Technology:90% Psychology

If you've ever implemented a technology project at a nonprofit, you know it's true: technology is 90% psychology. Success rarely hinges on the hardware and the software; technology hinges on the humans involved.

These days, technology has forced its way into every single aspect of our organizations. While we used to use change management strategies to help soothe the fears of those who would reject the new database, now we need something slightly more radical: entirely new organizations.

Like the proverbial frog in the frying pan, the temperature has been rising, and you've felt it. Even if you've managed to stave off the social media hounds in your nonprofit so far, you've seen other signs:

• Staff don't leave their desks for lunch anymore. Instead, they watch last night's Daily Show episode.
• The use of "status update" isn't the exclusive domain of project managers anymore.
• When the Internet goes down in your office, more than half your staff assume there's no way they can work without it and try to go home.

Things are changing. Is your organization?

Humanize is a call to action for leaders ready to embrace the new ways of reaching, convening, and conversing with our staff and communities so we can better go about our business: changing the world. It's not a practical guide or how-to manual. It's a great read that will get you thinking, and more importantly, set you into motion.

I'm probably not your typical nonprofit leader in this regard. I head a technology organization, so I'm likely more aligned with the premise of the book than most. But I found that I was still challenged by the ideas that Maddie and Jamie present.

First, I frequently hear other nonprofit leaders cite best practices as evidence of their sound decision making, when in fact what WAS a best practice five years ago may not be useful today. I think it gives decision makers a false sense of security.

Second, I think relying on best practices (defined as what's always worked) leads to the trap of incrementalism: next year, we'll set the goal 1% higher. The problems we're addressing in this sector don't care about incrementalism. In the last decade,poverty rates in the Midwest did not increase incrementally, they DOUBLED. Best practices aren't going to solve that.

A decentralized [organizational] culture works best when the different parts have a clear and shared understanding of key organizing principles. 

In a traditional, top-down organization, only the top of the pyramid really engages with questions of vision, mission, and strategy. The top makes the decisions, wordsmiths the language, then bestows it on the bottom of the pyramid.

Today, we need decentralized structures to succeed. The people who used to be at the bottom of the pyramid have to be empowered to represent the vision, mision, and strategy in their work, and then bring their experiences back to the leadership. The pace of change is too quick to wait for the next regularly scheduled strategic planning retreat to get feedback from your staff.

The challenge here, besides the new model, is that a decentralized, flatter organization ends up requiring more from leadership than the traditional hierarchy. If you're going to empower the edges of your organization to represent you in social spaces, at meetups, and through emails in ways they never were before, they can't simply memorize your mission statement: they have to truly understand your strategies.

Today's leaders are going to have to do more than distribute the strategic plan in nice binder.

Ownership means you don't have an excuse for not taking action.

I've been reading a ton of management books lately. (No joke. I am now familiar with every platitude and twelve point checklist published.) A common thread is what to do with those un-motivated employees, the ones who have an excuse for everything and only do the bare minimum.

Most of these management books define the problem as a lack of ownership. As managers, we're supposed to somehow get these staffers to "own" their jobs by helping them see how their cog fits into the machinery that creates the change we're manufacturing.

The problem is, they don't even own the cog.

In the traditional top-down organization, staff get very little freedom to determine how they do their jobs. Many organizations go so far as to control how staff share with the world that they even HAVE a job. How many times have you seen a Twitter bio that includes the phrase: "My tweets are my own and not a reflection of my [unnamed] employer?"

If you want people to own their jobs, you have to give them the freedom to do it. Not only is it the right thing to do, it's the best thing to do. When staff don't have to run an email through four supervisors to answer a public inquiry, you're more responsive. And being responsive is extremely important nowadays.Courtesy | nten.org