Culture is the fabric that bonds people in an organization together. The shared values, solidarity to a cause, comradery, and repeated jokes make the long days working together more meaningful. Even in the most difficult circumstances, humorous moments are sometimes what you remember most.

Erin recalls being in Sri Lanka a few months after the December 2004 tsunami hit. She was visiting some of the first communities we were partnering with to rebuild schools. It was a challenging time as Erin and the Room to Read country director of Sri Lanka witnessed firsthand the devastation and ongoing suffering. Reconstruction efforts were slow. In one small, predominantly Muslim community on the eastern coast of the island, we held a groundbreaking ceremony to lay the foundation of a preschool we were rebuilding with the community.

In the speeches being spoken in Tamil, Erin heard Room to Read being referred to as “Room to Breed.” The community thought our mission was to encourage families to have more children. In Erin’s speech, she had to correct the name to Room to Read and clarify that Room to Read’s mission was about ensuring all children were educated and developing a lifelong habit and joy of reading. This experience turned into a shared joke among the staff for years that rippled throughout the worldwide team of different names for Room to Read: Room to Work, Room to Travel, Room to Eat, Room to Party, and so on. Room to Read’s culture has always been one of hard charging for the best results, but it has also always had a heavy dose of fun.

Promoting fun has also been an important part of organizational leadership, and great leadership is, of course, key to building a world-class team. One of the most challenging aspects of rapidly scaling an organization is evolving one’s own leadership style and supporting other leaders throughout the organization to do the same. Every entrepreneur is trying to build the best team possible to deliver on his or her vision. Probably the most succinct and useful advice Erin was given was from one of her board chairs who had been the CEO of Yahoo! when it went public and had many hard-learned lessons to tell about scaling a company. During one of Erin’s monthly check-ins with him, he shared his philosophy about the role of a leader. To create a durable organization, leaders must anticipate skill gaps in the organization and fill them with other great leaders. They must be committed to giving everyone a path to grow as far as they can, and give them the professional development opportunities and training to get there. He summarized his advice about how to successfully manage a team as follows: (1) hire the very best you can; (2) set a clear vision and expectations; (3) get out of way, delegate, and give them the space to contribute their talent; and (4) check back in regularly to ensure they are succeeding and to provide support that might be needed.

This management advice struck Erin as simple but elegantly summed up. The only additional challenge she faced as a social entrepreneur is that she had do it on a shoestring budget. Nonprofits are obviously different from private companies in the fact that there are minimal incentives for attracting and retaining top talent other than satisfying people’s passion to change the world for the better. It’s wonderful when a social enterprise can leverage people’s desire to work hard for a mission. And it can also create an even more challenging work environment to manage. Expectations are high when staff members give up other opportunities to work in the private or social sectors, and they often have deep-seated beliefs about how the work should be done.

Because an entrepreneurial social enterprise has limited discretionary resources, investing in management systems and people development is difficult. Yet the greatest asset of any organization—and certainly those that have service-based program delivery models—is its people. As we say at Room to Read, world change is a team sport. The conundrum for the ESE sector then is how to attract, retain, and develop a world-class team on a limited budget.

In this chapter, we share some of the key lessons learned that have worked for Room to Read in four key areas of people management: (1) building a strong organizational culture, (2) attracting top talent, (3) building the capacity of a diverse talent base, and (4) evolving senior leadership through dynamic growth.

What Is Really Core in Your Core Values

Building and sustaining a strong organizational culture is essential in creating a successful ESE. When we attempted to write down our core values for the first time, we were in our fifth year and developing our first five-year strategic plan. This first strategic plan was an attempt to spell out our beliefs, our goals, and our strategies to accomplish them. Key to this plan was a set of 12 core values that we felt represented how we worked. Of course, 12 values were an overly ambitious way to start and proved to be too many to remember. The idea of “core” was clearly lost on us at this first attempt. But the exercise was motivating and empowering for a young organization as we set the tone for and created our organizational culture over time.

