I happened to be in New York recently when Hilary Clinton announced her intention to run as a Presidential candidate. Her campaign office is based in Brooklyn. Within a few hours her various opposition candidates had come out in force against her starting the combat or conflict that will consume American media for the remainder of 2015 until the next election in 2016. One local evening news anchor said on the night of the announcement, with a sense of despair, “why don’t politicians just live in harmony, then we all could?”.

It got me thinking about the positives and negatives regarding harmony and conflict.

1. Harmony is not the same thing as the absence of conflict

According to Dictionary.com, conflict is:
(a) A fight, battle, or struggle, strife, controversy or a quarrel
(b) Amongst groups conflict is seen to be a discord of action, feeling, or effect; antagonism or opposition, as of interests or principles.

For many of us, the desire to create a “harmonious” environment is strong. It is believed that this will increase people’s engagement and enjoyment of work. In seeking harmony, many well intentioned leaders take action to suppress or ignore conflict.

This can be a naive and unrealistic expectation. There is no doubt a functional work place is better than a dysfunctional one in terms of productivity. But working with a range of people means there will be natural differences of opinion, agendas and desired outcomes. Indeed diversity of opinions and perspectives often drive insights that lead to innovation or break throughs.

2. Unintended consequences are often worse than the notion of harmony

Trying to create and maintain a harmonious environment through the avoidance of conflict actually creates the unintended consequence of dissatisfaction and potential combat – a far more aggressive and destructive result than the conflict itself.

The “rub” that comes from conflict is an often desired and needed element. These disruptors are the catalysts for creativity, debate and exploration of a broad range of ideas and perspectives, increasing understanding of other views. It can produce creative / innovative outcomes sparking from generative discussions rather than just “holding positions”.

Where this is not encouraged then the conflict doesn’t disappear it just goes underground to bubble up in combative behaviours such as silo mentalities, fiefdom creation, internal competition, dysfunctionality, power plays, lack of transparency, etc, etc. All of these behaviours lead to suboptimal outcomes for the team.

In a recent team meeting within the food industry a leader bravely spoke up to her peers that the reason they as a leadership team had failed to execute on their strategies was that they believed they needed to be nice to each other continually but in reality their functions were ‘fighting it out’ across the organisation and inadvertently sabotaging each other.

This is an unintended consequence of trying to uphold harmony.

3. Creating shared understanding allows for conflict to happen naturally

The real irony is when structures and systems exist to work effectively with conflict, it actually is more likely to create the desired harmony.

When leaders and peers learn how to raise objections, challenge opinion, control their own natural reactions in a mutually understood manner, then a conflict enabling system is created. This allows differences to be aired, for people to feel heard and to actually be heard. This demonstrates respect. Respect for both the person and their perspective. From this position, people are open to reciprocating the same to others. It increases the ability to listen and increases shared understanding.

The key is to have in place systems and structures that enable constructive differences to thrive. The creation of these agreements and processes are often the content of the meetings we facilitate for clients as part of their leadership team as part of the Decide phase of our PALDER model where they are establishing the framework for effective team and organisational performance.

Team members agree on their shared understanding of

• What is our joint purpose? Why does that matter? This information is then used as the reference point and navigation tool.
• How we speak to, interact with and engage with others individually and collectively?
• What kind of language sets are used so everyone recognises when a peer is objecting or challenging an idea and therefore not to take that challenge personally.
• What is the process for decision making amongst the group?
• What is the process for exploration of issues? What is needed to be provided? By when? In what format?

When elements such as these are well articulated and actioned, the ability for conflict to be constructive is heightened.

4. Sometimes, the leader needs to actively cause discomfort to get a raised performance from the organisation

There is little doubt humans like to work for someone they respect rather than someone of whom they are scared. Bullies can achieve results in a short term period but eventually lose discretionary effort as people tire of aggression.

On the flip side however, leaders that are overly harmonious, balanced and even just very nice, also lose out on potential discretionary effort from their team members.

This was highlighted perfectly with a current client recently. He is a new and well liked CEO, who is showing great early promise. His team in a frank feedback session to him, uniformly said they wished he would push them harder rather than just keeping everyone happy. They felt as a collective group they had more to offer. ‘Cause some conflict’, one of them said!

And he will.

This post is sourced directly from OSullivanField blog

You’d think in an era of social media, where we’re all so aware of what everyone else is doing, that it’d be simple to give your organisation a human face. So, do your members know who to contact with questions and concerns?

How do you feel when you dial an 800 number and have to talk to a robot for 20 minutes to get a partial answer to your question? When someone asks a question on your Facebook profile, will anyone respond?

