The same is true for non-profit organizations. Whether engaging potential employees or potential volunteers, diversity matters. Leadership must work with and hire more diverse individuals whom reflect the diverse communities from which they come from. These communities are often the target of non-profit work.

Further, diversity aligns with the philosophical impetus of non-profit work. If non-profits in the U.S. truly bridge the gap services offered by the government or provide greater services to “deserving” often under-recognized groups, then non-profits are engaging in ethical work. According to McNett, this ethical derivation of diversity that non-profits engage in can be categorized into three areas: deontological (faith-based), teleological (hope-based), and caring (charity) approaches to diversity either applied universally or to a particular application. Regardless of the ethical theory applied, the United States is becoming more global along all of these facets and non-profit leadership must engage the audience and constituents.

What are the implications?

As historically excluded groups begin to stratify and make up sub-groups, thus adding to diverse identities, they bring with them varying skills. This idea is mentioned by Thomas Sowell whom noted that while Japan an Switzerland haven’t been historically prosperous in natural resources, their populations have developed a broad range of human capital that promoted economic prosperity (33).

Robinson and Dechant further this examination of diversity in soft skills in citing Fortune 100s data on why human resource executive foster diversity. While laws exist to denounce discrimination and segregation like the Equal Opportunity Employment Act, these HR executives promoted diversity because it’s presence added value to the company. This included creativity and innovation, higher0quality problem solving, greater leadership, and fostering global relationships (230-35).

What can leaders do about it?

For ethical and production reasons, non-profit leaders should foster diversity within their organizations at various levels. While Robinson and Dechant identify four steps to involving diversity in an organization (236-7), I find that they are no different than any other human capital targeting program, whether it be marketing, volunteerism, etc. The main take away is that to foster diversity, one must focus on and set goals to foster diversity. No organization will just happen upon diversity.

Further, Robert Herman (Renz, 2016) notes that executives must traverse both the internal organization and external forces. This reinforces the idea that context matters. Impressions and intentions matter. Having leadership that reflects the community, stakeholders, or other parties is important, particularly when addressing issues from the four distinct organizational perspectives: structural, human resource, political, and symbolic. This is starkly apparent in the case study involving the Acheen Malay Mosque Village where, despite having their cultural and historical interests in mind, the Muslim community was distrusting of the Penang Heritage Trust because their board was almost exclusively composed of Chinese-descendant Malay persons.

A Streetcar Named Collaboration

While collaborations can easily become complex, multi-faceted associations between several organizations, in its simplest form, a collaboration begins as dyadic relationship between a non-profit organization and another non-profit organization, a for-profit company, or a government agency. Typically, this dyad includes two individuals representing their organization.

Much like A Streetcar Named Desire, the role each party plays in collaboration depends on their goals and perspectives. Blanche Dubois is ruled by her philosophy and often adjusts for harsh realities by misrepresenting them or ignoring them. Non-profit organizations often fail to marriage their philosophical goals with their collaboration goals and, in failing to frame their vision for the collaboration (UnitedWay Worldwide, 2008) with fundamental process factors of success (Sharma and Missey, 1998), non-profit organizations fail to sustain collaborations. Stanley Kowalski, on the other hand, is rooted in dichotomous truths and instinct. Government agencies and for-profit companies, particularly the latter, have dichotomous 'bottom lines' that not only measure their success, but are unflinchingly rigid and often dominate the collaboration.

Here, I examine one non-profit collaboration specifically, identify the role played (Blanche vs. Stanley), and examine the success of the collaboration.

La Alianza Hispana and the Boston Dept. of Social Services (Non-Profit and Gov't Agency)

After years of criticism for lacking cultural competency and an increasing caseload, the Boston Department of Social Services (DSS) approached La Alianza Hispanaa (La Alianza, for short) with a harsh proposal: Either lose all DSS funding (which constituted a significant percentage of La Alianza's income) or accept a substantial increase in funding to provide all child protection and case management services to Latino children in Boston (a service that La Alianza had never provided before) (Varley, 1996).

Here, DSS is clearly Stanley because their goal was measurably dichotomous and their approach was rigid. For DSS, success was getting La Alianza to accept the contract (dichotomous) and their approach disallowed collaboration and often shuttered communication (rigid).

La Alianza played Blanche because while they stuck to their overall philosophy of bettering life for the Latino community in Boston, they ignored the major fault with the collaboration, which was a lack of communication and a lack of negotiation. Some of their board members verbalized their concerns that the per case funding was insufficient to cover overhead and the role they played in the Latino community would be severely compromised, but they did very little to address the stark imbalance in power dynamics. Further, La Alizanza would have been agreeing to provide a service that they had no experience in providing. While some training would have been provided by DSS, La Alianza would ultimately be shifting toward mission creep in fear of losing their funding.

