Impact Driven
The drive to achieve permeates their organizational culture and working style. They are obsessively results-oriented.
The methods of management for nonprofit organizations are undergoing changes to embrace new ways of pursuing mission impact. This report outlines the trends and environmental influences that have driven the demands for change, as well as provides a picture of what the “next generation organization” looks like.
The drive to achieve permeates their organizational culture and working style. They are obsessively results-oriented.
Effectively manage to a dual bottom line: financial viability and positive social impact. Financial leadership becomes another form of shared leadership, with staff at many levels seeking out new resources, making smart decisions around expenses, and thinking creatively about how to strengthen the business model.
The goal is to facilitate the learning of an organization’s people so that it is continuously transforming itself.
Power is diffused throughout and leaders who have positional authority readily share their power and engage others across organizational staff lines in questions of large and small consequence.
A leader must have community organizing skills, including an aptitude for utilizing social media technologies for rallying clients, colleagues, and fans of the movement to advocate for specific policies and legislation.
Next generation organizations don’t just value demographic diversity in their workforces. They infuse multicultural perspectives and practices into their work – in their governance, leadership and programs.
Next generation organizations embrace results only work environments, where staff performance is judged by results not timesheets. Technology has helped employees to recognize that individuals don’t live their lives neatly bifurcating work and personal.
Constituents are not passive recipients of good deeds from charity providers. Just as staff has influence in the organization, even more so do constituents.
Boards perform governance service beyond what individuals can do, and members provide an extra set of hands for work and brains for thought partnership.
No one nonprofit is likely to embody all the characteristics described. For our organization, CompassPoint, and for every organization we know, they are aspirations. These characteristicsstem from our desire to be relevant and effective in improving our community and changing the world, from our desire to have the greatest impact possible. We believe they are theemerging best practices for living our values and having an impact as an organization.
The turbulent world that characterizes our organizations today, staffed by increasingly diverse and skillful people, can no longer be pulled together by bureaucratic authority nor by charismatic personality.
– Joseph Raelin in <em>Creating Leaderful Organizations</em>
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