Companies support nonprofits for multiple reasons, some altruistic (the leaders genuinely care about the cause) and some pragmatic (aligning with a cause is good for the brand and for employee morale). Generally, business leaders approach such relationships with a patronizing attitude, infusing cash while deigning to teach bighearted but wooly-headed do-gooders how to fundraise, budget, and operate efficiently. It never occurs to most that they can learn just as much from nonprofits as nonprofits can learn from them.
Since its inception, Life Is Good has involved itself in children’s causes. Seven years ago we changed our strategy from supporting multiple 501(c)(3)s to formally incorporating one such charity into our organization. Project Joy was founded by Steve Gross to train and support teachers, social workers, pediatric nurses, and others helping children traumatized by violence, poverty, or illness. Renamed Life Is Good Playmakers, Steve’s organization is helping transform Life Is Good from a lifestyle brand to a life-changing brand.
Once firmly in the fold, Steve began presenting at our quarterly meetings, describing programs that his group had developed to help frontline caretakers gently reengage fearful, at times emotionally frozen, children through the power of play. Then something unexpected happened. Some Life Is Good staff wanted to do the training too. Among them were parents interested in new ways to interact with their kids. But most were managers and executives who saw a different possibility. Playmakers is only superficially about play; it is fundamentally about connection. Our managers understood that forging more profound connections with each other, with employees, and even with suppliers and retailers could improve everything from productivity to morale within our business.
To date, roughly 15 percent of the company has completed some level of Playmakers training. And the nonprofit’s imprint is everywhere at Life Is Good. For example, meeting leaders no longer expect team members–still hung over from the previous meeting–to launch immediately into a rat-a-tat-tat agenda. Instead, they ease them in with a warm-up circle, two or three minutes in which participants might bat a beach ball around the room or stretch their limbs in a vigorous round of jumping jacks. Our HR team kicked off proceedings at a recent conclave with silent meditation against a background of soothing Himalayan music. People emerged so energized and creatively fertile that the meeting was concluded effectively in just 15 minutes.
The language of Playmakers, informed by a deep understanding of psychology, has also crept into the Life Is Good vernacular. Human beings prefer road maps to marching orders, so where once we were “leaders” and “managers” increasingly we are “navigators” and “guides.” Playmakers uses the term “cat hair” to describe a fear-inducing person, behavior, or artifact. (The psychologist Jaak Panksepp demonstrated that exposing young rats to a bit of feline fluff induces stress and inhibits play and exploration.) At Life Is Good we have become alert for “cat hairs,” which could be toxic managers or practices that squelch debate.
Playmakers created an assessment its trainees use to see how well they know the vulnerable children in their care. What is this child’s favorite movie or sport? What does he or she like to do on a rainy Saturday? The emphasis on treating kids as individual, idiosyncratic human beings instead of data on a clipboard brought home how little many of us at Life Is Good knew one another. Starting with the navigation team, we have embarked on a get-acquainted initiative in which people pick three names from a hat and then take those employees, one at a time, for a business-agenda-less lunch or breakfast. We have also adopted a Playmakers tool called “news ball,” which invites people to share a happy- or sad-making dispatch from their lives before meetings. The more we understand each other, the greater our chances are of collaborating successfully.
As our for-profit and nonprofit sides grow in tandem, Life Is Good continues to absorb new lessons from Playmakers. For example, we are conducting a staff-wide survey to determine our organizational playfulness profile, a Playmakers-grown tool that rates groups across four domains: joyfulness, social interaction, active engagement, and internal control (how safe and empowering the environment feels). It goes without saying that Life Is Good educates Playmakers in such worthy capitalist skills as marketing, management, and finance. Interaction between the sides has produced a kinder, smarter, and more productive organization overall.
Of course, the specifics of what your company learns will depend on your charitable partners. Regardless of whether they are working to eliminate diabetes or clean up the ocean or provide clean drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa, I guarantee there is something they are doing to make the world a better place that could also make your business a better place. The smartest capitalists today and in the future will integrate social work into their businesses because their customers demand it, because it enables deeper purpose to their work, and because it strengthens their organizations.
http://www.inc.com/bert-jacobs/what-for-profits-can-learn-from-non-profits.html