If an organization wants to be seen as inauthentic,
all it needs to do is to say one thing and do another.
When an organization creates a gap between ‘who we say we are’ and ‘how we act’, it creates a common and avoidable authenticity challenge. This authenticity challenge is made even worse when an organization says it is expert at something and then demonstrates that it absolutely isn’t.
The New York Junior League is currently creating for itself just this kind of authenticity challenge. After years of presenting itself as so expert in the field of non-profit management that they run workshops and conferences to teach how non-profit management should be done, the NYJL has demonstrated that their own organization’s governance—the relationships between the Board, the elected officers, the administration and the membership- – is not quite best in class.
Recently, The New York Times publicized a dispute among NYJL Board members about a purported budget deficit of $1 million. For an organization that teaches non-profits how to manage their finances, having a surprise deficit is a bit embarrassing. Yet to add injury to insult, the way that the NYJL has responded to questions about its finances and its governance appears at worst downright disrespectful of its membership and at best quite ineffective.
How would an authentic organization and its leadership address a situation like this one?
To resolve this authenticity challenge, the goal of an authentic organization should be adjust its actions, so that through its actions the organization demonstrates that it is what it says it is. In the case of the NYJL, they should start acting as experts in non-profit management (more on this below).
In a future post, I’ll address how the NYJL might engage in a conflict resolution process that enhances and extends its authenticity. But first, let’s examine the authenticity challenge itself.
How does the NYJL present itself?
“The New York Junior League (NYJL) is an organization of women committed to promoting volunteerism, developing the potential of women, and improving communities through the effective action and leadership of trained volunteers.†The #1 benefit for the members themselves, as listed on the NYJL website, is training for effective community leadership, including fundraising, finance and public relations.
To extend their knowledge to others, the NYJL runs an annual conference to educate leaders of other non-profits. One showcase session at last year’s conference was entitled: “Practicing What We Preachâ€, where attendees could “(h)ear from NYJL volunteers who have started their own non-profits. Learn about the difficulties and struggles they encountered and were able to overcome… .†In addition, the NYJL runs a training course called “Leadership through Governance: Training Volunteers for Nonprofit Board Membership.†One entire evening of this course is devoted to developing, training, and evaluating board members, and discussing effective relationships among board members and administrators.
Clearly, because the NYJL presents itself as expert in non-profit management, they must believe that they have some kind of expertise in Board – Officer – Membership relations. But, this isn’t what they are demonstrating in their actions.
How is the NYJL acting?
Here’s a thumbnail sketch of the situation:
The current President and Treasurer and the NYJL Board disagree whether there is a deficit, whether the deficit is serious, how concerns about a deficit should be addressed, and whether and how concerns about the deficit should be shared with the membership.
On one side are The President and Treasurer. They claim that they as well as others have brought their concerns about finances to the Board, have been put off by the Board, and have been personally criticized by some Board members. They explain that despite being told by the Board not to communicate with the membership about this issue, they feel a “fiduciary duty” to inform the membership about the financial situation. And, they have filed a lawsuit and a complaint with the NY State Attorney General’s Charity Bureau in an effort to force the Board to act.
On the other side is the Board. The Board claims that the President and Treasurer have presented an inaccurate picture of the organization’s financial status and of the Board’s actions towards addressing (or not addressing) the President and Treasurer’s concerns. The Board claims that the organization is financially sound. They promise to present complete financial information at the annual meeting (1/29/08), and they ask that members keep an open mind. In addition, a Board member created a blog intended to share information about the budget and the organization’s financial status with the Membership,
If we compare how the NYJL presents itself with how it has been acting, we can easily see the contradiction. An organization whose Board and leaders get entangled in this kind of ‘she said- she said’ controversy is not modeling management expertise.
So what could the NYJL do to begin to address this identity challenge?Here’s one suggestion: Why not hold a workshop?
Imagine if the NYJL used their own current situation as a case study for their Winter 2008 Non-Profit training course. They could take the general principles and advice about governance that they have traditionally offered, combine it with the details of this situation, and then ask the participants to come up with an ‘action plan’. [[ Yes, this is just like the case teaching format for Leadership & Organizational Behavior at Darden. ]]
Using the general theories and advice that they offer to others, members of the NYJL and other non-profits could consider how to address conflicts of authority, responsibility, reporting relationships, and communication strategies.
For example, they could consider:
– Who should have authority over deciding whether a deficit is “seriousâ€?
– Should authority and decisions be challenged when leaders disagree? How?
– In this situation, how should the President and Treasurer define and fulfill their fiduciary responsibility to the membership?
– How should the membership become involved?
– Given the structure and purview of this particular organization’s board and of each executive member-leader position, what should the President and Treasurer have done? What should the Board have done?
