Step One: get rid of the baddies

One of the reasons I became the director of my non-profit is my ignorance. I didn't know how to read a balance sheet and so I did not fully realize how much trouble the company (it's a non-profit, but that's a company too) was really in. I knew I could use my classroom management skills to manage a team, but when it came to the numbers, I was completely useless. The other reason I becamse director was because I genuinely believed in the Association and wanted it to do well. I also couldn't think of anyone at the time who believed in it as much as I did.

My strength, though, was that my experience as a classroom teacher in the States and in Italy taught me that status and responsibility aren't always related. The fact that I wasn't concerned with it (if you're a teacher, you're not expecting much in terms of prestige or pay, let's face it) but WAS concerned with performance, probably made me a good choice for not making the same mistakes my predecessors had done. In Italy, titles are important. The moment you become a MANAGER, or a DIRECTOR or a PRESIDENT, you change status and people want to know you.

But... to be important in Italy you have to communicate complete COMPETENCE. That's why my Association, over 30 years, went deeper and deeper into debt and no one seemed to know a thing about it (except the people who were constantly waiting for payment, of course). The people in charge never let anyone know that they were in trouble. Asking for help, or showing any kind of transparency, for that matter, communicates WEAKNESS. And that is a no-no.

Then I came along and everything changed.

For starters, I asked for help and told people about the real situation, foolishly thinking that this would ignite some kind of collective effort to save the Association. I learned a lot from doing this. For one thing, the exact OPPOSITE happened. People who were in a position to help us DISAPPEARED. At first I didn't understand this, but later I realized that these people were the problem (a disgruntled board member AND, not surprisingly, the accountant, also a board member, and whose lousy advice exacerbated the problem. When things got really bad, he actually threatened to SUE US!!) and they did not want their names to be connected to these kinds of problems. Good riddance.

This is an important part of the initial Clean up. Getting rid of the BADDIES.

This was step one to purification.

Step two was choosing a team to share the burden.