So Why the Discontent?

Becky Morris, my business partner, returns to The Intersection of Purpose and Now with today's blog, grounded in the personal experience that makes all of Becky's articles so powerful.

Many of my female friends cannot understand the pleasure I get out of mowing my lawn. For them it seems to be a job that involves heat, bugs and little satisfaction. For me, it is quite the opposite. The heat doesn’t bother me and the desired results are very rewarding because they are instantly visible.

When recently meeting with a client, I heard from an employee that she is getting very little satisfaction from doing her job. She knows what is expected of her and accomplishes these tasks at the level her organization requires.

So why the discontent? She does not see the connection between her role and the goals of her organization. In fact, she is not clear on what the desired results are other than holding a certain number of “training” classes each quarter. There is little or no connection between these classes and the organizational goals.

Do you have the tools that will identify the gaps between the goals of your organization and the daily functions of those working in the organization? Assisting in narrowing these gaps not only allows organizations to be more successful, it increases job satisfaction because employees have a better understanding of why they are doing what they do.

Sound familiar? Let us help.

Is Your Non-Profit The Best Available Donor Option?

Can your non-profit organization quantify your social impact compared to the universe of charitable options?  

Whether you are an executive director, board member, employee or volunteer, you have a direct responsibility to both the mission impact and financial viability of your organization.  And it's not just about programs and fundraising, it is about Donor Loyalty.

Are you the Best Available Charitable Option (BACO) for your funding sources? How do you know? What would your donors say?  How do you demonstrate, measure and communicate this value? How accessible is the “story” of your positive impact, including meaningful data? This may be the most critical factor to your financial viability, your mission impact and, therefore, your organization’s sustainability. 

Knowing how you measure up as a Best Available Option is a critical indicator of Donor Loyalty, a primary metric overlooked by the majority of organizations - and most likely a critical strategy being overlooked by your organization. 

Do you have a Donor Loyalty Strategy? If your answer is, “I think so,” well, you probably don’t.

Non-profits are typically caught up in assessing “donor satisfaction” to one degree or another. But there is a difference - a BIG difference - between donor satisfaction and donor loyalty. Donor loyalty proves to be a far better predictor of future behavior than donor satisfaction.  Donors are loyal because they are emotionally attached to their current charitable alternative.

Non-profit leaders typically assume that high levels of satisfaction translate into donor loyalty when, in fact, donor satisfaction ratings are more closely linked to your donors’ perceptions of your service attributes rather than to the value gained by those services. Focusing on and measuring satisfaction, while it cannot be forgotten, rarely translates into improved financial viability.  

Satisfaction is a measurement of, “I expected it and I got it; therefore, I’m satisfied.”  If this were translated into a grading system, satisfaction could easily translate into a grade of “C” on any report card. The desired score is obviously an “A” and “A’s” always equate to loyal donors. “A’s” imply that donors got more than they expected and their expectations were exceeded in some way. Based on what is truly important to donors, they received more value from you than from your competitors. A loyal donor will come back to you much more readily than a satisfied one. 

To create and sustain loyal donors, it is necessary to consider every contact with each donor as an opportunity for you to provide value - every time!  Every service point is critical, and every service point has a level of expectation from the donor that must be understood and managed. We call these contact points, “Points of Connection.”

Research by such reputable sources as the Gallup organization, Accenture and many others demonstrate that no satisfaction measure, regardless of the number of points in the rating scale, can adequately indicate the true health of a donor relationship. Further, employee loyalty is a key factor of customer loyalty, since employees are directly or indirectly responsible for every point of contact with donors.  If you have no Donor Loyalty Strategy, including a plan to improve employee (board, volunteer…) engagement and a process to continually improve points of contact with donors, then the likelihood of becoming or remaining the Best Available Charitable Option with your funding sources is tenuous at best.

