Organizational culture in a nutshell
Whether it’s providing career orientation guidance, well-being or upskilling services, Youth non-profit organizations promote a call-to-action message for hope, sustained growth, and active citizenship among youth all over the world. Coordinated by advocates with a clear vision and unswerving commitment to their purpose, these for-impact organizations answer a higher calling, even in the absence of previous managerial or organizational experience. Even though their services, social, health or educational programmes may be different from region and NGO, all share a common purpose: to ensure that the young people are supported to reach their potential.
In for-impact organization, „why” is the foundation of the organisational culture (O.C.), the engine that drives and triggers inner motivations of volunteers, social workers, supporters, and large communities to help end-beneficiaries. However, there are still many organizations that don’t know who to clearly define their cause. The traditional „We want to change the world” is not powerful enough to help people imagine how this process might look like. Great causes are led by great civil leaders who can articulate the organization’s vision, paint the big picture for us, and afterwards set all of us on course towards that. „At the centre of organizational culture must be a fundamental commitment to value and respect all people, inside and outside our organizations.”[1]
In simple words, “culture is how organizations do things.”[2] This includes patterns of behaviours among team members and top-management, habits, artefacts, values, beliefs, rituals, unwritten rules of the tribe, their attitudes, principles, aspirations. Even though every single member (staff, volunteers) of a youth NGO has a role in cultivating the OC, the leadership deeply impacts the direction in which it will grow, evolve, and create a positive impact.
The „how” of an organization is as essential as the „why”. This is strongly correlated with the intrinsic motivation of the employees and volunteers who shape the organizational culture. In many cases, the true motivation of the staff and volunteers influence their attitude towards achievements that are difficult, challenging. The for-impact sector has one advantage compared when competing with for-profits to attract and retain personnel: purpose at the core of the organization’s existence. People usually feel that they are involved in something bigger than the self. It is worth mentioning that the organizational factors that impact the intention of volunteers to stay in an organization can be visibly different from those influencing the paid employees. Volunteers are driven primarily by relational factors, alignment of personal values, and motivations with those of the organizations, while the paid staff is largely impacted via normative, relational (being part of the team), and transactional factors.
Their commitment and intention to be active and loyal to the organization’s mission is as well dictated by management practices, proper learning opportunities, access to resources and induction within the “tribe”.
After studying the 3 cultural styles cultures, there’s one particularity of civil society noteworthy: while considering the scarcity of resources, exposure of the paid team members at the constant uncertainty and stress, as well as job insecurity, we might notice stronger levels of Defensive cultural styles (greater expectations to protect one’s status and security will emerge). However, from a volunteer’s perspective, they are exposed to a constructive culture since they have less transactional expectations and more behavioural expectations. Moreover, volunteers’ tasks are not highly procedural, they feel less pressured compared with the members of the permanent departments. This is explained as well by the fact that most youth NGOs rely intensively on the volunteer workforce for daily operations, therefore it might be possible that more appreciation and respect is given by the core team in exchange for their altruistic commitment towards the mission of the organization. The climate is mostly friendly, supportive, and encourage cooperation between paid and unpaid members.
Considering Job characteristic model (JCM) which provides “a set of implementing principles for enriching jobs in organizational settings”[3], we notice that due to the limited size of teams active in Youth NGOs, it is most likely that we can recognize all 5 core job characteristics among the employees: 1) Skill variety since they must wear multiple hats and develop a variety of skills and talents (grant writers, instructional designers, project coordinators, trainers etc). Rarely one day look like another for a youth worker. 2) Task identity: the employees are directly in contact with grant operators, with their beneficiaries and take ownership of the full project/programme cycle; 3) task significance: they can receive real-time feedback from their beneficiaries and understand to which extent they have positively impacted the quality of their lives through the programmes and services provided. 4) Autonomy: in youth NGOs, pro-activity and autonomy is encouraged and expected from all employees. Rarely they will receive clear procedures and frameworks from the board or management. 5) Feedback: is requested, immediate, clear, and actionable, especially since there is direct contact with the main beneficiaries and the community.
Looking at X and Y theories[4], proposed by the social psychologist Douglas McGregor in the ’60s, and interacting in the past 10 years with over 200 Youth NGOs, I’ve noticed that there is a strong preference of the Youth NGOs leaders for a decentralized, participative management style, which offer the right psychological safety for collaboration, autonomy, open communication, and trust-based relationship between management and employees. This translates into teams that are happy to propose and complete challenging initiatives, and to have their say in decision-making processes.
