Getting things done, internally

Photos: RODNAE Productions on Pexels and (insert) Avelino Calvar Martinez on Burst

This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

Introduction

I’ve used this web page to cover anything that you need to “get things done” with other people, apart from persuasive communication techniques.

Many trust fundraisers will read this and wonder what all the fuss is about – internal relations for them are basically great. However, charities vary enormously in how well things work and some of the most intractable and uncomfortable situations I’ve dealt with mentoring other trust fundraisers have been where they’ve struggled to get other people to do what was needed for trust fundraising.

There are also charities where the single most valuable thing you can do is to creatively thread together the different opportunities for funders and senior and junior Services staff. In such places, your role as an effective networker and mediator is key to creating situations where big applications, significantly impacting the organisations work and your targets, can flourish.

My definition of “getting things done” includes understanding and working with things like departmental and team goals, people’s personalities, ambitions, unquestioning ways of seeing things and unspoken agendas, also how you ensure positive internal perceptions.

There is a lot that good people still have to do, in order to make things work smoothly, positively and extremely effectively. I’m proud and inspired to have worked with great numbers of extremely good, decent, committed people, but you still need to cover a bit more than just the most rational of considerations.

Skills for the most difficult situations

At the same time, you need the skills to deal with occasional politically difficult people. A minority of the very senior people I’ve known, for example, have been ambitious, a little ruthless and not that interested in the needs of a junior member of staff in another department. 

What toxic political situations may look like for you are:

• Problems getting internal permission to fundraise for specific projects
• Pressures to fundraise for, in some sense, the “wrong” thing
• Monies raised not counting towards target – seen as “nice” but not important
• Projects not being ready – not developed enough
• Being unable to get the necessary information
• Struggles to get completed applications sent out
• Challenges getting issues on the project addressed
• Projects getting sabotaged in some way internally
• Whether staff will take ownership of work or responsibilities
• Restructures
• Raising a lot of money but still getting your contract ended

“Politics? I’m out of here!”

I’ve been in a lot of charities with zero, or almost zero, politics – but occasionally in quite “political” places. It’s easy to feel a sense of dread, but what you’re saying is: you’re closing yourself to the opportunities some organisations also present. The most issues getting things done tend to come up where:

• Organisational change is happening
• You work cross-departmentally
• The goals are ambiguous/flexible
• There are most silos (typically, in the biggest charities)
• You work with people you see little of (again, the biggest charities)

In any of those situations my antennae would be out for politics and where a number of these factors apply, I’d be very careful. At the same time, charities where all of those five factors are in play can be some of the most rewarding and fun places to work. The chances are, you’ll be able to make the most difference and be stretched the most intellectually. The single most political charity I’ve ever worked at is also the one I look back at with most pride for some of the services I funded. If you like a challenge, it’s great.

A lot of what follows, though, is just about how you do your job well, with actual, real (and normally good) people.

Relationships

Your job is to create many informal teams. Teams involve:

• Shared objectives
• Relationships One of the professors at Stamford Business School says: share, and especially share feelings. If you think about what you could share: if you never share anything of consequence, people will pick that up. If you share everything, you’re behaving inappropriately and probably taking too much of a risk. On the other hand, if you think in terms of about 15% of what it would be a risk to share, the easiest 15%, says X, that’s maybe the right level. The relationship develops a bit, through trust and openness: you share, then at some stage they reciprocate, encouraging a bit more openness in you and so on.

When to work with others

Rob Cross, author of Beyond Collaboration Overload, highlights that people are spending more and more time on collaborative work and it’s affecting productivity. They do it with the right motives – fear of missing out; desire to help / for status / accomplishment; dealing with emails or nasty bosses. It’s hard to argue with many of them, he says. However, he says it feels great and right until the last moment when suddenly it doesn’t. One of the best things someone who worked for me did to impact her productivity was to push back on the expectations that she attend meetings.

However, our work doesn’t exist in isolation and some of the people I’ve seen struggle most are those who wanted it to – to just sit there and have everything they needed come to them. So, a lot of the following is about effective co-working techniques.

Silo-busting

The Harvard Business Review article Silo Busting article focuses on coordination, cooperation and capability building as ways of breaking down silos to better serve the needs of customers. Amongst the range of techniques highlighted as used by businesses successfully breaking down silos are:

• Incentives for the staff involved
• Use of language and promoting the right culture
• Enough personal contact between relevant staff
• Restructuring the organisation
• Top management siting key responsibilities with senior staff
• Training/CPD so staff can become more generalist
• Ensuring that staff with generalist skills have a career path

A lot of these will be beyond trust fundraisers most of the time, but that’s a bit of a checklist for broad areas to consider, to which I’d add things like: influencing skills; good communication/impressions; and quick wins (nothing works to change things like clear, notable successes and failures).

