Not-for-profit leaders face increasing pressure to demonstrate their organisations’ impact, in an environment of increasing demand for services and increasing competition for resources. A recent study of Australian nonprofit board directors found that “many organisations continue to face challenges in articulating and measuring their impact, highlighting the need for clearer frameworks to enhance understanding and accountability”.
Organisational stewardship provides a paradigm for thinking about strategy and execution to ensure that organisations can stay close to their purpose and achieve their desired impact. While stewardship is an ancient concept, it has been defined more recently and very practically as “the responsible overseeing and protection of something considered worth caring for and preserving”.
Much of the early theoretical work on organisational stewardship was conducted in the context of the corporate or for-profit environment, and has since been extended into the environmental sector where the need for stewardship of land and resources is now widely acknowledged. The notion of stewardship is also highly relevant for the charitable and community sectors, where people are often drawn to work because of a passionate commitment to a cause.
Stewardship theory is grounded in trust. Stewardship does not deny the need for accountability mechanisms, good governance, and transparent reporting; however, it starts with the assumption that people in positions of trust will exercise that trust for the benefit of the organisation and others. That is, it starts with a positive rather than a negative assumption of actors’ intrinsic motivations.
Stewardship is not only for leaders, either: at all levels of an organisation, employees can act as stewards of purpose, resources, and implementation, in the best interests of the organisation. This is more likely to happen when employees are motivated by higher level ideals and have a strong identification with the purpose of the organisation.
Many years ago, as a young nonprofit executive, I designed a framework to help my organisation maintain fidelity to mission while developing strategy for the future, which I shared in the January Insights piece, “Leading through mission stewardship”. In this article I share a process for integrating the framework into strategic planning.
The diagram below illustrates the Stillpoint framework for organisational stewardship. Mission is in the centre, supported by the three pillars within dynamic internal and external environments.
The framework can assist for-purpose organisations to articulate their purpose by prompting leaders to reflect on the three pillars of identity, integrity and impact. These in turn can be translated into tangible measures of influence and outcomes. Together, the data arising from these can help leaders to implement changes over time as needed to maintain mission fidelity. For instance:
- Identity: A faith-based charity, recognising that the needs of a vulnerable community had changed over time, went back to their founding purpose to guide strategic discussions and consultations. The results helped them to assess whether and, if so, how best to support the community given its emerging strengths.
- Integrity: A disability support organisation, after reflecting on their founding purpose, went on to examine their intentions and legitimacy in a rapidly changing regulatory environment and how best they could continue to support their clients given constrained resources.
- Impact: A development agency, after reviewing Identity and Integrity, went on to develop new indicators for monitoring outcomes, ensuring their impact was congruent with their mission.
The diagram below outlines a process for identifying and monitoring mission fidelity using this stewardship framework. You will see that the reflection process starts with identity rather than mission; this is because purpose arises out of who we are. Mission is more likely to be authentic and sustainable if it is also congruent with identity.
This reflective, continuous learning process can be embedded within the regular strategic planning process so that organisational leaders are assessing, at least annually, the health and strength of their mission and its implementation. It is possible to create simple yet effective indicators to monitor each element of the framework
As stewards, leaders must ensure that they hold fast to the organisational mission that has been entrusted to them. An organisational stewardship paradigm can strengthen organisational capacity so that nonprofit and charitable organisations can do what they do best: making the world a better place.
(Photo by Anastasia Petrova on Unsplash)