Organizational culture, national culture and how they come together in INGOs

Leave a Comment / Equity, diversity and inclusion, Evaluation and organizational learning, Miscellaneous, Organizational culture, Organizational effectiveness, Organizational structure, Uncategorized

Organizational culture

Questions rummaging through my mind

How do national culture differences affect organizational ways of working — and ways of managing and leading?

How does the presence of many different national cultures among staff shape the organizational culture of an NGO?

To start with the obvious: The staff of INGOs typically consist of people from many different national cultures. This is even more so the case as many INGOs have focused on increasing the diversity of their staff body—including for managers and leaders. National cultures from global North no longer predominate, although global North-imprinted organizational cultures tend to remain in place for a lot longer. So how does the presence of all these national cultures shape the organizational culture of an NGO?

A new resource

Recently, I became aware of an interesting new research-based source on national culture differences—updated research by Erin Meyer, the American-French academic who works at the famous INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France. Her book, The Culture Map (2014) has been recommended to me by several NGO types. Erin has launched a new website, the Culture Mapping Tool which allows you (regretfully only on a paid basis) to compare specific sets of countries in neat ways with each other, based on the following dimensions:

Communications: from ‘high context’ communication styles to ‘low context’ ones
Evaluating: from indirect negative feedback to direct ones
Leading: from hierarchical cultures to egalitarian ones
Deciding: From top-down cultures to consensual ones
Trusting: from relationship-based cultures to task-based ones
Disagreeing: from confrontational cultures to those that avoid confrontation
Scheduling: from linear-based cultures to flexible time-based cultures
Persuading: from applications-first cultures to principle-first ones

The questions this sparked in me

Erin’s research sparked the following questions:

How does the presence of all these national cultures in INGOs shape their organizational culture?
What happens when the NGO manager’s leadership style, informed by national culture, is in clear tension with–let’s say–the espoused leadership model of ‘transformational leadership’, feminist leadership, servant leadership, you name it? This would suggest the person has to be one kind of leader in the daytime, but at night and on the weekend be another person? So much for authentic leadership and ‘bringing your whole self to work’ ideals in that case?
Who came up with these newer, aspirational leadership models that are now popular in some INGOs anyway?
As leadership and management of many INGOs increasingly is populated by a much more diverse set of people in terms of national culture, when and how will this make the organizational culture less global North-normed?
As INGOs have increased their leadership coming from national cultures in the global South, I sometimes see people being ‘spit out’ quite quickly by the dominant culture. Is this because the person’s identity (their lived experience, the non-NGO functional or professional background they may have brought, etc.) is different, and the predominant org culture is unwilling to ‘enlarge the tent’ and embrace this?
We know from the research on staff diversity that a greater diversity of people, while definitely beneficial to the organization’s outcomes, productivity, innovation, and creativity in the medium term, in the short term may lead to greater chances of miscommunication, mistrust, increased tension and conflict. As many NGOs are becoming more truly global, will the presence of an ever-greater number of national cultures further enhance these short-term challenges?
For those NGOs intent on increasing their global balance of affiliates, sections, members etc, will these new members submit to ‘isomimicry’, i.e. the expectation from the global North members that their organizations will look like them, or will they introduce different forms of ‘organizational being’ to truly diversify the NGO?
And what does this mean for change management approaches? To draw from another source on national differences in what’s expected from leaders and managers, (the GLOBE project, following the initial work on national cultures by Geert Hofstede, the Dutch researcher): surely differences in, for instance, performance orientation, power difference, assertiveness, uncertainty avoidance, future orientation, humane orientation, and ingroup collectivism affect how change leaders and change managers need to go about their work?

Many questions, few answers….. but let’s think about this together

I have few answers to the questions above (primarily some gut sense and anecdotal observations), but it would be very worthwhile to brainstorm on them together. Let’s talk if this sparks further ideas or thoughts! Ping me at tosca@5oaksconsulting.org

In the meantime, here’s an earlier blog post from me about why I am quite skeptical of hiring and promoting ‘cultural rebels’ as a strategy towards organizational change.