According to Daniel Pink, to increase performance and satisfaction, every leader should ensure that he/she transfer the right amount of power to the team members, and the jobs roles are designed in such a way that support employees the completion of three conditions: “meaning (desire to do something important and meaningful, mastery (urge to develop better skills), and autonomy (self-direction to increase engagement over compliance).”[5]
Leading the way
Culture does not happen in isolation. Leadership plays an important role in carving the nature of the non-profit’s culture, and an overall sense of morale. Whether your organization’s expedition is led by a person or a board with or without previous experience, it is essential to have someone who is formally identified and accepted as the leader by the group. The leaders have complex functions to carry out challenging missions with limited resources and demanding beneficiaries. The leadership practices and organizational culture enhance the capability of Youth organizations to embrace easier transformational processes, adapt to opportunities, environmental changes, as well as to maximize the use of resources available.
The leader is essential to create an inspiring vision of the future, motivate and coach its team to pursue that vision. Five models of leaders can be distinguished:
- The Craftsman (John Kotter) has the role to create the vision, motivate and inspire the team to engage in it, while aligning the team members.
- The Resonant leaders[6] (Daniel Goleman) “use their emotional intelligence to direct the feelings to help a group meet its goals”
- Inspirational leaders (Kouzes/Posner) make use of metaphors and analogies; they give us examples, tell stories, and relate anecdotes, because the employees aren’t persuaded by the facts as much as they are by the emotions, feelings, and images behind those facts. Nevertheless, “all people desire to achieve excellence. Autocracy thwarts people’s motivation and creativity.”[7] (Ricardo Semler).
- Authentic leaders (Badaracco, Collins) are first-line managers dealing with challenges and conflicts and move things forward slow and careful, but in a stable and sustainable shape.
- Management scholar Edgar Schein says leaders are the main architects of culture. These have the capacity to nurture leadership at all organizational levels, encourage initiatives and harness all employees.
For youth organizations to thrive, their leaders should continually develop the skills, knowledge, and abilities of all departments, to take on greater responsibility for carrying out its mission and engaging community members. They should advocate for continuous learning, information sharing and interaction between the board and other members to allow innovation and creativity to emerge from different departments of the NGO. Moreover, they should allow for and encourage questions, debriefing moments related to the organization’s strategy.
Netflix realm
With the right leaders at the helm of the expedition, we venture in this chapter in Netflix’s – No rules realm, to explore their „culture of reinvention”. An organizational culture that challenges the idea behind „Fearless organization” (Amy Edmondson) where to encourage innovation, you need a psychological safe environment „where people feel safe to dream, speak up and take risks.”[8]
The expedition will have three main stations that will allow us to explore the decisions and drivers that allowed them to shape together their organizational culture:
First station:
- „Build up talent density by creating a workforce of high performers.
- Introduce candour by encouraging loads of feedback
- Remove controls such as vacation, travel, and expense policies.
Second station:
- Strengthen talent density by paying top of the market
- Increase condor by emphasizing organizational transparency
- Release more controls such as decision-making approvals
Third station:
- Max-up talent density by implementing the Keeper test
- Max-up candour by creating circles of feed-back
- Eliminate most controls by leading with context, not control.” [9]
1)„Build up talent density by creating a workforce of high performers. According to Netflix’s CEO, an organization with dense talent has only high performers, talented and collaborative. Two of their HR policy is well known „Hire the very best employees and pay at the top of the market” and to instruct the managers to have the courage and discipline to release anyone who is not an A employee. This recommendation might apply in a youth organization partially for several reasons: most of the volunteers, and employees involved in Youth for-impact organizations are between 18 to 35 years old, mostly juniors, in the early phases of their career, people who enter in the organization with natural aptitudes, talents in exchange of mentoring and a safe space to experiment, grow, find, or even design their own place in the team. Most of the people who reach professional maturity (A level) in youth work, or in instructional design for educational programmes are absorbed afterwards by the for-profit or consultancy companies or decide to test the entrepreneurial waves. What they will bring with them in their future workplace is a flexible mindset, a curated selection of essential skills, great team dynamics, and endurance. Moreover, it’s difficult to pay at the top of the market the employees of a youth organization, not because people don’t have the ability to deliver quality services to their beneficiaries, but mainly due to the scarcity of financial resources.
