My Focus is My Locus - Organizational sustainability: what it takes to build an organization that lasts.
What does organizational sustainability actually mean to you, beyond keeping the lights on?
The focus has to be on an overall approach balancing long term goals based on the mission and vision with short term immediate needs including serving the clients, taking care of staff, and maintaining financial stability. Organizations must have the ability to pause periodically to examine the roses and thorns, a health check-up if you will, on what’s going well and what needs to change. In that process, success has to be defined beyond getting it done today, instead look at processes that are going well, challenges that have been tackled, not just covered with a band-aid, and efficiencies that have helped both the client and teams. Helping organizations realize their success metrics go beyond short term wins is important for both the staff, who see their work contributing to organizational longevity, and clients, who trust providers that have demonstrated sustainability.
Has there been a moment in your leadership where you had to make a hard decision to protect the long-term health of your organization, even when it was uncomfortable in the short term?
Recently the organization had to evaluate a decision made to eliminate its membership requirements with ongoing business needs. Using the IDEAL guiding principles allowed the organization to continue forward despite the challenges that we have to address. When called upon to make a decision that is difficult or uncomfortable, leaders must use organizational mission, vision, guiding principles which will ground their analysis and provide a path forward, rooted in purpose, not person. Eventually, and essentially, every leader is called upon to take an organization forward with their leadership style in service of the organization they are part of. So their discomfort or concern with a difficult decision, while natural, needs to be channeled through the lens of what guides and fuels the organization- that’s the sweet spot to stay in when leading through a difficult time.
What is the relationship between investing in your own leadership development and the sustainability of the organization you lead?
Leaders are best served if they look beyond the organization for guidance on improving or shoring up skills and talents when they identify gaps in the way they lead. The external support of an oxygen mask allows one to sustainably help someone else and that’s the bright guiding line when faced with balancing your own leadership development needs with continuing to lead. The relationship to leadership development and sustainability of the organization you are leading is that evaluating for longevity of the organization isn’t a one-time occurrence that is packaged away for all time to come, just like developing your own wheelhouse of knowledge as a leader isn’t a one time event. And when one is able to have the time, opportunity and privilege to invest in one’s own growth as a leader, newer challenges and opportunities present themselves, contributing to continued success of the organization.
What do you wish more nonprofit leaders understood about building financial resilience before a crisis forces the conversation?
When a crisis forces conversations about financial stability, or even anything else impacting the organization, all that leaders end up doing is being reactive, grabbing the closest available option to keep the doors open. Because leading a nonprofit is akin to drinking from the firehose, there’s never any time to sit back and look at the landscape, operational, administrative, and financial, which are the three basic pillars of any organization, to determine gaps and weaknesses. Working in crisis mode often brings about solutions that may not last beyond the crisis. It is for this reason that nonprofit leaders must consider taking stock of what is needed, including financial stability decisions, at a time when they have the ability to be responsive rather than reactive, analyzing the gaps that need to be filled and planning forward, instead of discovering a sinkhole, which is dangerous and needs emergency responders, not financial planners.
What does a sustainable organization feel like from the inside, for the staff, for the board, for the communities you serve?
From the inside it’s a well oiled machinery that has well defined processes, employees invested in the mission and vision of the organization, and a Board that’s able to support the organization as their fiduciaries. It’s a place where not only is the budget balanced, attrition is at a standard pace, staff vacancies are manageable, and the Board is able to help fundraise and be the organizational ambassadors they can be, with the community trusting the organization as a place to be heard, served, and taken care of.
If you could go back and tell yourself one thing about playing the long game in this sector, what would it be?
That the reality is two steps forward, one step back, that each challenge is a learning opportunity which can be tucked away for use at another time, and that success looks different at different times. Having the tenacity to stay in this sector requires periodically taking stock of the WHY that brought you to this work, to find your community who can be your watercooler buddies when times are tough, and to remind yourself that ‘when you’re tired, take rest, don’t quit’ a quote often attributed to the artist Banksy.
- Protima Pandey, CEN’s Outgoing Board Chair