ASSESSING THE LANDSCAPE

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

1. Summarize the elements of effective feedback

2. Explain the key factors for successful change management

3. Identify the type of team members who should receive the most energy

The task below will be automatically checked off once you complete taking the quiz.

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An organization must move as a single unit and be aware of the impact its movements have on those around it. Your people (staff, volunteers, members, and those with an interest or potential interest in the association) hold the intel necessary for such gliding movements.

Changes in culture span the inside and outside of an organization, making feedback a necessary component to understanding the effects of those changes. Failure to keep a pulse on those effects allows any damages, should something go off track, to grow deep and irreversible. Ideally, you want to know how people perceive your organization before you make any changes to its foundation (i.e., its Core Purpose and Core Values).

Feedback is essential to measuring the general mood of your staff, members, and even the general public. However, the quality of your feedback very much depends upon the tone the organization’s leadership sets beforehand. How well a leadership team listens to its people — both inside and outside the organization — goes farther than you might imagine in determining what they say, how they express it and how well leaders interpret it. Perhaps more important to obtaining reliable feedback, though, is the degree of regularity and transparency leaders use when expressing themselves.

FEEDBACK

The kind of culture that’s purposeful, transparent and has real leadership is founded on a demonstrable desire to help people grow. That is the only way you will earn people’s trust and gain consistently useful feedback, which enables dependable assessments of an organization’s internal culture and external climate.

Keys to giving and receiving feedback

Download your Open Garden guide to giving and receiving feedback!

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Vulnerability

A key to good leadership in the Open Garden Model is rooted in legitimately demonstrating vulnerability to your team to receive sincere and useful feedback. If the team doesn’t believe you’re interested in listening to them, no one is going to provide it. Some people may try, and those who do will either be brutally honest out of some long-held frustration, or they will censor their feedback for fear of retaliation. Most, however, will not waste their time.

Demonstrating vulnerability means you have to get in front of people and show you’re not an all-knowing person, which is a difficult and sometimes unnatural thing for leaders to do. Even so, good organizational assessments depend on reliable feedback, which can only come when people feel comfortable sharing it. It takes a lot of time and effort to build such an environment because you have to earn trust from individuals, not just your team as a whole.

Your tone demonstrates vulnerability. By taking feedback and acting upon it, people will believe taking the risk (providing feedback is perceived as a risk) will be worth it, because something positive might actually come from it. If you don’t agree with the feedback, be clear about why to avoid creating a black hole that people’s efforts disappear into. Over a long period, this will build a robust feedback loop, enabling better decision-making and a more connected and collaborative environment.

Listening Skills

Obtaining Feedback

The worse your culture is, the worse your feedback is going to be. To avoid that problem, many organizations have preferred sticking their figurative heads in the sand and ignoring any feelings of discontent, frustration or apathy from their respective internal and external communities. With websites and apps like Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Google reviews, Foursquare and Yelp that allow individuals to rate their experience, it’s increasingly important to set a healthy tone to get sincere feedback before problems fester and grow into the kind you cannot easily resolve.

After you set an open and receptive tone, there are multiple ways to actually obtain the feedback.

Click each tab to learn more.

Surveys

The most common is surveys. They are overhead-intensive, so you may want to do them only once or twice a year, and make them as detailed as necessary to gain a solid understanding of your current employee population and the mind-sets within it. You may have your HR department conduct these surveys, but most organizations today prefer using a third-party tool to help assure team members their answers will be kept anonymous.

The same strategy should be used when seeking feedback from the outside in. You’re multiplying the tactic out to people you’re not as connected with, like members, constituents or customers. To obtain quality feedback from them, you have to have the tools and capabilities to get feedback, of course, but you also have to demonstrate you’re interested in your external community as well.

General, vague questions would only produce general, vague answers, which are meaningless to the process of building trust. In the context of culture assessment, no news is not good news.

Be ready for complaints. In fact, when you first ask for feedback, you’re probably going to get a laundry list of complaints. You have to take time to work through feedback carefully and thoughtfully to avoid sending the message that you don’t respect their ideas and feelings.

Group or One-one-One Feedback Sessions

For some organizations, it may make more sense to conduct group or one-on-one feedback sessions, in which leaders and workers get together on a regular basis to discuss the pros and cons of their position, projects, and general work experience. These can be intimidating and uncomfortable at first, so you may want to bring in an outside facilitator to help initiate and moderate the sessions.

On the plus side, sitting down face-to-face with your team or individual members of your team and verbally expressing your feedback respectfully, with the idea in mind to help yourself and others improve is one of the best ways to nurture an open, collaborative and expressive culture in your organization.

Responding to Feedback

Consider personally responding to every review.

For complaints, respond with something like, “What you’re saying here, I understand. This is why we did x, or this is why we didn’t do x.”

For generic or nonspecific feedback, respond by saying, “Can you add some more detail here? What you’re providing is interesting for us to understand, because it’s clearly a concern to you, and we’re sorry you’re not having a great experience.”

If they were a former employee who didn’t have a good experience, tell them you would like to get more information to ensure others don’t have the same experience.

End responses with, “Here’s my number,” and post your personal cellphone number in the message: “Call me anytime if you want to talk about this, or email me because I’d love to hear your thoughts in more detail.”

It doesn’t mean you agree with the reviews. Some may say things that are unfair. But as a leader, taking the time to write responses and make yourself available on a personal level, you can establish an atmosphere that encourages productive dialogue and conflict resolution.

The way a leader handles a complaint or problem might actually convert the person or others into your most loyal customers, members, employees, clients or advocates.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Inevitably, either from feedback, technological advancements or various other reasons, change will need to occur. How your association leads through these changes is the foundation for successful implementation.

