The Bamboo Project Blog

Playing To Your Staff's Strengths--Help them Develop a Career Plan

Yesterday, we talked about some great resources for identifying employee strengths and using them for more effective management. Today I want to follow up with some thoughts about how career planning can be used to make that process even more effective.

Why Should My Organization Care About My Employee's Career Plans?
When individuals prepare a career plan, they must start with an understanding of themselves. What are their values, passions and skills? What are their strengths that they can build on and what are their weaknesses that they need to manage around?

This process of self-discovery can provide two major benefits for the organization:

1. Staff and managers get a clear picture of the staff person that can be used to redesign work responsibilities and find new avenues for staff to explore. In many cases you get a renewed sense of commitment to the job and greater excitement about exploring learning opportunities and new responsibilities.
2. In some cases, people find out that they are really not well suited to the work they are currently doing. In my experience, the people who discover this are the ones who are considered to have "attitude problems" or to be "burnt out." On several occasions I've ended up counseling people out of their current professions and this has turned out to be a tremendous service both to the individual and to the organization that employed him/her.

Resources for Developing Staff Career Plans
In another post, I'll discuss a holistic process for working with staff to develop and implement their career plans. For now, I'm going to share a few resources that staff can use on their own or working with management.

Explore Values
Find Their Calling is a great article from Fast Company on how to identify and honor staff values. In most cases, job satisfaction and performance is tied to the extent to which the job and organization jibes with the worker's values. This article discusses how you can use this process with staff and describes some of the benefits.

Be Bold
The Be Bold Career Planning Journal is a nice piece geared specifically toward people in the nonprofit sector. Developed by the Be Bold Team,  this workbook helps staff:

• "Find their Truest Self"

• Identify their "Moment of Obligation" (what are their passions or sources of inspiration?)

• Develop the "gall to think big"

• Find Solutions that are New and Untested.

They also have an online quiz to help users figure out if they're "bold."

The advantage of this handy guide is that its focus on commitment and finding solutions can also fit in well with an organizational planning process. I'm a big believer in the idea that organizations run better when the goals of individuals are aligned with the goals of the organization. This provides a process for doing that.

If You Aren't Feeling Bold
Bold isn't for everyone, although I think it offers significant benefits when it comes to translating individual career plans into benefits for the organization. If it's not your style, though, you might want to have staff work their way through the Career Development e-Manual developed by the University of Waterloo. This great resource has been around for a while and provides step-by-step guidance for developing a plan.

We Want Your Feedback!
Drop us a line in the comments to let us know if your organization helps staff develop their own career plans. If you do, how's it working for you?

Michele

Playing to Your Staff's Strengths

Last week I did a training/planning session with one of my Job Corps clients. This group is responsible for attracting applicants to Job Corps and then helping them through the admissions process.

These two aspects of the job require very different skill sets. The outreach piece is essentially sales--staff must be able to go out to a variety of applicants and organizations and "sell" Job Corps. The admissions component of the job is more about counseling and preparing young people for the demands of a Job Corps education.

In the course of our planning, we got into a discussion about these two disparate job responsibilities. I asked how many in the group enjoyed the admissions/counseling piece. Two thirds of the group raised their hands. Then I asked who enjoyed the Outreach piece. One third raised their hands. And there was basically no overlap between the groups. They either liked outreach or they enjoyed admissions. Only one or two liked both.

"How many of you," I asked, "spend more time on the piece you enjoy and find that you do a better job at it?" They all raised their hands.

Later I was speaking to the manager of the department. He reported that he wasn't surprised at the results. The people who enjoyed counseling applicants were the ones who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing outreach. The outreach people, on the other hand, tended to not do as well with the applicants and their families.

"Why," I asked him, "do you then split the job this way. If you know you have a group of people who love and are good at doing outreach, why not have them doing that full-time, while the others are doing what they love and do well?"

It was like a lightening bolt had hit him. Like most organizations, his has defined jobs according to organizational needs, rather than the skills and talents of the workers. But as we talked, he began to realize that he would be able to better meet the needs of his organization if he worked WITH the strengths of his staff, rather than fighting their "weaknesses."

This is a common mistake at most organizations. Even those nonprofits that specialize in helping clients with career and job search plans do nothing to ensure that their own staff have a career plan that clearly identifies their strengths. Further, even if they do, little is done to actually capitalize on those strengths.

