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Tosca’s guest appearance on Maurice Bloem’s podcast Walk Talk Listen

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Tosca’s guest appearance on Maurice Bloem’s podcast Walk Talk Listen

What happens when a thoughtful podcast host interviews you with questions that go all the way back to your ‘origin story’ of why you do the work that you do? That ask about your spiritual bearings? A song or piece of music that says something about you?

This is what happened to me when I was interviewed by Maurice Bloem, Chief Sustainability and Impact Officer at Church World Service (CWS), a US-founded faith based NGO. Maurice podcasts in his personal capacity, as part of his mission embodied in the 100 Mile Initiative: an an annual sponsored walk in many communities to fundraise for the eradication of hunger (this is also known as Cropwalk). I have participated in this, as part of my church community, along with my kids when they were younger.

Maurice is an alumni of the Transnational NGO Leadership Institute at Syracuse University, which I used to direct in my former identity as ‘accidental pracademic’. Maurice and I have stayed in touch, and I cherish our conversations about NGOs, leadership questions, climate change and sustainability challenges thrown at the sector – and of course our shared Dutch background (we are both from the Netherlands and have both lived in the USA now for a very long time).

Maurice’s interview questions were original, they made for an authentic and stimulating conversation and they made me think harder. The latter is always needed!

We also discussed my co-authored book, and what I am currently most enthused about: my newfound capability of team coaching now that I am a graduate of the Team Coaching Intensive program at Corentus, the renowned global team coaching company. – and now that they have made me one of their Core Practitioners (for part of my practice; I also offer team coaching in my Five Oaks Consulting capacity. Ask me (Tosca@5oaksconsulting.org) if you think your senior team and you as team leader could use an upgrade. And I offered some observations on trends I see in some NGO senior team underperformance issues.

Are you curious yet? Jump in here!

Remote working is hard but here to stay. And so are offices

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Remote working is hard but here to stay. And so are offices

Guest blog by John Gillespie – Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Amnesty International 2013-201, and  Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at  Circle Gas, a Kenyan start-up 2019-2022. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Five Oaks Consulting.

The pandemic changed how we worked

Back in 2019 I wrote on the challenges of managing remote working. Back in those innocent days it was an increasingly hot topic, but most employees turned up at the office most days. One pandemic later and we are all experts on remote working.

The consensus seems to be ‘the employees have won; we aren’t going back to the office’. Have they won really? Is the office dead?

My colleagues and I travelled more than most during the pandemic. We were running a startup with operations in Kenya and China. I only spent a few weeks in self-isolation. My CEO spent 6 weeks in the quarantine required to travel to China and back to the UK. We weren’t flying all over the world and putting our health at risk for the fun of it. We were traveling to see people, and that meant visiting offices. Place matters.

We are social animals. Turns out we still like a place to meet, to collaborate and to learn from each other. The office of the future is going to be a place for some people to work, but a place for a lot more people to work together in specific ways – ways that are best done f2f.

The future of remote working

First, remote working is here to stay:

    • The pandemic has proven virtual working is feasible; and even desirable (to many), though not all

    • CFOs are under pressure to control costs and cutting office space is an obvious place to look  

    • Technically, remote work is a solved problem. The advice I offered back in 2019 is now embedded. I was particularly bemused to see the quality of internet connections, sound and video improve significantly over the course of the pandemic all without much assistance from IT.

    • Leaders and employees are adapting, some by trial and error, some with the help of the courses like the ones offered by Five Oaks Consulting

However, we still need offices:

    • We like to get together for team building and to learn from each other.  Some parts of work are move effective when we are together — for example certain forms of collaborative creativity, onboarding new people, or the building of trust and candor.

    • Some people need space to work effectively. Not everyone can afford a space free of distractions. A home office is a luxury not available to all. Expecting all knowledge workers to work from home will penalise many. Particularly women expected to look after children. You will lose valuable colleagues if you do not recognize the equity side of this.   

    • Collaboration is easier and more effective when people have the opportunity to sometimes meet and work on shared problems, face-to-face.

Create offices that work for all workers

Our old offices are no longer suitable. I recently visited an office with bank after bank of desks all kitted out with dual screen monitors and high-end office chairs. 3 years ago it would have been buzzing with people. Now there was only a single lonely soul in the whole room. It was soulless and miserable.

What can leaders do?

Leaders can take the following steps:

    • Offices need to be designed around the organizational culture and behaviours that leaders want to promote, and that needs to be collaboration, and the promotion of ‘accidental collisions’ and spontaneous, unstructured meeting points. So, make sure to have lots of flexible meeting space.

    • Give those spaces the technology needed to collaborate and communicate with hybrid/remote teams. A properly equipped meeting room with well-designed sound and video can be good place for virtual conferences.

    • Create offices that are pleasant to visit and work. Staff have choices. That may mean wholesale redesign, redevelopment or even relocation of some offices.

