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Library of Capacity Building Letters

Our library contains over a dozen letters, each describing an approach to building a nonprofit’s capacity. Click on any of the titles below to go directly to an article of interest.



Useful Mission and Vision Statements

These Advisory Letters describe the capacity building management practices that have enabled businesses and nonprofits to double their capacity every two to five years. We encourage Orange County’s nonprofit leaders to share these letters with their management team, their Board and its committee members to generate interest, ideas and actions that will increase their nonprofit’s capacity to serve more of the needs of our community.

The Executive Coaches of Orange County is a volunteer organization that was founded in late 2002. We are sponsored by the Orangewood Children’s Foundation’s CONNECT Project. Our cosponsors are the Orange County Chapter of the Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) and the Orange County Community Foundation.

Our vision is that Orange County’s nonprofits will develop the capacity to insure that everyone in the county is growing up and living in the healthy and supportive conditions that are conducive to them being responsible and involved members of our community. Does your nonprofit have a vision that states what you want our community to look like in the future? A vision statement should reflect your nonprofit’s ideals and values.

If a nonprofit does not have a vision of the future that it believes in, it has no reason to grow. In our business of coaching nonprofit leaders, one of the first things we do to get leaders talking about their vision for their community, sharing the values that they believe in with one another, and rekindling the desire to do more to serve their community. This is a “best practice”.

One of the mistakes that some nonprofits make is having a vision that is about themselves, and how they would like to be recognized. These kinds of visions have a limited usefulness. Most people that work in a nonprofit, or volunteer their time to serve on Boards, its committees, or in operations, do so out of a genuine desire to help others. A nonprofit’s vision should reflect those values of caring about others and the community that the nonprofit is trying to serve.

The second key element of a nonprofit’s philosophy and shared values is its mission statement. The mission statement is a long term strategic choice that a Board or management team makes. It defines the limited role that the nonprofit will play in moving the community towards its vision.

Our mission is to provide managers in Orange County’s nonprofits with Executive Coaches, at no cost, to help them develop and implement capacity building strategies that will enable them to fulfill more of their mission. This mission statement gives us even more focus. We want to work with managers in Orange County’s nonprofits, and we want to help them develop and implement capacity building strategies.

A focused mission statement can enhance the credibility of a nonprofit. It gives the organization a limited role or specialty at which it can excel. A focused mission statement defines a niche that differentiates it from other nonprofits, and minimizes duplications of effort among nonprofits. And it makes it easier for people outside the nonprofit to quickly and easily understand what the nonprofit does, making outreach and fund raising efforts more productive.

Some nonprofits make the mistake of having a very broad mission statement that does not exclude anything that they might like to do in the future. While these generic statements may be easy to create, they are not very helpful in clarifying a nonprofit’s unique and important role to its employees, volunteers, donors, clients, other nonprofits, or the community in which it operates. In our coaching practice, we encourage nonprofits to develop mission statements that reflect a well thought out strategic choice to excel at delivering very specific, unique and important service to a well defined niche of clients. This is a “best practice”.

A nonprofit’s mission and vision should clearly state what it intends to do for whom (the mission), and why it is important for it to do that well (the vision). These two brief statements of philosophy are the reason why a nonprofit should exist. The statements should continually be used to inspire everyone (the Board and its committee members, the management and staff, the volunteers, donors and the entire community) to do what they can to help the nonprofit grow and build its capacity to fulfill more of its important mission. This is a “best practice”.



Developing Goals and Strategies

In our first Advisory Letter, we talked about defining and sharing values (via mission and vision statements) to stimulate peoples' desire to help your nonprofit do more. This letter discusses how to follow-up by getting people to start thinking about what they can do to help you build capacity by involving them in developing goals, strategies and action plans.

You might begin this process by discussing what kind of capacity growth would be most helpful to fulfilling more of your nonprofit's mission. This could be the total number of people served, the total number of services delivered; or it could be a particular kind of service delivered to a particular type client. For ECofOC, it is the number of nonprofit managers that we are actively coach (rather than the number of people subscribing to our Advisory Letter or attending our workshop). Your nonprofit first needs to decide what kind of capacity increase has the greatest leverage on your mission and vision.

The next issue is how to measure the capacity that you want to increase. A good measure should be easy to generate from existing records, should be definable by a simple and definitive rule set, and should be a reasonably good indicator of overall progress. It does not need to be a perfect indicator of a desirable result in every instance and nonprofits should not invest a lot of energy trying to agree on a perfect measure. ECofOC’s simplistic measure is the number of signed coaching contracts where the coach has plans to do some more work with their client.

The final step is finding out what the current value of your measure is, and what you want it to be in the next one, two and three years. ECofOC had 11 active contracts at the end of 2003. Our goal was to have 24 by the end of 2004 and 36 by year-end 2004. The three year planning horizon seems to help people think "outside the box", but also seems to keep them grounded in reality.

Your capacity building goal is a measure of your nonprofit's commitment to its mission and vision. If a nonprofit develops and publicizes a mission and vision, but makes no effort to move towards it, people may wonder if the statements are meaningless words created for the sake of appearances. Setting a challenging goal gets peoples' minds involved in capacity building; first in deciding on the goal, and then thinking about how to achieve it. The more thought that people invest; the more likely they are to do something to help you achieve your goal.

Motivational experts tell us that if a goal is modest, it will be a "no-brainer" that won't energize anyone. If it is too high, people will decline to get involved because failure is so likely. If the goal has about a 50% chance of success, it is likely to be seen as challenging, maximizing the likelihood that people will start thinking about how to achieve it. Challenging goals typically increase capacity by 25% per year, doubling capacity every three years (but could fall anywhere in the range of 15-45% per year).

If you decide to have a "challenging" capacity building goal, people are likely to start talking and thinking about strategies that can make it more likely that the goal can be achieved. You can help them focus their thinking by suggesting some strategic areas to concentrate on. Here are ECofOC’s six strategic focus areas:

  • Develop alliances with the government agencies, foundations, corporations and other nonprofit organizations that can increase our capacity to fulfill more of our mission.
  • Develop publicity that attracts the people to our nonprofit who can help us fulfill more of our mission (prospective Executive Coaches, committee members, donors, and clients).
  • Develop our infrastructure's capacity by training and effectively deploying a growing number of increasingly satisfied Executive Coaches and committee members.
  • Develop qualified clients who best enable us to fulfill our vision and mission.
  • Develop donors to give us the diversified funding sources needed for sustainable growth.
  • Evaluate and improve our capacity building strategies and action plans.