– How much should the broader membership know about disputes over management issues among their leadership?
Imagine the conversation that participants could have with each other, and imagine the variety of suggestions that might be offered to the NYJL itself. This suggestion should be relatively easy for the NYJL to pull off. After all, they already know how to hold workshops, and many members know how to present their experience so that others can learn from it. They already have the technology and structure for holding workshops, and this action step is consistent with what the NYJL knows how to do.
Moreover, the simple act of holding a workshop doesn’t require much introspection or much (pre)commitment to a solution by the organization. No one at the NYJL has to know what the answers are before holding the workshop. A good workshop ‘only’ requires being open with information and open to listening. Reminding themselves that the NYJL is about ‘volunteers learning to run non-profits’ might make it easier to avoid arguing over whose version of the situation is true and instead to take a learning orientation. Running a workshop using itself as a case study is only one of many options, and this option makes it possible for the NYJL to listen, learn, and address the deeper issues at the core of their leadership conflicts.
Given the nature of the NYJL’s authenticity challenge, if I were a board member of another nonprofit considering this training course, I would think twice about taking it. I would question whether I could learn much about how to run a non-profit by an organization that can’t seem to manage these basic issues well enough to avoid this kind of internal conflict. And, I would wonder what other claims about the NYJL I could trust. However, if I saw the organization recognizing their self-made authenticity challenge, opening themselves to learning more about who they are and what they could and should be doing, I might want to join them and contribute my insights. How about you?
What would you recommend?
I am an organizational identity and reputation scholar with a PhD in leadership & organizations. I research, write, teach and consult with organizations about the relationships between organizational identity, actions, and purpose. See the 
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi CV:
You understand the New York Junior League better than most. Your challenge — and the questions you ask — are really excellent. How much is too much of a deficit? When is it serious? All good.
Those people who take the non-profits board course, however, are members of the community, motsly, not League members. It would be truly distorted, even perverse, to use the League itself as a case study in that setting.
Moreoever, what made the dissent at the League worthy of the TIMES article is that whenever the League has any sort of problem, and we’ve had deficits before — they’re usually no big deal — League leadership solves its problems internally. As a former board member at the NYJL myself, I almost fell off my chair when I saw the Times story. I know Trisha Duvall, the now-departed president at the center of the storm, too, and she just never “got” the culture of the League. She hacked out a deal with Nominating (too complicated to go into) to become president in the first place. In this instance of the deficit and her “fighting” with the Board (outrageous!), she violated one of the most sacred principles of all — she violated League trust by turning to outsiders who don’t understand the organization. That’s the true source of the problem. League women are among the most principled people in the world. There’s such a strong belief among any given board (made up always by the most committeed volunteer members, by the way) that we know best who we are and what we need. Trisha’s handling of this mess — from the enemies she made on her own board to going to the press, for God’s sakes! — is seen as something completely outrageous, and entirely wrong.
What I am saying is that the culture of any organization is its most basic, most “authentic” self. You cannot divorce the culture of the League from this financial issue its currently facing, or any other issues, and actually think you understand the organization better or that your scrutiny is a good thing. Trisha may be right in terms of taking a hard look at the org’s finances, and her actions may look right to the outside world looking in, but she has handled this in a way that those in the League see as completely wrong — she has violated trusts, alienated the very people she needs to solve the problem, and made it impossible for herself to continue, not to mention a million other things that are just so wrong in terms of the League’s culture and its sense of “self.” Trisha can never be forgiven, nor will she be. The NYJL may have had some money problems, which are entirely fixable given the wealth of our members, but Trisha created a scandal.
Liz-
Thank you SO much for your insights. I was particularly struck by your comment that because the NYJL members “know best who we are and what we need” that they very act of turning to outsiders violates not just a general management principle (of dealing with each other first) but an actual identity element of the NYJL.
Also, the idea that what looks right to outsiders is exactly wrong to insiders is important— that’s exactly why people take their disputes to outsiders… they want some kind of ‘objective’ validation of their complaint. But who can actually assess the complaint, without a genuine understanding of the organization’s culture? I imagine that there are times when leaders/managers really need the perspective of outsiders (for example, as a reality check, or for expertise, or moral support). It must be hard for any ‘whistleblower’ to determine whether she is right in taking the argument public, or whether she is right to keep fighting it out inside.
Without any inside info, my sympathies usually lie with the ‘wistleblower’, because I have seen too many instances where organizations were blind to their own mis-management. But your comment offers the important reminder that the very mechanisms that one uses to bring up a problem inside the organization need to be effective in that organization’s culture. Another way to say that is– if you didn’t make the effort to speak in their language, you can’t go complaining that they weren’t listening.
Maybe you can tell us, months later, what’s happened? Anything good come out of this all?