Influencing situations through people

To quote Aryanne Oade in Building Influence in the Workplace, ‘The hallmark of a truly influential member of a workplace is that they have learned how to influence specific key people on the specific key issues over which they would like to have influence.’ To be truly effective in your role, you need to:

• Know the right people It’s tempting to try and work from your desk, through emails. However, that’s tantamount to pretending people don’t matter in the work. Even senior people are a little bit approachable – they spend their whole days being interrupted (as studies show) and whilst their time is of course precious, they are very used to accommodating people slightly and they usually have excellent people skills. I like to be friendly with almost everyone, if I can – it’s not just nicer, it’s helpful if I need something.

• • Understand what they want, finding common ground in terms of goals. I like to get to know the people in Services – who they are, what the team goals are but also, what they’re trying to achieve in their jobs, what their ambitions are. I occasionally ask questions like “What would you do if you had more funding?” I’m clear that I often can’t help further them, but I can keep an eye out. (You have to be careful that this doesn’t come across as you trying to “buy” them – but a good way of working is if you can develop a bit of reciprocality in a sense, as discussed under influencing techniques.)

• Understand how senior people are different Under the “Manage your manager” tab, the page on managing senior managers covers a lot about how they differ

• • You need to understand the personalities of others. For example, Oade says you need to adapt to each person’s style, values and preferences. That could include:
    • To persuade those who want to control events, stress the utility of using your ideas.
    • For those who focus on structure and quality, be logical and target great results.
    • To influence people who like to build rapport and relationships, you must dwell on teamwork and collaboration.
    • For those who facilitate and network, explain how your ideas build their prestige.
  • Develop internal champions This was a great piece of advice from the former Head of Trusts at Scope to an Institute of Fundraising conference. You want people to be on your side in meetings you aren’t at. People to start with are: those who need the most from you; people who’re mentoring you; and those who just “get it”. Incidentally, Professor of Influence Robert Cialdini found that you’re perceived as more prestigious if someone is advocating for you.

• Your natural allies are people who share goals. However, Cialdini also found that people who’ve done something for you and worked towards common goals with you are more likely to be on your side than those who haven’t.

• Informal social networks It’s easy to be sniffy about such things, but there are people who hear key news earlier/more often that way.
• Never waver from your sense of what is right and wrong. People studying power find that Machievellian figures are deeply distrusted, and even more so in our sector where there’s a culture of “niceness” and where we’re supposed to be the good guys. Machievelli was writing in a turbulent environment where vicious power struggles were the norm. You will get further if you have a sense of moral leadership than if you’re playing power games.

Influence through understanding the situation

“Knowledge is power” is a theme running through Michel Foucault’s work on organisations. It’s a key reason you can be persuasive internally, despite being a very junior person. To be able to get what you need done, you need to:

• Understand how people think. You cannot fully do this until you know:

• • • Their Organisational, Departmental and Team goals and strategies
    • Are they trying to build their work (and if so, how) or do they just want a quiet life?
    • Where do they want to be taking their work/team/division?
    • The culture they’re part of – especially, is there a “party line” on issues of concern to you?
    • What their body language means. People give away a lot regarding how they feel about things in this way. It’s well worth being able to recognize: liking/disliking; openness/closedness; deception; maybe status-type thoughts (e.g., superiority)
    • Beware of “yes people” or “box tickers” as regards their reliability

• Wider situational factors:

• • • Know and have thought about any “elephants in the room”: the kinds of realities that people know, but maybe don’t want to mention.
    • Avoid being sucked into “group think” or moaning
    • Underlying values, such as: short- or long-termism; relevant values of the charity; attitudes to risk
    • Don’t assume senior staff will always back you. Even if you know them well, you won’t know everything they’re having to take into account

• Organisational culture. The following dimensions of culture might be relevant in working out how to get things done at your charity:

• • Organisations where direct approaches are very accepted versus those where more indirect approaches, leaving more to be inferred,  work better
  • Tight culture (many norms and little tolerance for deviation – more common in, say, care charities) versus loose culture (many different ways of doing things are tolerated)
  • Hierarchical organisations (say, schools or hospitals) versus egalitarian (e.g., my current highly user-led organisation)
  • Collectivist (group success is more important than individual success) versus individualist
  •  Objective (strongly favouring objective evidence) versus charities where subjective experience and views are more accepted
• Understand how decisions are made, not just who decides. For example, unless you get a good brief from your own senior management, you might need a few goes to get something past your Senior Management Team in a straightforward way.

