Building Non-Profit Teams
Hello everyone!
I love summer and the heat. Even though my roots are Canadian, I am all about the hot weather. I guess Indiana summers are good for that. This month we are highlighting in the podcast what nonprofits need to know about inflation (with the Indiana University Kelley School of Business) and a recent ruling against a nonprofit because they did not list “no goods or services were provided” on their gift receipts. Both are very serious issues, so please pay attention to them.
But beyond the logistics, a big message I want to address regards relational care and your strengths. You realize that your staff, volunteers, and board members should be your closest constituencies, but how do those people work together for the good of the cause? How can they to release their strengths for the good of the cause?
Lately, I have seen many instances of these teams not working well together. Usually, it is not because of conflicting desires as much as a lopsided focus on strengths. We work a lot in team development, communications, and behavior. In this work, we have seen many tensions created by gifted people emphasizing their strengths without hearing others.
There is a saying that our strengths, when over deployed, become liabilities. This is the case for teams and organizations as well as individuals. When the board over-emphasizes its leadership and position, staff may feel devalued in the equation of success. Staff can do the same thing to volunteers. When volunteers overplay their purely voluntary value, a great asset, they can create a perception that they are less passionate or committed than the staff. When the organization as a whole overplays its position of community leadership, it can repel the very partners that are vital to its success by creating an image of independence from others and even portraying other organizations as less valuable. When a leader forgets that they can only lead when other people do the work to follow, they can seem interested only in themselves.
Here are a few questions for you:
Do you know how your relational and positional strengths with people are being utilized?
Are you finding yourself or your organization or its people in any of the descriptions above? If so, what are the consequences of that, good or bad?
How can you ensure that your people, your greatest strength, feel cared for and are themselves engaging and drawing others in, not repelling them?
Thanks,
Jamie
