Christopher Washington serves as Provost of Franklin University, and as Chair of the Board of Global Ties U.S.
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Fellow members of the Forbes Nonprofit Council have noted that staff at nonprofit organizations often stretch themselves too thin by performing more than one role. Without proper guidance and support from leaders, employees taking on too many tasks may either fail to prioritize the important work or settle for doing whatever it takes to just get the job done. Inattentive leaders may settle for mediocrity, which subsequently becomes the expected standard of performance.
A recent study shows that for many nonprofit leaders, talent management is not a priority. According to the 2019 Talent Management Priorities for Nonprofits survey only 28% of the 488 organizations from across the U.S. had a formal talent management plan.
In my experience, the negative impact of disregarding talent management can be enormous. Failing to attend to a workplace culture that brings out the best of what employees know and can do becomes especially acute following periods of work or workplace disruption. Poorly managed people can often bring down employee morale, tarnish an organization’s reputation, and waste time and valuable organizational resources. Employees who feel neglected rather than valued and appreciated may either choose to leave the organization prematurely, contributing to the high cost of employee turnover, or remain in the organization as unhappy and relatively unproductive employees.
Alternatively, a staff loyal to the mission and doing the right work in the most efficient way can contribute to more relevant, resilient and high-performing organizations. More enlightened nonprofit leaders identify performance improvement opportunities and create positive work environments that support and reward workers for high performance. If cultivating a high-performance work culture where employees develop expertise is in the interest of nonprofit leaders seeking double bottom-line results, then how does a leader go about doing so?
In his 1978 work, Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance, Thomas Gilbert, a psychologist best known for his performance theory, describes "worthy" performance as the desired outcome of employee performance. He suggests that employee behavior leading to valued accomplishments amounts to worthy performance. Gilbert also notes that those who seek to improve employee performance should compare typical performance to the very best instance of that performance, which he called “exemplary performance.”
Exemplary performers are the experts among us who choose to do their best in the workplace. Consequently, the greater the gap between typical performance and exemplary performance, the greater the potential to improve workforce performance.
Inspired by Gilbert’s ideas about improving performance (and the years of research studies that support his ideas) and my years of experience as a leader, here are seven ideas to help nonprofit leaders support and promote exemplary performance.
Know the performance outcomes you value.
Leadership effectiveness is about acknowledging the performance outcomes that matter to you as a leader. The performance outcomes you value can then become the basis for benchmarking exemplary performance and communicating high performance targets to employees.
Avoid the behavior trap.
Too many leaders and managers focus their attention on the deficiencies of individual employees as the primary cause of low performance. This focus assumes that expertise is innate. With this limited view, poor performance simply means that the wrong people are doing the work. Thomas Gilbert attempted to move managers beyond the assumption that poor performance is a result of incompetent or unmotivated employees. In what he described as the "cult of behavior," managers may place too high of a value on employee activity or on their personalities. A more effective approach is to differentiate activity and personality from performance by focusing more on valuable accomplishments.
Provide environmental support.
For Gilbert, a lack of environmental support factors is the source of the majority of performance problems. Decades of research suggest that if you put a good performer in a poorly managed organization, the impoverished nature of the organization will dominate. On the other hand, when employees know what is expected of them, they have a much better chance of excelling. To support your employees, provide data, information and timely feedback on how they are doing their jobs. In addition, provide the tools and resources employees require to perform work tasks to the best of their ability, as well as appropriate incentives and consequences in order to encourage and maintain high levels of performance.
Know the strengths and weaknesses of your team.
If environmental supports are not sufficient to improve performance, then leaders need to develop their staff. Here is where well-designed training can develop the knowledge, skills and abilities of employees. Before investing in training and development, it is necessary for leaders to ask themselves if it is worth the time and effort in order to achieve more desirable performance results.
Keep in touch by periodically discussing the value of exemplary performance.
Leadership teams should periodically discuss desired performance with individuals and work teams. Leadership teams that discuss exemplary performance as contrasted with typical performance, and that imagine the benefits of unleashing expertise throughout the organization, are more likely to create the conditions to unleash expertise in the workplace.
Socially, economically and ethically incentivize exemplary performance.
Top performers can be a leader’s guide to setting high standards, adopting best practices, adapting to change and raising the level of performance of others around them. As a way to reinforce and encourage exemplary performers, it is necessary to align incentives such as monetary and nonmonetary incentives, prizes and awards, or public recognition with desired performance results.
Share and celebrate success.
We all need a periodic reminder that the work we do is important. Celebrating shared successes can serve as the reminder we need while keeping exemplary performance in sharp focus.
As nonprofit organizations become more vulnerable to a host of disruptive forces that place pressure on their ability to manage resources, prioritizing rather than neglecting talent management can prove to be a useful resource management strategy. Enlightened nonprofit leaders have the ability to set clear performance expectations and align their efforts with exemplary performance standards, and they are most likely to close performance gaps and unleash expertise throughout their organizations.
Forbes Nonprofit Council is an invitation-only organization for chief executives in successful nonprofit organizations. Do I qualify?
