Organizational Effectiveness

Highly effective organizations exhibit strengths across five areas: leadership, decision making and structure, people, work processes and systems, and culture. The research and ideas shared here explore these areas in depth, providing useful resources for leaders looking to improve the effectiveness of their organizations.

We also invite you to use the navigation to the right to dive deeper into specific topics.

Featured Insights

When the Change Needs to Be You

When faced with organizational challenges, it’s easy for a nonprofit leader to lock in on everything other than himself to effect change. But what if he is the one who needs to change? In her column, Saroga.org’s Nicki Roth helps leaders assess their need to change and offers guidelines for changing leadership behavior.

Making Organizational Learning Stick

All organizations stand to benefit from internal knowledge capture, surfacing good ideas and sharing good practices. Some organizations also fulfill their missions by engaging with external sharing across their fields or to advance learning as a whole. Whether your goals are internal, external, or both, the right combination of technology- and people-powered processes will play a part in reaching them.

The Effective Organization: Five Questions to Translate Leadership into Strong Management

Effective organizations create results, and to be fully effective, nonprofits must exhibit strengths in five core organizational areas—leadership, decision making and structure, people, work processes and systems, and culture.

RAPID Decision Making: What It Is, Why We Like It, and How to Get the Most Out of It

Decision making can be challenging for nonprofit leadership teams. But using tools—like RAPID®—can help nonprofit leaders and managers identify the activities that must occur in order for a decision to be made well.

Leadership Priorities: What Facets of Management Shouldn't You Delegate?

There aren't enough hours in a day for a nonprofit leader to effectively address all of the issue vying for his or her attention. Delegating some of your responsibilities, and the attendant decision-making authority, can help. However, there are two critical areas of responsibility that cannot be assigned to anyone but the top manager.

Featured Presentations

Designing an Effective Organization

This presentation outlines the basic principles of effective organization structure and describes the pros and cons of various organizational models.

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Leadership Team Development: Leading for Impact

Leading for Impact brings together nonprofit CEOs and their senior team members over a six-month period to build and apply strategic management and team effectiveness skills. During the program leaders learn strategic concepts that Bridgespan uses in our work with clients, and apply these concepts to their organization through a team-based project. Participants have the opportunity to learn from peer leaders from other select nonprofits.

Lack of clear and measurable goals for knowledge sharing
Insufficient incentives to participate in organizational learning
Lack of processes and technology to share knowledge efficiently
Other