Organizational confidence is a nice concept, but how does it come to life in the real world? Here are some typical personas that mission-driven organizations — both for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations alike — have and how they react to organizations with and without confidence.
| ROLE | CONFIDENT ORGANIZATION | NOT-CONFIDENT ORGANIZATION |
|---|---|---|
| Managers | Darius manages a team of 25 front-line customer service employees. He loves his job. He knows exactly what the organization needs from his team and how to help them grow professionally while advancing their common purpose. | Darlene also manages a large team of junior employees. Her job is often frustrating and exhausting. Every day there are questions she can’t answer and situations that do not have a clear-cut answer. Her employees like her but think she’s ineffective or, at best, means well but is powerless to help. |
| Employees | Diane is a junior staff accountant and gets to do what she does best—work with numbers—while feeling like she’s making a difference in the lives of others. She thinks about her internship at a CPA firm and is grateful she seems to enjoy her job more than the employees there did. | Tyler works in fundraising and dreads going into the office every morning. Sometimes he has nothing to do, and at other times there’s more work than he can handle. Often, his manager changes priorities midstream, making him feel as if his time and talents are not valued and are going to waste. |
| Volunteers | Lisa volunteers on the special events team and adores working with the staff and other volunteers. The best part is talking to her friends and colleagues about how proud she is of the organization’s work and how honored she is to be a part of it. | Gary is a retiree who volunteered at the youth center for a month. He quit because no one seemed to know what they were doing or what he was there to do. |
| Donors | Seth is an entrepreneur who was introduced to an LGBTQ after-school program and fell in love with their work. He makes an automatic monthly donation, but whenever he has an unexpected windfall, he sends it their way too. | Keysha made a sizeable donation to an environmental group at their annual gala. Still, when they returned six months later and asked for more, she could not remember why their work was different from the other organizations she supported, so she said, thanks, but no thanks. |
| Customers | Chris loves the idea of reducing the number of paper coffee cups that end up in landfills and goes out of their way to patronize the coffee shops that participate in the reusable mug program. | Davis was all excited to support the market of local immigrant artists but was alienated because many of them did not seem to know how the compensation model worked. Plus, the staff didn’t seem to care if people purchased art there or not. |
| Grantors and Investors | Every time a grant application came through from the state’s leading food pantry, Linda smiled in anticipation of what she knew would be a well-thought-out, well-documented explanation of how they would use the funds she had to distribute. It was one of those often far too rare moments when her job brought her profound satisfaction. | Carlos wanted to support the new micro-lending platform the recent alum from his alma mater was pitching. He really did. But, they made so many assumptions about what the market wanted and how they could deliver it, he knew it would be more of a risk than his comfort level would allow. |
| Patients or clients | She’s not sure when it happened, but at some point, Beverly had become the scone lady at work. It’s just that the bakery in her neighborhood not only made the best scones, but their job-training program for homeless young adults also had one of the best success rates in the country. Should could not help but buy two dozen every Friday | Using the pharmacy at his local community health center was, in theory, a win/win for everyone. The pharmacy business was vital to the organization’s ability to care for the un- and under-insured, but their disorganization and mismanagement made it almost impossible. |
Organizational confidence is crucial and impacts individuals on a real and relevant basis. To boost your organization’s confidence, take a step back to reframe your focus and remaster your message. We can help.
This article was originally published here.
