Manage Your Organization
- Delegate authority to your staff. Help them perform and hold them accountable for excellent decisions and execution. Actively delegate credit to your staff, internally and externally.
- Give various program managers ample responsibility to speak for the organization in the media. Let them be seen as professionals in the eyes of the public. This helps them develop.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt actively sought as cabinet members people smarter than he. This is one very important way to build your organization's structure and program effectiveness. Do your best to slide your staff's salary scale upward every year by the inflation rate plus merit.
- Consider creating a core management group to give you confidential advice on sensitive internal matters. Our group consists of two other senior staff and me. Because of their candor, the quality of their advice, and the differing viewpoints, they have helped me enormously and the creation of this group is one of the best management decisions I've made.
- Seek measurable results that are visible on the ground to donors and the public. Think of these on-the-ground accomplishments as "the geography of philanthropy."
- If your group is relatively new, get a hide on the wall early. Pulling off a real accomplishment, small or large, is the most important developmental step for a young friends group. Follow it with a hide of larger size and significance. Celebrate each new hide.
- Work to maintain the important distinction between governance (a volunteer board function) and operations (a paid executive function). Board involvement in day-to-day functions can harm staff morale. A clean board-staff division of labor is a primary hallmark of the healthiest nonprofits.
- Resign from your organization when you and it are on an upward trajectory. Do not let your organization decline or even plateau while you are chief executive. Make sure you leave when you still love your work and still want more of it.
- In the search for your successor, tell your board to hire up, not down. The idea is to select a new leader, not settle on one. A sideways hire won't do. You want the organization to exceed whatever degree of excellence was attained when you ran it.
- Understand and speak often to the fact that running a successful friends group is a "we" proposition. The pronoun we reflects your personal acknowledgement that the organization's success comes from many hands, many minds, many hearts-another reason you should not possess or seem to possess it.