Who We Are

To attain and sustain excellent results in any organization is a challenge. To do so in the nonprofit sector is particularly challenging. Great leadership is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for success. As Warren Bennis says, "Great groups and great leaders create each other."

When The Social Venture Capital Foundation works with nonprofit groups, we suggest that they use the following guidelines for organizational excellence to assess their current performance and guide their future aspirations:

A Compelling Mission: The excellent organization has a clear, concise and explicit mission statement that defines the overarching purpose(s) of the organization and the key challenge(s) that the organization is committed to address.

A Unifying and Inspiring Vision: The excellent organization forges a shared vision of how the world will change for the better as a result of the successful execution of the organization's mission.

Explicit Objectives and Goals: The excellent organization identifies qualitative objectives and quantitative goals that it needs to achieve in order to achieve the vision. These objectives and goals are the tools by which the excellent organization defines "success". They, therefore, must include not only input-related objectives and goals, but also "outcome" or "impact"-related objectives and goals.

Passionate Commitment: The excellent organization is passionate and committed at all levels: passionate about carrying out its mission, achieving desired goals and objectives; delivering at least the value promised and wherever feasible, more (see Value Proposition below); and doing so in ways that are efficient, transparent, equitable, collegial, and honest.

Focus and Alignment:   The excellent organization strives for steady focus on the mission, vision, objectives, and goals, and alignment of the entire organization on all aspects of its operation. This does not mean that the organization functions only by consensus. Rather, it means that where there is loss of focus or nonalignment on some important aspect of the organization's operation, there is an active search to determine the root causes of this loss of focus or non-alignment, and there is a determined effort to use this difference of perspective to find better ways to operate and a stronger basis for building unity of purpose.

Measures of Performance/Self Assessment: The excellent organization articulates specific metrics that it will use (and uses them) to evaluate the progress it is making, the adequacies of the strategies that it is using, and the need for performance improvements.

Stakeholder and Contextual Analysis: The excellent organization understands the key stakeholders that affect its ability to achieve desired objectives and goals; the perspectives, interests, and needs of those key stakeholders; and the opportunities for finding common ground, building alliances, and defusing or minimizing opposition. The excellent organization also understands the larger context (and multiple arenas) in which these stakeholders operate, the most important influences that may affect them, and how the context (and multiple arenas) may present opportunities or challenges for the organization in achieving its objectives and goals.

Systems and Process Thinking: The excellent organization uses systems and process thinking in conducting its analyses and devising (and revising) its strategic plans. It considers factors like feedback processes, unintended consequences, leveraging and synergism, concurrent and parallel influences, newly emerging trends, step function change, mitigation processes, forces of entropy and chaos, and potentially countervailing forces for re-integration and development of new levels of order.

Strategic Plan: The excellent organization develops a written plan that lists the strategies it will use to achieve the desired goals and objectives and explains how these strategies will work to bring about these results. The strategic plan identifies and analyzes the organization's resources, strengths and weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and incorporates the range of strategies best suited to the organization's situation, capabilities, and needs, and the larger context in which the organization is operating. The strategic plan (and planning process) envisions the best, anticipates the worst, and helps create readiness for response to all contingencies.

Action Plan: The excellent organization prepares an action plan that sets forth what specific actions will be undertaken by whom and by when in order to carry out the strategic plan and achieve the desired objectives and goals. As with the other elements of organizational excellence, the action plan is not a single event or static product. The action changes (is updated and upgraded) as it is implemented, as new information develops, and as it is revisited periodically. See sections on Adaptability and on Continuous Improvement below.

Monitoring, Information Flows, Feedback Mechanisms, and Evaluation Systems: The excellent organization establishes systems for monitoring its performance and its progress toward achievement of desired outcomes. It regularly conducts monitoring, communicates interim data and results to all who need to know, and evaluates what it could be doing differently or better to improve its performance. It learns from its own experience and the experience of others. It then acts on the new knowledge it has gained to refine and improve the organization's approach.