Links for further reading and thinking

A summary of dimensions derived from the GLOBE project, a very interesting long term research project on cultural differences in leadership and management models:

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-principlesofmanagement/chapter/dimensions-of-cultural-difference-and-their-effect/

Erin Meyer’s Culture Mapping Tool: (regretfully, the tool is no longer available for free)

Erin’s book The Culture Map

One could argue that being comfortable in a global North-based national culture is a source of informal power. Here is a handy visualization of this particular form of informal power, plus many others. My colleague-consultant Esther Kwaku and Iare co-created the list based on work we did for the International Civil Society Centre this past year. With credit to MEDA, the Canadian development agency, who had the list converted into this nifty graphic image (they liked the list as a prompt to spur useful conversation).

A short video with me about how I define organizational culture

Black and white picture of woman planting flag on tiny island in ocean

The many ways in which informal power shows up in civil society organizations

Leave a Comment / Change Management, Collaboration and conflict, Equity, diversity and inclusion, Organizational culture, Uncategorized

The many ways in which informal power shows up in civil society organizations

Our question

How can we as civil society entities be more self-aware of how *informal* power shows up in our organizations?

How can we as leaders and managers be more self-aware of how forms of power that are not related to positional power play out?

This has been on the mind of many of us in the past few years.

My colleague-consultant Esther Kwaku who also runs the neat social enterprise the Nerve Network and I did some work earlier this year which, amongst many things, surfaced insights around the fascinating ways in which informal power plays out in our organizations. Some of these ways you will be aware of; others may certainly cause you to reflect on what’s really happening in our organizations — even during our attempts to shift and share power. The result is a thought-provoking list, we think.

Adding a visualization

And then Dorothy Nyambi, CEO at the development agency MEDA and her colleagues took it upon themselves to commission a sharp graphic designer to visualize the list – so that they too could use the content. Thank you, MEDA!

The result

Result? Voila! Download your copy of the visualization of the many ways in which informal power shows up here:

PDF version of the Informal Power viz

PPT version of the Informal Power viz

How does informal power show up in your civil society organization? Feel free to use the content as well in your work (please credit us as creators, of course). Enjoy having good conversations about this!

Beyond Diversity Training – What Works (Part One)

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Mandatory diversity training, the need for short-term wins and a nuanced approach to a global challenge

A guest blog post by Richard Eastmond; Richard is the former Senior Director for People, Operations and Corporate Services at Amnesty International. He currently serves as an independent consultant. Richard is solely responsible for the views expressed is this post.

Responding to Tosca’s challenge on (mandatory) diversity training

Tosca @ Five Oaks Consulting recently shared her practitioner knowledge on what works and what doesn’t in diversity training. Pushing back on common trends within INGOs, she argues that mandatory training doesn’t work and that singling out certain groups or people for such training is unlikely to produce meaningful change. However, voluntarily attending a diversity training strengthens a person’s resolve to do more to fight bias, while a broader focus on management systems, mentoring for all, behaviour modeling by influential people, and allyship is key to systemic change.

In this two-part blog post, I argue that there can be a place for mandatory diversity training and that there is plenty of reason to leave room for local nuance and interpretation of what diversity awareness means.

Part One: Short-Term Wins with a Long-Term Plan

Organizations are always in a hurry, and never more so than when they need to change. Whether engaging small, simple changes or addressing issues as complex as diversity, they have no time to wait for the “tide to turn”; action must be engaged now. In fact, getting started is extremely important, because these actions, over time, become embedded and are what influence long-term changes in behaviour. It’s getting started—especially when the undertaking can feel so monumental—that can be challenging.

When an organisation recognises that it must address a big issue like diversity, it needs to balance many different elements that, collectively, will contribute to systematic and deep-rooted change. Leadership must seek input and collaboration in order to generate a sense of cocreation and buy-in from all relevant stakeholders. The organization must establish clear best practices with expert input and embrace a fully intersectional approach. Taken together, these tasks can appear overwhelming, and oftentimes their execution reflects that reality—many elements will be left incomplete or even entirely neglected as the will to see them all through slowly dissipates.

