Six Steps to Deal With Generational Change in your Organization

by Peter C. Brinckerhoff
Excerpt from Chapter 3 of Generations: The Challenge of A Lifetime for Your Nonprofit,

Taking these steps will help smooth your ride through the transition as your organization prepares for the retirement of its Boomer generation (which largely built the nonprofit sector and still runs its largest institutions). The Six Big Actions are:

1. Include generational issues in planning
While generation change is not an immediate crisis, it will become one without adequate preparation. So start incorporating generational change into your planning at all levels. Generational assessments will determine the age of your clientele; the age of your staff; and the age of your board. Does the age of your board keep you in touch with your clientele? Do succession plans and retirement funds need to be looked at because of the age of your staff?

2. Mentor and discuss among generations
Conflict or resentment is one of the outcomes of actively seeking generational diversity among staff, board, leadership, and volunteers. Mentoring and open discussion is crucial to solving intergenerational conflict. Set up both formal and informal mentoring and discussions to break down barriers between generations.

3. Target market by generation
Rethinking your nonprofit marketing and public relations by generation is crucial to dealing effectively with generational change. While the traditional marketing process is the same, the emphasis and sensitivity analysis is significantly different.

4. Age down
This is both the simplest and most difficult action to take. It is simple, in that you compute the mean age for your board, management, volunteers, and donors, and actively seek to reduce that age. This is difficult in that you must balance your efforts to reduce the mean age against the principle of nondiscrimination and the huge value of Boomers and Greatest Generation members to your organization. This needs to be planned because it will happen.

5. Meet techspectations
Technology is important to your mission effectiveness, organizational development, marketing, fundraising, and management that it goes unnoticed as we think of our organizations. As we deal with generation change, we need to actively deal with technology. The key is to look at ways to use technology to bridge the generation divide, to accommodate the wants of different age groups, to make your organization more efficient and effective as it goes through generation change.

6. Ask
Whenever you cross into new territory, it is smart to ask, observe, and listen. With generation issues, we are often on new turf so we need to be asking, and asking constantly. Our past experience may be helpful, but there is so much to learn in this new area.

To read more about what Peter C. Brinckerhoff has to say about generational communication, click here.
 

Last updated: July 2, 2008