We focused in future strategic planning on whittling the 12 values down to three truly core values: (1) passion for education, (2) focus on action and innovation, and (3) commitment to collaboration. We tried to answer the questions, “What is most important to us at Room to Read?” and “What is unique about working here?” Starting in that first strategic planning process and refined several times since then, we also defined operating principles that support our core values. These statements together guide our decisions and actions.

Perhaps more difficult than developing core values is living them every day. Every organization has its explicit culture represented in its core value statements. However, the way we act as leaders says as much about organizational culture as the words in a core value statement. It is only when what we say on paper (our explicit culture) aligns with what we model in our behavior (our implicit culture)—when we “walk the talk”—that trust is high. When there is a wide gap between an organization’s stated values and what staff feel are the real ways decisions get made or people are encouraged to behave, an unhealthy organizational culture develops.

At Room to Read, we’ve seen the gap between our explicit and implicit organizational cultures vary over time. We can see how well they are aligned in our annual staff satisfaction surveys (translating the survey to ensure our global team can fully understand and respond meaningfully in their first language) as well as informally from “water cooler” conversations in the office.

One of the most notable gaps occurred in 2010. We had experienced a decade of rapid growth, and our employee base globally had grown to approximately 500. We had not devoted the time to focus on developing strong internal communication systems. Although we had hired many new staff members around the world, we had not yet established great ways of onboarding them or developed robust performance-management or professional-development systems to support them.

We hired a new chief talent officer around the same time. As part of his onboarding, he did a “listen and learn” tour of many of our offices. By then, our staff were spread out across a wide geographical footprint. Our new chief talent officer identified many Room to Read cultural behaviors that were not supporting our organization any longer given our larger size and the need for more professional and structured processes to manage the additional complexity. He then led the management team through a process to identify ways to adapt these old organizational cultural behaviors to newer ones. We decided to evolve 24 behaviors in all. (Who knew we had so many explicit and implicit behaviors?) This was when our get stuff done (GSD) mentality became get stuff done right (GSDR) to transition our start-up mentality from one focused on speed to one that embraced important and strategic matters, too. “Cheap and cheerful” became “cost effective.” We moved “taking the time to supervise” and “conduct regular one-on-one meetings with your staff” from a secondary responsibility to a primary responsibility. We also placed a greater value on management and established clearer organizational structures, roles, and responsibilities.

Identifying that we had to shift our organizational culture led to a three-year human resource long-range plan. This plan committed us to invest in better systems and processes to support our growing staff. It focused on onboarding new employees, developing positions and appropriately managing workload, and improving our performance-management system. We began to focus more on helping supervisors develop their management skills, especially since we had many first-time supervisors, as well as aiding staff members to enhance their skills and achieve business goals.

These human resource investments in many ways are still a work in process. We didn’t accomplish everything in three years, but we have evolved our work culture to one that focuses on supporting and sustaining an engaged employee base. From defining core values in our early start-up days to investing in our staff as a more mature organization, we have prioritized building an organizational culture that reflects what we want to be.

Another complicating factor in growing our ideal organizational culture is that we work across numerous country boundaries, languages, and cultures. Our worldwide staff work in places with different languages, work habits, traditions, and practices. As a result, culture is something that we think about a lot. We try to simplify the language we use internally to be friendly for nonnative English speakers and work to celebrate the diversity in our organization. But there are also the unspoken aspects of the dos and don’ts in any given culture, and the norms of acceptable behavior vary widely. These are harder to navigate.

Take the issue of how openly authority can be challenged. In the entrepreneurial cultures that many social enterprises cultivate in the West, leaders want to encourage a nonhierarchical structure in which new ideas and innovations can come from anywhere in the organization. This is harder to do in Asia, for example, where hierarchy and respect for status is highly valued. Another issue is expressing anger and frustration. Many Northern cultures like we have in the United States express these feelings relatively openly. If a conversation gets too heated, people apologize and are generally forgiven afterward. In many of the Asian cultures we work in, however, it is never acceptable publicly to show these emotions. Bonds of trust can be broken that are very hard to repair.