Quick wins matter

Consequently, quick wins are never more important than when beginning the process of tackling an issue like diversity. To me, mandatory training, often seen as the ‘sheep dip,’ is an admittedly blunt instrument, but it also acts to highlight the importance of an issue. It demonstrates that the issue affects everyone, regardless of identity or station within the organization, and demonstrates that leadership is invested in making a significant change. While it is no ‘silver bullet,’ mandatory training has its place at the start of a change journey; the key is incorporating it into a mission-centred story that demonstrates the necessity of diversity and how it will benefit the organisation, its people, its partners, and its beneficiaries.

Key questions to answer

If you are looking into increasing diversity within your organization, here are two key questions to answer early and often throughout your journey:

How have you balanced a symbolic training intervention with a long-term, multi-pronged plan around promoting diversity in an INGO?
What leadership acts have helped or will help your organisation ensure a systemic change—namely embedding diversity and inclusion in all its forms—takes place?

I look forward to hearing your perspective: please reach out to me on LinkedIn with your responses.

Richard Eastmond, January 2021

For part two of Richard’s argument, check below.

Beyond Diversity Training – What Works (Part Two)

Leave a Comment / Organizational culture, Organizational effectiveness, Uncategorized

Diversity Training: Maintaining Local Nuance when Addressing a Global Challenge

This is Part Two of a guest blog post by Richard Eastmond. Richard is the former Senior Director for People, Operations, and Corporate Services at Amnesty International. He currently serves as an independent consultant. For Part One, see above. Richard is solely responsible for the views expressed in this post.

In Part 1 of this two-part guest blog on diversity training, we address how often-maligned “mandatory diversity training” for an entire organization can actually play a vital role in a much longer journey by providing quick wins early on. A related phenomenon INGOs must address when tackling the need for greater diversity and inclusion is how to maintain local nuance while applying a global strategy to address the problem.

Any one action reverberates across the entire organization

On the one hand, there is a challenge, in an era of acute sensitivity to ethics and accountability in INGOs, where the impact of one individual within a single part of a federated organisation—which, in many respects, acts an independent entity—can cause a reputational tsunami for the global brand. On the other hand, the question when endeavouring to make a change such as increasing diversity, therefore, is how to best balance the need for a global, standardised approach with the reality of implementing such a complex change across a global network of entities of very different scales, resource levels, and leadership maturity. (And this is all without even mentioning the local cultural differences and understandings of what “diversity and inclusion” mean that deeply affect the people on the ground.)

Allowing for local nuance in implementing diversity training

Due to these myriad factors, INGOs need to carefully think through them and their nuances before adopting a “levelling up” or standardised approach to implementing diversity training. For instance, an approach that may be wholly appropriate for a European context might totally miss the zeitgeist in North America and have little relevance in countries in Asia and Africa. What is deployed needs to be adaptive, flexible, and localised, and must recognise how perspectives differ from country to country due to social norms, legacy factors, and the political and cultural context.

When developing an approach to diversity training within your organization, it is therefore necessary to use the following question as a guide:

How do you account for different ways of thinking and the need for local nuance when approaching diversity awareness at a global level?

I look forward to hearing your perspective: please reach out to me on LinkedIn with your responses.

Richard Eastmond, January 2021

Photo happy face, attached to arrow, made up of lights against dark background

The Future of Transnational NGOs: From Anxiety to Strategy

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The Future of Transnational NGOs: From Anxiety to Strategy

In this blog post, George Mitchell and Hans Peter Schmitz, co-authors, provide a synopsis of one of the main arguments in our brand new book ‘Between Power and Irrelevance: the Future of Transnational NGOs’. You can read more about our book here, including where you can buy it — for a limited time period with a 30% discount.

Geopolitical shifts, increasing demands for accountability, and growing competition have been creating a more challenging environment for Northern-based transnational nongovernmental organizations (TNGOs). In addition to changes in TNGOs’ external environment, TNGOs’ own ambitions have increased. Many TNGOs today have adopted a greater focus on addressing the root causes of societal problems, often complementing direct service provision with longer-term strategies for sustainably improving environmental, social, and political conditions. Prominent TNGOs have expanded their strategic repertoires to include new forms of activism, including rights-based approaches to development and supporter-led digital campaigning. Over time, TNGO interventions generally have become more complex, requiring more resources and greater collaboration within and across sectors.