So, in this age of automated sales, web-etiquette and tech, how do you maintain your organisation’s connection with members? Shoot for your biggest target: real people, not a social media statistic.

Mix Your Mixers

You already know better than to set your social media feeds on autopilot and walk away, but another great way to monitor consumer involvement with your organisation is to run contests and challenges. It encourages awareness of your organization on social media and addresses any potential disconnect.

Remember this sort of sharing is essentially a peer-to-peer endorsement. When you have one person saying, “Wow, I love your organisation,” the hope is their colleagues will see the same post and investigate further.

Do the same with occasional in-person mixers. Organise org-meet-community cookouts with raffles to encourage new clientele to come meet your team and, yes, blast them out over your social network too.

The About Page

Perhaps the simplest and most essential space on your website, the About page provides a space for your organisation to show its depth. You’re not just a membership organisation, you’re one with deep ties to the local community. The about section is where you show your clientele why they can trust you and what they will gain by doing business with you.

Gregory Poole CAT does an excellent job with this. Every kid who’s ever owned a Tonka truck knows the brand name CAT because it’s that large of an organisation. But Gregory Poole puts a face on the company by detailing where and how he started the company. Clients don’t learn about a faceless organization from this page, they learn about the hard work and 60+ years of business put in by one family.

Thank-You Follow-up Call

The thank-you note is nearly a lost form of art, but politeness never goes out of style. If a client makes a major purchase, write a thank-you note or pick up the phone and call them. A just-checking-in phone callprovides several opportunities. You can:

• Make a direct connection with your customer
• Provide a specific point of contact — the face for your organization — to your customer
• Express how much your customers matter
• Take a moment to make sure their new product meets expectation
• Remove conversational barriers

If the customer’s interaction with your organization wasn’t memorable before, they won’t forget to talk about it now that you’ve taken a moment to listen to their thoughts or concerns.

Don’t let your organisation oversimplify with technology to the point that you lose human interaction with your customers. Yes, automated social media allows us to market to our customers, but it should also increase our ability to interact with clients on a more personal level.

This article first appeared on Social Fish by Scott Huntington

Across Australia there are many high-performing NFP and commercial organisations, often with long, rich heritages. Individually these organisations are evidently doing a lot of things right. Indeed, some successful organisations have looked at their commercial or NFP counterparts for insights that could boost their businesses even further.

One person who can provide informed commentary on the strengths of both sectors is Steven Cole. He has form in multiple sectors, currently sitting on two ASX-listed company boards (one as deputy chairman) as well as chairing the Western Australian not-for-profit Brightwater Care Group and the statutory QEII Medical Centre Trust.

A strategic blend of the strengths of each sector is useful to consider, he says. Organisations should "think creatively and benchmark themselves beyond their own domain to identify areas for potential improvement." Cole lists 10 areas where he believes not-for-profits and for-profits can look to the other for benchmarking benefit.

Key characteristics of successful for-profit organisations:

1. Strategy

Dedicate appropriate time, resources and effort to long-term strategic issues, even if it’s at the expense of today’s charitable outcomes.

2. Board information

Enhance informed decision making by ensuring the timeliness, quality and adequacy of information flow to the board.

3. Consultants

External input from consultants is both necessary and valuable to supplement lean NFP executive teams.

4. Legacy programs

Jettison programs not central to the organisation’s strategic future, even if they fit the mission.

5. Project disciplines

Rigour in project planning, execution and accountability is non-negotiable.

Key characteristics of successful NFP organisations:

1. Stakeholder respect and engagement

Maintain accountability to, and earn support from, a broad and diverse stakeholder group.

2. Strong culture

Develop a strong, unifying and sustaining organisational culture.

3. Recognise the value of different skills sets

Optimise diversity among upper executives and leadership groups.

4. Team buy-in

Develop relationships and co-operative teamwork towards shared organizational goals.

5. Keep a tight rein on the purse strings

Being frugal yet remaining effective.

"In many ways," says Cole, "the commercial corporation’s strengths are ‘hard’ skills, whereas the NFP sector brings with it ‘softer’ skills. Each can be effective. A healthy blend of the two suites of skills can differentiate high performing organisations with sustained effectiveness, irrespective of the sector."

This post first appeared here on Company Directors blog.

Finding success in the nonprofit space often depends on an organization's digital savviness. Especially when trying to reach a demographic that advocates for good causes with their dollars (hint, hint: millennials), navigating online donations and marketing tactics.

Luckily, it seems leading nonprofits are wising up, according to a new report. The 2015 M+R Benchmarks Study, which will be released in full on Wednesday, analyzed how 84 charitable organizations performed online last year. It found that nonprofits raised nearly $413 million online in 2014, with related revenue increasing 13% year-over-year. is essential.

