R. Douglas Spitler knows what people say about his type of organization. And to some extent, he may even agree.
“There are some who believe that nonprofit organizations are not particularly the best at managing business,” says the president and CEO of Episcopal Retirement Homes Inc., a nonprofit organization that operates several retirement communities and provides senior outreach services. “But we’ve tried to seek out and adopt best practices from the business community … and to balance that with the mission of a not-for-profit organization.”
Borrowing business expertise from executives on his volunteer board of directors, Spitler is aligning his staff along a strategic vision. As a result, he’s been able to achieve business success — like 2008 total revenue of $23.3 million — through the involvement of his 350 employees and the 1,200 seniors they serve.
“We’ve tried to really set a very clear vision and set of strategic expectations for the organization and to communicate that from top to bottom,” Spitler says.
Smart Business spoke to Spitler about aligning your constituents along your vision.
Communicate constantly. It’s really critical that the senior leadership of an organization be accessible and communicate routinely with all constituents involved in a business organization.
For us, that means we have all-staff meetings twice a year. It’s two full days where my complete senior leadership team — there’s six of us — meet with all the staff in the organization at five different sites. It gives us an opportunity to share updates on where the organization’s at, to share the vision, to reinforce that, to give people some insights in terms of how we’re executing against that vision and strategy, to solicit their support and to give them an opportunity to ask us questions to build those relationships.
So starting with our board’s involvement and senior leadership’s involvement in identifying that strategic direction, adopting it, to communicating that to all the staff, to the residents, to engaging staff members in the creation of the systems and the policies and the new work culture that’s necessary to achieve that, has been a way that we try to build commitment and understanding about where the organization’s headed and what our vision truly is.