Room to Read has not figured out all the nuances of working globally. What we have done worldwide, though, is realize and place a high value on in-person meetings. We feel this builds a level of trust and collaboration that has allowed us to traverse many misunderstandings. We try not to assume we understand what another colleague is thinking or perceiving. We spend a great deal of time building a sense of community in the greater Room to Read global family. We often say a staff person must wear both her country hat (“I work for Room to Read Bangladesh”) as well as her global hat (“I work for Room to Read”) and understand how her decisions and actions impact both parts of the system. Functional teams from different countries meet periodically in person.

Team bonding is another way we’ve ensured we have a strong Room to Read organizational culture that crosses country barriers. Investors and partners who travel to our country offices often tell us how amazing our country staff are and how much there seems to be a sense of what it means to be a “Room to Reader” that translates across cultures.

At one of our country management conferences, in 2012 in Vietnam, we asked each country team for a short phrase or word that described what it is like to work at Room to Read. There was amazing consistency in what people said, and this consistency has persisted over the years. Common phrases were that Room to Read was a learning organization; that people were cooperative; that we had energetic and dedicated staff; that we had the freedom to express ourselves; that we were fast paced; that we had lots of deadlines; that we were not bureaucratic; and that we were like a family. As we have scaled Room to Read to more than 1,500 full-time employees and more than 16,000 volunteers, maintaining this strong sense of organizational culture has helped us build an amazing global movement.

Leadership in the Social Enterprise

Bill Draper, one of the founders of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, which invests in social entrepreneurial organizations, says that the three characteristics that set social entrepreneurs apart are their empathy, energy, and vision. We couldn’t agree more. These are the characteristics that make social entrepreneurs see injustices around the world in the first place and seek solutions.

People who join social enterprises also tend to be mission driven. Perhaps more than corporate leaders, who can use a variety of financial and status-oriented incentives to motivate staff, nonprofit leaders rely extensively on “influence management.” This requires the power of personal persuasion to affect the actions or decisions of staff members, investors, and partners to commit people to a collective goal.

Of course, every executive’s job is to set vision and strategy as well as manage teams and deliverables; but to tap into the emotions and passions required to sustain a social movement, the investment is particularly high. Erin in her own leadership development has often reflected on the truth of the Maya Angelou quote: “People will forget what you said, forget what you did, but will never forget how you make them feel.”

For more than a decade now, Room to Read has held an annual country management conference (CMC) in which country directors—the senior leaders from each of our countries of operation—join our global office headquarters management team for a week-long offsite to set priorities and align leadership for the coming year. We rotate the location every year to a different country so that leadership can see and experience the different contexts firsthand. One of the primary purposes of the CMC is to build a supportive environment for the worldwide leaders to share and learn from each other, as a global movement requires great leaders throughout our network. Our country directors, each in his or her own way, encompass the empathy, energy, and leadership vision to inspire country teams that make up 90% of our worldwide staff.

At this conference, Erin delivers an opening talk, jokingly referred to as the State of the Union address, summarizing the strengths from the past year, the current challenges, and the strategic vision for the way forward in the coming year. She also selects a book each year to give to the leaders that represents a key issue of focus for the organization. Topics over the years have varied from change management to scaling to organizational development. But the topic that most frequently reappears is leadership.

One of Erin’s favorite books from the early days of Room to Read is Jim Collins’s Good to Great. As Collins writes, everything begins and ends with great leadership. His model for what he terms “Level 5 Leadership” touches on an aspect of leadership that is not discussed enough in the social sector: Charisma is overemphasized. To drive profound and lasting change, a leader needs to have the mix of personal humility and professional will. Personal humility, Collins says, is about inspired standards, not inspired charisma. The leader focuses on the organization more than the self and apportions credit for success appropriately. Professional will, Collins describes, is about a commitment to superb, long-term results, apportioning responsibility for poor results adequately, and looking inward rather than outward.

