Archives for posts with tag: leadership

What’s wrong with restricted grants

November 30, 2014 //

I know a lot of people who’re starting up new nonprofits, and most don’t have any prior experience with fundraising. That was me!, back in 2007 when I took over the Wikimedia Foundation. And so, the purpose of this post is to share some of what I learned over the past eight years, both from my own experience and from talking with other EDs and with grantmakers. I’m focusing on restricted grants here because they’re the most obvious and common funding source for nonprofits, especially in their early stages of development.

Restricted grants can be great. Grantmaking institutions fund work that’s socially important, that’s coming out of organizations that may have no other access to funding, and that is often risky or experimental. They take chances on people and organizations with good ideas, who may not yet have a track record. That’s necessary and important.

But restricted grants also pose some specific problems for the organizations seeking them. This is well understood inside nonprofitland, but isn’t immediately obvious to people who’re new to it.

Here are the five main problems with restricted grants.

Restricted grants can be administratively burdensome. At the WMF, we actively sought out restricted grants for about two years, and afterwards accepted them only rarely. We had two rules of thumb: 1) We would only seek restricted grants from organizations we knew well and trusted to be good partners with us, and 2) We would only seek restricted grants from organizations that were roughly our size (by staff headcount) or smaller. Why? Because restricted grants can be a lot of work, particularly if the two organizations aren’t well aligned.

Big institutions have a big capacity to generate process: forms to fill out, procedures to follow, hoops to jump through. They have lots of staff time for meetings and calls and email exchanges. They operate at a slower pace than smaller orgs, and their processes are often inflexible. People who work at grantmaking institutions have a responsibility to be careful with their organization’s money, and want to feel like they’re adding value to the work the nonprofit is doing. Too often, this results in nonprofits feeling burdened by expensive process as they procure and report on grants: time that you want to spend achieving your mission, instead risks getting eaten up by grantmakers’ administrative requirements.

Restricted grants risk overwriting the nonprofit’s priorities with the grantmakers’ priorities. At the WMF, we didn’t accept grants for things we weren’t planning to do anyway. Every year we developed our plan, and then we would (sometimes, with funders we trusted) seek funding for specific components of it. With funders we trusted, we were happy to get their input on our priorities and our plans for executing them. But we weren’t interested in advancing grantmakers’ goals, except insofar as they overlapped with ours.

Too often, especially with young or small non-profits, I see the opposite.

If an organization is cash-strapped, all money looks good. But it’s not. Here’s a crude example. Let’s say the WMF knows it needs to focus its energy on mobile, and a funder is interested in creating physical spaces for Wikipedians to get together F2F for editing parties. In that context, agreeing with a funder to take money for the set-up of editing cafes would pose a distraction from the mobile work the WMF would need to be doing. An organization’s capacity and energies are always limited, and even grants that fully fund a new activity are necessarily drawing on executive and managerial attention, as well as the organization’s support functions (human resources, accounting, admin, legal, PR). If what a restricted grant funds isn’t a near-perfect fit with what the organization hopes to accomplish regardless of the funding, you risk your organization getting pulled off-track.

Restricted grants pull focus from core work. Most grantmakers want their money to accomplish something new. They’re inclined to see their grants as seed money, funding experiments and new activity. Most successful nonprofits though, have important core work that needs to get done. At the WMF for example that core work was the maintenance and continued availability of Wikipedia, the website, which meant stuff like hosting costs, costs of the Ops team, site security work and performance optimization, and lawyers to defend against censorship.

Because restricted grants are often aimed at funding new activity, nonprofits that depend on them are incentivized to continually launch new activities, and to abandon or only weakly support the ones that already exist. They develop a bias towards fragmentation, churn and divergence, at the expense of focus and excellence. An organization that funds itself solely or mainly through restricted grants risks starving its core.

Restricted grants pull the attention of the executive director. I am constantly recommending this excellent article by the nonprofit strategy consultancy Bridgespan, published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Its point is that the most effective and fastest-growing nonprofits focus their fundraising efforts on a single type of funder (e.g., crowdfunding, or foundations, or major donors). That’s counter-intuitive because most people reflexively assume that diversification=good: stable, low-risk, prudent. Those people, though, are wrong. What works for e.g. retirement savings, is not the same as what works for nonprofit revenue strategy.

Why? Because organizations need to focus: they can’t be good at everything, and that’s as true when it comes to fundraising as it is with everything else. It’s also true for the executive director. An executive director whose organization is dependent on restricted grants will find him or herself focused on grantmaking institutions, which generally means attending conferences, serving on juries and publicly positioning him or herself as a thought leader in the space in which they work. That’s not necessarily the best use of the ED’s time.