Your sources of power in situations

French and Raven identified six types of power:

Expert – This is based on your high levels of skill and knowledge. It’s worth dropping in bits of information, to position yourself as the expert. I’d always rely on this one before any other, because it’s easily the most constructive. Developing that skill and knowledge also builds your potential to do good in the future.

Referent – This is the result of being liked and respected. As various gurus highlight (Richard Vargas from project management, Richard Kaufman from marketing and business) if you’re seen to be delivering at a high level, that’s more power you have. At a presentation to the IoF National Conference, the then Head of FR at Scope presented this as one of two key ideas for a trust fundraiser to get their way with Services (the other being to have an internal champion). Ditto, if you come with a reputation. So, you need not just to deliver but to be seen, by Services and with your management, to deliver. Even if the application doesn’t work, if people have seen that you’ve done a great job, that will increase your influence in the future. 

Legitimate – This comes from your formal position in the organisation. E.g.: your job may give you the right to decide what project to assign to a funder. Be aware that people might sometimes still struggle with you over this, it can be better as your fallback source of influence than your first choice.

Reward – This results from your ability to compensate another – e.g., assigning a funding opportunity to their work. (Be careful though – being seen to be allocating funding to someone, especially a senior person, for other than the right reasons is a serious faux pas.)

Coercive – If you could punish others for noncompliance, you’d have coercive power. You may not be able to do that, but if you can position yourself as the spokesperson for the funder in warning what they might do, you may be able to use their coercive power. Clearly, that would need care: negativity and machiavellianism don’t go down well.

Informational (one that French added to the list later on) This comes from a person’s ability to control the information that others need, sharing, using or holding it back.

To those I’d add: 

• You normally have more thinking time and time to work out what exactly is really going on in the situation. So, you can use your expert power well. None of that necessarily trumps seniority, but it can do.
• The final source of your authority between departments, when push comes to shove, is sometimes actually not you, but the funder. Money talks. It’s about leveraging your understanding of them and acting as a conduit for their decisions.

What works in influencing others?

…I’ve filled out a list from a Harvard Business Review book on this. In declining order:

• It fulfils the other person’s agenda. (Not sure why this wasn’t on HBR’s list!) 
• Power you exercise through role in the organisation (NB: the funder can have power even when you don’t, which is a reason to reference them in the conversation)
• Authority (skills and knowledge) – can be a good one for Trust fundraisers who may have time to research & think things through. Expose your expertise a bit. However, junior staff can be assumed not to have it so you may need to time to establish your authority
• Passion
• Sometimes, non-verbal communication – cues, timing, etc

Professor of influencing theory Robert Cialdini offers some very different ideas, which are much less well known but will offer at least a degree of leverage:

1. People do more for those they like…

1. Who clearly like them
2. Who you’ve established common ground with
3. Who offer genuine praise

2. People repay in kind
3. People follow the lead of others who are similar to them (in trust fundraising: if one team works well with you, ensure the others know)
4. People align with their clear, public commitments (in trust fundraising: ensure Services’ commitments are widely known)

Common indications that someone’s being less than honest with you

I recommend a book on this at the end, as it’s not really a topic specific to trust FR. However, three of the more common signs that something may be wrong are:

• Unsuitable nervousness and anxiety
• Pretense of a lack of interest in your questions
• The answer sounds rehearsed

Clearly, there are lots of other reasons why the speaker might be nervous, rehearsed or feigning disinterest, not all of which you’ll guess at the time, but it’s a flag that something might be happening.

I thoroughly recommend watching training videos on relevant body language, too.

Build shared strategies

If you’re going to be somewhere for a few years, you may not get parts of what you want until Years 2 or 3. If you learn where people are trying to go, speak up yourself and keep some consistent focus on the long-term end result, you’ll get further.

In organisations where there’s a lot of change, by pursuing the same things consistently, building support towards your goals, you can often get further than would initially appear possible. 

Making the right impression

There’s a separate webpage on internal customer service. That’s definitely the most important part of making the right impression. However, there IS more.

