When you hit the brick wall before you leave your own building
- Thu, February 02 2012
- Filed under: Nonprofit leadership
I get a lot of email from people who are trying to better connect with their supporters, but they encounter resistance to new approaches from within themselves or, more often, from within their own organizations. If you’re hitting a brick wall, this post is for you.
It’s not easy to turn the focus from your own perspective to that of your audiences, but turn it, you must.
When you hit a brick wall before you even leave your own building, don’t give up. Don’t stop pressing for taking the perspective of those you must reach. Don’t abandon the quest to do things differently and better. Because it’s the only way forward.
No one ever built a great organization by navel-gazing and never changing. Ever.
Advocate for meeting the needs of your donors and your beneficiaries and your customers above all else. It will lead to success, I swear. As a wise CSO recently put it to me: “Meeting the needs of the customer is always the winning hand. Always.” The best companies in the world get that. And their stock prices show there is positive payback.
If you do right by your donors, the money will come.
If you do right by those you serve, the mission will come.
If you do right by the status quo, nothing will come. And that has to be more scary than trying to make things happen.
Don’t turn back at the brick wall. Find a way around it, over it or under it. There’s usually a secret passageway - in the form of a different messenger, a different message, or different positioning. And if you can’t find that, there’s always the fallback: Do it right and then seek forgiveness, not permission. More likely, you’ll get more than forgiveness. Perhaps even applause - because the results will be something to celebrate.
Comments
This is so true. There is a lot of resistance, suspicion and outright fear of communications out there. Don’t ignore the worries, try to understand them. If you don’t get approval you have to find ways to ‘test’ things. The figures will then do the rest of the persuading for you. By the time the ‘new approach’ is mainstream, you’ll only get the blame if you didn’t find ways to implement it already.
@cXchanging
keep it up katya
you make good blogs that help us all
good job
Keeping your team on the same page, in today’s mobile work environment, is imperative. Collaboration software that aims to help small or big business users is just that we are wating for. And we also need to say goodbye to e-mail for business.
Read this blog!
http://blog.beezway.com/
Just wanted to add to your message- I totally agree to hold fast to what you believe, and find a way around obstacles. However, I wanted to introduce another option. Going in with an attitude of “I’m right and you’re wrong and I only need to convince you of my way” is set up to fail. Maybe your way is right. Maybe it’s not. Maybe a collaborative process with staff from all perspectives would result in an even better solution than the one you’re bringing. I believe that if people are resisting, then taking the time to listen and find out why and eliciting specific concerns and then talking it out will yield a better outcome than believing they are resisting just because it’s change and “people resist change.” As you might imagine, I have been on the other side and accused of not wanting to change when that was not the case at all. Take care not to set up a dynamic that will not be productive, that’s all I’m saying.