Why all the existential angst?

But TNGOs find themselves today at a point where their rhetoric of creating sustainable impact and social transformation has far outpaced the reality of their more limited abilities to deliver on these promises. Many individual TNGOs have moved to address this gap through organizational reforms, but these efforts have not yet addressed the larger challenges that exist at the systemic level. Meanwhile, there is continuing and sometimes growing criticism of TNGOs along several fronts, including charges of ineffectiveness, limited efforts to hand over control to local partners, and failures to live internally the values that TNGOs promote externally.

What is at the heart of the challenges confronting TNGOs? Many observers have argued that TNGOs have become too large and too focused on their own survival instead of their missions. Others have blamed the overall aid system and its inability to fundamentally change the economic conditions of millions of people living in poverty. And some have blamed increased competition and professionalization, perceived to be inimical to the sector’s ethos. These criticisms identify important issues, but they all miss a fundamental problem faced by virtually all TNGOs: TNGOs are constituted as nonprofits and therefore operate within a specific institutional and normative architecture that constrains their ability to embrace new strategies and roles essential for their future effectiveness, legitimacy, and survival.

How the sector’s architecture is failing TNGOs

In our new book, Between Power and Irrelevance: The Future of Transnational NGOs, we consider how the underlying normative and institutional conditions of TNGOs—what we refer to as the sector’s architecture—are expressed in restrictive legal regimes, societal expectations, and cultural beliefs that make it hard for TNGOs to pursue their expanded missions. The difficulties are not simply due to the magnitude and complexity of global problems or the failures of individual organizations. Instead, key stakeholders of the sector, including individual and institutional donors, the general public, and governments, have been too slow in shifting their outdated expectations about the appropriate roles of TNGOs. The gap between TNGO rhetoric and their ability to deliver on their promises is growing because TNGOs’ new strategies focused on sustainable impact are not matched by the required capabilities for executing such strategies effectively.

The modern institution of the nonprofit facilitates and carries forward centuries-old traditions of charity in which social value is consummated in the act of giving itself and in the virtuous intentions and actions of staff and volunteers. Although recent decades have seen the term impact become a ubiquitous buzzword throughout the sector, underlying societal expectations about how nonprofits should raise funds and operate have failed to change in step. Today, more and more TNGOs have adopted the rhetoric of impact and have staked their reputations on claims of not just being good stewards of donor resources, but of also making a demonstrable difference in the lives of those they claim to serve. Philanthropy is becoming more data-driven and outcome-oriented, stakeholders are demanding new forms of accountability and participation, and more sophisticated operational strategies are requiring longer-term time horizons and significant new investments in organizational capacities. However, the organizational forms and norms of the sector’s architecture are preventing TNGOs from fully embracing the kinds of changes needed to successfully adapt and evolve, and above all else, to reach their potential in serving their missions. We show, for example, how the architecture provides a permissive environment for ‘successful irrelevance’ (survival based on fiscal propriety, regardless of impact), how it binds TNGOs to a Northern donor-focused accountability model, and how it inhibits specific organizational investments in areas such as digital technology, measurement and evaluation, governance reform, leadership development, and collaboration necessary for long-term mission success

The need for collective action in addition to individual reforms

To make TNGOs fit for the future, individual actions and limited organizational change initiatives will only go so far. The sector must move beyond the false comfort of the status quo and confront the architecture with collective action. TNGOs have already decided what kinds of organizations they want to be, now they must work together to create an institutional and normative environment in which those kinds of organizations can flourish.

Order ‘Between Power and Irrelevance’ online at www.oup.com/academic with promo code ASFLYQ6 to save 30%!

Can Organizational Culture Help Explain Recent INGO Scandals?

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Can Organizational Culture Help Explain Recent INGO Scandals?

