Patrick Lencioni thinks that the reason passion-driven leaders and their social sector organizations underperform and their for-profit performance-driven counterparts are lacking in compassion is the acceptance of mediocrity and lower standards on both sides of the equation.  (See Pat’s Point of View April 2009.) Now that I’ve accumulated enough experience on both sides of the profit aisle, I can attest that his observation is commonplace. Too many nonprofit leaders place passion over effectiveness in the people they hire and accountability for the decisions they make. Too many business leaders give performance priority over long-term vision and engaging the people that make them successful.

Pat simplifies this dilemma by stating that organizations should stop thinking of themselves as mission-driven NFPs or performance-drive FPs, they all should be mission- and performance-driven (MDPDs). People at all levels of any type of organization just want to do meaningful work and when they believe what they do is of value, they don’t mind being held accountable for it. What makes us feel that what we do is important? Feedback from our leaders that links what we do to the mission.  What makes us assume accountability for our work? Our leaders give us goals that we own, that are visible to all on a regular basis. Why is this so hard to do?

Nonprofits that are more focused on mission than effectiveness often have righteous leaders who believe that the good they do will bless them with operational outcomes without the diligence necessary to achieve them. They feel fortunate to have the staff and volunteers they can afford or attract, which is the mediocrity to which Lencioni refers. For profits have the luxury of being able to hire the best performers, but they burn them out with increasing demands on their productivity and decreasing care for their emotional states. FPs make little or no investment in the engaging the passions of their people assuming they’ll bring it with them through the door every morning. But the default is personal interests and management complains about how difficult it is to get people to communicate and collaborate around a common goal.

It’s a difficult balancing act but it can be done. Leaders like Ray Anderson, the founder and chairman of Interface, who successfully committed to transforming his commercial carpet and fabric company into a profitable example of industrial ecology and sustainability, achieve that harmony between passion and performance. On the nonprofit side, there’s Frances Hesselbein, who rose from within the Girl Scouts of America to become the CEO that led nonprofit’s turnaround, restructuring and adding programs the led to increased minority participation, a membership of 2.25 million girls and a workforce of 780,000 – most of which are volunteers. Hesselbein is currently CEO of the Leader to Leader Institute (formerly the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Leadership).

I like the way Frances Hesselbein sums up her secret to harmonizing passion and performance. It’s her “secret” because she speaks about having two invisible tattoos on each shoulder. One is “Ask, don’t tell.” The other is “Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do.”  Efficiencies and effectiveness come from all we learn about what to do right and best. That’s good management. But in our increasingly diverse environments, the best leaders do more asking than telling and get the best from everyone. “How to be” develops quality, character, and the courage to “lead from the front on the issues, principles, vision and mission that become the star to steer by.”

I’m teaching my favorite class at JFKU this quarter (I admit, it’s one I developed) – Organizational Culture and the Emotionally Intelligent Work Environment.  It’s a hybrid class – a combination of classroom and online – and one of the online discussion threads provided a workplace example of culture change I found very interesting.  The environment was a hospital section where patients are under care but able to have visitors. The MBA student who started the thread was telling her story about being transferred to supervise this unit having morale and performance issues and turn it around. She says that the first thing she noticed is that the staff rarely acknowledged visitors. She was appalled! If they didn’t show care and respect for family and friends of patients, what message were they sending about the care they were paid to do for their loved ones?

She laid down a new law. “You will speak to and engage everyone that comes to this unit. You will greet them, make them feel welcome, and ask if you can be of an assistance.” Of course, they weren’t happy. Sometimes you DO have to tell people what to do when they act like they don’t know. But they do, and I think this is why Angela’s order began to turn things around. When people begin to see the effect that kindness and care have on others, they get back in touch with their empathy. It’s like smiling at a stranger on the street and they smile back. You smile at the next person you see and they probably do the same.