By heeding the insight into the Level 5 leadership style Collins highlights in Good to Great, ESEs can become less reliant on these charismatic characteristics and instead focus on leadership skills that lead more enduring collective movements. Scaling world change is a team sport, and it is not just about the leader or even the leader’s ideas alone. Organizations need to make room early in an organization’s life cycle to build, value, and recognize a world-class winning team.

Attracting Top Talent

Collins also came up with the bus analogy of organizational development that we frequently referenced in our early start-up years. “The Good to Great organizations first got the right people on the bus in the right places and then figured out where to drive,” he wrote. Good executives we knew focused on strategy, managing teams and deliverables, and always, always, always keeping an eye out for talent to attract the best and brightest to their organizations.

To this day, even with more than 1,500 full-time employees around the world, we spend an enormous level of effort attracting top talent. Many staff comment after joining the Room to Read team that our recruiting process was one of the lengthier and more extensive processes they have endured. We used to question whether we should change this. Several organizational development consultants over the years have advised us to shorten our recruiting process to get people in the door faster. We have chosen to stick with our practice, however, and now it has become a source of pride and a hallmark of how we have built an incredible team.

At our global office headquarters, we follow generally recommended best practices in recruiting. Those include clear job specifications; a wide sourcing of candidates, particularly drawing on outreach to our networks for referrals; screening of candidates by our human resource department to ensure candidates meet minimum criteria and demonstrate a close cultural “fit”; surfacing red flags (often salary, title, or relocation issues) that may be deal breakers; at least two rounds of interviews; and thorough formal and informal reference and background checks.

We do two things consistently that have helped us immensely to make good hiring decisions. One is to prioritize organizational culture fit. We always have at least one colleague outside the hiring department participate on the interview panel to provide input into that fit. Second, our final-round interview is an intensive, eye-opening day. Candidates who make it to the final round all have the minimum qualifications for the listed job, so at that point we are more interested in determining who we think will best fill the role and fit culturally into Room to Read.

Additionally, the day is about giving the candidate the opportunity to get to know us and make sure they understand our expectations. We want them to be enthusiastic about joining the team. The final-round day starts with a presentation the candidate delivers to the entire interview panel. We give the candidate a presentational prompt several days earlier that represents a real, on-the-job situation or strategic activity that would be typical for the position. We ask them to walk us through how they would develop a solution.

Often the interview panel will play different roles as part of the session, acting as demanding government officials or skeptical potential investors and asking tough questions. This part of the interview process can be intense, but it gives us the opportunity to really get to know the candidates and evaluate how they strategically approach problems, conduct research, think through solutions, and articulate their perspectives. The candidate then spends the rest of the day in interviews. If a candidate makes it through the end of the day and is still energized and excited to work for Room to Read, we know the person will be a good fit for our dynamic, fast-paced work environment.

We put a lot of effort into recruiting at Room to Read and created our recruiting process early in our organizational history and have used it consistently throughout the different stages of growth. It is one of the few things that has not changed much as we have matured.

When we do hire the wrong person for a job—which can sometimes be the case since interviewing is a very artificial situation—we try to part ways quickly. This is rare and tends to be because people don’t cope well with our demanding work environment rather than to any shortcomings in skills. We try to be up front in our interview process and screen for strong organizational cultural fit, but it can be difficult at times to separate the “talkers” from the “doers” until they are on the job. Preserving the strength of our culture is key, and allowing poor performers to remain brings down the whole team. Hire slowly and, when necessary, part ways quickly, has worked for us as a basic principle.

This recruiting process is for our global office headquarters. In Asia and Africa, the employment markets and talent pools can be very different. Local country staff members who are experienced and have the capacity to guide and inspire change in the educational system in their country are even more key to our success. Although the global office is often involved in hiring senior country management positions, country management teams have a lot of latitude in hiring as they are best placed to assess talent in their markets.

