It is said that Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, was asked the following question by a diplomat: "You've been trying to reform the UN for years and you've done very little. God made the world in six days!" To which Kofi Annan replied: "That's true. It's just that God, apart from being who He was, worked alone."
We too, in non-profit organizations (NPOs), don't work alone: we work (leading or being part of teams) with people and for people.
Searching down memory lane for my earliest experiences in managing NPOs, I go back to my student days in Coimbra. As I recalled in the autobiography I wrote for Jornal de Letras in 2018, O pretérito mais-que-imperfeito:
"I recognize today that founding and directing the Plastic Arts Circle (Círculo de Artes Plásticas) and chairing CITAC were my first experiences as a manager, which - with the brief interval of politics - would become my profession. How many times, in banks, in companies, at Europália, at the launch of Culturgest, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and in other challenges in which life has been prodigal with me, have I recalled the un-theorized lessons that, at the age of 20, I happily but committedly began to learn: the pooling of efforts and wills in the leadership of teamwork; the obligation of results, almost always with scarce resources; and the weight of the solitary exercise of decision-making."
All of this underlines the decisive importance that human resources (HR) management has for anyone in charge of an NPO, especially when, as is often the case, resources are scarce given the scale of the objectives to be achieved, and the urgency of the responses forces us to move forward without giving much time to organizational and preparatory tasks.
The usual topics when it comes to HR - recruitment, training, coaching, motivation, evaluation, career development, remuneration, reward, etc - are very specific to the management of NPOs.
Firstly, because it is often not easy to compete with the market in which the public service and companies also compete.
Secondly, in the field of motivation, you need empathy with the beneficiaries of your work and conviction in your actions, because NPOs are essentially mission-driven entities.
Thirdly, because NPOs also incorporate volunteer work, when they are not exclusively staffed by volunteers, which implies their own appropriate approach. It is important to underline the difficulty for managers of effectively combining good will, commitment and enthusiasm with the demand for professionalism, rigor and results.
Other specificities could be mentioned, but what has been briefly outlined points to the need to carefully prepare and adapt the always timely capacity building actions to the concrete realities of each organization, where ready-made formats are unlikely to be of any use. In this context, leadership training is essential and perhaps where to start.