In recent years, leading international nongovernmental organizations (INGO) such as Oxfam International, Save the Children, Amnesty International, MercyCorps and others have been implicated in scandals about sexual abuse and other forms of abuse of power and harassment. In this ‘pracademic’ essay, just published in the peer-reviewed journal Nonprofit Policy Forum (Open Access, yes!), I suggest focusing on organizational and sectoral culture as an explanatory variable for these crises, which are particularly hard-hitting for purportedly value-based organizations. In the case of NGOs, these are driven by six factors:

(1) particular individual leadership traits that may be prevalent especially in the emergency and humanitarian relief related sector

(2) the effect of power on leaders’ perspectives and behaviors

3) a culture of silence that makes it hard for NGO staff to speak up about toxic workplace behaviors

(4) the presence of deep power structures within NGOs which are not openly acknowledged and therefore addressed

(5) the myth of own innocence that leads NGOs to treat wrongdoing as aberrations instead of systemic problems; and

(6) a culture of limited individual and team-level accountability practices.

The extent to which these cultural failures can be addressed through formal policy and (self)regulatory measures is limited, given that culture is primarily about informal, covert belief systems. NGOs will have to do sustained and disciplined culture work themselves if the roots of the scandals are to be taken away.

A couple of warnings and notes: this essay is on the longer side. And I do not claim I am an expert in sexual harassment and abuse, either in the workplace or when NGOs interact with program impacted people. I am an expert in organizational effectiveness, dynamics, and culture as it relates to NGOs, and have a background in gender and gender and leadership as well. It is from those perspectives that I have written this essay. What I do is drawing links between organizational phenomena well researched in other sectors (public/government and private) and what can happen equally in NGOs, based on my 30 years of experience in the sector.

The other essays in this special issue of Nonprofit Policy Forum – written by well-known academics – are also available if you are interested.

Your comments on my essay are very much welcomed.

Is hiring and promoting ‘rebels’ the way out for changing our NGO cultures? A skeptical view

2 Comments / Change Management, Innovation, Organizational culture, Organizational effectiveness

Is hiring and promoting ‘rebels’ the way out for changing our NGO cultures? A skeptical view

Should NGOs hire and promote more ‘rebels’ – i.e. unlike minded characters – if they want to ensure enough adaptive capacity to weather the changes in the external environment? Will that make us better at seizing opportunities?

The case for rebels

Years ago I was part of a Task Force on Culture Change, hosted by the International Civil Society Center. Some participant supported the view that hiring and promoting ‘rebels’ or ‘strange bedfellows’ was the way to culture change. By ‘strange bedfellows’ I mean people who are squarely dissimilar from many NGOs types in background, social identity, cognitive outlook, skill set, industries etc. This approach has been recognized in the academic literature such as that of the organizational culture ‘guru’ Edgar Schein as one avenue indeed. And we know from the innovation literature and practice that when people from very different disciplines and backgrounds are exposed to each other, this can lead to creativity and innovation. See for instance my short interview with Aleem Walji, head of Aga Khan Foundation USA, who himself drove innovation in Google and the World Bank before coming to Aga Khan, in which he describes aspects of this process. Leandro Herrero, of the book ‘Viral Change’ about change management and a frequent, I might say caustic commentator on organizational dynamics, highlights the role of organizational dissenters, such as in this recent blog post. And the recent surge of attention paid to organizational diversity strategies in the private and public sectors also points to benefits in terms of creativity and innovation. In fact, the NeuroLeadership Institute argues that our brains must work harder and consider a broader set of ideas when we are surrounded by people who are different, i.e. ‘rebels’ within our workplace – and thus we do better work.

My skepticism

While I see the point of ‘rebels’ entirely, I am somewhat skeptical of how much space they are typically given in NGOs . In my observation, many NGOs I interact with have a limited ability to work with ‘strange bedfellows’; in fact, they form strong ‘antibodies’ against incoming ‘rebels’ who have been hired to change the culture. We tend to primarily be open to information that originates within our own sector. I wrote about this in a 2018 essay for CIVICUS’s Annual State of Civil Society report. In fact, the view that ‘radical, new leadership’ is critical and the only thing that is going to make culture change happen causes me to be skeptic in two ways. One, can leaders with formal positional power really drive transformational change in our rather leadership-averse, consultative cultures? And two, do our civil society organizations truly accept ‘radical leaders’? Or are we in fact quite good at spitting them out soon after they have entered?

