Yes, I’m writing to you all from a Vietnamese Catholic convent in Saigon right now. I have to keep the name of the convent off the Internet as it’s unclear how the Vietnamese government would react to its posting. Anyway, it’s a working vacation for Confessions as I have a remarkable opportunity to understand the ins and outs of a religious nonprofit. Of course, the convent and its male counterparts, the monastery, were clear antecedents to the Western NGO (Red Cross being the liminal example of the transition from the religious to the secular NGO).
As to be expected, they have a remarkably strong ethical base that allows for strategies that we couldn’t possibly replicate in a secular environment.
For instance, I’m working with some of the nuns here on improving their English (modal auxilliaries — could, should, might, shall will and all that) and I’m realizing that these nuns are actually in an internal leadership development program that has gone on for decades despite the fact that their eventual succession to true executive management is another decade away. It’s quite fascinating to see such long-term development of human capital actually being practiced before my eyes. What I see at this convent is what happens when you constantly focus on the development of human capital in your workforce consistent with the ethos of your organization. It’s a rather heady mix of religious belief with hard-nosed organic operations management regimes.
As I suspected, good operations management rarely requires technology to be successful. Yup, you’ve heard it here first — technology is NOT a necessary ingredient for the success of a nonprofit. The convent has only a modicum of communications technologies — ADSL only in the last year and limited telecommunications. Yet, because of their tremendous investment in human capital (all of the nuns and novitiates are sent to school and many have the equivalent of postgraduate work) they are able to create a tightly knit labor force whose clear loyalties are to the organization in everything they do. The convent has remote operations all throughout the length and breadth of Vietnam and despite local telecommunications troubles can trust and rely upon their staff to act in an expected manner because of their shared educational background. The human capital replaces the IT infrastructure by obviating the need for extensive communications.
Is there a lesson here for the secular American nonprofit? If anything, the lesson is that human capital almost and always trumps IT infrastructure. We’ve seen this lesson expounded upon time and again by books like Good To Great and in my earlier posts about Nonprofit 2.0. We will never see a true wave of Nonprofit 2.0 in the United States until we start to pay attention to developing all nonprofit staff (not just the people in Development) into knowledge workers.
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Our department just went through our annual budget submission process. One of my big pushes was for a lot more reosurces for PD for my staff. I have sent this article to the other supervisors in my department.
We have been very fortunate in the last two years to have spent a lot of resources on technology, and have taken steps to develop a formal technology plan nad software roadmap. The same cannot be said for PD and conference spending.
Yes, yes PD is very important. I know that some people think going to conferences is just an expensive junket and used badly, it really can be characterized as such. However, management is supposed to point out the needs of the organization prior to attending the conferences thus allowing for a more directed experience and lessening the expensive junket factor.
PD should be part of the yearly organizational planning process. It should show up in performance evaluations as well as a determining factor in assessing the performance of your staff. Here at the convent, that constant assessment stretches even into the upper echelons of management. For instance, management is actually elected for four year terms from within a pool of applicants. It\’s fairly similar in concept to the College of Cardinals that elects the Pope. Imagine that, electing a nonprofit manager to head the nonprofit! How ironic that secular nonprofits are actually LESS democratic than a convent!