Truly, can a troubled organization make a successful 180?

Corporate and non-profit leaders alike have tackled this question — from the staff of the Harvard Business Review to Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser in The Art of the Turnaround. Last week, Jan Glick offered the Stanford Social Innovation Review a glimpse into his new book, Nonprofit Turnaround, which serves as a guide both for non-profit leaders and for those who advise and fund their work. In this post, he points to the case of Mary McKinney who engineered a successful turnaround of the Alcohol and Drug Council of Middle Tennessee:

… McKinney began to oversee changes to the Council’s management, meeting with different constituencies to chart a strategic planning process. The new Council management soon determined that it had lost sight of the organization’s vision by trying to be all things to all people and chasing funding. It had fallen victim to mission creep. [...]

“Before the turnaround, we used to serve anyone,” said McKinney. “Over a couple of years, we switched focus to serve people who are the most vulnerable, most in need. [...] These changes have actually helped us in our fundraising. We redefined who our customer is.”

In other words, McKinney actually grew and developed and, yes, turned around her organization by making it smaller.

“Smaller” is perhaps not the right word; “specific” or “targeted” is more apt. But Glick and McKinney hit upon an essential point: smaller, precise focus can lead to larger success. Frequently, organizations that serve the public — whether they provide much-needed job training or transcendent performance — want to be there for everyone. Leaders crave inclusion and diversity and openness, as well they should. But as McKinney suggests, that very craving can transform into a troubling and problematic conviction: that being “all things to all people” is the only way to stay viable.

What she and her team discovered was that exclusion could be beneficial — and that focusing on specific people with specific needs made her organization (in fact) more viable. They ultimately determined a few services that they could provide at the highest level to a targeted, needy population. And that discovery, that narrowing of focus and redefinition of “who our customer is,” helped them to develop as a service-provider and to turn around. Moreover, with all resources focused on a few key outcomes rather than several broad objectives, her fundraising efforts yielded better results. After all, what is cooler and more compelling than offering an answer to a specific and heretofore undefined problem?

The post focuses on human service non-profits, rather than cultural or educational organizations, but I believe that the idea can apply there as well. Personally, I find the Greater Washington performance community (and the Catalogue arts and culture non-profits) so exciting because each organization’s work is so specific — because our theater and dance and arts education non-profits each have landed upon a style that is so uniquely theirs, an experience that no one else can duplicate. And the creation of those incomprable experience requires the same daring that McKinney discusses. Daring to be a bit narrow, to be very specific, to be utterly clear in who you are.

In conclusion, Glick writes that “McKinney was successful because she had the courage to lead a process that involved major organizational decisions, including staff and program changes and cuts.” His book offers 100 other studies, so her example clearly cannot stand in for all of them. But he also highlighted it for a reason, perhaps to reassure other leaders that sometimes, well, you need to articulate what you don’t do. Large, comprehensive human service organizations are of course essential to our local communities and our nation, but small organizations can have a unique power and impact because they are small. And focusing and (perhaps) even cutting is sometimes a lot like growing.

What do you think? Does it “pay” to be specific and (arguably) exclusionary? What are the other essential and perhaps counter-intuitive steps to organizational development and turnaround?