Having several strategic focus areas helps you involve more people with diverse interests and skills in a capacity building effort. You might ask each participant to think about their plan of action for how they can use their skills and interests to help your nonprofit build its capacity in the strategic area that most interests them. A "search, adapt and reapply" approach is likely to lead them to strategies that deliver desired results most efficiently and reliably. The literature, training courses and colleagues in other nonprofits are all good sources of strategies that might have worked well in situations similar to yours.

Sharing values (mission and vision) can capture a person's heart. A challenging goal can follow-up on their desire to help by getting them to think about your capacity building goals and strategies, and their ideas for how they can help you achieve your goal. Our next letter will discuss how to take the final step of getting people to act on their ideas for helping you build capacity.



The Power of Persistent Publicity

Let’s assume you have defined your differentiating mission and your heart-warming vision of what the community will look like if you fulfill your mission (Letter #1). Let’s assume you have set a challenging and measurable goal of how much more of mission you want to fulfill in the next three years, and have invested some thought in identifying the strategic focus areas that will enable your organization to achieve those goals (Letter #2). Now what do you do?

One powerful way of getting people to do something that is strategically relevant to your capacity building goals is to publicize your mission, vision, goal, strategies and success stories every chance you get, in writings, in conversations, and in meetings, so that everyone hears and sees the message, every month, month after month, until they remember it, believe it, internalize it, and start acting on it.

I was fortunate to have learned about the power of persistent publicity early in my career in Procter and Gamble. P&G’s mission was to produce superior quality household products at a competitive price. Art Spinnanger almost single handedly was enabling P&G to produce our products at a competitive price in the early 1960s when I joined P&G. His mission was to get everyone that was involved in P&G’s product supply system to consciously think about the methods they were using to do their work.

One of the strategies of his Methods Program was the Elimination Approach. The strategy was to ask yourself and others the following question about every task you perform: “If it were not for what basic cause, this task could be eliminated.” If you could not identify the basic cause, eliminate that task from the work that you needed to do.

Every time I was in a departmental meeting with Art, he never failed to bring up P&G’s mission, his Methods Program and the Elimination Approach. Every time I saw Art personally, he would ask me about my work, would listen intently, and when he didn’t clearly understand why I was doing something, would ask his “basic cause” question. He’d send me brochures on methods improvement strategies. He would conduct training workshops every month. And he broadly distributed a monthly newsletter about the Methods Program and its successes.

It wasn’t long before I remembered Art’s message, believed it, internalized it and acted on it. Thousands of people in P&G’s product supply divisions had the same experience that I had, enabling P&G to continually eliminate every task and report that no longer had a basic cause. I have not seen Art, or worked in P&G’s product supply divisions, for 35 years. Yet I still remember Art, his mission, strategies, and the wording of his “basic cause” question that helped P&G produce its products at a competitive price. Art’s approach convinced me of the Power of Persistent Publicity.

The power of persistent publicity is not limited to mobilizing employees. When I left P&G in 1994, I started up a financial services businesses targeted at managers in P&G’s corporate headquarters. One of my strategies was to write and distribute a monthly advisory letter to P&G managers on the subject of personal financial planning and investment strategies.

In 1996, an independent audit concluded that I, Merrill Lynch and another local firm, were the three leading providers of financial services to P&G managers. An investment of less than 8 hours/month in persistent publicity helped me to compete with large firms in Cincinnati, while I was operating out of an extra bedroom in my home in Sedona, Arizona. Persistent publicity is a highly effective community outreach and marketing strategy.

In 1999, I joined the Orange County SCORE Chapter, which consists of about 80 volunteers who counsel individuals on how to start up or build a more successful business. Despite SCORE’s three month training program, I had a difficult time getting clients to come to me for follow-on sessions. Others in the chapter had similar problems.

The national office in Washington D.C. told me that our chapter excelled in many areas, but was in the bottom quartile nationally in our percentage of follow-on sessions. They gave me the contact information for the ten chapters with the highest follow-on session percentage. I interviewed these chapters to find out how they did that. I tested some of the strategies in my own counseling practice, and they helped me improve.

In the spring of 2000, I started sending a monthly E-mail to the chapter’s volunteers, publicizing my goal to double our percentage of follow-on sessions, and my vision of becoming an above average chapter. Every month, the letter described the success of a counseling strategy that a SCORE volunteer was using to get above average follow-on rates. Every month, the letter reported the chapter’s and each counselor’s follow-on performance, and reminded them of the six month performance contest that we were running.

Every six months, the contest winners received their awards at a chapter meeting. After four months, nothing happened. But then things started to move. After 30 months, the chapters follow-on rate tripled, putting us in the top quartile nationally, while delivering a 65% increase in the chapters counseling business. An investment of less than 8 hours/month in persistent publicity helped our SCORE chapter achieve these very significant capacity improvements.

Persistent publicity has proven itself to be an effective mobilizer of strategically relevant capacity building action by employees, volunteers, and in the community where you want to succeed.



Committees that Work

Organizing a working committee (as opposed to an advisory board or committee) to develop and implement a variety of capacity building strategies can build capacity much faster than limiting yourself to just one persistent publicity strategy. A working committee might be a management team or a group of volunteers and a staff member or two.

The average volunteer in the US donates eight hours of service a month. A working committee of ten people typically invests ten times as much effort in capacity building as a persistent publicity strategy. Committees also have the breadth of experience and interests needed to implement a variety of strategies. The more effort mobilized, and the more strategies implemented, the faster capacity builds. Building an infrastructure of an ever increasing number of working committee members is one of the most cost-effective ways for a nonprofit to build its capacity.

The first capacity building committee that a nonprofit should try to organize is a lead committee to develop and deploy the nonprofit’s strategic plan for building capacity. A diversity of people experienced in strategic planning, marketing, sales, public relations, E-commerce, getting grants, donor development, volunteer management, etc. might staff this lead committee. Our next letter will present some ideas for how to go about recruiting committee members.

The objective of the first meeting of the lead committee is to get everyone to share their values, and through discussion, align with one another on a statement of their mission and vision (see Letter #1). This important first step builds each committee member’s commitment to one another and their shared values, providing a motive to do the work needed to build capacity.

