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Every manager dreams of having committed staff, diligent people reliably coming in at 7am and still working into the evening.  But when it comes to organisational change, your most committed people can be the first to resist.      Managers need to support staff to keep work in perspective because when strategic change happens, nobody is protected. It can then be the most dedicated staff who feel the most hurt.

The Unspoken Expectations of Committed Staff 

We all know overwork is bad for us.  Despite this many of us still kid ourselves that it’s the right thing to do.  We tell ourselves and our teams we have to do it for the greater good of our project and our organisations.  Sure in the short term this might be helpful, but when people are too personally invested in their jobs it’s a nightmare keeping boundaries between home and work life.  This kind of commitment can cause a lot of problems. I see this a lot in not-for-profits, where staff are so focused on the cause and loyalty to colleagues that nothing else much matters.

It’s not always bad of course.  There are many successful organisations which only survived crises because devoted people stayed up all night to finish a proposal or to review the accounts.  Sometimes we have to do it.   But when work and personal lives become too intertwined, it comes at a price.  When staff give so much of themselves to the job,  they usually have an unspoken expectation that the favour will be returned.  They don’t admit it to themselves let alone to their employer, but there is an assumption that the organisation will demonstrate similar loyalty to them when the going gets tough.  They are massively disappointed when it doesn’t.

Successful Organisations Thrive Without Us. 

One of the toughest jobs for a manager is implementing change.  It’s doubly difficult when you know your staff have invested so much of themselves in the work.  How do you tell someone  their project is closing when they have spent their evenings working on it?   Or that their performance needs to improve when you know they really love their job?  So many change programmes derail because managers just don’t know how to have that difficult conversation with dedicated staff.  When change hits a committed member of staff, they can easily transform to become the change programme’s greatest critic.

It’s great to get have a team who get on with each other and love what they do.  No-one wants to clockwatch and disappear in a dust cloud at 5.30pm.  And of course as managers we should appreciate the extra effort from our staff.   But we all need to have a line between ourselves and our job. While many of us feel our work is personal, organisational change is not.  When we have too much vested interest in our work we can get in the way of bigger change happening. We need boundaries, not just to protect ourselves from stress and burnout but also to enable our organisations to move on and succeed without us.

In the fast moving work environment you need to work hard and keep your skills up to date.   But you also need to remember a job is a job – know the line where work finishes and home life starts. Have a great weekend!

At some time in our working lives, we all experience one of those discussions, where the debate goes round in circles and you just wish someone would cut to the chase and get the job done. So while the success of the Brexit and Trump campaigns took many of us by surprise, it is easy to understand the appeal. Both campaigns capitalised on widespread frustration with the debates of a political elite. Their leaders offered solutions, (not always based on fact and evidence) which brought a fresh energy and hope to many people who had become disillusioned with the status quo. As we wait to see what Brexit and a Trump presidency mean in practice, what can the sector learn from the two campaigns?

Certainly there must be something we can learn about communicating and influencing. After all, many charities have very successfully challenged the status quo and achieved excellent results, being the driving force behind new legislation and schemes to protect vulnerable people. We have plenty to shout about. But somehow we haven’t quite articulated it. The Brexit and Trump campaigns highlighted how the promise of positive change inspires people to action better than warnings about consequences. There are no easy answers, but charity communications do often focus on the dangers of the world, the plight of refugees or the perils of global warming and much of it is targeted to raise money. It may be time to consider how we communicate the positive aspects of what we have achieved, how we convey a clear, vigorous message of change.

The campaigns should also prompt the sector to look at stretching its circle of influence to the many people who clearly feel they have been overlooked for too long. We need to get better at influencing outside of our core constituency of Westminster and the major donors and funders. Our diversity in terms of involving people of different gender, religion, ethnicity, sexuality and so forth is often high on the agenda. However, there are many people who may be of the same gender and ethnicity but whose values and world view is very different to our own. We have to acknowledge and work with this. As Mark Flannagan stated in his November column, it may be time to challenge our assumptions and make sure our politics do not prevent us from working alongside people who think differently.