The function of a non-profit organization is to best serve their community. To effectively serve their community, non-profits must be financially viable.  Most non-profits today rely on donors as a significant part of both their funding and their workforce (volunteers). Therefore, if the reason for non-profit organizations to be in business centers on the community they serve, as your organization’s leadership team, managing and measuring your donor interface becomes one of your most important functions. Making certain that your donors get what they want is of critical importance to the long-term success of any organization. All factors that impact negatively on the donor, must be identified and corrected if you wish to compete effectively now and in the future. 

When you understand the alternatives to the work you are doing, it becomes far easier to measure your work, and to value it.

Catalysts for Change

My partner, Becky Morris, and I are making some changes. That’s right, major changes. We’re asking ourselves the same tough questions we ask our clients, because that’s what we do best. Our answers are coming very soon.

Catalysts for Change

Merriam-Webster defines "catalyst" as an agent that provokes or speeds significant change or action. Our desire is to be a catalyst for you, your team, and your business.

That’s what we do! We help you get from where you are to where you want to be. We help you achieve the change you want.

How would your life be different if you achieved the change you want?

• The change you want in your business, including strategy, leadership, culture, sales and customer loyalty.
• The change you need in the dynamics of your team, because it’s affecting you and your customers more than you may want to admit.
• The change you want within your career, or even a change in career.
• The change your organization needs.
• The change you want in your life.

That's what happens at The Intersection of Purpose and Now. Things change more like we want them.

Of Marshmallows and Learning

At Performance Development Network, no matter what kind of work we are doing, we are helping people achieve something new based in part on what they already have or know.  Breakthroughs to individual, team or organizational success might come through an intensive leadership development or strategic planning process; it may come from facilitating something as simple as "The Marshmallow Challenge".



I don't "teach" much - I haven't found it necessary too often.  Most people already have more knowledge and skills than they actually use. And when you assemble a team of multiple people, the skill sets increase exponentially.

Instead, I ask questions. The right questions help people discover hidden potential.  Even the simplest of questions, asked at the right time, help people discover new possibilities for applying what they already know and know how to do.

And I nearly always involve experiential learning and iterative techniques, among other disciplined approaches.  I give people an activity to do, as a team for example. Then I ask questions about their experience, what they learned and how the experience and lessons might apply in their daily circumstances or to the challenge they are trying to address.

People don't like to be taught, but they love to learn.  They love to play, too.  But activities don't have to be "fun", because when people are learning they come to appreciate the struggle to learn. We learn best through experience and we retain most through repetition. It's a brain thing. Dr. John Medina, author of Brain Rules, says this:

"If you are in education you are in the business of brain development. If you are leading a modern corporation...you need to know how the brain works."

This is true for strategic planning, for customized workshops and seminars, for development processes focused on broad issues such as leadership, sales and customer loyalty, for the myriad of "team building" approaches I provide, even for keynote addresses and inspirational presentations.

I provide something for people to experience in the moment - and I ask questions.  Make them use their noggins.  And the outcomes are amazing.

Lived experience, especially shared experience, also generates lateral thinking.  We do something together here and now, even something as distracting and seemingly meaningless as building a marshmallow tower, and it informs us. We learn from the distracting activity:

• how we work together in other situations
• why we get less than desirable results in other situations
• how we might want to change our daily environment, the actions we take in that environment, and the processes we use in that daily environment 
• what we must do to improve our results in our daily environment

It's not magic, but if your team is struggling with a challenge or opportunity, a skilled facilitator with the right activity and the savvy to ask the right questions may help you produce some miraculous results.

[The Marshmallow Challenge is a remarkably fun and instructive design exercise that encourages teams to experience simple but profound lessons in collaboration, innovation and creativity. The task is simple: in 18 minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top.]

Where New Possibilities are Born

The struggle is the point.
That's where new possibilities are born.

I see it all the time - individuals, teams and organizations trying to make decisions with as little struggle as possible. They look for "low-hanging fruit", which can be a great strategy to gain quick wins but a lousy one to reach the plump juicy fruit at the top of the tree!  The best stuff requires climbing, reaching, extra effort, a higher cost.