Restricted grants are typically more waterfall than agile. Here’s how grants typically work. The nonprofit writes up a proposal that presumes it understands what it wants to do and how it will do it. It includes a goal statement, a scope statement, usually some kind of theory of change, a set of deliverables, a budget, timeline, and measures of success. There is some back-and-forth with the funder, which may take a few weeks or many months, and once the proposal is approved, funding is released. By the time the project starts, it may be as much as an entire year since it was first conceived. As the plan is executed the organization will learn new things, and it’s often not clear how what’s been learned can or should affect the plan, or who has the ability to make or approve changes to it.

This is how we used to do software development and in a worst-case scenario it led to death march projects building products that nobody ended up wanting. That’s why we shifted from waterfall to agile: because you get a better, more-wanted product, faster and cheaper. It probably makes sense for grantmaking institutions to adapt their processes similarly, but I’m not aware of any who have yet done that. I don’t think it would be easy, or obvious, how to do it.

Upshot: If you’re a new nonprofit considering funding yourself via restricted grants, here’s my advice. Pick your funders carefully. Focus on ones whose goals have a large overlap with your own, and whose processes seem lightweight and smart. Aim to work with people who are willing to trust you, and who are careful with your time. Don’t look to foundations to set your priorities: figure out what you want to do, and then try to find a grantmaker who wants to support it.

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Categories Fundraising, Leadership, Nonprofits, Revenue

Why leadership development needs a revamp

September 21, 2014 //
10

For the past 15 years I’ve been a client for leadership development work both on my own behalf and on behalf of organizations I’ve led. I’ve used the industry a lot, and gotten tons of value out of it. That said, the world of work has been changing pretty dramatically, and I can’t honestly say I feel like leadership development is keeping pace.

When I first started getting leadership training, way back years ago, here are some of the messages I was given:

The boss should talk less and listen more. Bosses should practice empathy, and learn how to give calm, clear, actionable feedback rather than yelling or being punitive.

Not everything can be reduced to numbers and deliverables and milestones and targets: the human side matters too.

Bosses should practice some degree of self-disclosure and let themselves be vulnerable: that builds trust and healthy working relationships.

People should be encouraged to admit mistakes, to change their minds, and to constantly iterate towards better.

Bosses shouldn’t pretend to have all the answers: they should be receptive and open to the ideas of others regardless of their position in the formal hierarchy.

Transparency is generally good. If people don’t know what you’re thinking, they make up stuff that’s way worse than reality.

Those are good messages. They helped me think in a more explicit way about the practice of leadership, and gave me permission to be the kind of boss I’d like to think I’d have been anyway. But once you poke at them a little, it’s clear they’re built on weird assumptions.

I was a journalist in broadcast media, a totally non-command-and-control industry. I’d never even had a command-and-control boss. Roughly 50% of the people in senior roles in my organization were women, and women bosses are widely understood to be more inclusive and communicative than male ones. My then-organization was 85% unionized and the unions were pretty strong: when management wanted to exert its will, our most useful tools were influence and persuasion.

So why were our coaches and trainers putting so much energy into guiding us away from being autocratic jerks?

Eventually I concluded that the leadership development industry, built as it is on decades of studies and analysis and practice, probably generally has a bias to lag behind reality — meaning, it’s shaped not so much by what’s actually happening now, or might happen tomorrow, but by past experience. And therefore it implicitly, reflexively, assumes an old-school boss: a guy, maybe in his fifties, who’s smoking a cigar and barking out orders.

The trouble is that while that may have been the typical boss 50 years ago, with each passing day it’s less and less our reality. We just don’t work in command-and-control environments as much as we used to. And to the extent that leadership development is designed to fix the problems of autocratic jerks, it is limiting its ability to be useful for everybody else.

I live and work in the Bay Area, in media and tech. Everybody I know is experimenting with organizational design and leadership style, whether they’d say it explicitly or not. People are trying to figure out how flat their orgs can reasonably be, how to devolve power, how to maximize cohesion and buy-in and organizational agility. Gruff Shouty Boss is just not our failure mode.

Here’s the kind of thing people I know talk about.

