The Bamboo Project Blog

Wiki-olio Anyone?

Beth Kanter is musing on her increased use of wikitations--wikis as presentation tools that either replace or build upon a PowerPoint presentation--and suggests that a wiki might also be a great place for her to keep an online portfolio. (I'm suggesting we call it a "wiki-olio" but I'm open to other suggestions).

Personally I think that a Wiki-based portfolio is a fabulous idea, particularly as I've been doing a lot of thinking about a professional development project I'm working on for one of my clients. (I also see this idea building off of some of my earlier thinking about building nonprofit skill networks.)

From an organizational perspective, having staff maintain an online portfolio with links to their work and presentations, resume information, etc. would be an outstanding resource. And for individuals, it would be a great way to keep an ongoing library of their work and skill development to be used throughout their careers. I don't know about you, but I've often forgot about projects I've worked on, trainings and presentations I've developed. If I got into the habit of maintaining a wiki-based portfolio, I'd have all of my work in one place.

For such a thing to work for organizations, I think that there would have to be an agreed-upon format and tagging taxonomy that all participants would use. The tags could cover skills, job functions, presentations/conferences, interests, work experiences, etc. It would make it much easier to find people who had a certain background or skill, particularly in larger organizations.

Definitely something I want to ponder further. I'd be curious to hear if anyone has created their own "wiki-olio" and what suggestions they have for organizing the materials, showcasing talents, etc.

Creating Nonprofit Skill Networks

Lately I've been exploring the concepts of nonprofit networks here, what it takes to form and nurture connections among various nonprofits and between nonprofits and individuals. We've talked about building connectivity networks that link people to people, affinity networks that reinforce commonalities among network members and production networks that move affinities into collective action.

The other day I was researching learning management systems for a client interested in tracking staff competences and training needs. I started thinking about the need for skill networks within the nonprofit community and what would have to happen in order for us to develop such networks.

What Do I Mean by a Nonprofit Skill Network?
Very simply, a nonprofit skill network would bring together the knowledge and skills of individual staff at all member organizations and make those skills available to the members of the network. For example, a staff person at Agency A might have skills in developing organizational newsletters. This skill would be cataloged in an online location--either a database or in some other form, such as through a wiki using tagging. When Agency B needs someone to do a newsletter for them, but they lack the internal skills for this to happen, then they would be able to find the staff person from Agency A who could then assist them in implementing that project. 

Why Do We Need Nonprofit Skill Networks?
Staff knowledge and skills are the lifeblood of any organization, but this is particularly true for nonprofits. The more skilled our staff are, the more access to good information they have, the more likely we are to be successful. But many nonprofits are small. They don't have the capacity within their individual organizations to cover all the skill needs that may be necessary to create an effective organization. This is particularly the case when we venture outside of traditional program areas into more functional skills, for example, IT, human resources, marketing and public relations, staff training etc.

With the creation of a skill network, member organizations would be able to expand their capacity to access particular knowledge and skills. In some cases, I could see organizations sharing a collective pool of staff. For example, Agency A might employ a marketing person who splits her time between several members of the network. Network members who used the marketing person would either reimburse the employing agency for the staff person's time or they could trade for services, perhaps offering the use of their finance person in return.

Agencies would also be able to access specialized skills and knowledge for special projects. For example, if an organization needed to run a training on case management basics, they might be able to "borrow" a staff person from one of the other organizations to provide the training. Again, they could either pay for the use of the staff person's time or they could trade for other services.

How Would a Skill Network Operate?
The first order of business would be to find a way to catalog the knowledge, skills and abilities of staff from all network member organizations. The network members would need to agree on a common taxonomy for describing skills so that member organizations are comparing apples to apples.

Ideally, these skills would be cataloged in an online system, either a shared database or by using something less sophisticated, such as tagging. If tagging was used, I could see the creation of a network wiki or blog. For each staff person there would be a detailed biography and maybe a copy of their resume, work samples, etc. Their entries would also be tagged with the appropriate knowledge and functions. Interested agencies would then be able to access the biographies by looking under the appropriate tags.

Other issues that would need to be addressed by the network would include:

• Processes and procedures for collecting the information from staff, including what information will be collected and how it will be shared.

• Will participation in the skill network be voluntary or required for individual staff?

• Processes for accessing staff from other agencies to work on various projects

• Acceptable exchanges--will trading be allowed or would it be strictly a financial arrangement? How will the organizations handle the financial side of things?

• Who will be responsible for maintaining and updating the skill database?

Cons of a Skill Network
There would be a number of challenges to creating such a skill network, not the least of which would be getting past the often siloed, territorial thinking of many organizations. Clearly this would be a complicated endeavor with logistical and practical concerns galore. Many organizations might be uncomfortable with the idea of hiring a staff person in the hopes that they would be able to share that person with other agencies and be reimbursed for those costs. (One way around that would be to look into sharing freelance consultants who would not be employed by any single agency). For various reasons, individual staff might also object to providing their services to another nonprofit. And a significant number of nonprofits operate in crisis mode, making the idea of setting up a skill network a pipe dream they feel they have little time to pursue.

