Bring on the Managers

Sandy Rees over at Get Fully Funded Blog offers a tongue-in-cheek short piece about the difference between a leader and a manager. It includes a whimsical video.

I love the fact that Sandy is writing about nonprofit management (see her too-true piece about how to spot a dysfunctional leader), but I disagree with the message this time, which seems to be that "managers" are square and unimaginative (a la the PC guy) and "leaders" are creative and inspirational (a la... you get the idea).

I admit that I'm a pretty square guy; that can't be helped.  Still, I believe that we need more straightforward management in the nonprofit world.

I mean: procedures for hiring staff, managing staff on a week-to-week basis, creating goals and tracking success against those goals, creating and tracking budgets, creating timelines for important projects and assessing whether those projects are on schedule while it's still early enough to do something about it, establishing key metrics and monitoring them on an ongoing basis, etc. We don't have to cling to those procedures like gospel, but they provide a starting point for action.

I had an embarrassingly messy room as a kid (my mother was more horrified than embarrassed, actually), so management hasn't exactly come naturally to me.  So it is unfortunate that I've received almost no formal training about any kind of management in most of my jobs. That's how it is for most of us in nonprofits -- we jump into some pretty choppy waters on a sink-or-swim basis. Is it any wonder that most of us spend our careers doing one endless, exhausting, panicked doggy paddle?

I've worked with some great fundraisers in my life, and with some very inspiring leaders.  But most of my colleagues and bosses over my career (with some impressive exceptions) have succeeded through sheer force of will and hard work, accepting missed opportunities as the inevitable fall out of too much work filling up too little time.  We just don't have the training to do it a different way.  It isn't part of our culture.

Our organizations could get a lot more done if we instilled management training as standard operating procedure.  We owe it to our entry level staff to provide them with that training, and we owe it to our CEOs to provide them with the tools they need to lead our organizations to satisfying success.