So what to do?

What is your experience with this? And how can we be more open and inviting to rebels, once hired? Have them be sponsored as well as mentored more effectively (by people who already have much informal capital in the organization)? Have important meetings facilitated by outside facilitators so that rebels’ ideas and suggestions are given enough airtime? Let me know!

Anger and grievance among Amnesty staff: should the broader INGO sector pay attention?

2 Comments / Accountability, Change Management, Evaluation and organizational learning, Organizational culture, Organizational effectiveness, Uncategorized

Anger and grievance among Amnesty staff: should the broader INGO sector pay attention?

Introduction

When was the last time you read that an entire Senior Leadership Team (SLT) of a major NGO offered to resign? This happened recently in Amnesty International (shy of Kumi Naidoo, the relatively new Secretary General). It occurred after Amnesty made public (to its credit!) an independent report on the state of its staff well- being. The report put allegations of unfair treatment of staff, negatively impacted by a recent big organizational change process, and of racism, gender discrimination and bullying front and center as part of a longer standing cultural issue.

Why I write about this

I have followed these developments in Amnesty closely because I was part of a team that between 2014-2017 undertook a two part External Assessment of Amnesty’s Global Transition Program (GTP) . This big organizational change effort, as embodied in its informal name ‘Moving Closer to the Ground’, in effect decentralized Amnesty’s International Secretariat away from London to 11 Regional Offices, led (among others) to the appointment of many more global South staff and leaders, instilled a greater focus on gaining more global South members and supporters and led to the departure of a relative large number of staff who often had been with Amnesty for a long time. In effect, GTP also led to some redistribution of power within Amnesty. The Transnational NGO Initiative at Syracuse University, USA, which I directed at the time, undertook the External Assessment. Co-authors in this effort included Ramesh Singh, Steve Lux and Shreeya Neupane. In addition, I also was the co-trainer in an annual Senior Leadership Development Program for major INGOs including Amnesty since 2013, and in that process have heard many observations about Amnesty culture, including when it comes to interpersonal communication styles.

Our Assessment had a much broader scope than effects on staff of the Global Transition Program (GTP) alone, but it certainly included those effects. We included data on persistent and legitimate staff grievances as a result of especially weak change management capacity and practice, particularly during the first (crucial) stages of GTP implementation. We indicated that Amnesty’s Management seemed to consider these grievances in ways that we found to be unhelpful. Our report came out in May 2017, and from the Staff Well-being report produced by the consulting group Konterra which just came out it appears that our work did not make much of a difference – a not uncommon limitation of externally commissioned work!

It should be said that the internal communication culture of Amnesty was known to be ‘confrontational’ well before the Global Transition Program. By this we mean a style of communicating that is dominated by attempts to persuade others through internal advocacy style communication, the use of argumentation and attacks – instead of on skillful interpersonal communication that leads to greater mutual understanding, conflict management and collaboration. This communication culture, anecdotally, is not just reported in Amnesty, but also in some other campaigning NGOs. The phenomenon is described by David La Piana, for instance, in “The Nonprofit Paradox (Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2010).

This made me reflect on some things[1]:

