One Of The Best Things A Nonprofit Can Do: Practice What You Preach
Two Cents has focused the last couple of blogs on work culture – the challenges and opportunities to improve it in our modern day’s changing work environment. It’s something we come back to often.
As part of this series, let’s talk about the importance of nonprofit leadership creating a work environment that reflects its core mission and values. For integrity purposes, we must embody our missions through our daily work cultures. We’ve got to live the life we envision.
Seems like a no-brainer, right? It’s actually a lot harder (and less common) than you would think, when you factor in all the challenges that nonprofits have to deal with – such as financial constraints, limited staff capacity, and emotionally-drained employees and board members.
On top of these challenges, because nonprofits actively preach for a certain way of life, behavior, or change, people are a bit more sensitive and aware of their actions, and whether or not they are what they envision and expect from others.
Regardless of the challenges, we should be actively working to model our mission and vision for society. Let’s punch in some examples.
If you are a nonprofit with the mission to…
- Strengthen families: you should model a family friendly work culture, i.e., flexible work schedules and minimal evening and weekend work hours.
- Provide economic opportunities and employment for low-income community members: you should be employing people from the community with a decent, livable wage.
- Improve mental health: you better model excellent mental health practices with your employees and volunteers, such as acknowledgement, empathy, active listening, and healthy work/life balance.
- Fight abuse and advocate for healthy relationships: you should be modeling healthy relationships in the work place for employees, volunteers, board leadership, and clients.
- Fight global warming and climate change: you should be using alternative energy solutions, paperless communication solutions, and be recycling incessantly (doesn’t it kill you when you get a paper appeal from an environmental organization?).
The list could go on and on. It comes down to integrity – accountability – leadership. I’m not above using of a good cliché when I see an opportunity – practice what you preach. It is an essential way to maintain integrity and leadership in the good fight you are fighting.
Got any others to share? Tell us below!
