Personal development: creating your own strategic positioning.

Now that a marathon Saturday session is over and your organization's strategy is set, it's time for you to develop your own parallel personal strategic position.

One of the least appreciated aspects of strategy development is that individuals, especially managers and executives, need to he aligned to the strategy just as much as the structure and other major processes of their organization do. A little proactive thinking on everyone's part about how they can fit into the new strategy will help both parties.

It is generally accepted that nonprofit organizations have life cycles. Less well recognized is how those life cycles affect the people in the organization. Because the nonprofit must do different things during different cycles, it will demand different things of the people who manage it and work in it.

To put it more concretely, if you want to get an idea of where an organization is headed, watch where its best people go. When a part of the organization is growing or innovating, those on the inside know it and it is usually in everyone's interests for them to make a shift. The resources and management attention directed to that part tend to act like a magnet for talent. Similarly, when a nonprofit is drifting or downright failing it is an open secret, and the best people start moving out of the organization.

Where is your group headed? More importantly, how can you best position yourself to take advantage of the opportunities created by the new strategy?

The answer is to follow the personal equivalent of the organizational strategy-setting process, called strategic positioning: examine your environment (in this case, the organization); take an inventory of your personal strengths; decide where you want to be relative to the organization over the next several years; then create a personal development plan that will get you there. Here are each of these steps in order.

Scan your environment

As an insider, your personal environment is the organization. What the organization will look like in five to 10 years, what it will emphasize and what it is trying to become will have a lot to say about your professional development. There are a handful of variables that will largely determine your happiness and success as a professional. Examine them closely.

Demand for services

What general market or markets for its services does the organization want to be in? How do those markets differ from where the organization is now? What are the demographics and related trends in those markets? Is demand growing, contracting, or staying the same?

Users of the services

Within those markets, who are the projected users of the services, and how are they the same or different from the ones currently being served? If your theater plans to supplement its symphony series with country and western acts, the future overall portrait of attendees will look very different from the way it looks now, which could have implications for you.

Geography

All nonprofits are geographically-oriented. Will your organization's geographic spread be changing? Will sites be added or subtracted, or will it remain unchanged? Within that geography, what are the expected trends? New geography brings new opportunities.

Co-workers

Co-workers often make a pivotal difference in a nonprofit job. How will your co-workers be changing? Will there be additional numbers of employees, more turnover, less turnover? Might there be a contraction of the work force? Will the skill level and socio-economics of your future co-workers change appreciably? Where will the new people be coming from? Will they create a more competitive environment, or simply add to an existing base? Co-workers are enormously powerful in changing an organization's culture, which is a big factor in most people's comfort level. Can you intuit where tomorrow's workers will come from and what cultural values they'll bring?

Personal assets

What type of personal assets--education, skills, and knowledge--will the organization need to carry out the strategy? How will this differ, if at all, from what it currently needs? Pay particular attention to the future skills that the strategy will require. Technical skills often go in and out of demand, whereas generic abilities like people skills or communication skills tend to be steadily in demand.

Inventory your personal strengths

Next, critically examine your existing strengths against the same categories listed above. Look honestly for your strengths, because that's what you'll build your personal strategic position on.

For market-related questions, consider the implications for you of any new markets. Ask yourself whether you will be comfortable serving a new market, or giving up an old one if that's the case. Do the same for future users of the services. You may not like country and western music, but do you like its fans?

Geography might be out of your control but at least understand what it means for you personally. Typically, people in higher paid and/or professional positions tend to have a broader range of acceptable geography, whereas other positions to be filled by people from a narrower geographic range. Is the future geography going with you, against you, or unchanged?

As with users of your organization's services, your future co-workers are not a controllable variable. Assessing where your co-workers are currently strong will help you better understand what the organization is going to require in the future to build on those strengths.

Finally, everyone in an organization is expected to make a deposit in the knowledge and skill bank. What is the nature of your current contribution? What things are you good at? What contributions of yours do others seem to value most? The most critical and manageable part of adapting to your organization's future strategic position is your unique stock of professional assets. These are your strengths, and it is what you'll build on for much of your future personal strategy.

Considering all of the above, decide where you want to be in five years. This is essentially a process of recognizing and deciding to accept the implicit incentives laid out in the strategy. If the changes you project in your environment come true, do you expect to stay put? If so, it's time to decide what your personal strategic position in the organization will look like.

One by one, decide where you want to be with respect to each of the first four variables--the projected demand for the organization's services, the expected users, the desired geography, and your anticipated co-workers. These are all factors that will facilitate your happiness and success.

They are also the least controllable, from an individual's perspective. What is quite controllable is the store of personal assets you bring. The benefit to you of a well-crafted organization strategy is that the handwriting is already on the wail, so you know what to plan for, and you have some time.

This is also a good time to launch your personal development plan by adding some skills that will grow more valuable as the larger strategy is implemented. Depending on your role, these skills could be cultivated in areas like new groups of users or changing program models for the new demand for services.

Happily, in five years you will also be more experienced and more knowledgeable. So, if nothing else, make sure the experience comes in the direction toward which your organization is moving. Education is the obvious way of achieving this, whether it is formal or informal, on site or online.

On the other hand, if you don't like where you see the organization being in five years, then you have already made the preliminary decision to leave. That's okay for now. You still have plenty of time, and things can always change. If not, at least you have established where you want to be and it will be easier to recognize an organization that will help you achieve that.

Organizations have strategies, so should their people. Peer into the future, assess your strengths, decide where you want to be, then launch your personal development plan.

Thomas A. McLaughlin is a national nonprofit management consultant with Grant Thornton in Boston. He is the author of Streetsmart Financial Basics for Nonprofit Managers and the forthcoming book The Art of Strategic Positioning:Decide Where to Be, Plan What to Do (John Wiley and Sons, late 2005). His email address is [e-mail].