• Thank your colleagues in Services and speak well of them to others (it can get back to them)
• Speak out (but don’t be domineering)
• Establish a connection with opponents – if you get on well with everyone rather than sulking, it looks professional
• Protect everyone’s egos (especially senior staff)
• Understand other people’s communication styles, so you can use them when appropriate
• Try to build a sense of shared strategy
• As a trust fundraiser, you should have an impeccable sense of discretion and ability to keep a secret. There’s plenty that could be shared with you that would normally be above your pay grade. You need to show you can handle that information
• It’s a big help if you appear to know plenty about the funder and at least more than anyone else in the room. Your understanding of them is often your trump card.

That means:

• Impulse control
• Be positive and win:win
• If things are difficult, don’t personalize issues, but be curious about the facts. (This is much more powerful than it might initially look – try it.)
• Be honest and sincere in your relationships and requests
• Take the emotion out of situations, be as objective as you can
• Know the evidence/issues that each party cares about

Providing internal leadership

In Ordinary People, Extraordinary Practices, Kouzes and Posner highlight that, actually, titles don’t define leaders. They propose five leadership practices that you can do at any level of an organisation:

• 1. “Model the way” – Back your words with action, getting precise feedback. ‘If people are going to follow someone willingly, they must believe the individual is honest, competent, inspiring and forward-looking.’
• 2. “Inspire a shared vision” – Talk about exciting possibilities down the road, in their terms. People want to make a difference and be part of something meaningful. Leaders must foster conditions under which people will do things because they want to, not because they have to.
• 3. “Challenge the process” – Be prepared to experiment. Seize the initiative. Incremental change is more effective and less intimidating than a major overhaul.
• 4. “Enable others to act” – Leadership is a joint venture. Allow them to contribute, make decisions and take chances. Help teammates who might be struggling with challenging assignments. Pay attention when others express concern or hesitancy. Ask questions that convey sincere interest,
• 5. “Encourage the heart” – Demonstrate your belief in your co-workers. Stay visible, stay positive.

If you need to set your charity in a new direction as regards trust fundraising, showing leadership is a useful part of that and there’s a lot of good, concrete advice in their book. (As of 19.07.21 it was only available in the USA, so you might need to look abroad for a copy – sorry for the obscure book, most books on the subject are for managers!)

Serious organisational change

If you really want to change things deeply (a big challenge, that most of us rarely attempt) you need to look into something called “change management theory”. The key figure is someone called John Kotter, whose key book is Leading Change. The fundamentals are:

• Get senior buy-in and form a powerful coalition in favour
• Create urgency, a really overwhelming impetus for change now
• Create a clear and communicate vision of the change
• Get buy-in from those affected
• Overcome the key obstacles (e.g., maybe try and sideline the most challenging individuals)
• Empower action; assess & address impact
• Communication & Preparedness
• Quick wins & champions
• Don’t let up – build on the change and keep going to make it stick

Kotter argues that the key reasons change initiatives fail are: (1) there’s sense of urgency; and (2) people think it’s over after the “quick wins” and slack off, when actually you may not even be halfway to lasting change, yet.

If that framework doesn’t look like it covers your issues, there’s a terrific overview of the wider field, called Making Sense of Change Management: a Complete Guide to the Models, Tools and Techniques of Organisational Change by Cameron and Green. Alternatively, the problem-solving materials on this site may help.

Dealing with politically manipulative people

We’re generally lucky in our sector that there’s so little of this. However, you DO very occasionally meet people who fancy themselves as “players”, as in any walk of life. My own experience of this has been, if you show you can deal with it perfectly well, they stop messing around like that. The following are some good ideas out of the books 21 Dirty Tricks at Work and 21 More Dirty Tricks at Work that might help with things I’ve seen at least once in the last 30 years. Clearly you’d need to use tact and sensitivity, especially with senior staff, but they were interesting ideas:

• Being a bystander in a situation which will go horribly wrong, but not helping: Ask the bystander what they think will happen. Question them to reveal their position on the issue
• Delaying taking a decision by asking for more information, until the proponent gives up: Ask what their criteria for green lighting the work might be. It’s worth noting that senior staff can like making decision in small increments, so you need to spot if that’s what’s happening and get from them how they want to get that process complete in the available time
• Hiding a belief about the situation through indirect statements: Ask clarification questions
• Avoiding work by pretending to be overstretched: Ask how the work fits with priorities; agree a specific way forwards, with a specific date
• Leaving people off distribution lists, so they miss meetings: Ask why; ask what the process for the meeting is and who’s the direct organiser; what’s the root cause if it’s happened a few times?
• Being offered people to resource a project who are clearly not up to the job (when there are other options): Short 1:1 meetings with key staff, politely testing how they came to nominate each person. Q: “what talents do they bring to the team?” “Who else might be available?” and asking if you can have person X on the team

If these don’t cover your needs, or you need to dig more deeply into any of them, I suggest you get the books I named, which are cheap, quick reads on Kindle.