And perhaps in this post-truth reality we have to acknowledge that what we think is important about our work may not be what sparks commitment and inspires public action. Long term strategies, facts and evidence are important to us in putting together our fundraising case, measuring impact and checking our internal operational efficacy. More important to others is that we get on with the job we set out to do and say so. Perhaps if there is one thing we should learn from the events of 2016 it may be just that – let’s talk less about the consequences of underfunding and more about our drive, commitment and the positive change we have and will actually achieve.

An earlier version of this article was first published in Third Sector in August 2016

This year I’m not doing a New Year Resolution. In fact, I’ve decided my new New Year resolution is giving up New Year resolutions. Too often I’ve committed to an ambitious health drive only to remember soon after that the pleasure of a comfy sofa always trumps that of the treadmill. I am a creature of habit, even when I know those habits aren’t good.

And whilst I haven’t quite given up on them, my enthusiasm for big organisational change programmes is seriously waning too, especially when I read that charities like Scope and Mencap are spending £1 million in redundancy payments. There must be a better way to improve charity effectiveness. Large corporate change initiatives are like the January detox. Instigating them might make us feel proactive and in control but the benefits, if any, are often short lived. They don’t address the underlying habits which caused the problems in the first place so we soon revert to our bad old ways.

A marginal gains methodology to improving performance has been credited as the key to success for Olympic athletes and is increasingly popular in other areas. This advocates small incremental improvements which, when added together, result in a significant improvement. So instead of a crash diet of spirulina smoothies, over time just eating a few less doughnuts and using the stairs. No individual improvement is big, but the cumulative effect is a long term change to unhelpful habits.

We need to review the way we do organisational change, move on from the all or nothing crash diet approach and instead focus on marginal gains. We can all identify small positive changes we could make, but here are just a few ideas.

Clear the workspace
As every dieter knows, it’s nigh on impossible to lose weight when there’s only pizza and beer in the kitchen. And it’s an uphill struggle to perform well if your desk is cluttered with irrelevant papers. Focusing on clearing the workplace every day helps create the space where people can focus on results.

Know the costs of meetings
As a sector we like our meetings, but are they really worth the cost? Nowadays food packaging states the nutritional value so, although no-one tells us we can’t eat that pack of biscuits, we do so knowing the implications. We could do the same with our meetings, stating on every agenda an estimation of the cost to the charity of holding that meeting (i.e. costs of people’s time, opportunity costs etc). It might just prompt us to keep discussions on track.

Give and receive feedback at the end of every project
Like dieters need to get on the scales, we all need to get and give feedback on performance. Sometimes the feedback is good, not so good, expected or unexpected. What is important is that that we give and receive feedback regularly and use this information to improve our performance.

Which changes are right will depend on individuals, the organisation and what you are trying to achieve but most importantly none of them are earth shattering. They don’t need a budget, communication plan or even an announcement. But if we each individually develop a habit of implementing everyday improvements then those organisational change programmes might not need to be so big or painful.

First published Third Sector magazine, January 2017

There has always been some scepticism about whether charities really can combine doing good with being effective. Some have suggested that charity people are simply too nice to take the tough decisions necessary to run an efficient operation. We are continually being told we need to be more ‘business-like’, (indicating a received wisdom that commercial enterprises are by definition more efficient). The consequence of all this has been an increasing focus amongst charities on performance measurement. But are we taking this too far? In our keenness to measure our impact and demonstrate our efficiency, are we not missing the point and in danger of overlooking what makes charities brilliant?

Many argue that in comparison to commercial business, it is much more difficult for charities to demonstrate effectiveness. Business has the simplicity of the profit bottom line whilst charities must struggle with a more diverse range of performance indicators. Charities need to demonstrate relevance to beneficiaries, commissioners, members, volunteers….the list goes on. And there needs to be indicators relevant to each, leading to all sorts of confusion about what a successful charity actually is and does.

In response to this, the charity sector has developed a range of approaches and initiatives all aimed at measuring and managing performance. From sector specific quality assurance frameworks, outcome measurement, impact evaluation and so on, we are trying to pin down the holy grail of charity effectiveness. In amongst all this, a sizeable industry of charity trainers, consultants and advisers has grown offering their skills and expertise to support charities to demonstrate effectiveness.