  • How to, in decision-making, balance inclusivity against efficiency and speed.
  • How to balance an individual contributor’s sense of personal agency against the organization’s need for everyone to row (or bail) the boat together.
  • How to maintain leadership accountability while fostering broad ownership and responsibility throughout the organization.
  • How to have leadership be accessible to all levels of the organization, without drowning the execs or undermining middle management.
  • How to create a strong, shared work culture without accidentally turning into a monoculture that doesn’t tolerate people who don’t fit.
  • How to, in organizations that over-value harmony, ensure disagreements are openly expressed and worked through.
  • How to create an environment that enables the effectiveness of creative, talented people who have depression, ADD/ADHD and/or Asperger’s.
  • How to equip leaders from underrepresented groups to manage their imposter syndrome and to successfully handle subtle biases among their co-workers.
  • How to lead in a period of experimentation, when the boss can’t pretend to have all the answers.

These are the kinds of questions that leaders in the tech sector are facing today and, as software eats the world, they’ll increasingly be faced by leaders in every sector.

There are people working on figuring out this stuff — for example, I like Michael Lopp and Venkatesh Rao and Joel Spolsky, and I think boot camps and foo-type camps are useful too. But I feel like, in focusing on fixing the mistakes of the past, the LD/OD industry itself is erasing, rather than helping shape and define, new and emergent forms of leadership. That’s a huge missed opportunity.

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Categories Leadership

Making change at Wikimedia: nine patterns that work

November 9, 2010 //
13

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees met in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and had a long and serious discussion about controversial content in the Wikimedia projects. (Why? Because we’re the only major site that doesn’t treat controversial material –e.g., sexually-explicit imagery, violent imagery, culturally offensive imagery– differently from everything else. The Board wanted –in effect– to probe into whether that was helping or hurting our effectiveness at fulfilling our mission.)

Out of that agenda item, we found ourselves talking about what it looks like when change is handled well at Wikimedia, what good leadership looks like in our context, and what patterns we can see in work that’s been done to date.

I found that fascinating, so I’ve done some further thinking since the meeting. The purpose of this post is to document some good patterns of leadership and change-making that I’ve observed at Wikimedia.

Couple of quick caveats: For this post, I’ve picked three little case studies of successful change at Wikimedia. I’m defining successful change here as ‘change that stuck’ – not as ‘change that led to a desirable outcome.’ (I think all these three outcomes were good, but that’s moot for the purposes of this. What I’m aiming to do here is extract patterns of effective process.) Please note also that I picked these examples quickly without a criteria set – my goal was just to pick a few examples I’m familiar with, and could therefore easily analyze. It’s the patterns that matter, not so much the examples.

That said: here are three case studies of successful change at Wikimedia.

  • The Board’s statement on biographies of living people. Policies regarding biographies had been a topic of concern among experienced Wikipedians for years, mainly because there is real potential for people to be damaged when the Wikipedia article about them is biased, vandalized or inaccurate, and because our experience shows us that articles about non-famous people are particularly vulnerable to skew or error, because they aren’t read and edited by enough people. And, that potential for damage –particularly to the non-famous– grows along with Wikipedia’s popularity. In April 2009, the Board of Trustees held a discussion about BLPs, and then issued a statement which essentially reflected best practices that had been developed by the Wikipedia community, and recommended their consistent adoption.  The Board statement was taken seriously: it’s been translated into 18 languages, discussed internally throughout the editing community, and has been cited and used as policies and practices evolve.

  • The strategy project of 2009-10. Almost 10 years after Wikipedia was founded, the Board and I felt like it was time to stop down and assess: what are we doing well, and where do we want to focus our efforts going forward. So in spring 2009, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees asked me to launch a collaborative, transparent, participatory strategy development project, designed to create a five-year plan for the Wikimedia movement. Over the next year, more than 1,000 people participated in the project, in more than 50 languages. The resultant plan is housed on the strategy wiki here, and a summary version will be published this winter. You can never really tell the quality of strategy until it’s implemented (and sometimes not even then), but the project itself has accomplished what it set out to do.

  • The license migration of May 2009. When I joined Wikimedia this process was already underway, so I only observed first-hand the last half of it. But it was lovely to watch. Essentially: some very smart and experienced people in leadership positions at Wikimedia decided it made sense to switch from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA. But, they didn’t themselves have the moral or legal right to make the switch – it needed to be made by the writers of the Wikimedia projects, who had originally released their work under the GFDL. So, the people who wanted the switch launched a long campaign to 1) negotiate a license migration process that Richard Stallman (creator of the GFDL and a hero of the free software movement) would be able to support, and 2) explain to the Wikimedia community why they thought the license migration made sense. Then, the Wikimedia board endorsed the migration, and held a referendum. It passed with very little opposition, and the switch was made.