    • Set an expectation that an office is a collaboration space that teams are expected to attend. The frequency will dependent on the team and the mission (and whatever the organization may mandate). That might range from a couple of days a week to a couple of days a year. 

What’s next

Why is a CIO talking about facilities? The tech sector had a good pandemic. Billions were thrown at video conference software, internet connections, laptops and webcams, and it paid off: we made remote working work. People are taking a bit longer to adapt, it is hard to change career-long habits, but it is happening.

Our offices are next.  

Is all this talk about a ‘power shift’ in our sector really amounting to substantive changes?

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Is all this talk about a 'power shift' in our sector really amounting to substantive changes?

How 17 INGOs are going about it

Is all this talk about a ‘power shift’ in our sector really amounting to substantive changes?

And if it is – what has actually changed in the past 3-5 years?

This was the topic of a small ‘benchmarking study’ of 17 international civil society organizations (ICSOs) that are co-owners of the International Civil Society Centre. My fellow consultant Esther Kwaku and I looked into what actually shifted, in terms of decision rights, processes, and structures. And we looked at sources of informal power, as much as formal ones. The results?

The Centre shared the full findings with the agencies who had chosen to be the focus of the study. It also aggregated the findings in a shorter report for the public — credit to Esther for writing this summary!

See Report Here

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

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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

Changing the medical culture one team at a time

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CHANGING THE MEDICAL CULTURE ONE TEAM AT A TIME

My guest podcast interview with Jen Barna, MD, CEO at DocWorking

What is organizational culture, how can we ‘see’ it in action, and how can we affect it, as leaders?

The ‘culture’ question is one that tends to be of great interest to many leaders—but ‘culture’ is a nebulous concept, at once both vague and changing. Misunderstandings abound about what culture even is—and how to improve it. We see this regularly with civil society leaders, but it is equally true for physicians who lead teams and for health care agencies working in the US (including nonprofits).

To provide some clarity on these issues, my friend Jen Barna, MD and CEO of DocWorking, the coaching resource for physicians who seek a better balance between their professional and personal lives, interviewed me as a guest on her podcast. Regardless of your professional sector, you may find value in listening in!

And – if you are a physician who leads virtual or hybrid teams, DocWorking and Five Oaks Consulting designed course just for you. Have a look if you are interested: https://5oaks.teachable.com/ (scroll to the bottom of the page for specific information on courses geared towards physicians)

Listen to Podcast Here
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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

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

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!

When nonprofits conform to common financial management norms, they may sacrifice as much as half of their impact

Leave a Comment / Accountability, Evaluation and organizational learning, Organizational effectiveness, Uncategorized

When nonprofits conform to common financial management norms, they may sacrifice as much as half of their impact

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

By George Mitchell, Associate Professor of Nonprofit Management at the City University of New York. He reports on recently published research, conducted together with Thad Calabrese, Associate Professor of Public and Nonprofit Financial Management, at New York University. (George, Hans Peter Schmitz, and Tosca are the co-authors of the book ‘Between Power and Irrelevance: the Future of Transnational NGOs’, and have collaborated for close to 20 years.)

Charities that conform to common nonprofit financial management norms may be sacrificing more than half of their mission impact over a decade. This is the conclusion of our recently published research on a large population of US registered nonprofits and NGOs (domestic and international ones).

As charitable organizations, NGOs have long been under pressure to make themselves look financially trustworthy by following practices like:

  • minimizing overhead
  • being fiscally lean
  • diversifying revenue sources; and
  • avoiding significant debt.

Many funders, watchdogs, and other stakeholders routinely evaluate NGOs based on their conformity to norms like these. But how does following these norms actually affect organizational performance? My co-author Thad Calabrese and I analyzed data from thousands of US charities over several decades to find the answer. Read more (short article) at The Conversation.

Or check out our original research here  (open access/no paywall) or here (paywall).

Let us know how you react to this — perhaps counterintuitive — research outcome! Email me at george.mitchell@baruch.cuny.edu, or leave a comment.

man and woman near table

NGOs: Chasing Innovation, Funding & Impact?

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NGOs: Chasing Innovation, Funding & Impact?

I recently joined Chris Meyer zu Natrup, MD of MzN International, for a 3-part short podcast series in which we had candid, thought-provoking – and somewhat provocative – conversations about the future of the nonprofit sector and the mindsets and mental models that shape the organizations of today.

Now we are back with a live Q&A session on April 7 from 8:30 – 9:30 am ET eager to your questions pertaining to: 

NGO innovation, in particular: 

– if nonprofits are at risk of becoming obsolete

– what NGOs need to do to survive and thrive in a modern, digital world

– what leaders can do to transform their organizations into better-equipped problem solvers and innovators in uncertain times

NGO funding, in particular: 

– the never-ending funding cycle and the seemingly outdated business model which most NGOs are forced to adopt

– why some organisations continue to grow while others stagnate

– what NGO leaders can do to make their funding and business models more sustainable

NGO impact, in particular:

– if nonprofits can truly make and measure the impact they set out to achieve 

– why some organisations do not create the impact they desire despite the time and expenses they invest in their programs

– what NGOs can do to create a more learning- and evidence-driven culture

Please submit your questions for Chris & me here in advance and register here to join. We look forward to seeing you there! 