The second step is to define the committee’s capacity building goals and the strategic focus areas that committee members might work on (see Letter #2). Third, determine who has an interest in working on each strategy. If there is insufficient interest in a strategy, then the strategy is not viable for the committee at that point in time, and it should be deleted from the current plan. Everyone should be allowed to contribute in the way that they want to contribute, rather than being pressured to work on a particular strategy. This policy tends to maximize each team member’s motivation, satisfaction and contribution. It is a “best practice”.

In a working committee, everyone is expected to do some capacity building work between meetings. If some members only want to attend meetings, it creates inequalities and inequities, which is likely to reduce other committee members’ commitment to contributor efforts. If a committee member is not interested in making a working contribution, the committee should make it easy and mandatory for them to withdraw from the committee. This is a “best practice”.

Every viable strategic focus area needs a leader willing to be responsible for implementing the strategy. If no one volunteers to be the responsible leader, the strategy is not viable, and should be dropped from the plan. The leader of each strategic focus area should meet with the interested contributors to set a measurable goal for their strategy for the coming year. The lead committee should review all these year-one strategy deployment goals to insure that they are sufficient to achieve the year-one capacity building goal, or make adjustments so that everything is consistent.

Once a set of goals for year-one is agreed to, the people working on each strategic focus area need to develop an action plan to achieve their goal for the year. They might try to recruit additional volunteers to help implement the strategy. An action plan is a list of tasks, with the name of the person who wants to make each contribution, and when they expect to make it.

Every committee member should have at least one action item to contribute. If people are allowed to work on their own strategically relevant ideas, those tasks are more likely to be successfully implemented than if others try to assign them tasks. This is a “best practice”. If all the year-one action items for a strategy seem likely to meet the strategy’s year-one goal, then the strategy is viable. If not, adjustments are again needed, until everything is consistent.

Researchers have found that the primary difference between high and low performing groups is the willingness of its members to make performance commitments to one another, and to hold one another accountable for results. In every monthly meeting, high performing groups get a progress report from every member. They recognize those individuals that report good progress, and uses a constructive problem solving process to immediately address every under-performance. This is a “best practice”.

The defining attributes of low-performing working committees is that they spend virtually all their time telling stories, asking questions and sharing information and ideas. Members rarely commit to do anything, or hold anyone one accountable for doing it, or use constructive problem solving processes to address any performance problems. A low performing working committee’s dialog is not about performance, which is why they become low performing.=



Building a Committee Infrastructure

Previously, we described how to mobilize a Capacity Building Leadership Team and Strategic Action committees to build a nonprofit’s capacity. Some Orange County hospitals and performing arts organizations have dozens of committees and guilds, staffed by hundreds of volunteers, implementing a wide variety of capacity building strategies and events for the benefit of their nonprofit. This letter discusses how you can enroll more volunteers in the capacity building efforts of your nonprofit.

There are at least three reasons why people are likely to join a working committee in a nonprofit. First, they are good at and enjoy doing the type of work that they are being asked to do. Second, they enjoy being with the people that they will be working with. And lastly, they are doing it for a cause that resonates with their value system. Where do you find people whose personal interests fit well with the needs of your capacity building working committees?

The first place to look is among people who already have a working relationship with your nonprofit as Board members, employees, clients, suppliers, partners and volunteers. Most of these contacts already know and believe in your cause, and probably enjoy working with some of the people in your nonprofit. A second source is anyone that you know who enjoys your company. You are already satisfying one of their needs. In fact, anyone enrolled in your capacity building program might be persuaded to launch an effort to recruit some of their associates if you showed them how to do it in a friendly and easy way.

Make your recruiters aware of the fact that half of the adults in the U.S. do volunteer work. The average volunteer donates eight hours of volunteer effort per month. There are ten volunteers for every paid employee in the nonprofit sector. In aggregate, volunteers do one third of the work of the nonprofit sector. Half of the people that any of your recruiters know are probably volunteers at some nonprofit.

The process begins with a recruiter’s conversation with each of their contacts. Find out which of their associates are already volunteering. The most recruitable people are the 50% who already have the values that lead them to do volunteer work. Find out what each of these volunteers do as volunteers, what they like and don’t like about what they do, and why. This conversation about getting to know all your associates as volunteers can be a safe and enjoyable way of adding an interesting new dimension to everyone’s relationships.

When a recruiter finds a person who likes to do the kind of volunteer work that fits well with your nonprofit’s cause and needs, tell them about your nonprofit’s mission and programs, and of its need for a volunteer that matches their friend’s profile. Invite the prospect to a committee meeting, and if it seems to be a good fit, ask them to join the committee. Research on volunteers indicates that if you ask people in your personal network to volunteer to do something that they like to do, 50% of them will accept the invitation. But you have to ask.

Once they have agreed to join your capacity building effort, you need to give your new committee member some sort of orientation to help them be productive in their new role. For a committee that is just forming, the process described in our first letter might suffice for people familiar with your nonprofit. For all other situations, an orientation process and manual is probably needed. It is also helpful to ask an experienced and productive member to personally mentor a new member into becoming a productive member of their working committee.

One thing seems clear: if a nonprofit does not take the time to orient volunteers in the role that they are supposed to play, it is not likely to get much from the volunteer. All too often, a nonprofit succeeds in getting someone to join its Board or a committee, but does little else to prepare the person to contribute. Then the nonprofit wonders why everyone is so passive, doing little more than making a few comments in the meetings that they do attend.

Lastly, it is important to continually nurture working committee members. Volunteers want to feel good about their donation of time. One way of insuring this is to involve them in the planning process, letting them decide how they want to contribute. Another might be to have monthly meetings where volunteers can build relationships one another, can talk about and be recognized for their contributions, and can discuss issues and ideas. Another might be to publish a monthly capacity building progress report for the nonprofit, to make them proud of all the progress that they are helping their nonprofit realize. Another might be to survey the volunteers to find out what is satisfying and not satisfying them, and doing something to improve volunteer satisfaction.

Organizations with nothing but volunteers, like SCORE and the Executive Coaches of Orange County, do most of these things in an effort to keep their valuable volunteer resources involved and energized. It not unusual for satisfied volunteers to invest increasing amounts of effort in their nonprofit, leading to them accepting larger responsibilities as Committee or Board Chairs, or even Executive Director.

Another good way of finding volunteers is though organizational alliances. We will present some ideas for implementing this strategy in the next letter.



Capacity Building Alliances

In our previous letter, we described how to work with the personal networks of the people in your nonprofit, to find and enroll an ever increasing number of volunteers for your capacity building effort and its committees. This month we discuss developing alliances to help you recruit Board and committee members, or to help you implement any of the other capacity building strategies that we identified in Letter #2.