Here are nine patterns I think we can extract from those examples:

  1. The person/people leading the change didn’t wait for it to happen naturally – they stepped up and took responsibility for making it happen. The strategy project grew out of a conversation between then-board Chair Michael Snow and me, because we felt that Wikimedia needed a coherent plan. The BLP statement was started by me and the Board, because we were worried that as Wikipedia grew more popular, consistent policy in this area was essential. The license migration was started by Jimmy Wales, Erik Moeller and others because they wanted it to be much easier for people to reuse Wikimedia content. In all these instances, someone identified a change they thought should be made, and designed and executed a process aimed at creating that change.

  2. A single person didn’t make the change themselves. A group of people worked together to make it happen. More than a thousand people worked on the strategy project. Probably hundreds have contributed (over several years) to tightening up BLP policies and practices. I’m guessing dozens of people contributed to the license migration. The lesson here is that in our context, lasting change can’t be produced by a single person.

  3. Early in the process, somebody put serious energy towards achieving a global/meta understanding of the issue, from many different perspectives. It might be worth pointing out that this is not something we normally do: in order to do amazing work, Random Editor X doesn’t have any need to understand the global whole; he or she can work quietly, excellently, pretty much alone. But in order to make change that involves multiple constituencies, the person doing it needs to understand the perspectives of everyone implicated by that change.

  4. The process was carefully designed to ask the right people the right questions at the right time. The license migration was an exemplar here: The people designing the process quite rightly understood that there was no point in asking editors’ opinions about something many of them probably didn’t understand. On the other hand, the change couldn’t be made without the approval of editors. So, an education campaign was designed that gave editors access to information about the proposed migration from multiple sources and perspectives, prior to the vote.

  5. A person or a group of people dedicated lots of hours towards figuring out what should happen, and making it happen. In each case here, lots of people did lots of real work: researching, synthesizing, analyzing, facilitating, imagining, anticipating, planning, communicating.

  6. The work was done mostly in public and was made as visible as possible, in an attempt to bolster trust and understanding among non-participants. This is fundamental. We knew for example that the strategy project couldn’t succeed if it happened behind closed doors. Again and again throughout the process, Eugene Eric Kim resisted people’s attempts to move the work to private spaces, because he knew it was critical for acceptance that the work be observable.

  7. Some discussion happened in private, inside a small group of people who trust each other and can work easily together. That’s uncomfortable to say, because transparency and openness are core values for us and anything that contradicts them feels wrong. But it’s true: people need safe spaces to kick around notions and test their own assumptions. I know for example that at the beginning of the Board’s BLP conversations, I had all kinds of ideas about ‘the problem of BLPs’ that turned out to be flat-out wrong. I needed to feel free to air my bad ideas, and get them poked at and refuted by people I could trust, before I could start to make any progress thinking about the issue. Similarly, the Board exchanged more than 300 e-mails about controversial content inside its private mailing list, before it felt comfortable enough to frame the issue up in a resolution that would be published. That private kicking around needs to happen so that people can test and accelerate and evolve their own thinking.

  8. People put their own credibility on the line, endorsing the change and trying to persuade others to believe in it. In a decentralized movement, there’s a strong gravitational pull towards the status quo, and whenever anyone tries to make change, they’re in effect saying to hundreds or thousands of people “Hey! Look over here! Something needs to happen, and I know what it is.” That’s a risky thing to do, because they might be perceived in a bunch of negative ways – as naiive or overreacting, as wrong or stupid or presumptuous, or even as insincere – pretending to want to help, but really motivated by inappropriate personal self-interest. Putting yourself on the line for something you believe in, in the face of suspicion or apathy, is brave. And it’s critical.

  9. Most people involved –either as participants or observers– wanted more than anything else to advance the Wikimedia mission, and they trusted that the others involved wanted the same thing. This is critical too. I have sometimes despaired at the strength of our default to the status quo: it is very, very hard to get things done in our context. But I am always reassured by the intelligence of Wikimedia community members, and by their dedication to our shared mission. I believe that if everyone’s aligned in wanting to achieve the mission, that’s our essential foundation for making good decisions.

Like I said earlier — these are just examples I’ve seen or been involved in personally. I’d be very interested to hear other examples of successful change at Wikimedia, plus observations & thinking about patterns we can extract from them.

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Categories Consensus Decisionmaking, Leadership, Wikimedia Foundation

Why speaking for effect is a bad idea

September 4, 2010 //
6

I read a book recently called Authentic Conversations, which is essentially an argument for honesty at work. That may not sound too radical, but it actually is. I’ve managed people for more than a decade, and the book made me think about how much conventional management theory and training is designed to replace authenticity with calculation, and how damaging that can be.