I've come to believe, though, that if we tap into staff passions and strong points we can actually boost our organizational performance in ways we never imagined. When people love what they do and feel like they're doing what they are good at, they will naturally become your top performers. In many cases this can happen by accident, but why not be more deliberate about it?

Resources for Managing to Staff Strengths
If you're going to explore how to manage to staff strengths, your education should begin with First Break All the Rules (if you don't have time for the book, then at least try this summary). Then follow it up with Now Discover Your Strengths, which includes a free code for taking the online Strengths Finder to discover your own personal strengths.

These two books by Marcus Buckingham describe in easy-to-read terms how successful, high performing managers help their staff identify key strengths and then structure the employee's job responsibilities to capitalize on these strengths and minimize weaknesses. They give explicit step-by-step instructions that can be used by any organization to get the most out of their staff, something I think is key for many nonprofits.

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Tomorrow, I'm going to talk in some more detail on how to use a career planning process to engage staff and management in talking about strengths and engaging them in what their areas of passion. This is another way to approach the strengths process that I think is also very in line with some key themes of the 2.0 revolution.

Michele

Why Blog?

We've been talking here lately about helping nonprofits to see the value in blogs. Fortunately, CK has come to the rescue with the results of her recent reader poll asking "What is the single greatest point of value you receive from blogging?"

This fabulous collage is a montage of the answers she received. (You can get a PDF of her full report here.) Very visual and striking--captures a lot of key points in just a few words. Seems like a great piece to share the next time you're trying to convince someone of the value of blogging.

QUESTION--Beth asks in comments what value I find in blogging. She values the fact that it forces her to write and reflect on a regular basis. I like that I'm always learning. What do you value? Let us know in comments.

"Today I Applied for Food Stamps and an Abortion"

It's been my experience that after a few years on the job, it can be easy to forget why we do what we do, particularly if we work with some of society's most downtrodden. Whatever youthful optimism we may have brought to the job initially can fly out the door once we've spent some time in the trenches.

But of course with that optimism can go our compassion and our motivation. It can be very easy to get caught up in the requirements of paperwork and case notes and fundraising and a million other things that have nothing to do with actually helping people. I've been guilty of this myself, so I know whereof I speak.

I don't think this has to happen, though, if as organizations we require staff to put themselves in customer's shoes at least once a year. Look what happened to Keely Stevenson who spent a day posing as a single mom, pregnant with another child and in need of services because her abusive boyfriend would no longer be supporting her:

"The woman from HRA was very nice to me, but I had a tough time understanding her. I didn't have my social security card or birth certificate, so she couldn't process my paperwork. I didn't have an address and she said I needed some address or they couldn't issue me anything. She had no idea where I could get a social security card, and I was all out of money (had given it to Micky and Annie outside Taco Bell), so I couldn't call anywhere to find out. I certainly couldn't go to my boyfriend's house to get it because we were hiding from him since he abused my son and me. When I told her I was 2 months pregnant and needed a doctor, she said it didn't matter until I was four months pregnant. There were so many confusing components of the conversation because she was thinking of her system and I was thinking of my needs- a miss match. If I was a shy, less confident person, I might have just made assumptions and accepted that I couldn't get help. Instead I asked more questions and finally found out that I could get food stamps the same day if I had my and my son's social security card and that it takes about a week to open a case for Medicaid, child care services, shelter assistance, domestic violence services, etc. I told her I would try to get some ID (somehow) and come back tomorrow.

I was so overwhelmed and was empathetic of my own story (since it was really a story of so many women I have met before), I felt hopeless. Tears actually began to stream down my face."

So after less than a day as one of the women she serves, Keely knows helplessness and grief in a way she could never have known just sitting at her desk. The beauty of Keely's experience is that it reminded her of why she works where she does. It gave her a street-side, on-the-ground, in-your-face picture of what it means to be a poor, young single mother who is pregant and alone.  It forced her to experience life from the inside--and it changed her.

Now imagine an organization that required this as a regular part of it's ongoing professional development process.  Imagine an agency that required  staff at all levels of to spend a day as a homeless vet and then participate in a facilitated discussion on what they learned. What if staff had to be "blind' for the day and then write about what they experienced? Or what if they shadowed a client with AIDs, using video footage and interviews to tell the customer's story?

Building this kind of "experiential learning" into the professional development process could have a powerful impact on both staff's ability to empathize with the people they help, as well as on their motivation to come in day after day after day. It could re-energize and re-invigorate  them and it could help them find new ways to do what they do. 