2) Introduce candour by encouraging loads of feedback – „Only say about someone that you will say to their face” is a term coined at Netflix that encourage openly voicing an opinion, as well as candid and frequent between the boss and employees (and vice versa). For them, this translates into faster learning processes and increased effectiveness. They use feedback as a tool to avoid misunderstandings, create a climate of co-accountability and reduce the need for hierarchy and rules. One idea that I have introduced already in my organization was to have a time dedicated to feedback integrated into our weekly meeting, which allows us to constantly improve the way we can contribute towards the organization mission.
In Youth organizations, feedback is paramount and present, especially since our philosophies of learning-by-doing and life-long-learning, where we constantly must keep our mind open towards the needs of the volunteers and beneficiaries. In the organization that I coordinate, feedback is introduced in all the educational programmes that we coordinate. During the international training courses or youth exchanges, we allocate at the end of each day, up to 1 hour for debriefing using non-formal education methods and to offer feedback to the instructors and the instructors to have a group or one-on-one short feedback meetings with as many as the group members. This allows us to keep the learning environment safe and to encourage acceptance of different points of view.
Since we are working with young people with different cultural, and social backgrounds, who are still learning and practising their ability to offer feedback, we do however encourage them to pay attention to how their words might have an impact on others. We already practice „Start, stop, continue” in our training, with the beneficiaries for 5 years already, among many other feedback methods, and we expanded as well in our organization, and with our close partners.
3)Remove controls such as vacation, travel, and expense policies.” [10] At Netflix, „what matters is what you achieve, not how many hours you clock, especially for creative companies”, so a „no vacation policy with soft limits”, „Freedom and responsibility”, „spend company money as if it were your own”, „no decision-making approvals needed” were introduced. The impact of this approach: biggest innovations and AHA moments happened when people disconnected from high-intensity, long working hours.
Many non-profits follow business hours/structures without recognizing that they are different. We work outside normal hours, and so allowing employees the flexibility to structure their workday to meet their needs while meeting organizational goals provides them with some control and balance.
And the organization I coordinate is not an exception to this rule as well. We operate with many high-intensity peaks in terms of work volumes – during grant applications submission, when preparing and facilitating the educational camps. We follow the national regulations and policies, however, after myself experiencing different phases of burn-out, I strongly encourage and monitor my team members to take breaks after „hei-rup” moments, to allow up to 10% weekly time during working hours to learn something new and share it with the other team members at the beginning of each month, as well as to subscribe to valuable self-development training courses (national and international). This is possible since we have a common and agree on timetable which allows us to act in the best interest of the organization, to feel free and responsible. Moreover, I agree with the fact that by saying and showing to our team members that we trust them, they will do their best to show that they can be trusted. With constant training from grant operators, clear rules, and know-how transfer from more experienced employees, even the very young youth workers have the capacity to coordinate the whole cycle of long-term educational projects. It is highly recommended by the organization that young people take ownership of their ideas and become autonomous in the implementation phases.
At Netflix, they talk of „whisper wins and shout mistakes”. I agree to a certain extent that mistakes are normal. Due to funds regulations, we know how to minimize the operational and financial risks, but in terms of learning programmes, the young volunteers and youth workers acknowledge that in „the playground” mistakes are perceived as learning and growing opportunities. This is possible only with the already traditional debriefing process in place, which allows us to understand what the key learning points are, without pointing fingers.
Netflix’s approach towards good decision-making is the engine for innovation and fast growth. „Don’t seek to please your boss, seek to do what is best for the company”.[11] According to their organizational culture, people are more likely to thrive on jobs if they receive control over their own decisions. In a highly regulated organization from a funding perspective, this recommendation is already applied in terms of topics that our educational programmes are tackling. The grant writers, volunteers, and youth workers have full autonomy to submit their own applications and if funded, to coordinate them. I have noticed that after the junior youth workers (21-22 y.o.) got their first projects funded, the energy, motivation, willingness to work more, and come up with new project ideas, substantially increased.