Set of earphones surrounding 3 books

Between Power and Irrelevance: are INGOs actually changing their roles? [ICSC podcast interview]

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Between Power and Irrelevance: are INGOs actually changing their roles? [ICSC podcast interview]

Set of earphones surrounding 3 books

Are we transforming as INGOs? Or preparing to die well? Or die badly? (to use a term my colleague and collaborator Barney Tallack coined)

Between power and irrelevance: are INGOs actually willing and able to change their roles, where needed, in response to the many changes in the external environment? Where are leaders in regards to the case for transformational change? Is there (still) a lack of awareness? Or lack of action? Or is our ability to take action constrained by the (legal and normative) architecture in which INGOs are embedded? 

These and other questions were at the heart of an International Civil Society Centre podcast interview with George Mitchell, Hans Peter Schmitz, Barney Tallack and myself – all co-authors of and/or contributors to our book ‘Between Power and Irrelevance: the Future of Transnational NGOs‘.

The upshot

In ICSC’s podcast episode, we discuss:

  • What’s the core claim of our book?
  • What does a culture of innovation look like?
  • What are practical levers for culture change?
  • Where are INGOs with respect to digital strategies, tactics, and capabilities?
  • And are our sector organizations transforming? Or preparing to die well? Die badly?

These topics reflect some of the chapters in our book. I really like how our ICSC colleagues allowed us to play off and complement each other. Have a listen!

PS: pretty soon, my new Youtube channel will include a recording of this discussion as well: subscribe to be in the know as to when!

blue skies

Nothing Lasts Forever: Exit Planning is Essential for INGOs

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Nothing Lasts Forever: Exit Planning is Essential for INGOs

Guest blog post by Charlie Danzoll, independent consultant. The views expressed in this post are Charlie’s. You can reach him via LinkedIn.

For all the energy, time, and resources INGOs invest in starting new initiatives, their plans for moving on are often sorely lacking.

 

Whether it is transitioning from INGO status to a nationally governed entity or withdrawing from the country, an INGO planning for closure of its country presence is faced with a dilemma: How can the organization responsibly manage such a contraction when doing so pitts its commitment to core values against the cold hard reality of resources that have run out?  What does responsible transition or exit look like? How can organizations better prepare to uphold their vision, values, and commitments during and after they leave?

While many organizations plan for transition and exit at the project level, and these plans are sometimes included in country-level strategic plans, INGOs don’t often define milestones or benchmarks for country-level transition or exit. Poor planning and execution of country transitions and exits contribute to the very critique of neocolonial aspects of aid. They manifest as, for instance:

  • Disgruntled staff, partners, and stakeholders;
  • Organizational inertia and dissonance;
  • Gradual bleeding of already scarce resources;
  • Insufficient resources to support transition and exit;
  • Focusing on financial risk at the expense of staff and organizational legacy; and
  • Underinvestment in staff income security and opportunities for professional growth.
  • All of this increases the perception that INGOS are not accountable to the people and communities they serve.

Consequently, I argue that preparing for transition and exit is a matter of strategic importance and should be addressed at the very beginning of the work in that country. By naming a transition/exit strategy as a priority, investing early in its design, and maintaining this commitment throughout the program/project life cycle, INGOs can uphold their missions and values through the end of their initiatives and beyond.

Admittedly, the prevailing challenge is operationalizing this advice. “Walking the talk” is often quite difficult.

I therefore recommend the following:

  • Review and adopt the lessons from the excellent  Stopping as Success Project;
  • Set organizational intentions, including principles, benchmarks, and policies for exit and transition;
  • Build transition and exit into the organizational ways of working and strategic planning processes—i.e., viewing them not as a failure but as normal parts of the business cycle;
  • Earmark unrestricted organizational resources for transition and exit;
  • Define transition and exit activities as core costs and advocate that donors accept them as an accrual (similar to how staff severance is accepted as a core cost);
  • Dedicate time and resources to staff wellness as it relates to transition and exit; and
  • Balance the need for financial risk management with enhancing impact and legacy.

Commitment to aligning an INGO’s mission with on-the-ground realities starts with recognizing transition and exit as organizational imperatives that need to be planned for well in advance. Planning should begin years (as opposed to months) before such a strategy is needed and be included as part of country-level strategic planning and program/project design.

The true test of an organization’s legacy and, ultimately, its impact will be how well the transition is planned, managed, and carried out. Therefore, it is time to prioritize responsible transition, exit, and closure.

Beyond Diversity Training – What Works (Part Two)

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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