Unfortunately, I haven't seen this kind of thing going on too much, although I'm not sure why. Do you know of any organizations that do this kind of customer experience? Or any ideas on why they don't?
 

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Last time we talked, we were discussing individual performance objectives and the very human reality that you get what you measure. This is a cardinal rule that I find is ignored all too often usually with the best of intentions.

Another mistake that organizations often make is to ignore the law of unintended consequences which holds that "almost all human actions have at least one unintended consequence. In other words, each cause has more than one effect, including unforeseen effects." In this case, what we mean is that unless you're REALLY careful about how you set individual performance expectations, you're going to end up with staff behaviors and organizational outcomes you didn't intend or want.

Here's what often happens. Jobs R Us helps people find jobs. They've decided that a good organizational goal would be to help 40 people per month get a job and they're going to measure whether or not 40 people got a job by looking at their dandy new computer system, where each case manager is supposed to be documenting the people who obtained employment.

Further, they've decided that it makes sense to just divide these forty placements up among their four case managers--each case manager will be responsible for "placing" 10 job seekers.

Jobs R Us  now THINKS (not unreasonably) that they've  set up a system where staff are "held accountable" for helping people get jobs. This is inaccurate. What they've done is:

Set up a system that rewards staff for DOCUMENTING that people got jobs.

Do you see what happened here? It's not about helping people find work. It's about PROVING it. And in some cases, that can be done without actually doing anything.  In the worst case scenario, so much attention is paid to the documentation aspect, the customer actually walks away angry because service will go right out the window ("Hi--Congratulations on that new job. I'm calling because I need to prove that you're working." Yeah, thanks. Click)

So here's the law of unintended consequences at work. We WANTED staff to focus on helping people get jobs. But what we got were people working on DOCUMENTING that a customer got a job. Big difference.

Here's another unintended consequence that I often see. Jobs R Us is really into teaming and they want their case managers to support each other and work together as a team, sharing job leads, etc. But they've just set INDIVIDUAL performance objectives! This inevitably sets up a system of competition, not cooperation.

Depending on how crazy the organization gets about the 10 placements a month ("You're FIRED if you get 8 placements!"), what you will often see is staff withholding job leads so that only "their" case load gets access to those jobs. Or if Case Manager A is out of the office and one of her customers comes in, Case Manager B isn't going to "waste time" helping that customer--she gets rewarded for HER placements, not for helping someone else's client.

Do you see how the expectations have created these outcomes? It's not that staff aren't doing their jobs, it's that the law of unintended consequences has intervened and we have created a system to which they are responding. They understand their jobs to be something different than what you intended. This tends to happen when we focus more on outcomes measures, rather than on setting expectations for how processes will occur.

So what can you do? How do you set individual expectations that will give you the kinds of staff behaviors you're looking for? That's a topic for another day . . .

Individual Expectations And How We Screw it Up

Previously we were talking about the role that expectations play in NPO performance--more specifically, we looked at NPO goals at the organizational level. We also talked about the difference between outcomes and process expectations. (Wasn't that fun?)

Today, we're going to take dig a little more deeply into expectations at the individual employee level. After all, they're the ones who presumably will take you to the organizational success. (NOTE--I am talking here about working with paid staff. Volunteer expectations are similar, but different and in this post I'm not dealing with issues related to setting expectations for volunteers)

You Get What You Measure Redux
Just a little reminder, in case you've forgotten . . . Human beings are driven by rewards and punishments. They will generally work on those things for which they are held accountable (both positively and negatively) and they will not work on the things that are ignored by the organization.

As you'll recall from our previous discussion, most NPOs regard themselves as being mission-driven. As a result, they also tend to believe that their staff are very mission-driven, spending their days doing the best things for the kids or women or homeless people or disaster victims they serve. Let me be clear that I think that there is much truth in this. Most people won't accept the wages and working conditions of an NPO unless they're either bought into the organization's mission or really desperate. In my experience it's usually the former.

BUT . . . These people also want to keep their jobs. . . so THAT means that whatever the organization says they should be doing, that is generally what they'll be doing. And if the organization is most focused on outcomes, then that's what staff will focus on too.

The

Shortest Route

to Expectations Will Generally Be Chosen
There was a time when NPOs weren't particuarly good at setting performance objectives. This has changed in recent years and I find that most NPOs have some level of performance metrics in place. The problem, though, is that many times these metrics are only outcomes-based. And remember what we discussed is a potential challenge with outcomes-based expectations? They often create opportunities for abuse.