Symbolically, the offer of collective resignation by Amnesty’s Senior Leadership Team was a necessary and useful action – this is irrespective of whether it accomplishes anything ‘structural’. It met the emotional needs of some staff (though not all) and the political needs of Amnesty’s Board.
It gives the current Secretary General a free hand to start afresh with new leadership – even if Kumi decides to hold on to some SLT members while accepting the resignation of others. This can help with top leadership getting ‘unstuck’ with regard to certain ‘mental models’ of how staff grievances should be understood.
Based on work I have done with other mid to large size NGOs who have gone through big change processes, I wonder if two realities co-exist in terms of whose voices counted or were privileged in the Staff Well-being report: on the one hand, there is a widespread, deeply shared and easily understood set of grievances. At the same time, it is my sense that there is also a set of voices that is critical of all the attention that has gone into ‘looking to the past’, who think that the power imbalances within the movement as well as the very identity of Amnesty needed to change, and who think the Staff Wellbeing report is (somewhat) overblown. The latter people just want to move on with the direction of travel that Amnesty is on, because they deeply believe in this direction and feel that the significant amount of change the organization went through was badly needed. I would have been interested to see in the Staff Well-being report, for instance, whether the latter voices had certain characteristics in common or not?
And I also struggle with this question: on the one hand, a human rights organization cannot be seen to violate staff rights within the organization. And people certainly cannot work productively and contribute to worthwhile outcomes if they feel strongly aggrieved. On the other hand, all this attention is inward looking instead of outward looking, to rights holders who Amnesty aims to support and promote. And this is after the GTP change process itself already instilled a strongly inward looking climate for staff in the International Secretariat for several years.
We all know there is a perennial debate within civil society as to what is the importance of having ‘passion for the cause’ and having ‘the right values’ (reflected in what some call the ‘soul’ of civil society), relative to the aim to professionalize. And it is obvious that mission and values-focused NGO staff are driven more by intrinsic motivations than by extrinsic rewards such as salary. However, we as staff still need to be competent (professional) in how we communicate and treat each other; and we also may need to be more concerned with external effectiveness, and less with ‘good intentions and passion’.
This in turn reminds me of the time I facilitated a senior leadership training, and we discussed the concept of a ‘psychological contract’. This concept (developed by Denise Rousseau) points to the set of – often unspoken – mutual beliefs and perceptions with regard to the informal obligations that may exist between employers and employees. As trainers, we asked each participant to indicate what their psychological contract was with their NGO employer. I recall how one set of participants indicated that theirs consisted of two things: having passion for ‘the cause’ and a willingness to work long hours for not that high a salary. I remember thinking to myself: but what about actual outcomes for the people or causes you work on? Outcomes did not seem to be part of the equation.
This also brought back memories of the time when I set out to work in the international development field – a long time ago. I never saw myself as a ‘do gooder’ even though that was the assumption that many people had about young people like me. I did want to work on public causes, but I was weary of any notion of ‘saving the world’: the arrogance and ego that was personified in that idea was not something I was comfortable with. II just wanted to do meaningful work well. Please note that I am not saying I always succeeded! But doing work well was my main mission.
Coming back to Amnesty’s current situation, this sentence in an editorial of The Times (after the publication of the Staff Well-being report therefore stuck with me: “Staff and managers employed … may pride themselves more on their commitment than on their professionalism. Being morally right all the time can induce an attitude towards fellow employees which is characterised by impatience and intolerance. Due process can come to be seen as an impediment to doing what seems to be the right thing, rather than as an assistance. Nothing is as “toxic” in the workplace as the resulting arbitrariness.” (The Times, February 6, 2019)

In conclusion, perhaps we as a sector should get better at balancing being ‘morally right’ (which is in any event depending on one’s viewpoint of the world), with being focused on skillfully interacting with our colleagues, so that we may support the creation of better outcomes. Why does our ‘moral outrage’ entitle us to treat others badly? Does this showcase a certain amount of ego and self-gratification, while masking as ‘doing good’? Should we apply a bit more humility, honesty and self-awareness?

This is a highly complex situation. What do you think? I look forward to hearing your comments and to learning from your perspective.

[1] I am grateful to Catherine Gerard, my colleague at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University (USA), who has been my mentor as well as co-trainer in the Senior Leadership Development Program since 2011, for inputs received.

Agile leadership behaviors, leading change and culture in INGOs: a Humentum SocialEx podcast interview

Leave a Comment / Change Management, Leadership development, Organizational culture

Agile leadership behaviors, leading change and culture in INGOs: a Humentum SocialEx podcast interview

Agility is a much-discussed topic among INGOs these days. This is not just about how to become more organizationally agile, but also how to be more agile as individual leaders. Humentum, the NGO membership organization that supports capacity building in the area of operational excellence, and the Maxwell School recently designed a pilot e-course on Agile Leadership Behaviors which I designed and co-facilitated during the first course run. Full credits for much of the curriculum foundation of this e-course go to Catherine Gerard at the Maxwell School, however!