As a leader of a youth organization, I find valuable the recommendations suggested by Netflix to filter the new programme proposals of the employees: „Is he/she a stunning employee? Do you believe he/she has good judgement? Do you think he/she can make a positive impact? Is he/she good enough to be on your team?”[12] I would add an extra one „Does his/her proposal is aligned to the organization’s mission?” Even though you might consider that it is common sense to build the social or educational programmes always having the mission in mind, there’s a certain enthusiasm I have noticed to follow multiple rabbits (funds) simultaneously that distracts both the management and employee’s focus from their mission.
Since our resources are scarce (time, energy, staff and volunteers, financial resources), I would like to integrate in the following months the concept of „-10 to 10 ideas rating”. We receive partnership proposals, or our team is constantly generating new project ideas, however, all team members should be able to explore different perspectives before allocating the organization’s resources in large projects.
The Netflix leadership model encourages the managers to „lead with context”. It is the responsibility of the leaders to provide all the information they can so each employee can build their decision-making muscle and reach their objectives. In this way, micro-managing is avoided, and the goals are focused on innovation, instead of control. This is feasible in small youth organizations which operate as flat organizations in loosely couple systems as soon as all team members reach a consensus.
Homecoming (conclusions & recommendations)
In the last year, due to a constant overworked of the employees from our sector, the discussion about wellbeing appeared frequently on our agenda. A healthy culture requires non-profit leaders to care for, root for and know their team personally. With all the other systems, and regulations mentioned earlier in place, we still must prioritize their wellbeing, making sure they feel valued, heard, and respected. If a non-profit employee can contribute to the organization’s internal culture with a unique voice, they are likely not spending their energy trying to be seen, heard, or appreciated. Instead, their workplace can provide energy and a sense of worth for them. This means we must invest the time and resources necessary to care for our team as they care for others.
As a leader of a youth organization, it is highly necessary to build and maintain morale, to offer to each one of the employees dedicated check-in times, when they can give and receive feedback, as well as come up with suggestions for organic growth. Although a manager may not be able to provide financial incentives to retain good employees, if they actively implement suggestions from their team for improvement, employees will have concrete examples of their worth to the organization. When young people acknowledge their worth, the chances of keeping them motivated, engaged, and creative will increase.
Without salaries and benefits above the market that can reflect the impact of their work in the community, our focus as leaders should be to increase employee satisfaction, engage them around the importance of our mission and offer them an active role in programme design & advocacy processes, transparency into all major decisions, and more “team-time” opportunities even in a mostly remote format.
Bibliography
Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer, “No rules rules: Netflix and the culture of reinvention”, Penguin Press, New York, 2020
Alexa Cortes Culwell, https://ssir.org/articles/entry/how_leaders_can_strengthen_their_organizational_culture, 2018, Stanford Social Innovation Review
Michael D. Watkins, Article “What Is Organizational Culture? And Why Should We Care?”, Harvard Business Review, 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-is-organizational-culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_characteristic_theory
John J. Morse and Jay W. Lorsch, “Beyond Theory Y”, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/1970/05/beyond-theory-y
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_About_What_Motivates_Us
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkadAhDnPYkKelly Killian, Francisco Perez, “Ricardo Semler and Semco S.A.”, TB0199, Thunderbird, School of Global Management, January 28, 1998
[1] Alexa Cortes Culwell, https://ssir.org/articles/entry/how_leaders_can_strengthen_their_organizational_culture, 2018, Stanford Social Innovation Review, accessed on February 28th, 2021, 17:47
[2] Michael D. Watkins, Article “What Is Organizational Culture? And Why Should We Care?”, Harvard Business Review, 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-is-organizational-culture, accessed on February 21st, 13:32
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_characteristic_theory, accessed on February 28, 09:20
[4] John J. Morse and Jay W. Lorsch, “Beyond Theory Y”, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/1970/05/beyond-theory-y, accessed on March 1st 2021, 20:32
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_About_What_Motivates_Us, accessed on March 1st, 20:49
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkadAhDnPYk, accessed on March 2nd, 2021, 21:04
[7] Kelly Killian, Francisco Perez, “Ricardo Semler and Semco S.A.”, TB0199, Thunderbird, School of Global Management, January 28, 1998
[8] Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer, “No rules rules: Netflix and the culture of reinvention”, Penguin Press, New York, 2020, page 11.
[9] Idem 9.
[10] Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer, “No rules rules: Netflix and the culture of reinvention”, Penguin Press, New York, 2020, page 17 (electronic version)
[11] Idem 9
[12] Idem 9.