Pros of a Skill Network
For all the potential problems in setting up and maintaining a skill network, I think that there are also significant benefits that make it a worthwhile endeavor. Clearly it would expand the capacity of individual organizations to provide higher quality services. They would have access to knowledge and skills beyond their organization that could give their individual organization a new lease on life.

There's also a benefit to individual staff. In many cases, nonprofit staff get burned out from dealing with the same people and problems on a daily basis. The opportunity to provide services in their strength areas to other organizations could re-energize a tired career. They could also give staff an opportunity to stretch and grow in ways that would in turn benefit their employing organization.

Some Possible First Steps
When I'm thinking about possibilities, I tend to take them to the furthest degree. I see the end result, which can be overwhelming to a lot of people. I think there are smaller steps that organizations could take, however, to start moving in the direction of a larger skill network.

Create an Internal Skill Network--The technologies exist for individual organizations to create their own internal knowledge and skill networks. Using wikis and blogs, individual organizations could take it upon themselves to catalog their internal staff knowledge and skills to make this information available to others in the organization. I would suggest delving deeply into what staff know--you may be surprised at the skills that people have developed in other parts of their lives that could be utilized within the organization.

Create a Skill Network with 1-2 Trusted Partners--Most nonprofits have developed relationships with other organizations already. To expand outside of the individual organization, they could reach out to a few of their trusted partners to build a smaller shared network of skills. You may already be doing this on an informal basis. However, making it a somewhat more structured process could reap bigger benefits for all members of the network. It could also create some major value-add for grant applications.

I think that there are a lot of possibilities for this concept and I'd love to hear from you about your thoughts, if you've seen anything like this being developed anywhere, etc. E-mail me or leave me a note in comments.

Michele

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.

_______________________________________________________________

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

The Leadership Deficit

Over at the Social Edge, Mark has started a discussion about "Profit for a Purpose" and asks about how non-MBA execs can develop the skills needed to run a non-profit that will generate revenue. Elizabeth (in the second comment on the page) brings up a larger point--namely the dearth of leadership talent in the non-profit sector.

According to the Summer Issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, as with every other American organization, the impending retirement of the leading edge of the Baby Boom does not bode well for non-profits.

"To understand the magnitude of the leadership deficit and why it will intensify, we need to examine what shapes the supply of, and demand for, nonprofit leaders. The supply side of the story begins with the baby boom generation. Because of the boom, the pool of American men and women of prime executive age (34 to 54 years) swelled to 35 million between 1980 and 2000. But the first wave of this nearly 80 million-strong generation is now turning 60, and because the boomers did not have as many offspring as did their parents, the cohort that follows them has a lot fewer people. From 2000 to 2020, the number of people in the prime leadership age bracket of 34 to 54 will grow by only 3 million (author cites a study by the Committee for Economic Development, May 2005) . . . nonprofits will require 78,000 new senior managers in 2016 alone, up from 56,000 in 2006 and more than a fourfold increase since 1996. When the leadership needs of each of the coming 10 years are added together, the total comes to 640,000 new senior managers - a 140 percent increase in the current population of nonprofit executives." So, the question is, where will these executives come from?"

Indeed. Where WILL they come from. The Review has some thoughts:

"Up to now," states Tierney, "nonprofits have tended to draw their leadership from a relatively small circle of friends and acquaintances. Although personal networking is an essential element of any recruiting process, it will not produce all the leaders needed in the coming decade."

Tierney then suggests that "three significant pools of new leadership talent are already available": (1) the baby boom generation (a recent study by the MetLife Foundation and Civic Ventures found that baby boomers want to continue to work after retirement age; (2) many people at the midpoint of their professional lives (article calls these people "midlife career-changers"); and (3) young managers in training (according to the article: "In 1990 there were 17 graduate programs in nonprofit management in the U.S. Today, there are well over 90, and more than 240 programs offer courses. Source for these statistics is H. Joslyn, from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Jan. 8, 2004).

For my money, one of the greatest resources will be retiring Baby Boomers who want to make a difference. There are already programs that are looking to help these individuals make the transition, including the Wilson Center for Social Entreprenurship, which is focusing specifically on helping "experienced" business people make the transition into the non-profit world. For such recruiting efforts to be successful, however, I think that non-profits will have to seriously examine their approach to attracting and retaining talent, including how they structure the workplace to appeal to Baby Boomer sensibilities.

Interestingly, I think that non-profits could be in a BETTER position than many businesses if they play their cards right. Many polls indicate that Baby Boomers are interested in spending their later years doing good in the world, so working with a non-profit is an obvious selling point. But I also think that non-profits may have cultures that are more supportive of exploring alternative work arrangements than some businesses. I do think that there will be a need to focus more on staff capacity-building and development, however, because many Baby Boomers also indicate that they want to continue to develop their skills, even in their "second careers" and non-profits are not necessarily known for their training or for being on the cutting edge.

What would be interesting, I think is if the non-profit world worked together to create a sort of "career exploration program" that helped retiring execs to re-assess themselves and their career goals and then helped them to explore the various non-profit opportunities that might satisfy those goals. Regardless, to address this looming shortage, non-profits will need to start working now, as they're already lagging in comparison to business.

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.