Functional Isolation
Imagine you are an HR manager for a nonprofit organization with a staff of 40 people. You began your career working as an admin in the operations department of a nonprofit and taught yourself about Human Resources by working in the job. As a result, you got promoted into this new role.
You are the only HR person at the organization. Your boss knows a little about what's involved but is truly a generalist who responsible for a ton of functions--from HR to finance to real estate to legal needs. Neither of you have ever worked for an organization of more than 40 people.
Where do you go to identify best practices? Where do you go for support when problem solving? Where do you go to understand the ways in which your systems need to change as the organization grows to have a staff of 50, 75 and 100 people? To whom do you turn when you want to vent about your challenges to someone who understands the situation? Where do you go to think about your own professional development and career advancement?
For a small nonprofit, this is a very common scenario for professionals working in departments like marketing, HR, IT and finance that consist of only one member (or fewer) due to the organizations small scale. These professionals are often self trained and report to someone without a lot of functional knowledge or experience.
How can we leverage the systems of large companies to support these function-area professionals who are relatively isolated from their peers? How could companies leverage their teams and systems to share with these nonprofit professionals? What if each corporate department "adopted" the functional staff of their company's grantees?
We talk about wanting nonprofits to scale and to be able to retain top talent. Both of these require finding a solution to this issue of isolation for these functional areas.
At Taproot Foundation, we have been looking into this issue and see a potential opportunity for a model of pro bono to provide a sustainable solution. Any ideas?
I think this situation could pertain to both the nonprofit and for profit sectors -- especially in this economy where everyone is scaling back to bare bones.
Reach out, connect -- my belief is that working in nonprofit requires just as much entrepreneurial spirit and discipline as a for profit organization.
Whether you're a team of one or many, you don't possess all the answers, you are not an island unto yourself -- being tapped in to like minded individuals, mining for progressive HR practitioners/organizations and seeking new ideas outside of your own world is what I believe will help you leverage best practices and strategies. Other companies may have teams of 50 but that means they have more people to do the work -- it doesn't necessarily mean that they have more brain power or ingenuity. Most of the time it is the contrary -- people are confined by politics, etc, and ideas and practices conform.
If I were in this isolated situation (which I have been in a for profit org) I'd seek out associations (SHRM), call HR practitioners who are working at companies I admire -- you'd be amazed at how much people are willing to share knowledge and help others, organize weekly think tank calls with fellow isolated professionals and most importantly carve out time to quench your thirst for knowledge, planning and implementation. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how many people are on the team.
Perhaps the short-term project model doesn't work as well for the HR issues - maybe a longer term match between an HR professional and the nfp would be more helpful.
The organisation I worked for in Mumbai, India had a very interesting system, which in retrospect, made a huge contribution to my personal and professional learning- which generated a sense of warmth in me for the organisation.
They did this. Every Friday morning, 7-10 they had the Friday Trainings where everybody got together from the ED to the Trainees in a Board Room. The sessions varied from Book Presentations, to watching meaningful movies and the like- all aimed at continual learning. We even had outdoor games and yoga sessions. Occasionally, speakers were invited on specific skillset training as well. We also had conference call every morning for 30 mins where we all connected to the rest of the five offices across India, where we shared what progress we made on the work front. We had presentation on Industry journals that kept everybody updated on the latest development in their respective sectors.
This really fostered teamwork and held the objective of continual learning and training- very high.