What is an alliance? It is a relationship with another organization that results in benefits for both organizations. It is not a donor relationship. Alliances can be tactical or strategic, and can be developed to support any of the other capacity building strategies.

When should you try to develop an alliance? Capacity building is mostly about extending a nonprofit’s “reach” into the community in an effort to include more Board and committee members, donors, volunteers, clients and/or client services in its program. If your organization’s publicity program and personal networks are not able to do this fast enough to achieve your capacity building goal, an alliance may give you the breakthrough that you need.

For example, every year we need to recruit quite a few experienced executives who are willing to volunteer their time to coach nonprofits in capacity building. The personal networks of our existing organization were only able to recruit one or two people a year. So we identified several organizations that had the kind of people that we were looking for, and attempted to develop an alliance with each of them. Our relationship with the Orange County Chapter of SCORE developed into an alliance that has been able to supply us with the volume of qualified and interested volunteers that we need to achieve our breakthrough capacity building goals.

If one of your strategies is to build your infrastructure of Board and committee, you might try to develop alliances with local civic organizations, chambers of commerce, businesses and professional organizations in order to reach a lot more prospective Board and committee members than you might be able to through your nonprofit’s personal networks.

The power of alliances is not limited to reaching prospective Board and committee members. They can help you reach businesses who might donate equipment, supplies, underutilized space and money to the nonprofit, individuals who might donate time or money, or institutions that can help you promote and publicize your nonprofit through participation in community events, joint service ventures and grants, shared mailing lists and website links, client referrals, etc. The possibilities are endless.

How do you develop an alliance? First, define the attributes of people that you would like to include in your nonprofit’s program, and the reason for including them. Second, identify organizations that have access to this target market that you want to reach. Third, do some research and networking to determine which of these organizations have values that are supportive of helping you access that market for your intended purpose. This is your list of possible alliances.

Then figure out what to ask of a prospective ally that may not cost them much to give; like referrals, mailing lists, participation in an event, unused space, equipment, supplies, food, etc. In addition, think of what you have to offer the prospective ally, which is of benefit to them. Lastly, recognize that a key ingredient of an alliance is the desire of the leaders in the two organizations to have a good relationship.

The goal is to find an aligning concept that creates a benefit for both organizations, at a readily affordable cost and downside risk. When you think you might have a viable concept for an alliance, use your personal network to initiate conversations with leaders in that organization, to develop relationships, and to test and shape the concept until both parties have some enthusiasm for helping one another.

For example, SCORE attracts an abundance of new members every year, and looks for ways to build their counseling business and deploy its new members. The Executive Coaches of Orange County invested several years of effort learning how a business executive could be of value to the nonprofit community, and have the marketing skills and contacts needed to create nonprofit coaching assignments. We asked SCORE to let us make a brief presentation at one of their chapter meetings, and five SCORE members volunteered to be nonprofit coaches.

We have another strategic alliance with the CONNECT project of Orangewood Children’s Foundation that enabled us to learn about the nonprofit community, and develop relationships in that community. Some of these relationships have, in turn, developed into other alliances that are helping us make the nonprofit community more aware of our Capacity Building Advisory Letters and our free follow-up Executive Coaching service. One alliance leads to others. It is a key capacity building strategy for us.



Developing Donors

There are several advantages of having individual donations as a major source of nonprofit funding. First, individual donations are a very stable source of revenue. For example, in 2002, individual contributions in the US totaled $241 billion, an increase of 1% over 2001, in spite of the fact that the US economy was going into a recession. In contrast, Government funding of nonprofits is the most unstable, with major changes occurring according to the preferences of politicians in Washington and Sacramento, and with the dramatic swings in state and federal tax revenues that result from the economic cycle.

The contributions of foundations are more stable than government grants, but still can vary considerably according to changes in the value of the stocks in their portfolio. At the program and individual grant level, foundation funding is even more unstable because many of them fund a new program for a few years, and then drop that support in favor of another new program that comes along that is even more appealing.

A second advantage is that individual donations are typically unrestricted, and can be used for nonprofit overheads, or even reinvested in capacity building to generate even more income. Most government grants are actually outsourcing contracts, where the government is paying a nonprofit to deliver specific services to targeted populations. While there is nothing wrong with being a contractor for the government, their grants must typically be spent on delivery of services according to the exact terms of their contract.

In addition to being a fairly stable source of unrestricted income, developing individual donors has the added value of creating public awareness and support for a nonprofit. In order to develop donors, a nonprofit has to reach out to the community and convince prospective donors of the value that it contributes to the community. Many nonprofits that depend on grants for their revenue are almost unknown to the public, making it difficult to attract volunteers to serve on Boards or committees, or to rally much public support if they have to make major cutbacks, or even face extinction because of the loss of a major grant.

Where are these individual donors? They are almost everywhere. According to the American Association of Fundraising Council, 70% of households in the US donate money to charities. According to a study made by Professor Ross Gittell at the University of New Hampshire, California taxpayers who itemize their deductions give an average of 3.7% of their income to charities, or an average of $1800 per year per filer. People over 55, or people who also donate their time as volunteers tend to give more than the average donation of 3.7% of income.

How do you develop donors? The following donor development cycle seem to work well:

  • Nurture a prospect’s positive feelings for the good things that your nonprofit does.
  • Present your case for doing more, and your nonprofit’s low costs of doing its work.
  • Ask for a specific pledge that you are pretty sure the donor would be willing to give.
  • Offer an appropriate incentive for making the requested pledge.
  • Follow up monthly with thank you notes, news of the good work that their donation made possible, and a variety of opportunities to get involved with your nonprofit.
  • For high potential donors, develop an ongoing relationship, so you know what each donor is capable of giving, and the kind of incentives that appeal to that donor.
  • After 4-12 iterations of steps 5 and/or 6, return to step 1

For example, when I retired from Procter and Gamble, I decided to endow a scholarship at Cornell. Their donor development staff started visiting with me in my home to bring me news about things that were of interest to me at Cornell. On one of these visits, I mentioned (with satisfaction) that the boy’s day school that I attended had put my name on a bronze plaque as a major contributor to the capital campaign for their new athletics building. A year later, Cornell sold me on making donations that would put my name on a bronze plaque in their new business school building.

On their visits, they noticed some of my golf memorabilia, and are now proposing that I endow one of the eighteen holes on the Cornell golf course, which, of course, includes a bronze plaque with my name on it as the tee marker for that hole. They even got one of my fraternity brothers, who is a golfer, to ask me for the donation. Cornell is a master at donor development.

