Preventive Medicine
How Human Resources defines, develops, and defends your organization's culture.

Jim Thomason | posted 6/19/2009

Your organization's good name is central to its mission. Without a good reputation, you risk ineffectiveness or extinction from losing the support of your workforce, volunteers, and donors. The damaging scandals that cripple or kill good organizations are always a result of human frailty and misbehavior. People, then, are the primary risk factor when an organization is living out its values, maintaining its reputation, and surviving.

Yet while people are the biggest risk, many nonprofit organizations put very little emphasis on their Human Resources (HR) program. Professionals from other disciplines, such as attorneys, accountants, or other longtime staff, run many nonprofits' HR programs. Some do a great job; others do not. Even those who do a good job often lack the experience or support to install a complete HR system.

Without a complete HR system, you hire the wrong people more often and spend precious energy trying to control them. Last year I co-presented a Christian Leadership Alliance workshop in Dallas. I was surprised by the number of attendees who asked how to control their younger employees' off-hours conduct. Underlying this conversation was a lack of consistent hiring standards, policies, and enforcement—in other words, a lack of a system that defined, developed, and defended organizational culture.

Defining Your Culture and Behaviors

I have worked in and with enough companies and organizations to know that values alignment at the top is scarce. Furthermore, those values are rarely communicated consistently down through the workforce. While executive leadership may agree on its organization's overall values (e.g., we are Christian, we feed the hungry), there is often a lack of agreement on the behavioral level.

What does it mean to live out the values of your organization? Thomas Nelson is a venerable Christian company that has always had strong values. However, the way in which those values translated into behaviors was a matter of individual interpretation. A few years ago, when Michael Hyatt became CEO, we came up with a revised Core Values Statement. Our core values are, in order:

• Honoring God

• Serving Others

• World-class Talent

• Focus and Discipline

• Collaboration

These values did not consistently come to life until we later defined supporting behaviors that went with each core value. For instance, under "Honoring God," we defined as one behavior, "We keep our commitment even when it is difficult, expensive, or inconvenient." Under "Serving Others," we defined as one behavior, "We respond quickly to e-mail and phone messages."

The defined behaviors under each value gave us valuable information for job descriptions, performance reviews, and employee communications. More important, we had something with which to inform our own decision making on tough judgment calls.

Developing an Aligned Culture

First, executive leadership must be aligned on values. The next step is to reflect those in your HR system. A comprehensive system should include

• A handbook or policy manual that each employee must sign and acknowledge, and that contains an explicit statement of organizational values.

• Personnel forms that track all personnel transactions (hiring, pay changes, transfers, reviews, promotions, terminations, and so on).

• Communications systems that allow leadership to speak to its employees, and just as important, to receive safe and confidential feedback from employees.

This system is the primary vehicle for developing your culture. Through policies, you codify rules and values. Through personnel documents, such as job descriptions and performance reviews, you reinforce them. Through communications systems, you repeat them while simultaneously listening for how your people, including middle leadership, are living out those values.

Communicating (You Can't Say it Enough)

If organizational misalignment happens at the executive level, it is much worse further down in the organization. To staff, organizational values are what supervisors do every day, no matter what the company puts in writing.

Constantly speaking your values to your team is the most effective way to identify managers, employees, and volunteers with incongruent values. You will automatically receive feedback on problem areas and people. Here at Thomas Nelson, we use public e-mail, private e-mail, blogs, and quarterly all-employee meetings to stay in touch with our workforce.

Articulating values will also change your candidate pool and hiring decisions. We find that the more we publicly articulate who we are, the more our applicant flow reflects people who share our values. This is preferable to the legal and public-relations issues that come from screening applicants based on religion. It is much simpler to attract people who agree with you than it is to screen out those who don't.

Saying who you are and what you stand for at every opportunity puts a self-policing system into place. It provides candidates and employees with ample information so that they can self-select where they want to work.

Defending Your Culture

If you employ people, you will occasionally have to defend your organization and its reputation. Attacks may come from candidates you did not hire, dissatisfied employees, or, most likely, from those whose jobs you terminated.

Do not be ruled by fear of complaints or litigation. You should terminate people who do not perform or belong in your culture (after a fair coaching effort) as soon as you conclude that they are unable or unwilling to do the job or fit in on the team.

To be that proactive, you must keep your organization in a perpetually defensible position (not a defensive position—there is a difference) by having your HR system in place. With a strong HR system and reasonable severance packages, you have the right ingredients for peaceful terminations.

Positioning your organization to win employment litigation minimizes risks. Contingency fee attorneys are often more adept than their clients are at assessing which claims will be a waste of their time. Securing employee signatures acknowledging your handbook, documenting all transactions, and consistently using the handbook's reasons for termination discourages most litigation. Often the client's own attorney takes the lead in encouraging them to sign separation agreements rather than litigating.

Another important step is instituting a HR review or, if you are a small group with no HR staff, a peer review prior to any for-cause terminations. This ensures that you followed your own rules and acted consistently with past situations. A severance contract requiring a release of claims against your organization in order to receive any compensation ensures that you won't have surprise litigation months later.

Just remember, many of those who leave the company without a fight will still say bad things about their supervisor and/or your organization. Even fair-minded Christians have their own narratives about how well they performed or why they were released. Just let it go rather than defend yourself. The signed release of claims mentioned above only covers you up to the date of termination and not for anything you may say afterward.

With a comprehensive HR system, your organization gets stronger with each hire and fire. As your workforce aligns with your stated organizational values, the risk from scandal is mitigated. You have taken appropriate and proactive personnel actions that will protect your good name and honor your mission and values.

Jim Thomason is vice president of Human Resources at Thomas Nelson Publishers, a member of the Society for Human Resource Management, and a corporate blogger for Thomas Nelson at thebusinessofpeople.blogspot.com. He can be contacted at jthomason@thomasnelson.com or jimthomason@bellsouth.net.

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