Dear Organizational Pivoter,
The things you list as crisis responses—income diversification, strategic thinking—certainly are important. To complement your ideas, I offer three potential pivots that may be less comfortable to name out loud, but that I think are equally important to the long-term sustainability of organizations:
Initiate necessary staff separations
Reduce or eliminate office space
Walk away from the wrong funding
Initiate Necessary Staff Separations
For a range of complex factors—from our values of equity and belonging to our habits of conflict avoidance—nonprofits are not very good at initiating graceful separations from people who are no longer thriving at the organization. In some cases, we prioritize the needs of a single person over the wellbeing and flow of the rest of the staff. Or we allow people to remain in roles that are no longer strategically necessary to the organization’s theory of change.
While leaders should not wait for financial threat to make these hard separation choices, it is true, in my experience, that times of crisis can be very clarifying as to who must be part of the organization’s future and whose time may be at a natural transition point.
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