At the grass roots level, when I worked at Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati, I volunteered my time as a fund raiser for the United Way, and trained dozens of P&G managers in how to ask for a donation. I remember calling on a Howard Johnson’s hotel with a colleague that I was training. I asked the manager if I could talk to the employees about making a donation. He laughed, saying that his employee turnover was 200% a year, and I would be lucky if I could raise a dime. But he agreed to let me try, and flippantly said he would match anything I raised.

The manager directed us to the basement stock room where employees took their breaks. I spent a few minutes talking with each employee, using the first steps of the donor development process, and asking each person to make a weekly pledge of the price of a cup of coffee. Sixty of the seventy employees made the pledge. When I asked the manager to match the total, he said those people will never honor their pledges. The next year, I checked the records, and to even my surprise, 85% honored their pledge. But by that time, the manager was a part of that company’s 200% turnover.



Asking for a Donation

In the previous letter, we outlined some reasons why a donor development program should be a key element of a nonprofit’s long term sustainability plan, and described a donor development cycle that seems to work well for most nonprofits. This letter discusses how to ask for a donation.

Regardless of whether you are going to ask for a donation by mail, phone, at an event, or in person, the presentation planning process is very similar. Start by deciding on the donation that you are going to ask for, an amount that is a relatively easy step for a donor to take. For example, in a mailing to new prospects, your whole presentation might be targeted at getting a pledge of $25. That is a pretty easy first step for most people to take. The purpose of a mailing to non-donors is to try to find as many new donors to your cause as possible (rather than trying to find some large donors).

For a mailing to donors that gave $150 last year, you might ask for a $200 pledge this year. For donors that gave $1500 last year, you might want to develop a personal presentation to try to take them to the $2000 annual giving level. For maximum effectiveness, the presentation plan is different for each giving level. At the high end, the presentation plan might even be different for each individual at that giving level. But the first step is deciding what giving level the presentation should be designed to support.

Next decide what to tell the donor you are going to do with the additional money that you are asking them to donate. Try to be specific like “provide food for more needy families or seniors, tutor more children in the 3Rs, etc.” For maximum impact, tell them how much of that service their added donation will buy. For example, a $25 initial pledge or donation increase might provide a week of after school tutoring or five hot meals for a disabled senior. Obviously, nonprofits that make extensive use of volunteers and donated equipment, supplies and services will have a huge advantage in demonstrating how much value they can deliver per donor dollar invested. But try to address the issue of how much good the donor’s gift will enable you to do.

Third, decide what you are going to do for the donor if they make the requested donation. If they and their gifts are important to you, you might want to list their name on a donor wall at your nonprofit, send them newsletters about the good that their donations are doing, invite them to events, etc.. How will you show them that they and their gifts are important to you?

These three elements of the asking plan define the first or next easy step that you are asking the donor to take to help your nonprofit, how you will use their donation for what effect, and what you will do to show the donor how important they and their gifts are to your nonprofit. In effect, these elements provide the reasons why the donor should make the requested investment in your nonprofit.

TV advertisers are masters at creating a commercial that tap into the feelings of a viewer in just twenty seconds. I can recall an image of an exhausted athlete re-energizing himself with a cold Gatorade; the satisfaction of a couple turning down lenders who are standing in line to offer them a mortgage, the excitement of driving a sporty car is through mountain “S” curves while a young boy whispers “zum, zum”; and an SUV ad where the remote controlled hatchback, door locks and door step allows a woman to put her groceries in the back and get into her seat before a thunderstorm breaks. The viewer can imagine themselves being in those “slice of life” stories, and when they do, they feel what the people in those stories feel. These ads tap into the feelings of the viewer.

Most asking plans should talk about some of the tragic circumstances that your nonprofit sees. A friend of mine told me what it felt like to have to stick his infant granddaughter with a needle a dozen times a day to test her glucose level. My eyes are tearing right now as I write this paragraph, thinking of how hard that must be for that family. Not surprisingly, I have made some major gifts to juvenile diabetes at their fundraisers, not because of any good reasons why I should be giving to that particular charity, but because of my feelings about what it must be like for a family to have to cope with this illness.

It is easy to determine if you have a story that taps into people’s feelings. If, when you tell it, or write about it, or think about it, it gets an emotional response from you, you are probably on the right track. I was asked to give a short talk about legacies at an annual meeting of the Orange County Community Foundation. To prepare, I was reflecting on the legacy that my parents had given me, and found myself getting choked up. I knew I had I story that would tap into my emotions when I told it, and would, therefore, tap into the feelings of at least some of the people in the audience when I delivered it.

Obviously, it is much easier to tap into the feelings of a prospective donor when you make the presentation personally to an individual or at an event. When you make that presentation, people will tend to feel what you feel; making it much more likely that you will get the donation that you are asking for. But even if the presentation is made by mail, it is still a good idea to tell the reader about some tragic circumstances that your nonprofit helped alleviate. Follow this by asking for a specific donation to do more of that good work, and then close with how you will use that donation for what effect, and what you will do to show the donor how important they and their gifts are to your nonprofit.



Prioritizing Donor Development

Our last two Letters discussed "Donor Development" and "Asking for a Donation". This letter discusses strategies for prioritizing your donor development efforts.

A commonly cited rule of thumb in the business world is 80/20. This suggests investing 80% of your development efforts in the largest 20% of your customers, programs and products because they probably account for 80% of your revenues, and 80% of your future growth.

For example, one of ECofOC’s clients with a multimillion dollar annual budget generated two thirds of their revenues from charging fees for the services they provided. Almost all of their remaining revenue came from a single, large grant from a foundation. The Executive Director was understandably concerned about what would happen if they lost that grant.

The nonprofit was thinking about starting up a new donor development effort to create the additional revenue needed to offset the possible revenue loss from this grant, and asked for our advice and help. Realistically, it would take them many years, or perhaps a decade, to learn how to develop a nonexistent program into a multimillion dollar revenue producer.

Their biggest single source of revenue was the grant. It enabled them to start giving away their services to children whose families could not afford to pay a fee, which was a very worthwhile thing to do. However, it also resulted in a decline in their fee for service business, perhaps because they started paying less attention to that program, and more attention to using the grant's funds to provide free services to low income children.

