Christian Leadership Alliance

Motivating Volunteers

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Preventive Medicine

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:

1. Honoring God
2. Serving Others
3. World-class Talent
4. Focus and Discipline
5. 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."

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