You're leading a non-profit organization. How do you ensure your decisions align with its core values?
As the helm of a non-profit, it's crucial that decisions reflect the organization's core values. Here's how to stay true to your mission:
- Engage in regular value assessments, ensuring each choice is vetted for alignment with your core principles.
- Foster open dialogue among stakeholders to gain diverse perspectives and reinforce value-centric decision-making.
- Implement transparent reporting systems that track decisions against value benchmarks, maintaining accountability.
How do you maintain alignment with your non-profit's values in your decision-making?
You're leading a non-profit organization. How do you ensure your decisions align with its core values?
As the helm of a non-profit, it's crucial that decisions reflect the organization's core values. Here's how to stay true to your mission:
- Engage in regular value assessments, ensuring each choice is vetted for alignment with your core principles.
- Foster open dialogue among stakeholders to gain diverse perspectives and reinforce value-centric decision-making.
- Implement transparent reporting systems that track decisions against value benchmarks, maintaining accountability.
How do you maintain alignment with your non-profit's values in your decision-making?
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Ensuring your decisions align with your nonprofit’s core values is essential for maintaining integrity and trust. I find the following helpful: REGULARLY REVIEW CORE VALUES: Keep your organisation’s values at the forefront of decision-making processes. STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT: Engage staff, volunteers, and beneficiaries in discussions to ensure diverse perspectives are considered. ETHICAL FRAMEWORK: Develop and adhere to an ethical decision-making framework that reflects your values. TRANSPARENCY: Communicate decisions and the rationale behind them openly with your team and stakeholders. CONTINUOUS EVALUATION: Regularly assess the impact of your decisions to ensure they align with your mission and values.
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Ensuring decisions align with your non-profit's core values requires intentional processes and continuous reflection. Start by anchoring all strategic decisions in the organization's mission statement and core values—revisit these frequently to ensure alignment. Involve team members in key decision-making to gather diverse perspectives, encouraging alignment through shared ownership. Regularly assess outcomes against your values; if a decision doesn’t reflect them, revisit and adjust. Finally, establish accountability by reviewing decisions in team reflections or board meetings, fostering a culture where values drive every action.
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We hire for skills and fire for values. Your agency already has them, so you need to discern values that control agency behavior and adjust as needed. This is a process. If you list 6 core values and no one has been fired this year because of that core value, ask why? Sometimes core values are too general to be understood. Enron's values were Respect, Integrity, Communication, and Excellence. What do those really mean for staff behavior? Sometimes a core value is aspirational (too big) or minute (too small) And sometimes premature. A CEO worked for a day with her team on core values. She ordered engraved rocks for every desk afterwards. They threw them away a year later! Review your core values for 6 months before you order rocks. :)
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Revisit your organizations mission and values. Too often, organizations evolve over time, which means original goals may not align with the current projects. Ensure that the board is also aligned and clear on these goals, and make sure that your mission statement is clear enough so that anytime you are questioning a decision, the mission statement can guide you. Too often organizations use mission statements as only promotional literature rather than a document to guide the work.
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Liderar una fundación, requiere un máximo esfuerzo de equipo, conectando gente cuya fuerza sea servir a otros. Escencialmente alto grado de empatía y conciencia social. Tomar decisiones objetivas que promuevan la integración de recursos y beneficio alineado al propósito de la organización.
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