Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices by Peter F. Drucker

Author:Peter F. Drucker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780062034755
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-09-06T14:00:00+00:00

STANDARD SETTING, PLACEMENT, APPRAISAL

For each person to take responsibility for his or her own contribution and for being understood requires standards. Standards have to be concrete; for example, the standard for the emergency room of the hospital which I quoted earlier: everyone who comes in is seen by a qualified person in less than a minute.

Standards have to be set high; you cannot ease into a standard. When we went in to work in developing countries, we all made the same mistake. We said: Here are untrained, unskilled people, so let’s start low. If you start low, you can never go higher. Slow is different from low. Sure, at the beginning of a new effort with a new person, you go slow. You make mistakes. But the standard is clear. There is a great deal to be said for the old schoolteacher of mine many years ago, who put examples of beautiful penmanship on the wall on the first day of second grade, and said: “This is how you are going to write.” None of us kids could do it, and most of us never did, speaking for myself. But none of us has ever felt that sloppy handwriting is anything to be proud of.

Clear standards are particularly important in the non-profit institution that is both centrally run and a “confederation” of autonomous locals. Originally, there were only a few such organizations around—mostly very large ones. The oldest is, of course, the Catholic Diocese. Then came the American Heart Association, the Red Cross, the Scouts, and many others. Now you have hospital chains and state university systems. We have a number of large Protestant churches which staff and support several small “outreach” churches, each with its own Vestry, its own congregation, and its own locally raised budget. In all of them, the standards have to be uniform across the board. But each local organization— the council, the chapter, the parish, the diocese, the hospital—has to be autonomous and has to make its own decisions. Squaring these conflicting demands for autonomy and conformity requires, above all, clear and high standards. But this kind of confederation also requires that the central organization think through the two or three things—not just the things to say, but the things to do. In the Catholic Diocese, the bishop makes the critical personnel decisions; he alone appoints parish priests. The Scouts provide centrally the program material, the books for the badges, and the innovations such as the Daisy Scouts. Headquarters also provides the national image and handles public and governmental relations.

Next, such organizations need control of standards. That’s the most difficult thing to do. That’s where the chief executive officer needs not so much skill as respect, so that a local council will accept a veto from the center even though it doesn’t like it. It helps if the central organization controls promotions in the system, the way the bishop does in the Catholic Diocese. But in most non-profit confederations, the local organization picks its own people.

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