In this Humentum SocialEx podcast interview, Caitlin Holland, Humentum’s Storyteller, interviewed me about the core concepts behind the new e-course (which will run in April once again). We also chatted about the Maxwell School’s extensive, global experience in the development of government and NGO leadership, and my observations on a few facets of INGO culture as I see them manifested in some of the organizations I work with.

Let me know what your views are on the topics Caitlin and I discussed!

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Countercultural HR recommendations: can what worked for Netflix also work for NGOs?

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Countercultural HR recommendations: can what worked for Netflix also work for NGOs?

Should NGOs leaders heed the advice from the former head of HR at Netflix, in their efforts to remain relevant as well capable of innovation and scale?

In an era of anxiety about remaining relevance – at least in some quarters of ‘NGO land’ — I would venture that it is worthwhile to listen in to this podcast with Patty McCorden, who headed HR at Netflix until recently, and now consults with many startups and other companies. Her thoughts and positions are stimulating and at times provocative. Mark C. Crowley, author of the book “Leading from the Heart” as well as the corresponding podcast series, interviewed Patty recently. I appreciate Mark’s podcast interviews, with their focus on the crucial role of emotional intelligence in leadership. And kudos to Mike Harold at Greenpeace, who put me onto Patty McCorden’s book “Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility” in the first place!

Here are counter cultural recommendations that NGO leaders should heed:

HR too often is backward looking (‘how was your performance in the past year?’); instead, it should be be forward looking: what kind of people does our organization need in 1-2 years? This may be quite different from what we have at the moment.

HR should not be focused on retention but on the match between where the NGO will need to go soon and the people (skills, competencies, attitudes etc.) that it will need correspondingly. When current staff – including those who may have been ‘star performers’! – no longer match what the organization needs, it is the role of HR to start conversations early on about changes that are on the horizon, and support HR can give to staff in the form of connections, references, job search support, etc. for people for whom there may soon not be a match anymore. These conversations and support systems will optimize people’s chances for a good next career move.

it is important for NGOs therefore to be fully transparent about the state of the organization, what key organizational level performance indicators are indicating about changes that may be needed in role, strategy, business models etc. NGOs need to share this data transparently with staff. This way, people can prepare their minds for impending changes and take action accordingly.

Anecdotally, the culture of many INGOs that I interact with seems to make it hard to discuss these aspects openly. Some scholars and practitioners think this is due to the passion that NGO staff frequently bring to the cause their organization represents, and the amount of identity that people thus have caught up with this. I will write more about this aspect in future blogs, because I see this to cause some real problems – which we do not talk about openly enough in our sector, and which causes plenty of ‘dishonesty in our discourse’ in my view.

Our NGO sector should therefore heed some of these HR approaches, because not doing so ultimately limits the impact of our organizations, which is not in line with what we say we are about – maximizing impact. Doing so is also ultimately unfair to staff, because it does not prepare them for necessary and successful transition in this era of disruption, including because of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (a term coined by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, about the seismic disruption purportedly impending due to digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, robotics, biotechnology etc. ).
So, what are you taking away from Patty’s recommendations for your NGO?
And what do you think of Patty’s phrase that HR leaders are the “COO of the organizational culture?” What does this imply for you as HR or OD leader, on a daily basis?

Let me know! Sign up for my future reflections. And let’s talk if you want to discuss any of these trends and issues.

Here are some links to help you dig deeper, as a start:

Lead from the Heart interview by Mark C. Crowley with Patty McCord: http://markccrowley.com/patty-mccord-parting-ways-with-traditional-leadership-rules-is-how-netflix-built-its-hugely-successful-culture/

Netflix’s culture story: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture

McCord’s TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/patty_mccord_lessons_from_a_silicon_valley_maverick_new_ways_of_working_and_collaborating

Article in Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr

Organizational culture