During my keynote, I brought up the Nonprofit Hunger Games and how all of us are in constant competition with one another for resources and influence. “I call it Stabbing for Dollars,” says one seasoned nonprofit executive. A manifestation of this is through our hiring philosophies and practices. There are thousands of articles on staff recruitment, retention, etc., but they all have something in common: It is always about the well-being of the organization, getting the best talent for the organization to ensure the organization thrives, rarely about the entire sector or community. We recruit professionals to fulfill our individual missions, not paying much attention to what happens when they leave our organizations, or how the way we treat them might affect their work at their next organization, or our own individual responsibility to support a “bench” of talent needed for the entire sector to thrive.
This is all understandable. This is how we have been trained and how we have been influenced by the corporate sector. But unlike the for-profit sector, the problems we are trying to address are profoundly interrelated. Our missions are interconnected. Our successes depend on the success of other organizations, and staff are the most critical resource we have as a sector.
And so the way we think about talent in the sector needs to change. We must all believe deeply that we have a responsibility not just to our mission, but to the entire sector, and invest in our staff accordingly. Professionals naturally move from one organization to the next, and they will carry with them the strengths or the scars they receive from each org they work at. We need to recruit, hire, train, and even fire staff with the mindset that our actions affect the success or failure of the whole nonprofit community. Here are some things I think we can start with:
Let’s treat job candidates with respect: I wrote “Hey, can we be nicer to job candidates and not treat them like crap?” a while ago, but it’s a message that needs to be repeated. For example, there are still too many reports of “ghosting,” where candidates apply for jobs and never hear from the organization again, even after having gone through interviews. I’ve seen too many instances of organizations treating job candidates with disdain—wasting their time with unclear processes and ridiculous requests, poor communication, acting like the org is doing them a favor simply by interviewing them. Our professionals who lift up families and communities do not deserve that; no one deserves that. And if we treat job candidates like crap, they are likely to leave the sector or not even enter in the first place. If all of us can treat our job candidates better—by being more communicative, giving helpful feedback, introducing them to other orgs—even if they don’t get the job with us, this positive experience will increase their faith in the sector, and our community benefits.
Let’s treat our professionals as professionals: How we treat our people affects not just what they do at our organization, but also how they function at other organizations. I’ve encountered many professionals now who need counseling after the horrible treatment they have received at various places of employment. The micromanagement, the backstabbing, the company politics, the infantilizing of professionals happen too frequently. Many will ditch a soul-sucking, toxic environment. But where does that leave the people who can’t simply walk away? What does that do to their morale, their passion for this work, and how they may function when they finally are able to move on to the next place? All of us need to do a better job ensuring our professionals are respected and happy, because that affects the entire sector.
Let’s increase funding for professional development: For-profits in 2013 on average spent $1200 per employee per year, with the tech sector averaging $1800. Nonprofit work is probably five times more complex than for-profit work, and yet we probably spend a fifth what our for-profit friends are spending on professional development for our staff. The people in our field are endlessly creative, but Youtube and the occasional brown-bag book club is not cutting it. A reason why we are don’t budget enough for PD, and an element of why our work is so complicated, is the ridiculous notion of “overhead” that still clings to donors’ and funders’ brains like some sort of stubborn moonshine-cherries hangover. Let’s all increase professional development in our budget, to at least $1,200 per person per year, because why should we invest less in our staff than the average for-profit does? The entire sector would have a stronger pool of talent to draw from.
Let’s pay our people decent wages: A team member at my own organization just wrote a blog post reflecting on the lessons we learned in determining pay for the fellows in our leadership program. It was eye-opening and humbling to realize that we could be paying poverty-level wages even as we claim to fight poverty. Paying people decent, livable wages is not just practical, but the ethical thing to do. It allows us to keep talent in the sector, and allows people to remain living and establishing roots in the community they serve. Let’s have better processes for determining wages, and let’s pay our people fairly. It is good for the whole sector, as happier, more secure employees means more stability for our sector.
Let’s mentor emerging leaders inside and outside our organizations: I’ve benefited so much from the various leaders in the sector who take time to provide me with advice and guidance throughout my career, especially during some of the darkest times of my career, aka, galas. The generosity of these leaders was especially poignant considering that I didn’t work for their organizations and would unlikely help to advance their missions. If we can all take that sort of philosophy to heart, that we are mentoring future sector leaders, and not just organizational leaders, the returns for our community will be significant.
Let’s encourage our staff to build relationships with other orgs: Let’s be more generous with our staff and encourage them to connect across missions. Some organizations build into their employee handbooks that staff have a couple of days of paid time off that they can use to volunteer at other organizations. That’s awesome. Let’s do more stuff like that. Let’s encourage our team members to involved with other organizations. The influx of new ideas, the sparks for potential collaborations, these are all things our organizations could benefit from. And our sector will become stronger and more effective at addressing societal issues as our professionals are talking with and supporting one another more across different missions, and even across different sectors.
I know the Nonprofit Hunger Games are ever present in our sector. They make us see one another not as partners in the fight against injustice, but as competition. This has affected how we treat the professionals in our field. We’ve been trained to care about our staff only to the extent that they can help us carry out our missions and survive and win the Games. And when they are not yet part of the team, or when they leave, our investments in them wane.
But remember, “When you play the Nonprofit Hunger Games, either you win or you die.” I think…
Looking at the nonprofit leaders laughing and joking while the cicadas droned beneath the Tennessee moon, I was reminded that it doesn’t have to be this way, that we don’t have to participate in the Games. Let’s start by changing how we invest in our people. We can build a better sector and a better world if we all commit to caring about and treating every professional and potential professional as a critical partner in the ongoing fight against injustice, whether or not they work for us.
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