When I meet with team members of any non-profit I work with, the first question I ask them is, “What’s the mission?” I truly want to know. I want to know how they’ll respond. I’m curious if they will have an answer. What I’m hoping for is a quick answer in their very own words. Incidentally, this is rare.

Here’s what I’m used to hearing:

A very long pause.
And then, “Do you mean for this meeting?”
Or, “Well, I guess it’s …,” which is answered in the form of a question.

And then one time in about 25, I’ll get a great answer like Nathan’s, “Mark, we walk with people as long as we need to.” That was the right response for me because I already had the general idea. Accordingly, he personalized it. No, he nailed it.

But I’m not done yet. When I ask about the mission, I like to follow up with, “How do you know?” As in, what are the results of this organization? Generally, long pauses, or as one operations director once said, “Mark, that’s a great question.”

And that’s the purpose of this brief discussion: performance monitoring and tracking in the nonprofit. Confession: I hate financial meetings that I don’t lead in any nonprofit. That even includes board sessions where I’ll typically excuse myself because the focus is all wrong. Plus, we should spend 95% of our time talking about the mission and its results, and very little on finance unless we’re terrible at raising funds or spending money foolishly. That’s never been the case in my limited experiences with the nonprofits I’ve worked with.

Before moving on, let me lay some groundwork so that you’ll know where I’m coming from. When I think of non-profits, I just can’t shake Peter Drucker from my mind. I keep hearing him in my ears shouting, “Mark, it’s the results, stupid; it’s the results.”

Incidentally, I am taking some writer’s liberties with slight dramatization because I doubt Peter Drucker ever shouted at his students and clients. The word “stupid” probably wasn’t in his dictionary either. The bigger point is ensuring we have a non-profit leadership team that fulfills its mission with clear, identifiable results.

And that leads me to the organization PAWS Chicago. About once a week, I try to study one non-profit, reviewing its mission and the performance results it reports. PAWS Chicago is a great case study on this topic.