This is to some extent a necessary endeavour. Clearly when we are handling such huge sums of public money (total income of charities in 2011-2012 was over £39 billion), it is only right that we account for every penny. The problem though with much of this performance measurement is that it assumes a mechanistic “factory-line” approach to operations, as if a charity has tangible inputs, outputs and defined processes. This of course is not the case. An effective charity is not a machine, churning out uniform results but in fact tailors its response to every situation and beneficiary. But perhaps feeling the need to impress funders, we seem to be trying to shoe-horn our organisations into this over simplified mould, completely ignoring the relationships and people which are what make us really effective.

Charities exist to challenge, create and drive change. We would love there to be a few clean cut performance indicators but if the problems we addressed were so easy to define, there would be no need for our existence. Charities don’t conform to simple performance measures because they work with some of the most difficult and thorny problems society faces. We need to move this impact and performance debate forward and be unapologetic about our complexity. Instead of trying to appease our funders and commissioners with simple (and sometimes frankly dubious) measures of success we need to support them to understand the messy reality of our work. Rather than simplifying our operations, we should strengthen the skills of our staff and volunteers in managing the complexity.

Performance measures have their place and of course we need to be accountable and transparent. But we must not confuse indicators of performance with performance itself. It is true that “what gets measured gets done” and therein lies the danger with oversimplistic performance measures. Excellence in charities is not about fundraising income, or the number of beneficiaries you have, or the number of mentions in the media. These measures are only indicators of our success, suggesting whether or not we are heading in the right direction, but not whether we have arrived at the destination.

And this hints at the uncomfortable reality that many of our stakeholders have different views of what that destination is. Rather than shy away from this, we need to redefine the role of charities as enterprises which enable understanding across different groups, facilitating and inspiring stakeholders with very different motivations to work together towards a common cause.

Ironically perhaps, the corporate world has recently had a rude awakening to the fact that simplistic measures of performance are no longer adequate indicators of corporate health. The 2008 crash was a prime example of how a focus on the profit bottom line does not promote a healthy organisation. The corporate sector has (and still is) desperately trying to figure out how to respond to this realisation. The City’s leaders are becoming acutely aware of the need to engender trust across diverse stakeholder groups to build successful organisations.

Of course these are exactly the challenges that we in the charity sector have quietly been grappling with for years. Engendering trust and keeping diverse stakeholder groups on board is part of the charity sector’s DNA.

So let us hope that this year charities will start to see the limitations of the current performance measurement debate. They will not be embarrassed by the complexities of their work, encouraging stakeholders to oversimplify the issues. Rather the leading charities of the future will see their roles as expert facilitators and influencers able to communicate with beneficiaries and members whilst harnessing the energies and resource of funders and commissioners. Great charity leaders will always have the stats and the evidence in their back pocket, but will be comfortable with the messy complexity of their world and able to confidently and competently operate within this.

Here are just a few ways you can prepare your charity to manage in this complexity.

1. Proactively develop and manage networks
Every charity is focused on issues which are interrelated and connected to a whole range of other causes. We need to move beyond believing we can single-handedly change the world and appreciate the larger system of networks and relationships we are part of. To effect sustainable change, we need to work with a whole range of supporters, contacts, networks from across all sorts of backgrounds and businesses – even those we may not have always traditionally agreed with.

1. Develop individual and organisational awareness
Getting and giving feedback is something we too easily shy away from. But without it how do people and organisations know what they’re doing well and where they’re falling short? We need to start developing organisational cultures which communicate clear expectations at all levels and are comfortable giving open and honest feedback.

3. Develop first class communication skills.
Managing complex stakeholder relationships, requires the ability to relate to and communicate with a range of people. This requires heightened sensitivity to communication, behavioural styles and approaches. Outstanding charity leaders will not just focus on those situations where they’re comfortable but will be adept at communicating effectively with every stakeholder group in every situation.

4. Develop strategic thinking
Too many of us are too busy. In the rush of everyday work, we jump to conclusions desperate to find ‘the definitive, right answer’. In doing so, we simplify problems and draw on our experience of past problems to find quick answers. For many of the problems we deal with there is no straightforward definitive answer. Leading charities will develop a culture of strategic thinking, encouraging staff and volunteers to lift their heads above the to-do list, appreciate the wider environment and be comfortable working without the old-fashioned clear cut certainties.

First published in Charities Finance Yearbook 2014