Online, users gave more than 6.4 million gifts; the average one-time gift was $82, while the average monthly gift was $22. Users also took nearly 7.5 million advocacy actions. However, response rates for fundraising and advocacy emails dropped 12% and 18% from 2013, respectively.

On the social side of things, the nonprofits in the study — which include big names such as Greenpeace USA, the American Red Cross, Human Rights Campaign and the International Fund for Animal Welfare — saw 42% growth in Facebook fans and 34% growth in Twitter followers.

This article first appeared on Mashable: http://mashable.com/2015/04/21/online-giving-data-2014/

Cyber attacks on Australian businesses and government increased by 20 per cent last year, according to a defence force intelligence unit.

The Australian Signals Directorate said the most commonly targeted sectors are banking and finance, resources and energy, defence capability and telecommunications.

"It's an arms race - it's a cyber arms race - where sometimes the bad guys will get a little bit ahead and sometimes the good guys will get a little bit ahead," said IT security consultant Wade Alcorn. The Commonwealth Bank, the country's biggest bank, receives millions of cyber attacks daily from organised crime and so-called 'hactivists' - people using hacking to further a social agenda.

According to CBA's chief of information security, Ben Heyes, the number of serious attacks are rapidly on the rise. "We're seeing the tools that are available for executing a cyber attack are becoming more widespread and becoming increasingly more sophisticated and, with that, we're seeing a large increase in the volume of attacks," he observed.

"We have categories of attacks that are designed to disrupt services and there are categories of attacks that are designed to gain access to an organisation's internal environment - to potentially withdraw from that intellectual property or data that's important."

New Cyber Security Centre

The Australian Government is taking the increase in attacks seriously - it opened the Australian Cyber Security Centre last November to co-locate defence intelligence agencies, the Attorney-General and the Australian Federal Police cyber units. This week Canberra will host a major cyber conference - bringing together experts from Australia and abroad.

According to the European Union's Law Enforcement Agency, victims lose more than 250 billion euros each year worldwide as a result of cyber crime - making it more profitable than the global trade in marijuana, cocaine and heroin combined. In February, it was discovered that up to $1 billion had been stolen from 100 banks around the world, including Australia.

Despite the breach, security experts say the finance industry is the Australian corporate leader in cyber security. "It's fair to say that finance is quite mature, finance has been facing cyber threats for quite a long time now - it's one of the most strongly positioned industries in Australia," said Wade Alcorn.

Find the full article here, originally appeared on ABC News Business website.

This article was directly sourced from Associations Now

Google’s decision to rejigger its search engine to favor mobile-friendly sites simply codifies something that should be obvious by now. Not that it doesn’t make it any less painful for those with massive legacies to convert over. Read on for some mobile web design considerations.

Unfriendly toward mobile-unfriendly

Over the past few years, Google has been putting a lot of energy into pushing website owners to cater to mobile customers, who are becoming an important part of the online ecosystem. And in recent weeks, the search giant has been sending messages to website owners warning them that they were staying mobile-unfriendly at their peril.

Today, the company will start counting mobile-friendliness in its all-important algorithms—and responsive sites, rather than dedicated mobile platforms, are the preferred way to go.

“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results,” the company announced back in February. “Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high-quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

Long story short: Mobile-unfriendly sites might be in trouble unless they redesign or retrofit, pronto.

Whether it’s fair that one company should hold that much power over the internet is an open question, one the European Union appears to be interested in, but let’s admit that site owners probably need the nudge.

This isnt easy stuff

Google is probably doing the right thing by encouraging everyone to design for every audience, but there’s a ton of give and take that comes with this. If you’re retrofitting an old site, it’s not as easy as slapping a new template on there in some cases.

Imagine what The Washington Post or The New York Times have to do with their 150-year-old archives every time they have to rejigger their content. Not fun.

Associations are the same way—all those resource pages, forums, and blog posts are buried in editorial and design decisions that made sense when they were made but now are troublesome at best.

Think responsively

“Responsive design” is a simple phrase that perhaps downplays the complexity and scale that many organizations will face in trying to implement it. 

Know where your current design stands. Mobile-friendly design doesn’t end with the breakpoints. Other issues, including the speed of the page loads and the size of the links on the site, matter as well. Google offers a mobile-friendly test that will let you know how your design is read by its search engines. It’s good to know how much work you’re going to have to do before you do a deep dive.

