August 21, 2011 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Organizational culture plays a more influential role at nonprofits than most leaders realize, say the authors of The Nonprofit Organizational Culture Guide: Revealing the Hidden Truths That Impact Performance. In an interview, the authors, all consultants, discussed their work:
Why did you write this book?
Denice Rothman Hinden: I had been working in Indianapolis with 14 community-development organizations and each one of them was having a very different experience. I began to think about why that was. There had to be a deeper explanation for why some organizations’ performances are stronger and others aren’t. The question of organizational culture was one that had not been studied a lot in the nonprofit sector. There was a lot of literature related to for-profit organizations, but it was pretty anecdotal and disjointed in the nonprofit sector.
Paul Sturm: We all were sensing that something was missing from the framework of how nonprofits understand what they do and why they have the results—or don’t have the results—they have. If you want to facilitate change in an organization, people need to understand what is most important to preserve.
Why hasn’t organizational culture gotten much attention at nonprofits?
Paige Hull Teegarden: With the growing pressure on nonprofits to be more businesslike, there’s this fear in my heart that they’re going to take this idea that we have to have the “right” business culture to create good financial results, when really, organizational culture is much, much deeper than that and is an opportunity for nonprofits to be able to describe what’s at their very heart, what makes them uniquely able to meet a particular social need.
What is organizational culture?
Ms. Teegarden: A pattern of beliefs and behaviors that form over time as a group of people that are working together toward some goal figure out what works.
[Edgar Schein, a management scholar,] talks about three levels of organizational culture. The first level is artifacts, things that you can see and describe; it might be the way an organization looks, what its offices look like. The second level is espoused beliefs, which is what people consciously say they value. The lastlevel is underlying assumptions and beliefs about the world. This is really about thewhy—why does the behavior happen?
Why look at organizatonal culture?
Mr. Sturm: Especially in the environment we’re in right now, where virtually every nonprofit is being asked to meet greater needs with fewer resources, it has never been more important for nonprofits to understand their culture because it really provides the context for everything they do, whether it be hiring staff people, recruiting and training board members, deciding what organizations are out there that would be good for partnerships and collaborations.
If you understand your organizational culture, you can find people who fit that culture.
All of which leads to the nonprofit bottom line, which isdelivering your programs and services in the most effective way.
How can nonprofit organizations step back and honestly assess themselves?
Ms. Hinden: Surfacing organizational culture is not for the faint of heart. You’re not going to reveal wholesale the entire culture of the organization in one sitting.
There has to be a willingness or openness on the part of the organization to say, We do have this concern and we’re going to review our culture and see what we can learn that can help us address that particular issue. Oftentimes, periods of stress make the most sense as times to do it.
Mr. Sturm: When things are going well for us as human beings, we’re much less likely to take a look inside ourselves. In that sense, organizations are like people.
