HRPS Global Conference Blog

The case of Wild Life Conservation Society presented by Steven Sanderson,  Ph.D. President  and CEO   in collaboration with Roselinde Torres, Managing Director, BCG,   captured powerfully  the meaning of the global shift.  This was a compelling case how a long-standing  relationship between a strategy consulting firm helped  a non-profit organization to face the challenges of transformation and prosper in the downturn. 

 Just like many for profit  companies,  the interest revolved around management, leadership and employee engagement. The subject was  Bronx Zoo in New York City and  a distributed network of wild life conservators  of which 3000 are based outside the US,  in places such as Burma and Afganistan and faced with radical challenges

WCS is a compelling example of how emerging organizational and leadership models would come from the non-profits.

 Highlights of the talk: 

 The value proposition of WCL is based on the core passion of the employees and they are willing to commit to the organization creating a highly engaged network of relationship.  Engagement with the higher mission propels learning, improvement and change and helps sustain the commitment through the downturn. 

 There are three fundamental principles of  organizational design at WCS. 

• Employee engagement via meaning
• Network vs. virtical organization
• Collaborative leadership model.

The Zen of leadership as it is practiced by Dr. Sanderson  is simple : you cannot base organizations on who is in charge

 The Leader develops  Team and empowers an Organization – one must look for organizational sustainability beyond an individual in charge 

Guided by this mission,  Dr. Sanderson  created a small management team where everyone has endless talents and opinions, but all executive team members are aligned around one common purpose.  ”We want a single mission,  not bunch of visionaries running around.”

 In this leadership arrangement,  Role mandates are agreed upon and there exists a highly collegial level of interaction. A leader’s  influence increases via reputational capital, not role authority’   The respect leaders  have is based on the respect for the organization, not one individual alone.   Looking  beyond criticism of individual shortcomings, the fundamental contribution and individual talents was  noticed and appreciated.

Questions from the audience:  How you balance the need to make fast decisions, manage speed.

 Answer:   Different tasks and challenges  take different incubations time. With role mandates established,  there are those who have  vito authority and lead a particular decision process .  Go to the right person for fast decion making.  True partnership is the right solution  because the other person has other talents:  

The partership between WCS and BCG is a remarkable accomplishment of cross sector collaboration between a mission driven non profit and highly motivated for profit consultancy. 

Once again during the conference we are hearing about the importance of networked organizations-this time to create fast change. It’s easy to see how the motivational model is different from the usual hierarchy and requires influence leadership. What’s different today is getting valuable advice on how to manage from a non-profit. But that fits with the direction of the times as people have lost faith in big business and the problems we face are societal, global and long-term in nature. Companies can work and innovate on specific projects, but fixing the big stuff is beyond the abilities of just the private sector. However, organization issues and change are very similar across sectors because human behvavior is pretty constant. So, when the Wildlife Conservation Society conducted it’s transformation, the structure and process looks the same as any big company. Yet, the mission looks and feels very differently–focused on a level of meaning that most private companies can’t reach.