Bottom-Lining in Allignment with Visioning

Clients are asking consultants to get to the bottomline as fast as possible. Is it the economic climate or the new state of mind of non-profits needing to be sustainable?

Visioning and discovery, necessary steps for determining direction and getting buy-in, especially from the Board of Directors, are essential for actually setting the priority objectives. As Executive Directors feel the pressure of sustainability and accountability, which are necessary but perhaps overwhelming when you have 15 bosses, the need for conclusions and tactics is pushing its way to the forefront.

In response our team is honing in more quickly on the top issues. Frequently it is a loss of the founding vision of the organization that is at the core of "what we should do next?" questioning. Behind that is the leadership dance - who is driving this ship? Is it the Board, staff or artistic visionary who sets the direction as an organization moves from ground and grow to maturity or, perhaps even into decline.

Determining who you serve, the organization's community, becomes equally important as the artistic vision. Once you know who you serve and identify how you serve them, organizations then need to determine if the "served" actually need what you are offering. Need is subjective, as all good marketers know. Who is the competition for your service or programming? From here priority objectives can be articulated and strategies developed. Only at this phase can tactics and operations be identified. Bottomlining these options runs in parallel and is based on a financial health check that assesses the organization's current state of financial management and cash flow.

Increasingly organizations are in need of organizational development consulting and professional development support in combination with strategic planning. Finding a balance of these requests in the consultancy scope of work is becoming a priority for clients and consultants. This is necessary trend in best practice shift across the arts non-profit field and not a cyclical situation in response to the challenging economic climate.

Release Your Organization's Inner Blogger

Blogging Resources
• Top 10 Free Blogging Platforms & Features for Web Designers http://tiny.cc/fxyEx
• Glossary of Blogging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogroll#B
• Technorati: Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation http://technorati.com/
• Blogging 101: http://technorati.com/help/blogging101.html
• Google Analytics: Track hits for free http://www.google.com/analytics/
• BraveNet: Free but visible hit counter http://www.bravenet.com/


Fourteen tips for starting up an organizational blog.
1. Creative process: Audiences want insight into the creative process, take them behind the scenes
2. Blogging champion: Nominate a blogmeister responsible for reviewing comments, encouraging bloggers to post and tracking blog analytics
3. Inner voice: Encourage bloggers to write in their voice, readers want authenticity
4. Just do it: The greatest blogging barrier is over-thinking - write in real time
5. Blog consistently: Get your readers in the habit of checking and increase your Google ranking
6. Keep it simple, snappy and interesting: Readers want tidbits to share with friends
7. Load up the links: Gets you those Google rankings and positions the blog as a resource
8. Visual vision: Post images and videos and encourage linking, warning: copyright a go, go, gone…
9. Key words are key: How Google finds your blog – viral marketing in action
10. Create a blogroll: Include links to blogs relevant your organization – increases your hits
11. Want comments? Make comments on other blogs – draws attention and builds creditability
12. Guest bloggers: Build readership – invite guest bloggers , visit: www.huffingtonpost.com
13. RSS: Be sure to include an RSS feed for readers to be notified when you create a new post
14. Driving traffic: Include links to blog posts on your homepage and in e-blasts

Creative Democracy

Symphony Magazine's July/August 2009 issue features an article on Orpheus Chamber Orchestra exploring their decentralized, democratic leadership model that embraces artists, Board and staff. Here is the leadership illustration as created by Orpheus trustee and Harvard psychology professor Richard Hackman. This is an inspirational illustration that acts more as a mindmap than an organizational chart.

Resources for Facilitators

One of my current projects is collaborating with Martin Farrell of Get2thePoint.org in creating training content for organizations that are training their staff to act as internal facilitators. This seems to be a new trend in professional development. It serves at least two purposes: save money by using internal staff to facilitate retreats and meetings, change organizational culture by creating an environment of facilitation, provide professional development opportunities for staff that allows them to excel within their roles and to move up in the organizational pipeline.

[Photo: Amy facilitating NCVO Barclay's Leadership Training Programme in London, February '09)

Leah Antignas of The Greater Possibility and I researched facilitation resources for Martin's various clients. The following are the best of what we found - specific to the art of facilitation as opposed to the format of the meeting. Its the people relationships that are most challenging to navigate. These resources offer some insights.

Facilitation Resources:

1) Seven Key Skills for a Facilitator
Podcast 9:11 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbEeHWahNmw

2) The Skilled Facilitator Approach
Chapter from The Skilled Facilitator: A Comprehensive Resource for Consultants,
Roger Schwarz, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2002.

http://www.schwarzassociates.com/files/229.pdf
PDF 20 pages

Summary: The Skilled Facilitator approach is based on a set of core values. Using a systems thinking approach, it enables you to clearly define your facilitator role and develop explicit agreement with a group about how you will work together. Together, the core values, the group effectiveness model, the ground rules, and the diagnosis-intervention cycle help you identify functional and dysfunctional aspects of the group and intervene to help the group increase its effectiveness. The approach enables you to explore and change how you think and improve your ability to facilitate difficult situations. It also helps groups explore and change their thinking to help them create fundamental change. All of the elements in the Skilled Facilitator approach are integrated to enable both group members and the facilitator to create collaborative relationships in which they can learn with and from each other. The core values, principles, and methods of the Skilled Facilitator approach are equally applicable to facilitative leaders, consultants, coaches, and trainers.