This collaboration was unsuccessful for several reasons. According to Mattesich and Monsey’s Collaboration: What Makes It Work, as cited by Sharma and Missey (1998), there are nineteen factors for successful collaborations spanning six categories. Of them, sixteen went unfulfilled. Yes, the sociopolitical environment corroborated the collaboration and was an opportunity for success. The Latino community in Boston was expanding and suffering due to the crack-cocaine epidemic, which both DSS and La Alianza recognized as a moment of intervention. However, the history between DSS and the La Alianza (and the Latino community at large) was strained with no sign of reversal, flexibility and adaptability were ostensibly disallowed, resources were insufficient, and communication was poor. Further, a namely due to the lack of communication and lack or flexibility, shared-decision making was absent and the vision for the collaboration was not shared between both parties, two keys of a successful collaboration identified by the National Civic League (UnitedWay Worldwide, 2008).

Other Types of Non-Profit Collaborations

As mentioned earlier, non-profit organizations also collaborate with for-profit companies and other non-profits, but the barriers to success are no different. When City Year partnered with Tiberland to provide apparel, both parties were somewhere between Blanche and Stanley. However, when Timberland’s bottom-line was at-risk (they saw slowed growth and declining profits), they abandoned the project because their measure of success did not include/measure value from the branding association – it only included profit. This collaboration would have been more successful if Timberland had expanded their measures of success to include multiple aspects along the value creation spectrum because the associational value was complementary for both parties, especially Timberland (Austin and Seitanidi as cited by Renz, 2016).

A non-profit collaboration with another non-profit faces the same challenges, particularly when vision and philosophy aren’t shared as those flexible definitions fuel non-profit work. In the collaboration between the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) and Low-Income Housing, the vision for funding allocation, political capital, and implementation was not shared between each party and the underlying philosophies clashed, resulting in an inability to communicate to the public the value added through the collaboration.

Conclusion

Overall, collaborations are neither sustainable nor successful when either party takes on an extreme role like Blanche or Stanley. So, avoid the dramatics, communicate, and collaborate in the decision-making. And make a checklist!

Strategic Planning: The World's Most Valuable List

Everyone loves lists! I think it's human nature. Just look at the rise of PowerPoint or Buzzfeed. With something as complex and fluctuating as strategic planning, the easiest way to express it would be a list. The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management provides John M. Bryson's Strategy Change Cycle, so lets examine it and see what value is being created:

1. Initiate and agree on a strategic planning process

2.  Identify organizational mandates

3. Clarify organizational mission and values

4. Assess the external and internal environments to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

5. Identify the strategic issues facing the organization

6. Formulate strategies to manage the issues

7. Review and adopt the strategic plan

8. Establish an effective organizational vision

9. Develop an effective implementation process

10. Reassess strategies and the strategic planning process

When engaging in any planning work, it's important to ask: What value is being created by this process? Well, in examining the list above, we can see that strategic planning manages assets and thus creates value by making assets more effective and efficient. Here are just a few ways strategic planning is creating this value by streamlining resources -- and yes, it's another list!

• Reducing redundancy -- Unlike engineering, program development should not have redundancy. Our steps forward should be focused and achievable as to not burden our limited systems more than once to achieve some good. This is reflected in every step, but particularly in steps 6 and 9. By formulating strategies to manage issues, we assure that when problems occur, we won't have to cyclically resolve them, thus taxing our resources and producign redundancy. And when we develop implementation strategies, we assure that in practice, we can achieve some good without over-allocating our resources and creating redundancy.
• Streamlining our assets and resources -- Similar to reducing redundancy, when we strategically plan, we assure that our available resources are adequate and efficient in developing some good. This prevents us from wasting precious resources and is primarily the target of steps 2 and 4, though streamlining occurs at every point. In step 2, we identify the requirement guidelines of the organization which could be limiting. This prevents us from mission creep and ensures that the approaches developed tie into the mandate parameters. In step 4, by assessing our SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and strengths), we find programmatic overlap that could help us consolidate our resources to achieve a single focus more efficiently. Further, by anticipating weaknesses and threats, we are better able to set goals and direction for our resource utilization.

Even though we love lists, the most important part of strategic planning is that it is non-terminal. The constant evaluations and reassessments means that the process fold in on itself and moves in new directions all the time. Much like this closing, strategic planning is a process that one should implement at all times ad in all areas of their work.

[Former GE CEO John Welch's response to the question 'What makes a good manager'] 

"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. Above all else, though, good leaders are open. They go up, down, and around their organization to reach people. They don't stick to the established channels."

References 

Bryson, John & Renz, David. The Jossey-Bass handbook of nonprofit leadership and management, Chapter 8.

Tichy, . Charan, R. (1989) Speed, Simplicity, Self-Confidence: An Interview with Jack Welch. Harvard Business Review.