“Leaders become great not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others.” — John Maxwell
What I’m about to say should come as no surprise to nonprofit executive directors: It’s important to support your team in their work. While we’ll soon post about the basics of performance management, in this article we explain how we approach it at Mission Met.
Fostering a culture that supports further growth and development with all of our team members is critical. And, our performance management processes are central to that effort.
The combination of assisting our team with their current job responsibilities while also encouraging their personal and professional growth results in the following benefits:
Improves work engagement
Contributes to a positive culture of support, learning, and development
Helps retain team members
Performance management is a topic on which many executive directors are seeking information. Based on my own conversations with customers and recent articles for the nonprofit sector (such as the Great Resignation and employee retention), how to manage performance and keep talented team members is top of mind for leaders of nonprofits.
I’d like to share some of our company’s practices and resources in hopes that this information will be valuable for your nonprofit’s performance management processes.
Twice-Weekly Team Standup
Since our team works remotely, we’ve found it’s important to have a cadence of regular check-ins. Twice a week, our entire team gets together to each share about what they are doing. In particular they answer these three questions:
What has been your focus recently?
What are you plan to work in the next day or two?
Are you blocked on a project or task?
Each team member takes 2 to 3 minutes at most to review their work.
This meeting tends to be task-focused and less about strategy. We keep it to 30 minutes and remind each other that it is not a meeting to sift through the comprehensive list of what everyone has on their plate. It’s only to discuss the priorities of the week and to remove any barriers that might be in the way of that work. This helps all team members prioritize their work alongside others and have a sense of what the team is accomplishing.
Staff ONE-ON-ONEs
We try to keep our meeting frequency across our team to a minimum. The common meme of “this meeting could have been an email” is regularly shared between employees. However, 1:1 meetings with staff and their supervisors is a staple with our team. They are prioritized and rarely canceled.
We’ve found that the weekly 1:1 meeting is an important, dedicated time (typically 30 minutes) for open-ended conversations. This meeting is where strong relationships are formed via coaching and mentorship (and the occasional venting).
Suggestions for this type of meeting include the following:
Follow a loose structure, more so than a set agenda
Managers typically start by asking what the employee would like to discuss
Create a shared document (could be a doc or in a performance management tool) where you both can enter any topics to be discussed. This is helpful so topics aren’t forgotten.
We’ve written on tips for better employee engagement, and the 1:1 meeting exemplifies many of the tips from that article such as keeping communication lines open, providing regular feedback and support, reinforcing the organization’s values, and celebrating success.
If you need help developing more effective tools for employee engagement at your nonprofit, we recommend reviewing the work of Manager Tools and in particular their work on 1:1s.
Strategy
If your nonprofit has followed our strategic planning method, the CAPE Cycle, you should be a pro at developing and executing your strategy with goals that support focus areas and priorities.
Encouraging engagement from all team members during the development and execution phases of your strategic plan will make your goals more achievable because everyone is a stakeholder and wants to see the success of the plan.
The team at Mission Met creates a strategic plan for our company and we follow our same guidance for meetings about strategy that we provide to our customers. We recommend a monthly champions meeting, a quarterly team meeting, and a strategy development meeting (that includes separate times for leadership and the entire team to provide insights.)
Monthly Meeting
Who attends? The co-champions of the plan meet monthly to review the team’s performance.
What are the key objectives? Champions should get a snapshot of goal completion timelines and review the team’s performance. Champions share their observations and they collectively develop a list of what needs to be shared with the team prior to the next quarterly meeting (such as important dates, reminders, celebrations of success, and agenda for the next meeting.)
Quarterly Meeting
Who attends? The entire team meets quarterly to review the plan.
What are the key objectives? Each team member walks away from this meeting with a clear understanding of the goals they will work toward in the next quarter and any questions regarding the plan have been answered.
Annual Strategy Development
This meeting is similar to an annual retreat for nonprofits.
Who attends? The first session is for leadership. A second session is for the entire team.
What are the key objectives? The leadership reviews feedback from their team and they set strategic priorities for the next year. The entire team helps to develop the goals for each priority.
Software
Executive directors often ask us for suggestions about how to use Mission Met Center as a performance management tool. For that reason, we developed a way for nonprofits to host individual plans for all of their team members (in addition to their overall strategic plan).
Best practices for hosting individual plans include the following:
Managers are administrators on their team members' plans.
Work together to populate the focus areas, goals, and action items. (Some of these items for an individual might overlap with the organization’s strategic plan but in many cases, separate focus areas and goals are documented.)
The team member regularly tracks their updates/progress and managers can review in times of check-ins or evaluations.
Don’t be afraid to put personal goals (health, personal coaching and development, travel, etc.) as each team member has their own life pursuits.
This is a great way for managers to encourage both professional and personal growth as we’ve seen individual plans include personal goals such as pursuing further education, work/life balance, and improving upon certain skills that are helpful in both the workplace and life (time management, interpersonal communication, etc.).
Employee Handbook
The employee handbook is a valuable resource for all types of organizations and employee level status and title (new hires, long-term employee, managers, part time, volunteer, interns, etc.). It documents all policies and procedures. It’s also a great communication tool for emphasizing your organization’s mission, vision, values, and practices.
We created our employee handbook with the help of a template from Workable.
We tailored the employee handbook template to fit our needs and continue to develop it as our team grows and changes. It is a living, breathing document that needs to be regularly visited. Additionally, we include our stakeholders, our team members, to contribute their ideas to the employee handbook. You want their input when you’re creating any policy or procedure that involves them. This helps enforce shared ownership of the culture and improvement of our company.
INTERNS: DAILY JOURNALING
It’s vital that you don’t forget about your interns! After all, they are working with your nonprofit to gain experience and part of that experience is learning about what’s expected of them, how they will be evaluated, and opportunities for future growth.
Just as you should be clarifying the workplace policies that apply to your interns, you should also consider how to manage their performance. We’ve implemented a daily journal project for all interns to document their work.
This journal activity allows them to reflect on the scope of their projects through daily updates.
Prompts we encourage in the journal for specific projects include the following:
What is working?
What is not working?
What is something they could do differently?
The journal affords an intern time to reflect on their projects weekly. It also allows the intern managers to review the entries prior to meetings so they are most prepared for the conversations. The journal also provides us with documentation after an intern completes their work with us in the event we need to revisit any of the work.
Conclusion
Your performance management policies and procedures can contribute to a positive culture at your nonprofit. We know our work has contributed greatly to ours. Similar to a strategic plan, begin by writing your workplace values and what you think it will take you to get there. Make those items your goals and work towards achieving them.
As outlined in this article, your performance management strategy can include a combination of meetings, documentation, processes, and online tools. Don’t forget to solicit feedback from your team along the way as this will continue to improve team relationships and show that you value their input.