Several events last week have reminded me of this basic truth about learning, development and personal growth. I'll share two of them.

First, I worked with a group of adult summer day camp staff and their young campers (middle school age) in our Team Building Adventures outdoor challenge course.   This particular group had some issues with authority that were holding them back. Not the typical issues of kids challenging the authority of their adult supervisors. Quite the contrary!

One staff person so earnestly wanted the kids to succeed that he directed them in everything, tried to be the sole problem-solver, planner, decision-maker, etc. - and the kids let him even though it wasn't working.  One young lady quietly confessed she wanted to offer an alternative to his ideas, "but that would be disrespectful."

So we discussed as a group the difference between authority and leadership, how each has a proper time and place.  I also muted the adults (no talking!) for the next challenge, since they were trying to eliminate the struggle. This small change in group dynamic required the youth to communicate, plan, offer alternatives, resolve conflicts, share and evaluate one another's ideas, allow one another to lead and, ultimately, succeed for fail on their own as a team, even though they still had the physical resources of the adults on their team.

I've long since learned to trust group process and intervene only when absolutely necessary. This group struggled, REALLY struggled at first. They seem to have grown dependent on adults making or arbitrating all decisions and I took that luxury away from them, leaving them on their own.  The didn't like me very much at one point during their struggles, but they persevered, and they discovered they had all they needed to succeed.

Typical goals of our facilitated challenge and team building processes are:

• To build commitment and camaraderie by having some FUN together!
• Emphasize the interconnectedness of the team members and how they impact each other.
• Recognize the different contributions/skills of each team member and strategize ways to utilize them effectively.
• Transfer the team member’s experiences during this experience to what they experience while working together as a team in ever day situations.
• Practice team skills like:
• Clearly communicating ideas, asking questions, listening to others, actively sharing information, keeping a positive attitude, taking initiative, setting goals, following through on goals, building commitment to goals, solving problems creatively, making group decisions and resolving differences productively.
• Build Trust! Recognize the importance of demonstrating trustworthy behaviors such as reliability, consistency, honesty and confidentiality.

These are exactly the kinds of things that began to happen among group members as they struggle to find their own way. This group didn't like me much at times, but in the end, their consensus evaluation of the day was "I never would have believed what we could achieve together before today," and "I trust people in this group a lot more because of what we achieved."

The struggle is the point.

That's where new possibilities are born.

Second: last Friday, June 18, I was the featured guest on the Blog Talk Radio show Diane Viere hosts called Setting Boundaries With Your Adult Children. Diane and I discussed how The Intersection of Purpose and Now is relevant to parents of adult children who struggle to succeed.  Of course, the basic connection is that without Purpose and clear, concrete values we become victims of our circumstances. We have a tough time making decisions and value-judgements because we lack the necessary clear, concrete values to do so. As a result, we are dependent on circumstance and the feelings of the moment, with little else to rely on to make sound decisions.

When it comes to our children, those "feelings of the moment" nearly always involve love. I believe that every parent loves his or her child. A relationship may not seem to others as having love, but it's always there.  Love is the foundational value of any healthy relationship, but it's not enough.  Other values shape and determine the effects of love.  We cannot lead our families well without love, but love alone still leaves a lot to circumstance.  "Spoiled" children were typically raised with a lot of love in the home, but perhaps not enough other values to develop in them a sense of responsibility and personal accountability, for example.

In short, parents must learn to "suffer through" their children's struggles. Seeing your children (or your employees) struggle may "break your heart", but the heart is a muscle and needs to struggle to build strength. Certainly, we can support others and help them along the way, but NOT to remove the struggle. The more we own our struggles, the more we own the possibilities for growth from those struggles.

The struggle is the point.
That's where new possibilities are born.

In case you are interested in listening to the Blog Talk Radio interview, here is the link.

Listen to internet radio with Diane V on Blog Talk Radio