Being on the same page matters.
In our 2012 research publication Employee Empowerment: The Key to Foundation Staff Satisfaction, we found that one of the key predictors of employee empowerment is the degree of alignment staff feel with the goals of the CEO and the board. Staff who believe they are working toward the same goals as their foundation’s CEO and board tend to feel more empowered than staff who don’t.
However, we also found that a sizable proportion of the 1,168 staff members in this study—14 percent—report that they “do not know” whether they are working toward the same goals as their CEO. Across the 31 foundations included in this research, the percentage of staff members saying they do not know whether they are working toward the same goals as the CEO ranges from zero to 35 percent of staff.
Those respondents who indicate that they don’t know whether they are working toward the same goals as the CEO are having a less positive experience across a number of dimensions that relate to their daily experience at work and their ability to carry out their jobs. They rate significantly lower on nearly a dozen concepts in our survey including employee empowerment, how excited they are about their contributions to the foundation’s goals, and the opportunities they have to learn and grow at work.
The chart below shows differences on key measures between staff who know the extent to which they are working toward the same goals as their CEO and staff who do not.One staff member who does not know whether she is working toward the same goals as her CEO suggests, “Rather than having differing opinions among managers about our goals and work, be sure all members of leadership stand behind the views and decisions of the CEO.”
CEOs and boards depend on staff to make progress toward important goals. The fact that more than one in 10 staff don’t even know if they are working toward the same goals as their CEO suggests a failure of communication within foundations.
Many experts on leadership—perhaps most famously Harvard Business School’s John Kotter, in his landmark 1996 book Leading Change—have observed that leaders tend to massively underestimate the need to communicate their vision, and that this has real costs. Our foundation staff survey data suggests that Kotter’s observation still applies.
Ramya Gopal is a Senior Research Analyst at the Center for Effective Philanthropy and co-author of Employee Empowerment: The Key to Foundation Staff Satisfaction.
