Chapter 2
Positioning Your Organization to Survive and Thrive
The Four Relationships That Are Critical to Effective and Productive Fund Development (and Healthy Organizations)
Is everything okay? Unless you work in a nuclear power plant, the answer is certainly no (and if you work there, I hope the answer is yes). No, everything is not okay. Not in a growing organization. Not if your company is making change happen, or dealing with customers. How could it be?
And yet, that’s what so many managers focus on. How to make everything okay.
We spend so much time smoothing things out, we lose the opportunity for change, or for texture or creativity.
Instead of working so hard to make everything okay, perhaps it is more helpful to work hard at living with a world that rarely is.
—Seth Godin’s blog, January 4, 2009, at www.sethgodin.com
Most leaders and managers are task proficient to one degree or another. Organizational cultures emphasize task and results, and base most rewards and promotions on them. In the last 25 years, there has been an increasing interest in examining the processes by which results are obtained. … What has been largely missing is any focus on relationship and its importance in producing quality results. Even the current emphasis on process is not about human process, the dynamics of how we work and communicate with one another. … This presents a dilemma because, in actuality, nothing gets done except in relationship. Task, process, and results depend on it. Action ...
