In this three-part series, we explore the building blocks of culture and provoke thinking around leadership’s role in cultivating an engaging workplace. Culture is a critical yet difficult-to-define element of every organization. While leaders may strive to create or foster a particular culture, culture is something that develops and evolves organically as people interact and circumstances change. It can be promoted and modeled, but not controlled. It is also interpretive, and as such is most intimately reflected in how people…
Katherine Paterson, author of several beloved children’s books – most notably The Bridge to Terabithia – is credited with the quote, “A dream without a plan is just a wish,” which some attribute as a minor modification to French writer and journalist Antoine de Saint Exupery’s quote “A goal without a plan is just a wish,” preceding Paterson by several decades. Wherever it hales from, the idea is at the core of the challenge that many organizations face in moving…
OF COURSE I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE EVERYTHING IS! The ringing in of the New Year in the US is accompanied by dramatic increases in testosterone resulting from the seasonal onset of Football Fever. College teams vie in Bowl games (44 Bowl games will take place in 2016), many with curious sponsorship-induced names (the Taxslayer Bowl?). Pro teams are in the thick of the playoff contention race, and the Super Bowl is roughly a month away. One of the situations you’re…
Organizations are deceptively complicated. Just how complicated they are becomes clear whenever a change to an existing process or policy is considered, or when a new process or policy is formulated and implemented. At the center of this phenomena is the essential role of communication, and in a fascinating irony organizations that invest in technology and marketing – brochures, websites, business cards, branding – rarely devote the same resources (sometimes they don’t actually invest any!) to understanding and improving their…
This is how change sometimes happens. Nonprofits that are funded by government agencies are frequently confronted by a challenge unique to their business model, which I’ll whimsically refer to as The Curious Case of the Customer Curveball. This “case” begins with our hero (you – the nonprofit) innocently walking along the path laid out by the mission. You’ve got your map, compass, weather gear – all the things that the nature of the work and the efforts of your forecasters…
It’s commonly understood that the best way to address a problem is to prevent it from happening in the first place. This notion was described in a provocative metaphor by Gary Grobman in “An Introduction to the Nonprofit Sector.” http://shop.whitehatcommunications.com/products/An-Introduction-to-the-Nonprofit-Sector.html He describes the scenario of children falling into a river and the various ways of addressing this problem with the ideal solution, of course, being prevention of their falling in in the first place. That’s how we think about consulting.…