You can’t have an effective organization when you have all the right people working on all the wrong things.
- Albert Ruesga,
White Courtesy TelephoneThere’s a running joke within the nonprofit sector that we are so cash-strapped to pay the kind of salaries that attract professional staff, that most of us are just looking for warm bodies to do the work. If someone is willing to work for what is considered low pay in comparision to business and government wages, most nonprofits are so grateful that we tend to hire without serious regard to relevant expertise or experience. This observation wouldn’t be as funny if it weren’t so often true. So while Seth Godin says that he would rather just hire people who know how to get stuff done, I would strongly disagree with applying this method to nonprofit human resources. I’m also at odds with Fast Company on this one. What works for business does not always work for nonprofits. Our sector already struggles with a profound lack of infrastructure, and hiring what very well may be the right people to do the wrong things is a big mistake.
Tom Tierney called this the “Who Thing” in a speech to the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. Tom said that an ideal team “consists of the right people doing the right jobs at the right times.” He also added the caveat that “effective leaders need to be cognizant that a person who is right for the job today, may not be right for the job tomorrow.”
What does this mean for nonprofit organizations?
For me, it means that you may need to reconsider that youth program coordinator you just hired because she’s really energetic and willing to stay late for special events, but is also disorganized, unprofessional, and has no experience with youth programs whatsoever. Or, look, you recruited your founding board and staff for their passion – and that was pretty important when the nonprofit was a start-up, but now you need the kind of strategic thinking and leadership that they don’t have to take the organization to the next level. We owe it to the communities we serve to hire well, and when we don’t, to find better replacements before they harm our organizations. There are qualified nonprofit employees out there, we just have to be committed to finding them. Educated pools of potential nonprofit leaders are coming out of universities and training programs at a rapid pace. They want to enter the nonprofit workforce, but only some nonprofits are getting it right.
This brings me to why I hate QuickBooks.
My current title in my organization is ‘Director of Development and Finance’. Never heard of such a position? Me neither. A quick Google search turns up a mere 129 references to that job title. (Google “director of development”, on the other hand, and you get a whopping 1,080,000 results.) Like many nonprofits, we made up the position to suit our needs. The story is that when I started with the organization as a temp, I was tasked with developing a financial management plan to help the nonprofit transition from almost completely outsourced accounting to bring many essential functions in-house. I created a step-by-step plan to do this in 3 months and implemented it. The big boss liked the outcome of this project and hired me full-time. The problem? I have no accounting background or finance-focused education.
I majored in English and minored in philosophy. I’m a writer at my core, and to tell the honest-to-God truth, I hate math. Although I did complete graduate work in nonprofit management, in order to obtain the answers to our financial management issues, I still have to consult with board members, our pro-bono CPA (who is, understandably, not at my beck and call), and the handy dandy Internet. Why put myself through this, you ask? Because I’m passionate about the cause and I think the organization I work for is doing impactful work in the field. And I took the job because the other half of the job description guaranteed me a foot in the door for what I really wanted to do, which is fundraising. So you might guess that my best days are ones where I get to write a grant proposal to a potential funder or communicate the importance of our programs to a corporate giving officer. But I’m just about gritting my teeth when financial report time comes around.
I digress, but the point is that the part of the job that I’m not that psyched about takes up a lot of time from what I think is fundamentally more important: building financial support to sustain the organization. That other part of my job would be much better done by an accounting or finance major. And I’m sure that if we had the resources, we would hire as such. But like many nonprofits, we don’t, so we make do. What I’m suggesting, however, is that nonprofits need to move away as much as possible from “making do” to hiring the right people for the specific job functions that you need them to do. I say this not just because it makes sense, but because I see many risks with continuing working this way, including these that are already major issues:
Nonprofits need to take more care in hiring the kind of people with relevant skills to help move their missions forward. Jokers be warned: despite popular belief, any warm body will NOT do.