Let me give an example. In a former life, my husband worked for an agency that was very focused on job placements. The entire department was in a tizzy every day. "How many placements have you gotten?" "I need only two more." "Damn, I have to get 6 more."

Wow, you would think--this is working really well. These people are really focused on what we need them to be focused on. This is great! They really know what they're doing.

Wrong. Here's what actually happened.

First of all, staff did not spend time helping people get jobs. Remember--the measure was "how many people were placed." Instead, they spent it documenting placement. More specifically, they spent their days trolling the database to find people who had already gotten a job on their own (!) and then calling the person so that staff could take credit for that placement. Staff literally spent their days combing through computer files and calling people who were already working! They actually resented it if a person who needed a job came in and interrrupted them in this task because they might not get a placement from it! They would groan and try to pass the job seeker off on someone else so that they could return to the computer to find another working person to take credit for. I'm pretty sure that this was not what the NPO intended to have happen (although I could be wrong)

Here's the other thing that went on. Staff had a quota of placing 8 people a month. If they "placed" their 8 people by September 10, then they considered themselves done for the month. They might try to work with a few people to get a jumpstart on October, but for the most part, they kicked back and enjoyed some free time. Not exactly what we were hoping for here, either.

At first when my husband would tell me this stuff, I would go crazy. I would blame his co-workers, talk about how they weren't doing their jobs. But then I thought about it. Yeah, they WERE doing their jobs. The problem was that the agency had focused on such narrow, outcomes-based performance expecations, people didn't see their jobs BEYOND that. Because there were minimal process objectives in place, the focus had shifted entirely to outcomes, to the detriment of both the NPO and their clients.

So one of the key considerations here--and this takes us back to the outcomes vs. process issue--is that in setting individual employee expectations, we must focus on setting expectations not just on WHAT gets done, but on HOW it's done. We must be prepared to be explicit in these expectations and be willing to hold staff accountable for these expectations.

We'll talk more about individual performance the next time.

 

Taking it to the Next Level

When I work with my clients (mostly government agencies and non-profit community and faith-based organizations), we often use a 6 boxes matrix for analyzing organizational issues.

1. Expectations--How does the organization measure success? What are the organizational measures and what are the individual measures? Is everyone in the organization clear about how success is measured? Are these expectations clearly and consistently communicated and measured?
2. Tools and Resources--What tools and resources do staff have access to to get the job done? Is there a policy and procedure manual? The proper forms? Do they have working computers? What about their working environment? Is it conducive to getting the job done?
3. Consequences and Incentives--What behaviors are encouraged? What behaviors are discouraged? What formal incentives and consequnces exist? What are the informal incentives and consequences?
4. Skills and Knowledge--Do staff have the skills and knowledge to get their jobs done? Do they have adequate training not just in the ways of the agency for which they work, but also in core skills and knowledge that may be necessary to get the job done?
5. Selection and Assignment--Do you have the right people on the bus? Are they sitting in the right seats? Are you leveraging people's strengths and helping them to manage around their weaknesses?
6. Motives and Preferences--Are you meeting individual employee needs? Are you using the right mix of incentives, work environment, etc. to motivate each employee?

In this approach, each box is built on the ones before it, so that Box 1 (Expectations) must be clearly developed and understood before the organization should move on to the next one (Tools and Resources). It does no good to work on Box 6, which is related to employee attitudes, if you have not worked on the boxes before it.

Nine times out of ten we find that poor morale is a direct result of the agency not paying attention to one of the earlier boxes, particularly Boxes 1, 2 and 3 If you do not set clear, consistent expectations, provide staff with the right tools and resources and provide the right mix of incentives for meeting expectations, then you shouldn't complain if morale is low. None of us is happy when we don't know what our job is or we're expected to do it without the right tools and training.

In later posts, I'll be taking a closer look at each of the individual boxes. For now, I introduce them because I think that they create the framework for understanding each of the areas that we must pay attention to in running an organization.

In this blog, I want to explore the resources that NPOs can use to improve their organizational capacity. I have a particular interest in the uses of technology and best practices to improve overall performance and want to examine how NPOs can begin to take advantage of the variety of resources that are available to improve their capacity to meet their individual mission.

An ambitious project, no doubt, but a fun one too.