One 80/20 approach to reducing their sustainability risk would be to make a major effort to work with their largest donor (the foundation) to understand its long term funding strategies. The foundation obviously believes in the work of this nonprofit, and should be willing to talk about their long term interests in increasing, sustaining or phasing out their support for this nonprofit. If they wanted to phase out support, they should be willing to develop a plan with the nonprofit to minimize the negative impact on the children that both of them are trying to help. The 80/20 approach focuses a major effort on the biggest donor to upgrade that relationship into an alliance in order to minimize the uncertainty of what might to happen to this major donor's support in future years.

Another 80/20 idea is to look at this nonprofit's huge fee for service program. If they put a major effort into growing it by 15% per year, rather than letting it decline, the extra revenue generated in year three would equal their current revenue from the grant. The nonprofit's secondary priority is to offer services for free to children in low-income families. However, rather than depending on one large grant to fund this capability, they could initiate a program of diversification that might include increasing their fees or asking for donations from families that could afford to pay, asking low income families to pay a token fee, using volunteers to deliver some of their services, learning how to apply for a variety of smaller grants, fund raising among well off families and alumni that have used their services, etc. etc.

One of the best nonprofit workshops that I have ever attended was one on donor development, presented by Katie Machoskie, CFRE, at the Orange County Volunteer Center. Katie's advice, as I recall it, was to allocate your donor development efforts as follows:

First, make sure that every Board member knows who your top 10-25 donors are. Put 25% of your development efforts into making sure that these donors are delighted about their relationship with your nonprofit (rather than just being satisfied or not dissatisfied), and are considering a donation increase.

Second, spend another 25% of your nonprofit's donor development effort on the 10-25 donors that have the greatest potential to be a top 10-25 donor. This, and the above effort, typically accounts for 70-90% of a nonprofit's donations, and donation increases.

Spend another 25% of your effort on the 10-25 largest donors that did not renew their pledge. It is a lot easier to get past supporters to restore their pledge than it is to find new donors to replace these losses. Equally important is to find out from each of these donors what your nonprofit did, or did not do to lose that donor's support, and make sure your nonprofit does not repeat that mistake with any donors in the future.

Spend the remaining 25% of your effort seeking out new donors. Note that this model suggests that you spend 75% of your donor development effort on a small number (30-75) and percentage (perhaps 10% in a typical nonprofit) of your existing donors, for a 90/10 fundraising rule of thumb, compared to the 80/20 rule of thumb for developing a for-profit business.

Our next letter discusses how a volunteer development program might fit with a nonprofit’s capacity building strategies.



The Case for Volunteers

According to the Nonprofit Sector Research Fund of the Aspen Institute, 49% of U.S. adults do volunteer work. The average volunteer donates 157 hours of effort per year (13 hours/month) and, in aggregate, accounts for about one third of the effort-hours expended by nonprofits.

There are many reasons why you might want to involve more volunteers in the work of your nonprofit. One obvious reason is that volunteers are not paid for the work they do, and can be looked at as unpaid staff members who are capable of doing virtually any or all of the work of a nonprofit. The higher the percentage of nonprofit work done by unpaid staff, the lower the cost of delivering services to the community, and the more services that can be delivered for any given funding level. For example, the Executive Coaches of Orange County is an all volunteer organization, and that enables it to offer all of its services free of charge, with very little need to do any fund raising.

A second benefit is that volunteers can provide the specialized expertise needed to run a nonprofit in a highly professional manner; expertise that most small nonprofits lack (a chief financial officer, a human resources manager, a marketing or public relations manager, a computer systems manager, and so forth). Unpaid staff members can give a small nonprofit the diversity of expertise it might need to have a highly professional management team at a very affordable cost.

A third benefit is publicity. Most nonprofits cannot afford to invest in the media buys (print, radio and TV) that can make their nonprofit well known in their community. They are highly dependent on word-of-mouth publicity. Volunteers can be a major source of this word-of-mouth publicity because they tend to tell their friends about the volunteer work that they do, and in the process speak highly of the nonprofit that they work for. The more volunteers that a nonprofit has, the more publicity that it gets, the higher its public profile becomes in the community. Some hospitals and arts organizations have very high profile reputations in our community that, in no small part, is due to the armies of volunteers that are involved in their various guilds.

These three benefits, in combination, can also give a nonprofit an enormous advantage in competing for grants: by enabling a nonprofit to offer a better value for the funder by delivering its services at a lower than normal cost, by having a highly professional management team and operation, and by being very well known and respected in the community.

According to a study by Professor Ross Gittell at the University of New Hampshire, Californians give an average of 3.7% of their income to charities, or an average of $1800 per household. This percentage increases for people with advanced degrees, people over age 55, and people that volunteer. Education and age are also correlated with higher incomes. In addition, there is a trend for donors to focus their philanthropy, giving larger amounts to a smaller number of charities. Nonprofits that involve these high potential donors as volunteers are much more likely to be the recipients of major gifts and bequests.

My own story fits well with this giving model. Prior to retiring from Procter and Gamble in 1994, I donated about 100 hours/year managing donor development and special event teams, and sitting on a couple of Boards. I donated about 3% of my income in small amounts to a wide variety of charities. I had no real passion for doing any of this, but did it because it seemed like the right thing to do.

After leaving P&G, I started up my own business, but gradually found myself spending more of time as a volunteer, which seemed to fuel my passion for the nonprofit sector. Last year I spent 1600 hours volunteering, and gave 27% of my income to nonprofits, with the vast majority of it going to just five nonprofits that I am most heavily involved with and committed to. A well designed volunteer program can be a significant asset in helping your nonprofit to develop donors into major contributors to your cause.

Another advantage of having a volunteer organization is that it gives a nonprofit the capability to execute large special events like inspirational dinners that tend to bond donors to a nonprofit. Special events typically require dozens, or even hundreds of volunteers to manage all the details required to create an event that is truly special for the attendees, helping you make your nonprofit their favorite nonprofit.

Lastly, our clients tell us that their biggest barrier to developing and implementing capacity building strategies is the difficulty of attracting energetic people to serve on their Board and its committees. Nonprofits with a large volunteer program have a pool of active people available to develop and promote into committee leaders and Board members.

With all the advantages of using volunteers in nonprofits, why don’t more nonprofits do more of it? The answer I hear most often is that the nonprofit tried it and it did not work. Obviously, it is not the volunteers that did not work, because volunteers have and are working successfully as employees in a wide variety of roles in other organizations. What failed was the nonprofit’s ability to manage an effective volunteer program. In our next letter, we will discuss strategies for developing a volunteer program that might become more of a major asset to your nonprofit.