3) Participatory Values
Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, 2nd Edition
Sam Kaner, Lenny Lind, Catherine Toldi, Sarah Fisk, Duane Berger, Michael Doyle

This book provides the tools to put democratic values into practice in groups and organisations. Designed to help groups increase participation and collaboration, promote mutual understanding, honour diversity, and make effective, inclusive, participatory decisions, it is loaded with graphics, guidelines and hand outs, and presents more than 200 valuable tools and skills. It is perfect for managers, participants, seasoned practitioners, and students of working group dynamics.

Chapter 1 - The Dynamics of Group Decision-Making, PDF
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/60/07879826/0787982660.pdf

4) Participatory Values Resource Links
Participatory Values faclitation resources categorised into three areas:

• Libraries, Networks, and Discussion Groups
• Professional Associations
• Organizations that Promote Participatory Values.
http://www.communityatwork.com/resources.html
or PDF http://www.communityatwork.com/images/CommunityAtWork_Resource_List.pdf

Book Review - Nonprofit Lifecycle: Stage-Based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity

Nonprofit Lifecycle: Stage-Based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity
By Susan Kenny Stevens, Ph.D with a foreword by Paul C. Light and published by Stagewise Enterprises, Inc. – March 2002

Winner of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management’s Terry McAdam Book Award for most valuable nonprofit book published in 2002.

Review by Amy Kweskin

Nonprofit Lifecycle: Stage-Based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity uses easy to understand developmental and organizational theory to guide in evaluating the health and evolution of any organization’s capacity functions. The most valuable feature of this workbook-style text is Susan Kenny Stevens’ illustration of Nonprofit Lifecycle Capacity Placement. Clearly articulated, easy to communicate and endlessly applicable this diagram-based methodology can be used to chart the evolution of all aspects of organization and program development.

The organizational lifecycle, like the human lifecycle, begins at conception and ends in death. Stevens frames these stages as Idea, Start-up, Growth, Maturity, Decline, Turnaround, and Terminal. Pinpointing the evolutionary stage of key organizational functions allows for board and staff to identify the health (capacity) of the organization. These functions include Programs, Management, Governance, Financial Resources, and Administrative Systems. You need not be limited to these areas. The model is endlessly adaptable and can be used by board and staff with equal effectiveness for addressing any management capacity issue.

I used Stevens’ model in a Board Leadership Training program to explain organizational lifecycles to a group of corporate executives and they found it extremely useful. It became our template for discussing a variety of organizational capacity development scenarios. Additionally, I used it with a class of undergraduate arts administration students to address leadership development and their own career evolution.

Charting the current stage of each capacity building function allows the organization to conduct its own situation analysis. The process jump starts strategic planning and enables organizations to proactively engage management services. Stevens clearly identifies the diagnostic characteristics and performance outcomes in each stage allowing for goals to be articulated and benchmarks to be set with measurable charting of progress. Using this text empowers organizational stakeholders to objectively evaluate the vitality of the organization. It also is one of the few resources that candidly addresses organizational decline and termination.

Charting Organizational Lifecycle for Capacity Analysis

This is adopted from Nonprofit Lifecycles: Stage-Based Wisdom for Nonprofit Capacity by Susan Kenny Stevens, Stagewise Enterprises, Inc .

The first step in a strategic planning consultancy is to assess the current reality and create a capacity analysis specific to operations. This is accomplished through one-to-one staff interviews.

(Click on bell curve to enlarge)

Methodology:
Lifestages are steps in an organization’s evolution towards sustainability and are an assessment of the key management, governance and programming functions in relation to the data, systems, staffing, funding, and policies surrounding the function. Exact areas of exploration are identified in Phase I of the consultancy. Assessment is conducted by the Lead Consultant and outcomes are presented in a confidential report as it is possible that findings are sensitive to the organization’s sustainability.

Lifestages

Idea – still in its earliest evolution and not yet fully articulated or prioritized.

Startup – just being implemented for the first or second time but lacking commitment of resources.

Ground and Grow – several rounds of implementation, policies and procedures developed and beginning evaluation.

Maturity – fully integrated into the organization, at the highest level of functionality, utilized consistently with predictable outcomes.

Decline – no longer relevant, possibly outdated function, in use but out of synch with what is needed at this time and in the future.

Dissolution – out of use, not relevant, obsolete but possibly not removed from the overall operations and in need of final closeout.

Building Capacity

Develop – what actions and resources need to be taken to move this function to the next lifestage?

Turnaround – is this function redeemable once past its maturity and if so what actions and resources are needed for revival?

Sustain – if operating at optimum what actions and resources are needed to ensure that it remains fully functional?

Following the capacity analysis one-to-one board interviews are conducted.

Developing Your Career

Much like strategic planning, setting out your career goals allows you to clarify your directives, recognize opportunities and measure incremental successes. The following is a basic outline to career coaching.

Set your goal - and it should be pretty clearly defined such as, “pursuing a creative endeavor in my spare time that allows me to express myself in ways that I can’t do at work.” It should be a goal that makes you smile, not one that makes you sweat with anxiety or feel so comfortable that you are still in your safety zone.

Define success - How will you know you’ve reached the goal when you get there? What will success look like? How will it feel? Can it be quantified and/or qualified? What will success allow you to do that you aren’t doing now?

Articulate current reality - Where are you currently in relation to the goal? Are there any things in your life that you may already be doing that are moving you towards that goal – things that you didn’t recognize before?

Identify action steps - What are specific actions you can take to get you towards your goal? Clearly identify them. How will you pursue them? What is a specific date/time that you will pursue each one? Once you think of a list add five more actions just to give yourself a good stretch in your thinking.