When a Country Office becomes a full INGO member… the Do’s and Don’ts

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When a Country Office becomes a full INGO member… the Do’s and Don’ts

This post was written by Hazem Fahmy, Co-Founder of CARE Egypt Foundation.
Views expressed here are my own and do not represent the positions of CARE.

I led the transformation of a CARE Country Office into becoming an independent full member of CARE globally. This is the story of how we went through the change, and what were the challenges we endured – our story can hopefully help others to avoid some of our pitfalls.

CARE Egypt operated for over 60 years as a CARE USA country office – quite a long history! In January 2022 the CARE Egypt Foundation (new name) became a full member of the CARE International confederation. Although the idea to become a national NGO was considered as early as 2007, the actual transformation journey started in 2016. Would we be able to cross the finish line? How and with who would we get there?

In 2014 CARE discussed plans to diversify its membership by supporting “Global South” offices to nationalize with the intention to increase the legitimacy of its global footprint as well as the credibility of its local presence. At the time CARE Egypt was fully staffed by Egyptian professionals and the country has been through two revolutions… we were ready to chart new territory.

Our transformation

Aid effectiveness, INGO legitimacy, decolonization of aid, localization of humanitarian efforts. These have been important topics, and the subject of heated debates for many workers in the development ecosystem worldwide since 2014. In this blog post, I will focus on how we transformed, and the mistakes we made so colleagues on similar journeys can learn from how we faced our challenges.

It was first important to create ownership among our staff for this monumental endeavor. I started with convincing senior management to agree on why we should do this, what is our vision, and how we might go about achieving our goal. But we realized quickly that senior managers’ championship alone was not enough to overhaul our $5M annual portfolio, involving120 staff operating in a complex ecosystem. We needed to change relationships with the government, CARE members, donors, and partners. We had to mobilize staff across all ranks.

Mistakes that I will avoid in the future

1/ Being overly cautious: One of the bigger mistakes that I made during the transformation journey was to downplay the effects of the transformation on our staff. My intention was to comfort them by minimizing differences between being an Egyptian organization versus a Country Office.

The outline of the “new organization” we wanted to become was very ambiguous with lot of unknowns. As time went by, ambiguity decreased, and we found concrete answers to numerous questions we had at the early stages. Equipped with more answers, clarity did translate into bolder ways to confront and explain the reality of the future to our colleagues.

If I do it all over, I would be bolder earlier, but would continue calming staff about the future. I would better balance my messaging about what will remain the same versus what will be different. It is essential to cater to the fears and concerns of staff, as we move forward in the transformation.

Obviously, while we had our fair share of problems in the past six years, it could have been a lot rougher if we had not worked on bringing our colleagues along, starting from senior management, middle managers and field staff. Colleagues had to see themselves as part of the change and get excited about our future.

2/ Change is not a project: Looking back, I would avoid treating the journey as a project. It is too limiting to think about this change journey in terms of a plan, resource use, Gant charts and a risk management matrix. When we started the process, the emphasis was on what are the steps required, what resources will we need? What were the risks of not achieving or not being on time to complete planned steps?

We were describing a project rather than a journey to achieve a vision. Thinking like a project made us overly focused on the details and we lost sight of the intention. When you couple that with a high level of ambiguity, it becomes impossible to navigate and manage the complexities. Aspects such as staff concerns, government questions, questions posed by the CARE confederation members. It just became impossible to navigate and manage all the moving parts.

Our intent to transform, our new north star should be the lens to evaluate our progress. What mattered is what our strategy should look like, which business model should we adopt. Such views helped us to focus on what is important at any given moment, and it also helped achieve tasks with clarity and focus while not losing sight of the big picture. My senior colleagues and I stayed grounded and were able to put things in perspective as we tackled one challenge after the other.

In the end

In the end I am proud of what we achieved, as we pressed to create buy in by our colleagues. We expanded circles of engaged staff while keeping the visionary intent to nationalize our entity as the primary way to evaluate our progress.

Writing this post has encouraged me to document a more detailed description of the journey and what we learned. We are still discovering what it means to be a southern member in an international NGO. But that is for another blog post: to speak of power dynamics and how they shift (or not) in an INGO. Stay tuned!

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!

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

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

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)

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!

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.

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!

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

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!

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 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)

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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