Good leadership is crucial for NFPs to succeed.
That’s why four major Australian foundations have announced a collaboration to create a 10-month, national capacity-building and leadership program for CEOs in Australian not-for-profit (NFP) organisations.
The Social Impact Leadership Australia program (SILA) is an evidence-based program specifically developed to meet the needs of Australian CEOs and build the capacity of their organisations directly and indirectly.
How does your organisation balance the sometimes-conflicting needs of your staff and clients?
A recent landmark legal ruling highlights the potentially dire consequences of failing to prioritise the safety and wellbeing of your staff.
A new Not-For-Profit Law Information Hub from Justice Connect could help you to better manage your staff and volunteers leaving you more time to work with your community. The Information Hub includes a range of fantastic tools to help NSW and Victorian charities fulfil their legal obligations, including factsheets on managing paid staff and volunteers. […]
Decades of psychology research show that humans have a deep-seated desire to find meaning in what they do. For many, that desire is what draws them to a workplace or a particular job. They want to contribute to something bigger than themselves – by improving lives, supporting communities or protecting the environment.
But that sense of purpose in NFP workplaces isn’t always guaranteed. When job demands increase, teams evolve and day-to-day responsibilities become more routine, it’s easy for the bigger picture to fade into the background.
So how can NFP leaders and HR teams keep that sense of purpose alive for their employees as the day-to-day work becomes familiar?
According to the latest Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends survey, there’s one area in which organisations are failing significantly – and their leaders know it: Performance management.
Of the 3,300 business and HR leaders surveyed, incredibly just 10 percent believed that their performance management processes were a good use of time. The great news from the survey, however, is that more organisations are changing their approach to performance management, with fantastic results.
Indeed, 75 percent of respondents recognised that performance management an “important” or “very important” issue overall – it just needs to change. So where is it all going wrong?
Are you ready for a cyberattack on your organisation’s website? How about a key staff member resigning and taking years of organisational knowledge with them? Floods? Fires?
Most NFP leaders don’t need to be told that unexpected things can go wrong in their organisation on any given day. But how ready are you for what might go wrong tomorrow?
This post explains the essentials of risk management and how – whatever size your organisation is – you can begin understanding and addressing your biggest risks thoroughly and systematically.
Restarting the recruitment process sooner than anticipated can be a real drain on resources, so it’s natural to respond by avoiding candidates whose CVs reveal a track record of job-hopping. But what things should you look out for to ensure you don’t miss out on a star recruit?
As the Australia debates whether our intake of refugees is the “right” number, ACOSS has noted that “20,000 refugees per year is . . . just three to five per cent of arrivals.”
But the heated debate over numbers obscures the enormous contribution refugees make to our economy – including as employees, often in regional areas or in less popular jobs that can be impossible to fill otherwise.
Refugees often arrive in Australia with valuable skills but without recognised qualifications and sometimes with challenges that are a result of their experiences of displacement.
For organisations looking to fill vacancies or skills gaps – and potentially make an additional impact by helping some of the most vulnerable people in our community – employing refugees might be an option you haven’t fully considered.
What are the leadership lessons that stay with us long after the books have been read and the courses have finished? In this series, we sit down with some of Australia’s most influential NFP leaders to explore the defining moments and insights that have shaped how they lead.
For our second post in this series, we spoke with Ronni Kahn AO, the founder, former CEO and now ‘visionary in residence’ at OzHarvest. Since rescuing her first surplus food in 2004, Ronni has grown OzHarvest into Australia’s leading food rescue organisation, recovering quality food that would otherwise go to waste from supermarkets, restaurants, farmers and businesses, and delivering it to charities that support people experiencing food insecurity. Along the way, she’s built a national team of staff and thousands of volunteers united by a shared purpose.
Here, Ronni shares the leadership principles that have guided her from day one.
Most people tend to think of the workplace as a meritocracy: if people have the right skills and experience, work hard and perform well, they have the same opportunity to succeed.
But socioeconomic background can shape people’s working lives in ways that are not easily visible – influencing who gets hired, who progresses, who feels they belong and ultimately who reaches senior positions.
In Australia, one in three children born into the lowest 20 per cent of income-earning families will still be in that group by adulthood.
So what can NFP employers do to work out where those barriers are showing up in their workplaces, and how can they remove them?