Put strategy first. Web design is not just about the pixels on the screen—never has been, never will be. Rather, it’s all about the user. So, as you’re doing the research on how to best build and maintain your design in multiple contexts, I recommend checking out the many guides offered up by developer Brad Frost on Github. You’ll notice that he doesn’t dive into the actual tools until about halfway in. There’s a reason for that—if you do responsive the right way, you’ll be rethinking your whole design strategy.

Building fresh? Use a framework. They’re all the rage these days. Launched by a couple of Twitter developers in 2011, the mobile-focused Bootstrap web design framework is a great way to build a design without repeating yourself too much. There are a lot of positives to this approach from a development perspective—for one, you can get off the ground a lot faster—but on the other hand, if you don’t tweak the design too much, it might end up looking pretty cookie-cutter. An alternative worth checking out is Zurb Foundation.

Need to retrofit? Perhaps creating a fresh redesign isn’t an option, or it’s a tough sell to the boss. Retrofitting can be done, but it’s essential to research the pluses and minuses of the approach first. I recommend reading what Sparkbox’s Ben Callahan has to say about this, and know that you may be giving your readers a subpar experience by choosing a more simplistic approach.

For the full article by Ernie Smith please click here: http://associationsnow.com/2015/04/mobile-friendly-design-longer-nice/

For over 165 years, AMP has been helping Australians to realise their dreams. Now, AMP’s Tomorrow Fund wants to bring many more dreams to life by backing Aussie talent, achievement and potential across the nation. 

The fund is an initiative of AMP’s philanthropic arm, the AMP Foundation, which has been supporting change to create a better tomorrow for everyone since 1992.

Who can apply?

Australian citizens and permanent residents of all ages and abilities can apply for an AMP Tomorrow Fund grant. We’re looking for determined people with big dreams who just need some help to bring them to life.

They may be passionate about solving community problems or lifting spirits with their music, art or words. Maybe they have an ingenious invention in mind or show real strength of character on the sports field.

What they share is a desire to make a difference, either by creating something special or inspiring others. These are people who have put in the hard yards and are ready to leap to the next level. The only thing stopping them is a lack of funds.

AMP’s Tomorrow Fund wants to remove the barrier by giving out grants of between $10,000 and $100,000 to help them with costs such as travel, living expenses and research – or whatever it takes to achieve their dream.

If you or someone you know has what it takes to be an AMP Tomorrow Maker, apply by 4pm on 14 May.

How to apply ?

If you fit the bill, apply online using the five-step application form.

You’ll need to provide contact details, explain your goal and how you’ll achieve it, the work you’ve put in and a basic budget. Also tell us about any funding or recognition you’ve received, include online links that explain your story and list two referees.

You can fill in your application over time and make changes up until you press ‘submit’.

Check out the sample application and tips and advice page.

Be sure to apply by 4pm on 14 May!

The majority of charities and not-for-profits use a standard reporting period of 1 July to 30 June, so as we are now in the last quarter of the 2014–15 financial year, now is a good time to remind charities about the importance of good record keeping. 

Not only will keeping good records help when it comes to completing the Annual Information Statement, but charities are required to keep both financial and operational records as a requirement of registration with the ACNC. Good record keeping is also an important part of running a successful organisation.

The ACNC provides detailed guidance about record keeping to help charities understand their obligations.

A Not for Profit campaign has seen Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey’s email inundated with thousands of complaints as the sector prepares itself for cuts of around $1 billion to Australia’s foreign aid.

The Campaign for Australian Aid, a coalition of Not for Profits supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has called on people to “interrupt Joe Hockey”.

The online blitz leads people to a web page featuring a caricature of Hockey writing the Budget and asks them to interrupt him by sending him an email.  

Campaign member World Vision Australia emailed its supporters, asking them to take part.

“[Joe Hockey’s] writing this year's budget right now. Last year, the Government announced massive cuts to Australian Aid over the next four years. Joe Hockey is expected to announce the first cut, of $1 billion, on Budget night (12 May). If he goes ahead with the cuts, it will be the biggest cut in Australian aid history and make us the least generous we've ever been,” World Vision Australia said.

- See full article at: http://www.probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2015/04/not-profits-%E2%80%98interrupt%E2%80%99-joe-hockey#sthash.2sl4bSHj.dpuf

With just eight weeks to go until ACE 2015, now is the time to make time for your professional development.

Putting aside time for professional development can be difficult, though when we consider the flow-on effects to our members, colleagues and stakeholders, we remember the benefits far outweigh the perceived inconvenience. After all, professional development forms strategy, has the power to focus teams, enables problem solving and supports collaborative learning.

If you are still not convinced, take a moment to discover the key professional development sessions below that will be covered at the not-for-profit run, 2015 AuSAE Conference and Exhibition (ACE) this June 18-19.

Then when you are ready, registration is only one click away.