Archive for the 'performance management' Category

The Power of Why

Joe Brown ▪ November 10, 2010 ▪ 0 Comments

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

This exchange, perhaps a staple of parent/child relationships, has no place in management. In fact, communicating to employees the why of their work — the context, value, and relevance of their work — is vital to both training efforts and effective coaching. Further, recent research, including a study conducted in a nonprofit fundraising environment, suggests that employees who know how their work positively impacts others are more productive than those who don’t.
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Rutgers IEL: Compensation in the Nonprofit Sector

Joe Brown ▪ November 4, 2010 ▪ 0 Comments

It was my pleasure to present this week at Rutgers Business School as part of the Institute for Ethical Leadership’s 2010 Nonprofit Leadership Certificate Program. In addition to leading a plenary session on the use of social media and social networking for nonprofit organizations, I had the chance to address both the executive and emerging leaders tracks on compensation in the nonprofit sector.

The two presentations overlap in conveying information about the past, present, and future of nonprofit pay. The first presentation, for the emerging leaders, also offers a brief overview of executive compensation in the sector, as well as a primer on pay for performance approaches. The second, for established executives, provides recommendations on ways to enhance their organizations’ pay and performance management practices.

Emerging Leaders

Executives

Each of the conversations branched out in several interesting discussions, some of which I’ve touched upon in previous posts, and all of which were worthy of further discussion. You may find the following related posts of interest:

Are Your Executive Compensation Bases Covered?
The Buck Stops Where?
Development in Demand: Challenges for Fundraising Professionals and Employers
Executive Compensation at Boys & Girls Clubs of America: A Closer Look
Human Resources Maturity
A Look at Nonprofit IT Staffing
The Path to Pay for Performance
Paying Attention to Turnover in the Nonprofit Sector
Salary Ranges 101

Please feel free to share the presentations and posts with your colleagues and, as always, share your comments and questions!

The Path to Pay for Performance

Joe Brown ▪ July 1, 2010 ▪ 0 Comments

My presentation from the June 2010 Nonprofit Human Resources Symposium at the University of San Diego outlines the steps nonprofit organizations can follow to develop an implement an effective, performance-based base salary compensation program.

The Buck Stops Where?

Joe Brown ▪ April 29, 2010 ▪ 2 Comments

“Managers are commonly ill-equipped to understand the dynamics of their compensation costs, never mind monitor and control them.”

I was struck by this statement by Chuck Csizmar in a recent post on the Compensation Cafe blog. Chuck was making a case for companies to focus on the return on investment (ROI) for employee compensation, and he went on to discuss the reasons for and consequences of managers making poor compensation decisions.

I have to agree with Chuck about managers’ abilities in this area, as this phenomenon is at the heart of a challenge I have repeatedly faced when working with nonprofit organizations to overhaul and improve their compensation practices. But, rather than ruing the fact that managers lack these skills and looking for ways improve them, I suggest that there is no real need for the vast majority of managers to develop them in the first place.
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