This process of recruiting locally works efficiently and effectively. Over the years, we have built a strong reputation for being a preferred employer in the nonprofit sector. In India, for example, for three years in a row from 2015 to 2017 we placed in the top 10 in the nonprofit category of the “Great Place to Work Award,” which is determined by anonymous surveys of organizations’ staff. India is a country with a very competitive nonprofit sector. Given that Room to Read India is our largest country operation, this has been a great honor.

To align our various Room to Read office hiring practices, we focus on three areas. First, we have a collaborative hiring process for senior staff in country offices to ensure we are getting a person with the best technical skills for each position as well as someone who can successfully work in a global organization. Second, we have always remained committed to hiring local nationals to staff our country offices. This practice ensures we are building local capacity, demonstrates our trust in and respect for our local staff, and promotes great in-country relationships with our government and local partners.

Our third area of focus in recruiting is onboarding new hires. Building a quality onboarding process across all offices is challenging due to differences in language and work practices. However, we have tried to develop a process that recognizes the key information every employee needs to know irrespective of location (such as mission, strategy, program overview, global structure, key worldwide policies) as well as the office- and job-specific information they must understand (for example, country program overview, local operational guidelines and policies, local application of information technology systems, and office customs).

Although people management is still a work in progress for us, many of our investors and partners who visit our country sites say that they are most impressed and surprised with the quality of our staff, and that the same passion and dedication was in evidence everywhere in the organization. As one investor said after witnessing Room to Read’s work in Laos:

Retaining and Scaling Top Talent as You Grow

In countries with more developed economies, people make a deliberate choice to go into the nonprofit sector. Employees are (usually) forgoing higher salaries and have other options. However, expectations are also high that they will be doing meaningful, impactful work. In countries with lower-income economies, where top talent is often looking for financial opportunities, generally to pull their families out of poverty, it can be hard to attract the most capable people. You simply can’t compete with the private sector on salary. In both situations, retaining talent is difficult.

Interestingly, research has identified that the talent gap is one of the few things that gets worse as social enterprises mature. At the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit, the Silicon Valley–based foundation RippleWorks revealed that access to talent and funding are by far the two toughest challenges for social entrepreneurs, but talent is the lone challenge that gets tougher as companies mature. The RippleWorks Human Capital Crisis Report in 2016 captured perspectives of more than 600 social entrepreneurs and investors in 59 countries. A full 63% of young, unfunded companies and 75% of funded, early-stage companies believe the inability to access the talent they need will have high or critical impact on their businesses. This talent challenge eclipses funding as the number one challenge as companies mature. RippleWorks found that 45% of later-stage entrepreneurs find accessing talent to be very or extremely challenging, up from 25% of early-stage entrepreneurs.

In our start-up years, we were simply focused on just getting the right people on the bus and building our founding team. However, in our transition years, to build the larger global team, we prioritized retaining talent as long as possible.

Our human resource long-range plan identified several principles that helped us create a more sustainable, productive, and healthy work environment as we grew.

Founder’s Syndrome

Founder’s syndrome. What is it and what can be done about it? With Room to Read headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area, arguably the start-up capital of the world, this is certainly not a problem for social enterprises alone. It is a popular term you hear to describe the difficulties that can be encountered by an organization when its founders retain so much power and influence that they risk holding the organization back from evolving into a more mature one. It often afflicts nonprofits to a greater degree, however, because nonprofit leadership can be so personality driven. In addition, founders can sometimes stay involved longer than is ideal because there are no clear financial metrics that boards can use to ask a founder to step aside.

Founders provide vision, strategy, connections, and motivation in those critical start-up years when many organizations struggle to survive. Your founding story serves the organization by building momentum that is necessary for growth and development. However, it is important to evolve your organization’s story as you grow. At Room to Read, as we built a strong, diversified team globally with a full management structure and local country leadership—a team that learned and innovated as we evolved—we could have done a better job sharing our more complete and complex narrative.

