We Are Our Own Worst Enemies, Part II.

It is time for the sector to get rid of the “gratitude factor” and remember why we are in the game to begin with. It is the gratitude factor that makes us keep long-time non-performing and under-performing board members on our board long past any “normal” person’s tolerance.  It is the gratitude factor that allows non-performing, under-performing and non-team players to stay on staff long past even the longest of times lines for improving performance.  And it is time for this to stop.

It goes along with what I’ve said before:  we are the “nice” sector.  We are so concerned with being nice to staff and board members, being understanding and caring, that we forget to what our first and foremost allegiance must be:  our mission.  The only thing which we must bend over backwards to nurture is that mission.  But when the gratitude factor controls an organization, it is being nice to neither its mission nor the vast majority of its staff and board to whom we really should be grateful for they truly work for and push forward the mission.

Don’t get me wrong:  I believe very, very strongly in the fact that an organization’s personnel policies must be as respectful, kind and supportive of its staff as the organization is to its clients.  We should want to do all that we can to keep those who do their jobs well as we want to keep those who are good clients.  But we have limits to how far we bend for our clients and passing those limits means consequences.  Don’t play by the rules, clients are gone:  for example, don’t pay your dues into the membership association, you aren’t a client any more; don’t show up to your job training site for the fourth time, you aren’t a client any more.  A client who violates conduct expectations—punctuality, being a team member when called for, disrespects property, etc.—will experience repercussions.

Yet, I regularly hear stories, complaints, laments about employees who have worked at nonprofits for years, sometimes decades, who do not perform their jobs, either because they don’t want to or are incapable of doing so, who are less than polite to colleagues, who ignore protocol, who overstep boundaries, who terrorize offices, who fail to comply with corrective action plans, and the list goes on.  These are not your once in a while stories; I have heard four such stories this week alone—and it has been a slow week in terms of stories!  And the stories cut across the organizational chart, from the receptionist to the executive director to a board member(s).

Why?  Why do we allow this?  Because we are grateful.  Grateful that someone is willing to hold the title (can’t say do the job) for the salary being paid and the conditions under which s/he works.  Grateful that someone is willing to fill the board seat so that the minimum in the bylaws can be met and the “difficult” (a myth that it is difficult) task of replacing that board member won’t have to be done. So, the gratitude factor allows us to be an inefficient, ineffective and wasteful organization—all because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, don’t want to play the heavy, don’t want to do the work and expend the energy that replacing that “problem” would cause.

The reality, however, is that so much more work, time and energy is already being wasted managing this problem, the tensions and, worse, this person causes, the anger and other emotions of the true workers, the negative impact on organizational morale, and this list, too, goes on.  All of this means a loss of resources that should be going to further the mission—the real reason why everyone is there.

It is time—and I do mean immediately—to fire these people.  Let them go from the board; let them go from the payroll.  They are poisoning the organization in ways seen and not seen and depleting the resources for mission service.  It is time to stop being grateful for mediocre or less than mediocre service to the mission; it is time to stop being nice to the wrong people.

Go fire and hire.