After a year of chaos and disruption, organizational agility is in the spotlight. Organizational agility is the ability to quickly identify and execute initiatives for opportunities and risks that align with the organization’s overall strategy. APQC’s research finds that an overwhelming majority of organizations see agility as key to their future success. But even when the external environment demands agility, achieving it is easier said than done.
If any industry knows how to do agility, it’s nonprofit. Nonprofits have always dealt with a lot of disruption, both inside and out. The industry is known for high employee turnover, and because millions of nonprofits are founded each year, the competition for donor dollars never gets easier. Community, social, and environmental needs change daily, so nonprofits must continue to evolve. To learn how nonprofit leaders enable agility in their organizations, I talked to Charly Weldon and Mike Pomeroy. Charly Weldon is the CEO of Family Houston, a nonprofit that provides basic needs, mental health, and financial stability services in the Houston area. Mike Pomeroy is the Senior Program Director at Brighter Bites, a nonprofit that delivers fresh food and food education to families in several locations across the US.
1: Don’t Just Have Strategy, Do Strategy
Rigid, rusty strategic plans are a huge barrier to organizational agility. Once-and-done strategic planning locks an organization into a set path and limits its ability to respond to emerging threats and opportunities. For nonprofits, that can be a death sentence. That’s why organizations like Brighter Bites conduct frequent planning reviews.
“We have an in-depth strategic plan across three years, and tactics are assigned to different people across the organization to make sure that we’re meeting the metrics we’ve set for ourselves,” said Mike Pomeroy. “We come together quarterly to review things, and just last week, we touched on our strategic plan and how we’re going to update it for the new year. It’s an ongoing process.”
2: Open Your Ears
Even the best and brightest executives can’t dream up a great strategic plan in a vacuum. To figure out where the organization can and should go, you need to listen to as seek out as many voices and perspectives as possible. So, when Charly Weldon joined Family Houston as CEO, she engaged each of the organization’s 75 employees in conversations about the current and future state of the organization.
“When I walked in, there were team members that had 15, 25, even 40 years of service to Family Houston. I had to make sure I understood all of that rich history and knew where we came from, so I could figure out where we supposed to go,” said Charly Weldon. “I invited everyone to the table to share their dreams, aspirations, and strengths. Through that process, we decided to let go of some things and concentrate on others, and we arrived at the three core competencies we have today: mental health, basic needs case management, and financial strength.”
3: Know (and Trust) Your North Star
Agility doesn’t mean pivoting for every single change; it means pivoting for the opportunities and risks that align with the organization’s overall strategy. So how do you know what aligns with the overall strategy? You need a “north star”—a big-picture, longer term view of where the organization will go. When you know and trust your north star, you can make the speedy and sweeping decisions necessary for agility.
Nonprofits are famous for their strong and compelling mission statements, but a mission statement is not the same thing as a north star. A north star is the organization’s mission and vision translated into strategy. Both Family Houston and Brighter Bites relied on their north stars to guide them through COVID-19.
The pandemic threatened to upend Brighter Bites’ operating model. Since its founding, the organization had provided food and educational programming in-person through partnerships with schools. When COVID-19 hit, this was no longer possible. Brighter Bites made a big shift and moved to providing contactless food distribution to families in need. “We had to abruptly change what we were doing as a program, and we can credit that to our strategic planning. That was what allowed us to clearly see that this pivot was still within our mission,” said Mike Pomeroy.
For Family Houston, the pandemic presented an opportunity to move faster on an existing strategic goal. “We were constantly getting asked by community partners and clients to branch further and further out within the city of Houston, and so our strategic vision was to figure out how to bring our services into the community,” said Charly Weldon. “When COVID hit in March of 2020, we very quickly set up telehealth services and Zoom sessions. It met our strategic vision. Our strategic planning process allowed us to really understand that this was part of our strategic plan.”
Learn More
For more from our conversation, listen to the podcast “How Nonprofits Do Strategic Planning in a World of Chaos” on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For further guidance and research on this topic, see APQC’s Strategic Planning and Organizational Agility collection. To learn more about these impactful nonprofits, visit the websites for Brighter Bites and Family Houston.