Are Non-profit Organizations Immune To Dysfunction?
September 29th, 2011
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- A large trade association is stung by accusations from staff that it practices racial and sexual bias. Anger and resentment erupt when a senior VP is threatened with a lawsuit.
- A public interest organization engaged in social justice advocacy is confronted with staff allegations of hostile, abusive management practices. “We’re all committed to our mission,” its director tells me, “so we shouldn’t be having these kinds of problems.”
- A humanitarian organization witnesses increasing dysfunction of a senior staff member. Management time is swallowed up trying to deal with the person’s declining performance, absenteeism, and erratic behavior toward coworkers. The CEO doesn’t know what to do. Fire the person? Get him help? He asks me, “How do we balance compassion for this person with our need to carry out our work?”
All organizations want to be successful, whether for-profit businesses or those in the non-profit world, large and small — such as trade associations, humanitarian government contractors, advocacy groups or government agencies. All of them grapple with new challenges emerging from our insecure and shifting economic, political and cultural environment. The later also includes growing workplace diversity and changing attitudes about career and leadership. But organizations in the nonprofit realm are especially vulnerable to problems like the examples above. That’s partly because
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