The challenge then became that we were victims of our own success. People saw Room to Read as “that organization that builds schools and libraries.” We struggled to move beyond those early associations to ensure people understand the depth and breadth of our approach. We trained teachers, worked with governments to increase the quality of their early-grade literacy instruction, and the strength of our Girls’ Education Program was our life-skills curriculum. It has been harder for people to get as excited about the many, many years of attempting new things, failing, iterating, and identifying methods that worked. That is the real story of most successful organizations that make it past the initial start-up stage. So, we’ve received benefits from our founding story, but there have also been other needs.

The greatest need was making sure everyone felt valued and part of our success. Even as a founding team, we did not do a great job of recognizing our own unique combination of complementary skills. Dinesh demonstrated strong local leadership in the field, which built respect and trust that is now core to our organization’s approach. John envisioned big goals, and he attracted other people to the cause. He tirelessly focused on building a global network to support our work. Erin was the systems and process person. She was a team builder and motivator, detail oriented and highly focused on quality execution.

As we evolved, we should have done a better job recognizing the incredibly dedicated early team that worked beyond their limits to heroically build Room to Read. Many of our first key hires stayed with the organization for years. They became our “cultural whisperers” who created and spread our organizational culture. They were a positive magnet for new hires and a model for how to succeed at Room to Read.

As we realized we needed to move beyond our cofounders’ initial ideas to grow and evolve, we worked harder to share the story of our team effort. We wanted staff members to push back at us—even though we were the founders, with new ideas or suggestions for improvement. We feel strongly that staff members should be encouraged to innovate. We try to have the team feel rooted in the founding values of Room to Read but not constrained that they should act in any specific way.

Some may ask why this is a problem if the founders are still dedicated to the cause. One simple answer is the “hit by the bus” test, meaning that if anything were to happen to the founders, would the sustainability of the organization be at risk? Perhaps the greater issue, though, is that the founders can’t do everything. If they attempt to, the organization would not be able to evolve and grow to its maximum potential. It is important to create space for new leaders to come into the organization and be given increasing levels of authority to avoid bottlenecks as the organization grows.

What do we recommend doing about founder’s syndrome? Some of the ways we at Room to Read have tried to address it, sometimes messily, have been as follows.

Key Takeaways

• Setting clear core values and building a strong organizational culture are central to a productive and sustainable organization. You need to evaluate your organization’s culture continually and make necessary changes as the organization evolves.
• A key area to focus on in sustaining a vibrant culture is internal communication at all levels: one-on-one meetings, management communications, “all-hands” staff meetings, and worldwide staff communications.
• Organizations with global operations have an even harder job developing consistent organizational cultures, but when done, this helps a lot in terms of collaboration.
• Leaders of ESEs should tap into their strong empathy skills and develop ways to use their personal influence to inspire and motivate a team effort around their cause.
• Great leaders need a balance of personal humility and professional will to succeed, as Jim Collins stated in Good to Great. This combination will ensure the focus is on developing more enduring collective movements.
• Hire slowly and part ways quickly, if necessary. Develop a customized recruiting process for your organization that selects the best candidates to fit into the work culture, and use it consistently to build a strong, cohesive team.
• Develop a long-range plan for managing human capital that prioritizes where to invest to support a more sustainable, engaged, and healthy work environment. It is important to put systems and processes in place for managing human resources while being conscientious to not create too much bureaucracy. Remember that organizations scale; people don’t.
• Maximize the power of your founding story and founder(s), but also recognize when their contributions begin to diminish. Address the issue of building strong leaders beyond the founders early and openly to create a culture that can innovate and accelerate beyond the initial programs and structure. Founders and key leaders need to adapt their leadership and hire in new talent continually to meet the evolving needs of your organization.