Strong, Flexible and Integrated Management, Budget, and Finance Systems: The excellent organization develops management processes and systems to ensure that the organization works efficiently, collaboratively, and equitably to carry out the strategic plan and achieve the organization's desired objectives and goals. These systems help clarify performance expectations for individuals and sub-units, responsibilities and accountabilities, evaluation processes, information flows and feedback systems, resource allocation and adjustment of priorities, incentives and financial control mechanisms.

Collaborative Problem Solving and Empowered Teams: The excellent organization uses collaborative approaches to problem solving, thereby bringing to bear the highest wisdom available. It forms and empowers teams to deploy complementary skill sets, experience, and expertise to carry out its strategic plan and action plans; to exploit new opportunities; and to respond to new challenges or contingencies.

Drive, Enterprise, Creativity, and Initiative: The excellent organization creates a culture that recognizes and rewards drive and passion in pursuit of the organization's objectives and goals and that encourages individual and team enterprise, creativity, and initiative. The excellent organization is proactive, as well as capable of reacting promptly and effectively when and as necessary. It encourages brainstorming, heretical thinking, new approaches, and the impulse to innovate for more efficient and effective performance.

A Culture of Adaptability and Resilience: As conditions change, whether suddenly or gradually, for the better or worse, the excellent organization is prepared. It can absorb shocks and seize opportunities. This is so, because it has the culture, will, processes and resources to recognize the need, and make and implement the necessary decisions, for change.

Expedition and Efficiency: The excellent organization is timely and efficient. It moves at the speed that the circumstances demand. It does not dawdle or waste time, particularly with respect to its most important tasks. It is thus able to seize opportunities, manage risks, and address concerns and perspectives of key stakeholders in a timely and cost-effective manner.

Outstanding People: The excellent organization attracts, recruits, retains, nurtures, and provides growth opportunities for, great people with diverse and complementary skills, experiences, and expertise. The attraction and retention of a cast of outstanding people are causes of an organization becoming excellent, and they are among the effects of organizational excellence.

Opportunities for Growth:   The excellent organization recruits new talent, mentors and coaches less experienced members of teams, provides challenge and feedback at every level of the organization, and develops career pathways for growth for every employee or member.

Appropriate Facilities, Equipment, and Employee Support Systems: The excellent organization generates sufficient resources (see below) to provide its employees with appropriate physical space, equipment, and support systems, including information technology, research tools, benefits packages, training, mentoring, and performance evaluations and regular feedback to support excellent performance by individuals and teams within the organization.

A Work Environment That is Challenging and Humane: The excellent organization provides a work environment that is professionally and personally challenging, yet is collegial, humane, and supportive. It provides challenges and rewards for the mind, heart, the spirit, morale, and the wallet.   The excellent organization can do the above because it is effective in generating the necessary resources.

A Value Proposition That Generates Sufficient Resources: The excellent organization develops sufficient resources to be able to carry out its mission, achieve its objectives and goals and to provide the kinds of opportunities and work environment for its employees that is described above. It is able to do so, because its operations provide great enough value to others to generate the necessary resources for its sustenance and growth.

Effective Communication, Marketing and Development: The excellent organization effectively communicates to key audiences the value that it is creating (the benefits or outcomes that it is generating and importance of those benefits or outcomes). It also exhibits inexhaustible curiosity about what the market (not just private sector) wants and needs that it may be able to supply. It fashions creative new ways to appeal to the market and to other sources of revenue (e.g., philanthropy, government). It develops new and broader strategic partnerships. As a result of all of the above, it creates or conveys greater and greater value and thereby warrants the devotion of an ever-increasing amount of revenues and resources to its mission. Its never outgrows its own ability to sustain itself and grow.

Continuous Improvement:   The excellent organization is never satisfied with past performance, but ceaselessly strives to improve all aspects of its work, internal and external. From each experience or evaluation, it seeks to extract the most important lessons learned. It fearlessly and honestly asks itself and others, how are we doing and how can we do better? It listens to the answers, and it responds quickly and appropriately.

An Effective Instrument of Change: The excellent organization, for all the foregoing reasons, becomes an effective, sustainable, and evolving instrument of change. It thereby eventually succeeds in executing its mission and bringing about the its desired vision.

HOME - NEXT