Nonpro;ts Need to Take More Care in Personnel Matters, Says Author
In addition to doing good,
nonprofits in the tough economy
struggle to do right by their employees—resolving conflicts, setting pay, offering benefits, hiring
and (sometimes) firing with care.
Jan Masaoka, who took over this
month as the top executive at the
California Association of Nonprofits, leads nonprofit managers by the hand as they navigate personnel issues in her new
book, The Nonprofit’s Guide to
Human Resources. Ms. Masaoka, who directed the online
magazine Blue Avocado and led
CompassPoint, the San Francisco nonprofit consultancy, spoke
to The Chronicle about the personnel challenges charities face.
The “accidental HR manager” does seem to be a common story in nonprofi ts.
It’s the overwhelming story in nonprofits. You know,
96 percent of nonprofits have
less than 100 employees. And
so people have someone who’s
designated as the HR manager, but that got tacked on to
their other job, the one they got
hired for, so they don’t have a
formal background.
What are some of the most
common problems nonprofits face because of their reliance on people who are
not trained in human resources?
They make assumptions,
because they think that they
know. And they just stumble
into things.
Let me give you one example:
A manager is trying to resolve
a conflict with a person who
reports to him. And the manager says, in this kind of non-profit spirit, “Well, let’s start
by agreeing that we’re both
at fault here.” And that was
meant in that spirit—and it
comes back in a lawsuit.
Having someone who’s a
[trained] HR person helps
keeps people alert.
What’s your argument to
small organizations that
may say, “We don’t need to
do annual reviews, everybody already knows how
they’re doing?”
In many corporations and
small businesses, reviews are
also not done. There’s sort of a
myth out there that everybody
does reviews except us. It’s not
true.
In a small organization, people’s jobs expand quite a bit in
any given year. Review time is
the time to document and acknowledge that expansion and
change. And I think people appreciate that a lot.
And in a small organization,
one bad person makes every-
one’s life miserable. I mean,
one bad person is bad in any
environment, but one bad per-
son in a small organization is
crazy-making for everybody.
It’s a good idea to have reviews
[in case] you need to let some-
body go, for cause.
In general, do you think
charities are too quick to
fi re poor performers—or
not quick enough?
They’re not quick enough.
I would say that it’s interesting because in the for-profit
sector, when something goes
wrong, it’s “Who’s going to take
the fall? Who’s going to get
their head chopped off?” While
in the nonprofit sector, when
something goes wrong, it’s “Oh,
we need to look at the system
or the process for how this happened.” And I would say the
corporate sector needs to look
more often at processes, and
the nonprofit sector needs to
fire more people.
You write that nonprofi ts
don’t do enough to test the
skills of job applicants. Why
is that?
That’s true for all sectors,
actually. Because it feels impolite? Or not team-oriented
enough? It just makes people
feel uncomfortable.
At Blue Avocado, we published this bookkeeping test,
because a lot of times executive directors hire bookkeepers without themselves knowing bookkeeping, so they don’t
Publisher: Nolo, 950 Parker
Street, Berkeley, Calif. 94701;
(800) 728-3555; http://www.nolo.
com; 375 pages; $49.99; ISBN:
978-1-4133-1375-8.
know if they’re qualified or not.
So this was a test and the idea
was that you could give it to
someone and see how they did.
And the author did not want
the answer sheet on the Web,
so we put this thing up saying
you had to e-mail us to get the
answer sheet. And we’ve had
more than 2,000 people so far
ask us for the answer sheet.
Part of it is that people don’t
have the tools, don’t know the
tools. The thought that you
have to give someone a test,
and start by making up the
test? It’s a lot harder.
You talk in the book about
how charities meet the
IRS’s standard that CEO
compensation be “reason-
able.” Compensation con-
sultants, you write, always
tell the charity what they
are paying is OK.
Why do you think they tend
to rubber-stamp pay proposals?
I don’t think they tend to
rubber-stamp them. They tend
to say that you’re not paying
them enough. Because you do
what a client wants.
If you’re a compensation consultant and you get a reputation for saying your client’s
salaries are too high, what do
you think is going to happen to
your clientele?
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
