"The infighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low."

I've learned most of what I know about nonprofit management from fortune cookies.

But every so often someone from the academy, or from a scary religious sect, makes a comment about his or her own organization that sheds a lot of light on the nonprofit sector. In this case, it was an applied physics nerd talking about a highly respected research institution:

"The infighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low."

Sometimes we're busy saving the world, and sometimes we're busy rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Perhaps the ship will sink no matter what we do, and rearranging the deck chairs is as good a way as any to occupy ourselves in the interim. However, I'd like to believe that if we stopped squabbling (about who gets the best view or the chair closest to the captain's) we might be able to bend our minds to more important tasks.

Are nonprofit agencies the customers from hell?

There's actually something worse than a nonprofit agency that makes crisis-driven decisions: the agency that strings vendors along for months or years.

It's humiliating to tell the patient and long-suffering vendor who has put so much time into drawing up a needs assessment, a proposal, and a price quote that you can't get a "yes" or "no" answer from the manager who needs to sign off on it. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has gleefully gone to a vendor with the go-ahead, after a mere 18 month delay, only to find that he has withdrawn the quote or even changed jobs. Can you really blame him for moving on with his life while the nonprofit agency dithered?

This sort of behavior on the part of nonprofit agencies only encourages people to regard us as the customers from hell. Any warm feelings they may get from offering their products or services to an organization with a worthy mission are off-set by the wear and tear that we inflict on their cardio-vascular systems.

Sometimes I wonder.

• Why does the executive director of the agency have a brand new monitor, when the people in Accounts Payable are still using the DOS verson of Lotus 123?

• What is the point of buying a new software package, when you don't invest in ongoing training for the employees who are going to use it?

• Why is everyone anxious for the agency to have a web site, when nobody has thought about what sort of content and features it should have?
  

• Why did management put all the candidates for the IT job through an 18 month hiring decision cycle, and then go with a part-time college student intern?

• Why are the servers located in the men's room?

If you don't tell employees what's happening, they'll make stuff up.

It's probably natural for decision makers at nonprofit agencies to hold off from announcing things until everything is definite. Just the same, you should bear in mind that the staff is human.

If they don't know what is going to happen next, they'll speculate about it. They'll discuss their speculations endlessly, and some of their guesses will make the rounds in the form of alleged facts.

Not only will the rumor mill operate overtime in the absence of information, but the staff will also make the highly justifiable assumption that they aren't trusted with information and aren't considered worthy of being consulted.

This really sucks.

Lack of information tends to lead to feelings of powerlessness in relation to management. Feelings of powerlessness do not tend to increase a sense of loyalty, trust, or job satisfaction. And in a nonprofit agency, you're dead in the water if your employees don't have those three.