Getting Real: Facing the Challenge of Mission-Driven Organizations
In highly mission-driven organizations, particularly in the non-profit and association sectors, we’ve been using a simple framework to help create strategic focus. It is not unusual for non-profits to face tremendous needs for their services; when coupled with employees who are highly committed to the organization’s mission, non-profits will often try to meet those many needs, whatever the cost. Budgets being limited, the cost is usually borne by the people, through burn-out, stress and, ultimately, less than optimal service-provision. Ironically, their level of commitment ultimately undermines—through a lack of strategic focus—their quality of service, thus defeating the very mission everyone is so committed to.
To stop that downward spiral, we have organizations look at their mission, their capacity and the needs they currently meet and anticipate meeting. Though you can start anywhere, we tend to start with needs, asking the organization to identify the various needs in its environment that it addresses, and to look at the quality that it delivers in meeting those needs. Typically this results in a portrait of many needs—in fact, too many needs is common—delivered with variable quality.
Needs are then looked at through the lens of Capability/Capacity. For this approach to work, capacity/capability cannot be an abstraction; it means how many people and people-hours can the organization (or team or unit) draw upon and the depth of know-how available. In moving towards a realistic accounting of capacity/capability, different assumptions surface. How much capability do we really have in X? How many people are dedicated to addressing Y? What are we taking on that our clients, stakeholders or volunteers could do? When placed alongside each other, Needs and Capability/Capacity generate a blinding glimpse of the obvious, which has for a long time either been undiscussable, denied, or hidden. The mismatch is not solved by working smarter; it does not lend itself to the simplistic nostrum of “doing more with less.” Something has to transform.
Mission-driven organizations have a tendency to create organizational cultures that are reluctant to say “no” to the needs of their stakeholders. Too few people meeting too many needs isn’t sustainable. When asked “what’s the cost of the mismatch?”, it’s not hard for answers, sometime uncomfortable, even painful, to come forward. That moment is where the filter of mission is brought in. A mission can be as wide as a doorway or as narrow as the eye of a needle; if the openness of the mission is so wide that it does little in the way of boundary-setting, then the mission needs to be pushed to clarify whom we serve, to what ends, with what services.
While a clear mission is part of providing a filter, ultimately the organization needs to have boundary-keeping capability demonstrated by those who stand at the boundary of the organization and its environment. An inability to say no becomes, over time, an equal inability to say YES!, because the resources are spread too thin, the commitments are too great. The energy that emerges is something like, “okay, we’ll take it on…there’s no one else.” By then, the organization has started to wear its role like a victim. Saying “no,” or “not right now,” is an act of leadership. Getting real about what a committed organization can do and cannot do serves well both those who provide the services and those who receive and collaborate in the delivery of them.
