Performance on Purpose
Two questions, asked at the same time, about the same organisation. Almost nobody asks both.
The two questions
Are we performing well?
Performance in a social organisation is not profit. It is whether the thing works. Does the money last the year. Does the service reach the people it is for. Can the team do the job without heroics. Would any of it survive the founder walking out.
Most organisations have never scored that honestly, because nobody ever asked them to.
Is that performance serving a purpose worth what it costs?
Purpose is rarely missing at the start. It goes missing slowly. A funder wants a different outcome, a contract arrives with conditions attached, and three years later you are delivering something nobody in the room would have chosen.
The question is whether what you do now still matches what you exist for, and whether it is worth what it takes out of the people doing it.
Asked on its own, the first question turns into a treadmill and the second turns into good intentions. Performance on Purpose is the commitment to holding both.
Why it matters in this sector
Most businesses answer the first question and not the second. Most charities answer the second and not the first.
That is not a criticism of either. A business is built to perform and has to be taught to ask what for. A charity is built on what for and was never taught to perform — nobody hands a new chief executive a course in cash flow, delegation or difficult conversations, and the sector loses good people to that gap every year.
So the two of them are carrying opposite halves of the same problem.
The quadrant
Score the two axes separately, out of ten. Never average them. The gap between the two numbers is what you work on. Pick a corner to read it.
Unfulfilled potential
High purpose, low performance. Where most of the social sector starts. The cause is right, the commitment is total, and the delivery is inconsistent because nobody was ever trained in that half of the job.
The move is focus, habits, milestones and somebody holding you to account for them. It is also the corner a business mentor is most useful in.
The treadmill
Low purpose, high performance. Where most businesses sit, and some large charities too. Delivery is strong, the targets get met, and nobody can quite say what it is all in aid of any more.
From the outside it looks like winning. The move is to step back, redefine what success means here, and stop the work that no longer serves it.
Drifting
Low on both. Usually a few years of chasing whatever funding was going, and the thread has gone.
The first move is not strategy. It is clarity, and one small win to build from.
Performance on purpose
High on both. The organisation runs properly and the work still means something. Funders can see what it achieves, and the people running it are not on their knees.
The job here is holding the alignment. Drift is the default.
The two corners on the diagonal each hold what the other one is missing. A business leader and a social sector leader working together moves both. How Connect works.
How it runs here
- You score it. Both axes, out of ten, on the organisation as it is rather than as you would describe it in a bid.
- We look at the gap. A seven and a three is a different organisation from a five and a five.
- One corner at a time. Whichever axis is lower is what the coaching works on first.
- A mentor from the opposite corner. Where it helps, we pair you through Connect with somebody strong exactly where you are thin.
- Re-score it quarterly, so you can see the movement.