Don't be an @$$

When our friend and colleague, Simone Joyaux, was honored for her dedicated career at the AFP International Conference, she encouraged all of us to "kick more @$$." I'm worried that some fundraisers and nonprofit leaders tend to kick like asses rather than kick @$$.

It's an interesting thing about donkeys and horses. When donkeys feel threatened, they act individually to rear and kick in all directions. Ultimately, they might end up kicking each other to death. Horses, their close relatives, have an entirely different reaction to trouble. They will form a circle with all heads pointing inward together. They then proceed to kick out at anything that might intrude or threaten the group.

Beth Walston-Dunham in Introduction to Law describes a serious problem with an overly simplistic remedy: work together.

Far too often, we spend considerable energy attacking each other unnecessarily rather than putting our heads together to defend against common challenges and obstacles. This happens both inside our organizations, amongst nonprofit organizations, and even between us as fundraisers.

The results of in-fighting and back-biting are obvious: less is accomplished, toxic cultures calcify, and we end up frustrated and embittered. But these insidious behaviors rarely stay private and dirty laundry gets aired (as indicated above for Lincoln Center et. al. in the public sphere contributing to an ongoing decline in public trust. (See O'Reilly at pg. 20)

How'd we get here?

Infighting within an organization, between departments or business units, is typically the result of competing perspectives on priority. I use the word priority intentionally. Greg McKeown in his book Essentialism reminds us that the word priority etymologically means the thing that comes prior. In the Industrial Revolution, we invented the word priorities to justify our own inability to prioritize. The word priorities actually doesn't make etymological sense, only one thing can actually come prior. If your finance team or your program team has a different priority (or set of priorities), this results in friction. In the absence of clear alignment on what takes priority, it's easy for even the most integrated of teams to be at odds particularly on how time or money is spent.

Between non-profits, we feel the same way: they are our donors. While fundraisers have a duty to their own organizations and their beneficiaries, we've viewed giving as zero-sum relationships with a donor. That is, that the donor can only give exclusively to us and any other nonprofit is a competitor. While there's nothing ethically wrong with Pancreatic Cancer Action's advertising campaign, "I Wish I Had Breast Cancer," the underlying assumption is that a donor needs to choose between pancreatic cancer and breast cancer support. That premise is false. Many donors (regardless of the level of giving) support multiple causes even in the same subsector. This is typically viewed as a cause for concern rather than an opportunity to deepen engagement with the donor as well as with other nonprofits.

One very large part of internal infighting among fundraisers occurs because of how we recognize and measure performance within our teams. While for-profit organizations face this challenge as well, we fundraisers tend to cannibalize one another with who gets credit for a gift but much of that blame resides on chief development officers, human resources staff, boards, or the CEO. Poor measurement metrics result in fundraisers seeing each other as competitors rather than compatriots. But when jobs, promotions, bonuses, and positive recognition hangs in the balance, it's easy to view gifts like Hungry, Hungry, Hippos.

But even amongst other fundraisers, we tend to nit-pick, finger-point, or accuse one another of either insufficient effort or malintent. To be clear, some of that truly does exist but many times our fellow conference presenters, bloggers, article writers, or others working in the sector are doing their very best to improve our collective lots. Perfection is too often the enemy of the good.

Where do we go from here?

If internal infighting is a result of lack of alignment, which I think is at least a primary cause, there are two potential remedies: a.) recognize that your colleagues are smart, passionate, hardworking individuals who are engaged in a struggle every day to do what they think is best to change the world for the better. By starting from this premise, we can't help but approach our internal peers as not just someone with an important, perhaps essential perspective but also someone that is already aligned with us. b.) seek common agreement on alignment. We agree considerably on so much already that going one step further from that premise may be simply about understanding each other's perspective on why the priorities differ and how that understanding can be reconciled. More often than not, fundraisers tend to approach all situations as binaries. When you do that, you are not collectively kicking @$$, you are behaving like asses, and everyone is wildly in it for themselves.

In the arts, we often talk about the value of theater to learn collaboration -- working together to produce a work of art. When it comes to working with other nonprofits, however, we are mostly skeptical. We know what we want to do and how to do it, many times it doesn't matter if someone else is doing it or doing it better. The huge increase in the number of nonprofit organizations is not tied to authentic, varied theories of change that advance the common good but most often because of the unwillingness to work together to solve common problems. A study in progress at the University of Maryland is lending credence to the hypothesis that collaborative fundraising is more advantageous than independent fundraising. The solutions to the problems we work on require the best solutions, even if they reduce the number of organizations working on those solutions. There are more than 1.56 million nonprofits and all evidence indicates that donors are giving more to the organizations that they care most about. The market solves this problem through creative destruction but the nonprofit sector is uniquely immune from some elements of these important forces. Nonetheless, these organizations are kicking each other trying to stay alive while their missions and visions falter. Collaboration and consolidation are the keys.

For fundraisers, there are separate solutions depending on whether you manage fundraisers or if you are a fundraiser. If you're a manager, you're like me and probably a source of the problem. I'd recommend picking up Don Rheem's book Thrive by Design that talks more about this and why money isn't a great motivator. While we have a revenue projection on our team and a number that we'd like to hit, we don't credit fundraisers with specific gifts. We recognize those most proximate to the solicitation but I take immense pride when the team talks about how someone else answered the phone call to process the gift or someone else helped with the cultivation event months ago that moved the donor to give. Every gift is a team effort but the only credit goes to the donor. Placing ourselves at the center of that act falsely assumes that we as fundraisers did something besides showing a donor how their greatest desires to change the world could be accomplished. If you're a fundraiser, your challenge is greater but not insurmountable. In addition to suggesting these alternatives to management, particularly about how "credit" is assigned, you can follow the advice of Adam Grant to avoid getting defensive in the midst of infighting. He references the work of Bob Sutton, a Stanford professor, who writes about workplace culture in a book that you'll just want to look up. He writes that when someone claims credit for your work or otherwise attacks you, calmly comment on the other person’s behavior and test the understanding of what the person was trying to convey. If all else fails including your pleas to management, Grant provides two options: "One is to decrease your dependence on your boss. If you can minimize interaction, they can’t do as much harm. The other is to increase your boss’s dependence on you. If they need you, they’re less likely to treat you like dirt." Ultimately, acting like asses to each other will only worsen the workplace culture.

If you're truly interested in what Simone's encouragement to "kick more @$$," we need to collectively stop acting like asses and more like birds. Birds that fly in formation time their wings to aerodynamically minimize energy and maximize the distance they can fly. The bird behind the leader is perfectly positioned to benefit from the "upwash" of the bird in front of them and the bird in front changes positions to allow someone else to lead. As a sector, we can learn from our feathered friends to accept the benefit of upwash even if we may have done things slightly differently or would prefer it done differently. There are serious problems that our colleagues are working on such as Donor Dominance or the Women's Impact Initiative and many more than require our collective strength and effort to persevere. Find out how you can support the work already in progress or at least extend gratitude to those peers volunteering their time and effort to advance these important issues and others like them. After all, you're not an @$$!