I was visiting with a friend who chairs a nonprofit
ministry board, and her board wants to understand how the organization is
doing in terms of accomplishing its purpose and to assess its strategy. This
is an increasing expectation of nonprofit boards. This means that the senior
leadership team will have to figure out how to measure its progress toward
the desired outcomes, impacting and changing lives, and that is not just
counting client encounters! Or some event-based “dashboard.” It will call
for a thoughtful approach, even inventiveness, in metrics and analysis.
The series of articles in this past Oct. issue of the
Harvard Business Review reminded me again of an often overlooked KSC
(knowledge, skill, and/or competency) needed by senior executive leaders,
that of metrology. We are (usually) quick to acknowledge the need for
financial understanding by a chief executive to at least the level needed to
engage in the financial leadership of their organization, but the lists I
see by writers on leadership rarely mention any need for an adequate
understanding of numbers, measurement, and interpreting their relationships
(metrology). The HBR articles reminded me that the growing complexity of the
organizational world, including the nonprofit world, will increasingly
require leaders to grasp numbers and analysis sufficiently to make sense of
the sea of data available and to then lead their organizations into
improving the understanding and insight they will need to form shrewd
strategy in these complex days.
The same demands are occurring on the donor side.
Nonprofits are looking for ways to understand their donors and the shifting
topography of donor landscape, especially their donor landscape.
There is much available in customer analytics but less regarding donor
analytics, a much less tangible area to operate in.
All this adds up
(especially when you throw in financial data) to an executive leadership
that must become sufficiently analytics savvy to effectively and
strategically lead.(Originally posted on our website 12/18/12)
RMB
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