Strongly Led, Under-managed

After I read through the article on capacity building, I started looking looking for some case studies regarding this all-important aspect of non-profit management. I found an entire section on Capacity Building on the National Council of Nonprofits website. As always, one link led to another, and I came across this very interesting article titled "Strongly Led, Under-managed: How can visionary nonprofits make the critical transition to stronger management?", by The Bridgespan Group, that discussed how many nonprofits actually have very strong leadership, that is driven by their mission, but poor management skills than can effectively translate this vision to implementation.

The article defines "leadership as the set of activities required to articulate an organization’s vision and ensure that all of its stakeholders will support that vision. These activities include: setting the organization’s direction and envisioning its future; communicating with and aligning the stakeholders whose efforts and contributions are necessary for success; and motivating, inspiring, and energizing people throughout the organization."

The article defines "management as the set of activities required to ensure that an organization will reliably produce results, especially as it grows larger and/or becomes more complex. Management’s core activities include: goal setting and budgeting; establishing systems, organizational structures, and processes; and monitoring performance and problem-solving."

Based on these definitions, it seems almost obvious that vision and implementation skills are completely different, and both require different individuals (or teams of individuals) at the helm guiding the organization. As Paul (from eLuma) pointed out in class last week, their present Director was not even part of the initial team that came up with the idea for their venture, she joined in later and now leads the management team.

Why is it then that most nonprofits completely underestimate the power of a strong management team that can actually achieve the goals that make its mission? One of the critical reasons, the article points out to, is the lack of key metrics for assessing these goals as well as the lack of performance assessment. These are excellent indicators of whether the organization is actually on track for making the social impact and change that it set out to achieving.