The book opens with a great story, in which the publisher of a struggling newspaper is doing a newsroom walkaround. [1]

It’s tough times for newspapers, so his staff ask him lots of anxious questions — is the company okay, what’s he doing about the advertising slump, has he figured out the pension issue. He talks confidently about how things are going to be okay. There’s a plan. The board is optimistic. And so forth. The authors (who were with the publisher that day, presumably starting a consulting engagement), say he clearly felt he was doing good work – creating an atmosphere of calm and confidence, so that his staff could focus on doing their jobs well.

And I have to say, I have definitely been there. I’ve never lied to anyone who works for me, but I worked for a long time in a troubled industry, and I certainly expressed optimism more strongly than I felt it, many many many times, and for the same reason the poor publisher was probably doing it.

The twist to the story is that back in the guy’s office, the consultants rip into him and tell him what he did was horrible. They persuade him to call a special meeting and tell his staff he’d been lying — that the company is indeed in trouble, and that neither he nor anyone can give them the reassurance they want. And that he’s not their father, and isn’t responsible for their security or for their happiness.

The story ends triumphantly, with applause all around.

I’d be surprised if things actually played out that way, because I don’t think that people necessarily value truth that much. But I do think that even when people don’t want the truth, or aren’t comforted by it, they deserve it.

The authors go on to decry that they call “speaking for effect.” Which again struck me as pretty radical. As a young manager, I was trained –over and over again, explicitly and by modelled behaviour– to carefully manage my words and tone in order to create the response I wanted.

  • A mentor of mine was well-known for using silence to increase his authority. In big meetings, he’d be perfectly watchful, and would say nothing.  Throughout the meeting, the other participants would get more and more nervous, wondering what he was thinking. They’d start second-guessing themselves and poking holes in their own arguments. Eventually they’d start actively soliciting his opinion, and by the time he finally spoke, whatever he said carried enormous weight. [2]
  • Two friends of mine, who were also friends of each other and who ran competitive TV shows inside our organization, used to stage yelling matches in front of their newsroooms in which they’d argue over whose show warranted more resources from the shared services pool (like, edit suite time or PR support). They did it so their teams would feel valued and defended, and afterwards they’d go out for beer.
  • I had a boss who was famous for his terrible temper. He’d shout, hang up on people, send all-caps e-mails, and storm around the office slamming doors and throwing things. But his capacity for anger –and his reputation for it– was mostly calculated — he’d slam down the phone and start laughing.
  • A colleague was proud of her ability to shame her staff into doing better work. Her magic words, she told me, were “I am disappointed in you.” I once watched her role-play a performance assessment, and I found her acting ability pretty remarkable. She’d sigh, put down her pencil, make prolonged eye contact, and say something like “Jim. You’re really letting down the team.”
  • And then there’s a very common use of speaking for effect: the deliberate expression of trivial agreement. This is particularly done, I think, in big, old companies where responsibility is diffused and group buy-in is critical. In those contexts, expressing trivial agreement (“sounds interesting!”, “good point!”, “great feedback!”) is the small coin of the realm. If you do it well, it costs you nothing, wins you allies, and puts money in the favour bank.

I’m not trying to argue that all these tactics are necessarily bad. It’s obviously true that managers need to be in control of their emotions, and need to be conscious of their effects on others. Undisciplined and reckless bosses can cause all kinds of problems.

But I think a little calculation goes a long way. And I also think there’s a cost, which sometimes goes unnoticed.  People who are very studied, whose words and responses are calculated for effect more so than being spontaneous and natural — they’re behaving inauthentically.  To a degree, they’re treating other people as means to an end rather than as human beings, and their behaviour also suggests that their minds are totally made up: they are not actually open to new information, they’ve figured out the correct end state, and the only work that needs to be done is persuading you to go there. Which means they run the risk that the people around them will learn over time to distrust them. It also means they miss the opportunity to engage authentically — to have real conversations, to stretch themselves, to learn.

[1] I don’t have the book with me, so I may have butchered specifics a little. But the gist of the story’s accurate.
[2] Warning to women who might consider trying this tactic: it doesn’t work for women. Truly. I liked a lot of things about that guy, and I tried modelling my own behaviour on his for a while, but it didn’t take long to realize that a silent woman is perceived totally differently from a silent man. Suffice to say that a silent woman is easily mistaken for a person without authority, regardless of how much she may actually have. Too bad :-(

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Categories Leadership, Workplace Culture