Building a Volunteer Organization

Our previous letter discussed why a nonprofit may want to involve more volunteers in their operations. This letter discusses the six key elements of a successful volunteer program. The names of these elements form the acronym "ERRORS".

The "E" stands for clearly defining your expectations of a volunteer; when and where they have to go to do the volunteer work, and what they are expected to do. For example, a Board member should obviously be told when and where the Board meetings are that they should attend. But they should also be informed of the responsibilities of that position, how much time they must spend doing what to prepare for each meeting, the effort that they are expected to invest to prepare for and attend committee meetings and any additional work they are expected to do (project work, fundraising, etc.). They should also be told what size donation they are expected to make to the nonprofit, and if they are expected to raise additional funds. Many of our clients wonder why their Board is so passive. A common cause of this problem is that nonprofits don’t tell prospective Board members everything that they expect their Board members to do.

The first "R" stands for the relationships that are a part of the volunteer role. If I think about all the volunteer positions that I have held over the last 40 years, the relationships that went with the role were at least as important as the role itself. For example, I enjoy giving presentations, and coaching and mentoring goal-oriented people. However, my most frustrating experiences as a volunteer were when I was asked to perform those roles with teenagers.

Every volunteer is likely to differ in the relationships they prefer as part of doing their work, from being left alone to wanting to work with dozens of people of all ages and backgrounds. Because relationships are a key to satisfying volunteers, it is important to think through what kinds of relationships you will be offering a volunteer, and then tell them about the relationships that go with their role.

The second "R" stands for recruiting. Where will you get your volunteers? One approach is through the personal networks of people already involved with your nonprofit. Another might be through alliances with other organizations. Once you define where to recruit, you need to define who will do it, the process for identifying prospects and developing them into successful applicants, and how you will motivate people to actually do the recruiting.

The "O" stands for orienting recruits. Some of your new volunteers might not have had any work or nonprofit experience, and most are not likely to be very familiar with your nonprofit's culture, the work it does, its finances, the work they are expected to do, and the relationships involved in doing that work.

One element of an orientation program is the written materials organized into a manual that might help a new person get oriented. Our Resource Book for our volunteers contains:

  • A description of the processes and principles that coaches can use in their work
  • Copies of all the educational and promotional materials that we have published
  • The process and materials we use to orient new volunteer coaches
  • Biographies and contact information for all our volunteers and staff members
  • A list of our clients and illustrative strategies that coaches developed for each client
  • Our nonprofit’s mission, vision and strategy, and the evolution of our organization as

    documented in monthly progress reports and annual revisions to our strategy.

I used to think that a comprehensive volunteer manual was the key to orienting recruits. I eventually learned that it is merely documentation of what needs to be personally covered in orientation sessions. Full time people get most of their orientation by interacting with other people at the work place. This is not available to most volunteers.

Orientation needs to include a series of sessions where volunteers can interact with staff and other volunteers until they feel comfortable with the culture, the work and the people they will be working with. If this is not done, volunteers may feel disoriented and unable to contribute at their full potential, resulting in disappointment for both the volunteer and the nonprofit.

The third "R" stands for recognition. The value of a nonprofit employee is recognized by their salary and fringe benefits, their office and access to equipment and support staff, and the other amenities that a nonprofit may provide. These forms of recognition are not offered to most volunteers, most of whom would also like to feel valued.

Recognition might include giving volunteers excellent orientation materials and briefings, a nice place to work or meet, a “thank you” for their help, involving them in decisions that affect their work, and a note of appreciation or a memento of their service. Volunteers who feel well utilized and appreciated are likely to continue to work for a nonprofit and be a source of positive word-of-mouth publicity for it. Those who are not typically leave and take some negative feelings about that nonprofit with them.

The "S" stands for assessing and occasionally doing something to improve volunteer satisfaction. You might interview your volunteers to find out what are their important sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. You can also conduct surveys to identify trends in the importance of various elements of the program, and the satisfaction they produce.

Finding out how your volunteers feel about their role is another way of recognizing the importance of your volunteers. Sharing the results of the survey, and doing something to improve satisfaction is an even better way of showing volunteers how valuable they are to your nonprofit.



Management Time Traps

Have you noticed that there can be huge differences in how well an organization serves its clients, depending on the manager?  Under one manager, an organization might deliver a fairly constant value for years. Then a new manager comes in and takes the very same people to a dramatically higher level of service to our community. Why the huge difference?

Manager Expectation: One reason may be a manager’s attitude or expectations. Some managers view their role as a custodial job, to maintain the organization’s capability to reliably deliver the traditional services as always, month after month. This perspective might be their own expectation, or the expectations of the organization in which they work. In my 34 years with Procter and Gamble, I had 11 different managerial assignments. P&G developed its managers by giving them a variety of assignments, and tested them by comparing results in each assignment with other managers that held those positions.

In only one of my assignments did my manager expect me to just perform a custodial role. In 90% of my assignments, I was also expected to build the business and develop my people into better managers. This organizational attitude towards continually building capacity might be one of the reasons why P&G was a growth company when I joined them in 1962, and may be why it is still growing today.

Where Do You Spend Your Time? As an Executive Coach to nonprofit managers, one of the discussions that I frequently find to be helpful to my clients is how much time are they spending on internal verses external communications. Internal communications consists of time spent with their employees, getting to know them, how they do their job, responding to their questions and concerns, making sure that everything is running as smoothly and as efficiently as possible for the business and the people in it.  It also includes time spent communicating with their bosses, reading and writing internal reports, and responding to internal phone calls, E-mails and people that walk into their office. Some of my clients were spending virtually all their time on these internal activities. It is what managers do to insure that everything runs smoothly.

On the other hand, working with people inside your organization is not a very good way of finding out what your organization must do differently in order to produce more value. People outside your organization that you are trying serve, current and prospective donors, volunteers, board members, suppliers and partners are in possession of the knowledge of what you can do to increase the value of your nonprofit to them. Taking time to seek out this information, and undertaking projects to act on this knowledge is the key to building your business with your clients, donors, volunteers, suppliers and partners.

The Right Balance: Do you want a smooth running organization or one with a very healthy growth rate? What is the right balance between spending time internally to keep your organization running smoothly, verses external communications and externally driven improvement efforts to enable your nonprofit to deliver services that are more highly valued by the community you want to serve?  Each manager needs to find a balance that is right for them.

