Organizational Development
How to Hire a Web Designer
This is from my friends at Green Bird Media. I share it with you here because websites are as important to nonprofits today as mimeographed newsletters were fifty years ago.
We often see customers after they have had one or two failed and expensive design launches. As a rule, we can usually see the problems were built into the hiring or communication process right from the start. We thought we would share some great strategies and tips on how to hire a web design team that will suit your site's needs.
Q & A on Strategic Planning
What is strategic planning?
The essential purpose of strategic planning is to answer a basic question: Where do you want to go as an organization? Another way to put it is: What do you want to see happen? Or, again: What do you want to accomplish? That question begs another: How are you going to get there? How are you going to realize your aspirations? A sound strategic planning process helps leaders arrive at informed, clear answers to these most basic questions.
Why should we bother? (Who knows what the future will bring anyway?)
Organizational Assessment: The Dashboard
The Situation
In some ways, we are constantly assessing our organizations. We review financial statements, monitor service statistics, and receive updates on accreditation or licensing reviews. In other ways, organizational assessment is an exceptional undertaking. A key senior manager leaves, so we review the structure of the whole department. Or, the complaints about technology become so loud that we decide to review all our technical systems. Ideally however, our assessment should not just be constant; it should be regular. And it should not only be exceptional; it should be comprehensive.
The Comprehensive Assessment of Current Conditions
New Year...New Plans?
We have now turned the corner on the new year and with it may come a mix of anxiety and excitement about what it will bring for ourselves and our organizations. Every year has its pleasant surprises and satisfactions and its disappointments and frustrations.
To tip the odds in favor of the former, most of us recognize that doing some planning about where we want to go or what we want to achieve will help. Yet, for many of us, the term “strategic planning” brings to mind elaborate processes and obfuscating jargon that hinders more than helps.
Year-End Reflection on Values
It is December and soon the last page of this year’s calendar will be discarded. For many of us, the passing of the year prompts reflection on what we have accomplished over the past twelve months. If it has been an especially fruitful year, our sentiments may be inclined toward gratitude for what has been and hope for what lies ahead. If this has not been one of our better years but rather one where the challenges we faced weighed us down more heavily than the victories we enjoyed could uplift us, then maybe we move into this time with unease, whether looking backward or forward. In either case, end-of-year reflections naturally tend to lead into new-year musings.
Organizational Structure
Do we get things done because of our organization’s structure … or in spite of it? Last week I introduced Marvin Weisbord’s “Six-Box Organizational Model” of doing assessments. To review, those boxes are: 1) relationships, 2) mechanisms, 3) rewards, 4) structure, 5) purpose, and 6) leadership.
I then mentioned that one of the issues which will often arise in conducting an assessment is the design of the organization. Is your organization designed for optimal effectiveness? Or, are structures the way they are because “things have just always been done that way” and “that is the way they have to be”? Do your policies and procedures and meetings propel progress? Or, do they impede it?
Organizational Assessment
As the seasonal holidays loom, some of you may be looking at the transition from one annual cycle to the next and wondering how it could be that “things are so messed up.” Maybe you started the fall excited about the possibilities, only to approach Thanksgiving with the question of “how did we get to where we are now!?” If this question is on your mind, then you might well consider engaging in the process of an organizational assessment.
Organizational Assessment and Weisbord’s “Six-Box Organizational Model”
Ground Rulesfor Working Together Effectively, Part I
Every working group, whether a board or committee or senior management team, needs to have a set of common understandings about how its members will work with each other effectively. Here is a list of possibilities. I urge every group to take this list of suggestions and decide together upon a short list of do's and don'ts for better effectiveness.
At Meetings...
Nonprofit Organization Development
Organize
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.
-- Niccolo Di Bernardo Machiavelli
The Challenge
Organization Development
Unfold
When we see clearly, we can change.
-- Ayya Khema
At its most basic level, organization development (OD) is about increasing the effectiveness and general vitality of an organization through a planned change effort. These efforts usually pertain to how the organization actually operates, i.e. its procedures and practices. A typical OD approach is to assess a given situation, prepare recommendations about how to intervene profitably in that situation, and then to proceed with the implementation of those recommendations.
