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Tips and Answers
to Your Questions
Leadership and Management
Having a change-friendly mindset
It is important to understand what you can control and what you cannot
in a dynamic world in which you don’t know what is going to happen
tomorrow, let alone in a year. This approach might be expressed as having
a change-friendly mindset. Mindset is the all-important element. Mindsets
are mental positions or outlooks from which people approach problems.
Mindsets can be either self-limiting or expansive. As the change leader,
your mindset will be emulated by those around you. It can either help
you or work against you. What mindset do you need in order to successfully
implement a merger?
Mindset #1: This is an opportunity.
To effectively anticipate and respond to the challenges of post-merger
integration, assume an aggressive stance toward the future: “This
is an opportunity” should be your motto. Do not be daunted by impending
change, and certainly do not fear it. Learn to use change to improve
the management of your organization and to advance its mission. Take
a simple example. Let’s say you need to integrate the two merging
organizations’ fundraising databases. Don’t limit yourself
to choosing between the two current systems. Assess your needs and it
may become clear that you require a more robust system to serve the current
and projected needs of the merged entity. Absent the merger, this upgrade
might not have risen to your attention, or garnered the organizational
will to make it a reality. However, since you must integrate the current
databases anyway, why not use the opportunity to obtain a better overall
system? Change equals opportunity; this mindset is contagious. If the
leaders exhibit it, the staff, volunteers, and even the board will likely
follow, at least to a degree. Post-merger integration will not go smoothly.
Be prepared for the bumps in the road and respond to them with a can-do
attitude. Seek opportunities in the chaos and uncertainty. It will work
wonders.
Mindset #2: Everything is negotiable, except the mission.
To keep on course in a changing world, your best rudder is clarity
about the difference between mission and “ what we do today.” Many
nonprofit leaders do not see a difference between mission and practice.
For example, ask the director of a food pantry what her mission is and
she might answer, “To provide packaged, nonperishable food to the
folks who drop inhere.” This is a fine statement of the work she
does each day, but it is an overly narrow statement of the mission, which
is about feeding the hungry, bestowing dignity, keeping families together,
and many other things beyond packaged food. This nonetheless typical
answer leads to a tendency to resist even small operational changes because
they are perceived as threatening the mission. In fact they threaten
only the accustomed way of doing things. In the food pantry example,
will expanding from one distribution site to three imperil the mission?
What about adding a hot meals component? Or initiating an arrangement
for meal delivery to a nearby shelter? Of course not. Yet any of these
opportunities might be presented to the food pantry through a merger
and resisted as being inconsistent with the mission, narrowly defined
as “what we do today.” Where does mindset come in? Nonprofit
leaders need to focus everyone’s energy on how to best advance
the mission in a turbulent world.
Mindset #3: We exist to serve our clients and communities.
During times of change, and never more so than during a merger, internal
constituencies accept great pressure to keep things as close as possible
to how they were — to maintain the status quo. To remain clear
about what is most important during times of change, nonprofit leaders
must remember that they are not in business to make their board members
or staff comfortable and happy. Rather, they are in business to serve
their clients and communities. While good leaders care deeply about the
morale of their people, and never forget that an unhappy board can make
life difficult, they do not let fears of the unknown, or resistance to
change, be the determining factor in organizational decisions. Statements
such as “We can’t work in that neighborhood; it is too dangerous” and “Changing
the board meeting day will cause us to lose board members” really
reflect the needs, desires, fears, and interests of these internal constituencies.
The leader is challenged to respond by focusing on the needs of the clients
or community served. For example,“ Now that we have merged with
XYZ, their clients are our clients. We will serve them, and we will find
a way to do it safely.” And “We are going to .nd a time that
works for the new board, and it may not be our old time. We’ll
work it out together so no one gets left out.”
Mindset #4: What you see is what you get.
To motivate staff, volunteers, and board members to embrace impending
change, you must help them to understand the reason for the change. The
leader’s mindset must be that “we are hiding nothing.” If,
prior to the merger, the organization had a history of clear and honest
communication with its stakeholders, particularly its staff and board,
those stakeholders will be more likely to trust what you tell them about
the impending changes brought about by the merger. Thus, a long-standing
and absolute commitment to “transparency” in all dealings
will enable the organizational leader’s communication about the
changes to be heard and believed. If the organization’s communication
has been less than open in the past (or at least is perceived by some
to have been so), then continuously clear and honest communication must
begin at once. Credibility is essential to change leadership.
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