Unite the group to create a common vision. The most important thing is to tap into the motivation around the mission. We change children’s lives forever, we make a lasting positive difference for children, and so that mission is really deep for those who are committing themselves full time to leadership roles within our system.
Tapping into that mission and the motivation and hope of our leaders is really easy to do. It’s the role of a leader to tap into that motivation and inspire others and engage others, and that’s really done through strong communication. [You need to have] two-way communication — listening and integrating that and inspiring folks for the future and believing in them and in themselves what’s possible and really garnering the will to achieve.
Key leaders tap into their essential motivation, and besides the mission motivation, we select leaders who have strong achievement orientation. They thrive on results and achieving results, and so the combination of the purpose of our work and the drive to achieve results for the children, it really motivates our team.
Use effective communication. We’ve grown through a common strategic direction that everybody has bought in to. It’s not each agency having their own direction — everybody has the same strategic direction — but the execution is very decentralized. So we’ve had to lead through influence and bringing real value to our affiliates with substances and ideas that worked and that came from a team of them that helped us create them.
In a network like ours, the communication links become extremely important.
One thing is to model what you expect others to do. For example, the way we run our Philadelphia organization needs to be transparent and an example of how we expect our local agencies to run their organization. So if we think good fiscal and financial management is really important — which it is for a nonprofit or any organization — then if we don’t do a good job of planning and managing our cash flow and building our balance sheet and having reserves, then how can we expect our local agencies to do that?
One of the key principles is to walk the talk. Lead by example; it’s very, very important.
Another key principle is to have everything that we do come from the purposes of the organization, so you have to make sure that you’re not distorting through unintentional consequences of why you exist.
Mission fidelity is extraordinarily important. One of the key principles we have is, we will not take money if it’s not in support of our strategy or our plan or our direction.
It’s critical, again, that you walk the talk.
How to reach: Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, (215) 567-7000 or www.bbbs.org