Begin Your Journey: To begin the journey, I typically suggest that interested clients keep track of the time they spend on internal communications verses external communications (meetings, meeting prep, mail, Email, phone, etc.) and how much time they have left for projects. If they have trouble getting enough quality time to do much project work, I ask them to also keep track of interruptions to their work, and where it comes from. Most of my clients would like to spend more time on external communications and do more projects to deliver more value, but have trouble finding the time to do much of that. Typical time traps include:

Interruptions: Some of my clients feel that they spend most of their day going from one interruption to the next. My personal solution is to process my mail, Email and phone calls in time slots of my choosing; first thing in the morning, first thing after lunch, and before I leave the office at night. I let the messages queue up if they arrive in other time slots.

Internal Requests for Information: Some managers leave their PC connected to their E-mail server, and every time a message arrives, they instantly respond to the E-mail. The faster you respond, and the more complete your response, the more E-mails you will get requesting more information. The same is true for requests received by phone or in meetings. Don’t try to be everyone’s best source of information. To minimize this time trap, only respond to requests that require a response, and make the response as brief and delayed as acceptable.

Office Drop-ins: If one of my employees interrupted me by walking into my office, I would work with them on the issue they brought to me. But if I thought they should have foreseen this issue and discussed it at their last weekly meeting with me, or could have waited until their next weekly meeting, I would also coach them on how they could have done a better job of planning their work week. As a result, my employees quickly learned how to plan ahead so that they could function effectively with only one business contact per week with me, which made them better planners and managers, and freed me from one major source of interruptions.

Internal Meetings: In my coaching practice, if a client feels they are spending too much time in internal meetings, I ask clients about the consequences (or lack thereof) of only attending half or none of the internal meetings, and scheduling some external meetings in those time slots. I learned early in my career not to do this to my boss, but most other internal meetings contribute little to the business or my effectiveness, and have almost no consequences of me not personally attending. I used my lunch hour as my primary method of staying in touch with key people and finding out what was really going on in the organization.

The Bottom Line: I think a manager with five direct reports should be able to maintain a smooth running organization with 60% of their effort focused internally, leaving them with 40% of their time to spend on external communications and projects that enable their organization to deliver more value.



Effective Communicators

The essence of good management is saying the right things to the right people at the right time in order to get the best results possible. I am a much better manager when I consciously think about my communication purpose prior to acting. Decades ago, someone told me about the four basic purposes of communicating. I try to keep these four options in mind when trying to decide who I should talk to next, with what communication purpose in mind, as I search for ways to improve the performance of my organization. Here are the four basic communications purposes and their role in management.

To Entertain: The first communications purpose is to build trust and rapport with new associates and to then maintain it. Rapport is built by finding common interests and feelings, so that it is possible to laugh together over the same story and have interests that you enjoy doing together or talking about.

Trust is about believing that your associate always acts in your best interest, helping you find success and happiness in life, rather than a win-lose agenda. When a manager begins working with a new employee, boss or colleague, it can take time develop the trust and rapport needed to have a productive relationship.

If trust and rapport are not present, it is almost impossible to be very effective in any higher level communication purpose because the person is too uncomfortable to hear much of what you say, or too distrusting to believe much of what they do hear. While it may take many hours of effort focused on building trust and rapport, once it is established, it only takes a minimal amount of effort to maintain it (unless someone violates the trust).

To Inform: A key role of a manager is to give an employee the information that they need to grow by increasing the value of their efforts to the organization. To do this, a manager should interview their employees to find out exactly how they did their job, and why they did it that way. Then interview the employee’s clients and coworkers, and their managers to determine which of those behaviors are highly valued and which are not, plus any additional things your employee could do to create even more value.

As a part of each performance review, interview employees to find out what kind of work each employee would like to have an opportunity to do, and what kinds of work they no longer enjoy doing. Quite often, what has become a routine task to one person is an interesting growth opportunity for another.

Collecting a wealth of information about what is of value to the employee, their clients and the organization equips the manager to advise employees on what they could stop doing because it no longer adds much value, and what they could start doing because it adds value. Managers should be redesigning each employee’s job at a pace that allows them to grow at a challenging and rewarding rate.

Being a “proactive mentor” that knows how their employees do their job, and how others value those efforts, makes each employee feel like they and their efforts are very important to their manager. Taking the additional step of proactively mentoring growth by showing employees how they can become even more valued enables the manager to build the employee trust and respect that managers must have in order to be highly effective.

To Convince: As managers acquire anecdotal evidence about what kinds of employee work behaviors are valued and not valued by clients, coworkers and other managers, a manager can conceptualize these facts into higher level statements that define their managerial values. If a manager is able to convince employees that their published value statements are valid, then employees can confidently use these statements as a guide to coming up with their own ideas of how to add value, further accelerating their own and their organization’s growth.

A manager’s mission, goals, strategies and operating principles are all values statements. To be valid, every activity or idea that is supported by a manager must be consistent with all of their value statements. Any decision not to support an activity or idea must be explained by at least one of the value statements. Any statement that does not play a significant role in explaining the decisions that a manager makes should be deleted from the values statements because it lacks operational efficacy.

Convincing an organization to buy into a set of value statements is an act of leadership. It takes some courage to publish tentative value statements, to be open to the employee feedback on how those statements might not explain some management decisions, and to keep revising until a credible consensus is built. The manager must then reinforce the consensus by using the value statements to explain each of their decisions to employees.

Managers that do this are likely to be perceived as highly principled and fair because they treat everyone’s efforts the same according to their published principles. Defining the hierarchy of values that drives a manager’s decisions is a great way of creating the three most crucial managerial assets of trust, respect and fairness.

To Persuade: Having an easy rapport with employees, being trusted, mentoring each employee’s growth, and developing value statements to help employees come up with their own ideas for improvement may not lead to employee action to improve. Some employees may still be hesitant to change, and need to be persuaded. Leadership is about convincing people of the merit of certain values. Management is about persuading people to act on those shared values.

One process of persuading an employee to take a more appropriate action is the process of delegation. It consists of advising the employee of specifically what action you would like to see them start or stop doing, why it is important for the organization and the employee to do that, and who they should work with to get the help they need to do what you are asking. Then ask the employee to tell you what they plan to do about your request in the coming week.

You might need to negotiate until you feel the employee is planning to give this item the right kind of attention. Then summarize the work plan that the employee agreed to, and state your intention to review their progress in your next weekly meeting. In the next meeting, recognize and value any progress the employee has made, and then negotiate the next week’s plan. Keep iterating until you are confident that the employee has adopted the desired change.