Click each tab to learn more.

Inclusion

The concept of INCLUSION has become incredibly important, as leaders recognize the benefits of expanding their market reach while shrinking the borders within their internal structures to assist in workers growing to become more dynamic players with the most diverse set of thoughts.

At its core, leadership should be about growing people through business, rather than growing business through people.

This is a nod to the idea that a worker bringing their whole selves to the job actually makes them more valuable to both the organization and themselves. When it’s conveyed consistently and sincerely that workers are capable individuals, they often feel a greater sense of importance and responsibility to the organization. Additionally, when each person’s contributions are regularly recognized and supported, the workforce is elevated to a communal mindset, and the expectation of a boss who must decide everything all the time is de-emphasized.

That de-emphasis also helps to minimize any feeling among the workforce that their leader(s) is high atop a figurative mountain peak from which they’ll never be seen, much less reach themselves.

Instead, a more connected and nurturing kind of leadership can take root, one capable of raising everyone together. When included in the decision process, workers are also given an increased sense of responsibility and accountability in the work that follows. This means they have to be allowed to fail — so long as they learn from it.

Accountability

Relinquishing some of management’s grip on daily tasks also means deadlines, milestones, and goals have to be made clear from the beginning. Because you’re ceding some control, leaders will need to have trial runs as their managerial involvement evolves.

Team members’ independence should be measured before dictating a task such as, “Complete this project by the first of July; see you when it’s done.” If a worker is not used to being an independent worker, or they weren’t clear on how to accomplish the task given them, they will almost certainly fail to meet the deadline and the expectation.

Leaders need to monitor how their workers are dealing with the freedom to work independently, giving more structure to those who require it. If you give more ownership of the work and its outcomes, then they will actually do a much better job. But there’s certainly tension to expect in getting there, as well as in understanding how different people work and the level of individual oversight they may need.

Flexibility

As people change, the organization itself changes. If its structures are too rigid, the organization cannot evolve accordingly, and it will eventually find it’s unable to sustain itself because it cannot cultivate growth. By replacing every fixed structure with a flexible framework that can better accommodate your company’s progress, organizations can avoid restricting or limiting their own improvement. Ultimately, Core Values lead the way and frame what is considered required and acceptable behavior, and what is not.

Flexibility is derived from this simple model. New ideas like “unlimited paid time off” can be adopted only once you have a clear set of values that are being lived on a daily basis. Accountability breeds flexibility because it allows you to manage the results rather than the inputs. Instead of measuring the time spent, you measure the outcomes being achieved. Efforts are clearly important and are known by the team, but accountability is for when a great outcome is achieved in alignment with the organization’s values.

PEOPLE CHALLENGES

You may run into situations during a period of cultural change when certain people (particularly those in management and leadership roles) are not prioritizing trust among their teams. When that happens, you may have to make some tough choices about restructuring.

For any organization to be successful, it needs its people to be successful first.

People need to feel good about the job they are doing or they will stop showing up, in whatever way that may be. Over time, you will realize who really doesn’t want to be part of the organization’s new direction. Once you do, you must sit down with that person and talk openly with them to assess the reasoning behind their resistance, looking for ways you may be able to help them resolve whatever conflicts they have. Even if they were once a great asset to the company — and maybe in terms of their output they still are — if their attitude isn’t aligned with the organization’s Core Values and where it’s trying to go, it’s better for the individual, their team and the organization to remove them.

Remediation

By being focused on rehabilitating one particular individual or a small group of individuals, you end up spending the majority of your leadership energy on the people dragging the organization down rather than investing in the people who you should be trying to lift.

To determine who to focus on to help embrace change, let’s revisit the Values-Productivity graph.

Where to invest your time

You want to invest most of your time in the A players, who are values aligned and highly productive because you need to invest in their future growth to keep them A players.

You also want to invest in the B players, who are high in values alignment but somewhat low in productivity. For B players, most of your investment should center on training, so a person who shows a lot of promise can learn the skills they need to become A players.

Where to avoid investing your time

C players should receive less of your time and energy. You want to maximize your energy by focusing on your high-performing and high-potential team members, rather than on the lowest-performing ones.

It may sound insensitive, but it’s a necessary component to assessing the needs of an organization and improving upon how it functions. Most organizations spend a larger percentage of their energy dealing with their lowest performers, which motivates your higher performers. As hard as it may be on a personal level, if someone is not values aligned, that’s very unlikely to change and you need to confront the problem head-on before it turns toxic for both the individual and the organization.

SUMMARY

A work environment that encourages creativity and honesty gets conversations started. The one that supports the collaboration needed to build on those conversations gains the most from them, and ultimately the results it’s looking for, too. This environment naturally and necessarily extends to volunteer leadership, board members, committee participants and the membership at large over time. It’s critical that the culture being built is consistent within and outside the organization’s paid staff.

Activities to apply this lesson’s concepts

Click each tab for the activity.

Feedback

As people change, the organization itself changes. If structures are too rigid, the organization cannot evolve accordingly, and it will eventually be unable to sustain itself. Obtain feedback from staff and members (e.g., surveys, guided face-to-face group sessions, anonymous digital platforms) to better gauge where the organization’s stress points are, and dedicate resources to repairing them before problems worsen.

Flexibility

Freelancers

Additional Tools

Download your Open Garden guide to giving and receiving feedback! Save and download or print.

Download the guide

CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING

See if you understand the concepts by completing the quiz. Click Assessing the Landscape Quiz to begin.

Assessing the Landscape Quiz

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