General points about dealing with manipulative people

Long-term relationships are important and people can have egos. Robert Greeene is more of an author than the level of authority I usually like to reference in this site, but he makes the interesting claim that the higher up the management tree they are, the more insecure the staff are. (How that fits with the more widely accepted claim that senior staff sometimes think they’re bulletproof, I don’t know. It’s interesting, though.) Anyway, I’d suggest you should be careful about making senior staff lose face and very careful that your judgements don’t actually reflect your (perfectly understandable) anger. 

At one charity, a Director clearly saw themselves as a bit of a player and had been playing fast and loose with the Trusts team for years. I very obviously outmanoeuvred them on something of a little significance. Afterwards, they avoided working directly with me ever again and rarely answered my emails. By prioritising the situation over my long-term relationship with them, I lost out quite badly.

Some more points about how to take manipulative people on in a skillful, tactful way:

• Choose your battles
• Ask great questions
• Get specifics – what and who
• Have lots of positive ideas for ways forward that work for everyone
• What other options have they ignored / cannot see?
• Be prepared and rehearsed when it comes to the meeting
• Being direct can work
• Sometimes exposure of the technique works
• Encourage a culture of honesty about mistakes
• Don’t burn your bridges with them (as I accidentally did in the above example)
• Being assertive, but defensively rather than attacking others
• Don’t back them into a corner
• Be able to “get over it”
• Enquire about the “big picture”
• Know when you can just ignore things

Further reading

If you need to go into interpersonal relations very carefully, Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature is very good. (Sorry, again to be citing someone who’s not a leading authority – he just wrote a very comprehensive and useful book.) The chapter on The Court and its Courtiers is very good on dysfunctional types, for example. Some people may find it Machiavellian, but I think his heart is in the right place. You can be a good, decent person but still very politically aware and astute. I’ve spent over a year on retreat, doing Buddhist practices to make me a more compassionate person who cares about the world (hence this web site!) but I still believe you have to live in the real world.

It’s worth mentioning that, unlike the great majority of the recommendations in this web site, it’s written by an autodidact author, rather than an acknowledged expert with extensive academic/practical experience.

It’s a weighty tome, but the following are Spotify links to 1 ½ hours of discussions of good bits of the book:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/73ro5Rf5D7Q4b16M5hclui?si=338a972a4017421d

https://open.spotify.com/episode/69tzA71MpnGYcmuwatPFDG?si=051f5d429cc0402e

I’d also strongly recommend learning about body language, though body language takes a lot of learning, to do and read well. There are two facets to this, the most important one in a highly political organisation is being able to read body language. There’s also using the right body language, yourself (for example, in meetings). There’s a lot to cover, so a thick book or two like Body Language for Dummies could be a good choice. The most important thing is that it has lots and lots of illustrations (and that the coverage is general, a few are about picking up a partner!) 

Even better might be a good long online course including lots of film of people actually doing body language (beware of the many courses that are really powerpoint presentations or whiteboard animations). For example, I spotted a very good course on microexpressions that reveal lying, on Udemy.

A simpler, science-based/experiments-based book of useful techniques to reveal people’s thoughts is that You Can Read Anyone by David J Lieberman. I saw this recommended by a professional magician who performs mind reading stunts. The book is a good reference to pull out when you’re planning for a key meeting where you think you’re going to have to elicit something that people won’t be forthcoming about, be it a particular fact or state or mind or awareness of something. However, Liberman’s approach to learning hidden truths relies on a lot of specific different techniques, which you’ll need to have to hand. So, it’s not something you can be subconsciously using all the time to inform you, unlike reading body language, unless you’re really good. At the same time, it does cover things that body language won’t help you with, as body language is largely about reading emotions and a few other mental processes.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is the classic book on developing charm, which is invaluable to trust fundraisers in getting things done.

The Chapter on Charisma in Seduction, by Robert Greene, is very good if you’re struggling to project in groups, as opposed to with individuals.

How to lead when you’re not in charge by Gary Hammel and Polly La Barre is a nice little article on the Harvard Business Review site about the titular subject.