The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Environmental movement’

Spending the time to do quality work and build a good reputation matters. Over a year ago, I interviewed Bob Fugere who was hired as an Interim Executive Director for a Non-governmental Organization. The interview drives home the point that a good reputation matters, what do you think?

Interview With Dr. Robert Fugere, Consultant

Challenge: I had been managing and advising Canadian and international NGOs for more than twenty five years until I retired, but my most challenging assignment came when I offered to be the six-month interim Executive Director for a local environmental group.

This group had a seventeen year history of excellent secondary research, good neighbourhood projects, and most of all, effective lobbying of city councillors. A bookkeeper and canvass manager (with five contract street fund-raisers) were the support staff; most of the content work over the past seven years had been carried out by four campaigners.

I knew when I started that two of these campaigners had just moved on to better positions elsewhere and the third one -whom I was replacing- was going off on maternity leave. My assignment from the Board was to “hold the fort and prepare for a strategic planning process”.

Within six weeks, I discovered that our $500,000 budget seemed to be overspent by $100,000. After two months the remaining senior campaigner informed me that he was leaving to run in the municipal election.

That left me with one part-time replacement campaigner, two challenging reports to prepare for our major donors, and a lot of sleepless nights, trying to figure out what to do to keep this noble but battered ship afloat. There were only three options to put to the Board:

1. Borrow some staff from other NGOs;
2. Set up an emergency fund-raising campaign;
3. Or quietly close the shop.

Resolution: I leaned toward the last option. That Board meeting was crucial. Two canvassers pledged to increase their door-knocking for the next three months. One Board member from the labour unions declared that this NGO’s work was so crucial for its worker/members that they would put up a line-of-credit loan to see us through the next six months.

Those votes of confidence were enough to permit the hiring part-time of two experienced campaigners who helped prepare two successful grant submissions and the raising of $20,000 from a few key friends who also valued the work we had done.

Lessons Learned

1. In my NGO management classes, I had long taught that our major asset as NGOs was the quality of the work we did, and this experience had proven that thesis
2. The excellent work this NGO had done over many years had built its reputation -and its acknowledged presence- in Toronto’s civil society, so that even with an almost complete turnover of staff, it still merited others’ support. It was this reputation, not the salary level, that attracted the new campaigners, that garnered the unions’ support
3. For me personally, I saw how important it could be to maintain an open, fully-informed and calm hand on the tiller when the seas run high. Though I couldn’t provide either the money or the technical environmental knowledge required, the staff, the Board and the donors all needed to sense that a trusted person would provide the information and maturity to bring each of their partial contributions to a common result

Formula for Success

Good quality work builds your reputation which is a major asset.

If you were in Bob’s position, what would you have done different, and why? Let’s keep the conversation going, I value your comments.