Notes on "Managing to Change the World"
Don't let the title fool you - it's practical and for everyone
This is my favorite management book that I have ever read.
The book “Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Manager's Guide to Getting Results” by Alison Green and Jerry Hauser comes highly recommended to me from a wide variety of top executive directors of top non-profits. After reading it, I can say these positive recommendations are entirely justified.
Don’t let the title fool you - while talk of “changing the world” may sound pie-in-the-sky or even hippyish, this book was relentlessly practical. The principles also matter more than just for non-profits… I think anyone managing others should read this book, regardless of whether they are working in non-profits or not.
The key principles in a nutshell
Management is about getting results through other people.
Good managers…
…set clear goals and hold people accountable to them
…help people meet goals while being direct when standards aren't met
…know when an employee isn't the right fit and act accordingly
…guide more but do less: Delegate tasks but stay involved — don't do the work yourself but ensure implementation by providing oversight and supporting employees through regular check-ins.
What is management?
Management means getting more done through others than you could alone. Your primary job is achieving results, and you bear ultimate accountability when your team falls short. The individual contributor mindset doesn't work for managers. Instead:
Your job as a manager is to get results: If your employees do not produce the results you are hoping for, it is your fault as the manager.
Prioritize impact over comfort: Deliberately choose where to focus your time based on importance, not urgency or familiarity.
Delegate aggressively: Push tasks to anyone who can do them adequately, freeing yourself for higher-value work.
Allocate time where you add unique value: Reject the “all hands on deck” mentality that has executives doing basic tasks — it's inefficient.
Invest time in actual management: Focus on reviewing work, giving feedback, conducting check-ins, and setting priorities rather than doing the work yourself.
Delegating Projects
Delegation is a win-win for the manager and the employees1 - the manager gets to shift responsibility to someone else and do more with less manager time, and the employees get to enjoy responsibility.
The best way to ensure successful delegation is to: (1) be clear about expectations from the start, (2) stay engaged enough to maintain alignment and ensure quality work, and (3) hold people accountable for what they deliver.
Management problems that appear to be personal issues with a bad employee are much more likely to be about issues with expectations and communication.
The book summarizes the approach as “guide more, do less”. A good manager will set very clear expectations about what is to be achieved and will follow up to ensure that the results are achieved. The manager should not do the work for the employee or dictate to the employee exactly how it is to be done (beyond some guidelines and suggestions).
Frequently, managers do not guide enough, especially after the project has been specified and handed off to the employee.
Specifying a Project
Specifying the project in the beginning is an important step of setting expectations. A good project plan is more than just a summary of the project, but answers the following “Five W’s and an H”:
Who should be involved?
What does success look like?
When is the project due? (and how does the priority of this project compare to other projects?)
Where might the employee go for help?
Why does this project matter?
How should the employee approach it?
The goal here is to come to a clear, shared understanding of what results are to be expected.
MOCHA
In projects where a number of people are involved, it is helpful to set out their roles explicitly. MOCHA (Manager, Owner, Consulted, Helper, Approver) is a good framework for this:
Manager - assigns the responsibility for the task to the employee and holds the employee accountable. Ideally the manager makes suggestions, asks hard questions, reviews progress, and intervenes if the work goes off track.
Owner - the owner is the employee who is in charge of completing the task and does all the work, maybe with helpers. The manager instills the employee with ownership, and the employee might in turn informally manage other people (see “Helper”).
Consulted - someone other than the manager who is asked for input throughout the project
Helper - someone who can help do the work, and is managed by the Owner
Approver - someone who has to sign off on the project before it is final. This may be the manager.
Each project should only have one manager and one owner.
Example: Run a fundraising campaign
Manager: The executive director sets a goal of raising $100K and checks in on the campaign periodically to assess progress
Owner: The fundraising director launches the campaign and sees it through
Consulted: The fundraising director consults with the communications director frequently
Helper: At the direction of the fundraising director, a fundraising associate helps by emailing all the major donors
Approver: The executive director tracks progress toward the goal. The communications director signs off on the email template being used for major donor outreach.
Staying Engaged
The most common way managers fail at delegation is by not staying involved throughout to check on progress. Hold regular (weekly) 1-on-1 meetings with each employee you manage. Use these sessions to connect personally, review progress, ask probing questions, provide feedback, help adjust priorities, and create connections between team members.
You should have a good idea of what you want to get out of the 1-on-1 meeting and how to get it, but you should also calibrate your meeting to the needs of the employee.
Managers should anticipate potential problems and ask probing questions about those areas. Rather than simply asking "Are we on track?", ask “What specific indicators show we're on track?”
Rather than assume things are going smoothly, the manager should assume things are not going well by default, until proven otherwise. (Though if the manager is going to ask the employee critical sounding questions, they should explain that they are relying on this principle.)
It is important for the manager to also get a good direct sense of the quality of the work upfront, as early as possible. Rather than have the employee spend several weeks on a first draft, review an outline and then approve it before moving on to the first draft. You should only need to see small pieces of the overall work, sampled evenly throughout the process, to ensure the quality.
When possible, occasionally observe the work first-hand. Examples include sitting in on media training delivered by the employee or attending a prospective donor meeting to hear their pitch.
If the work is not being done right, it is important for the manager to not redo the work themselves, but rather guide the employee towards doing it correctly. Similarly, rather than immediately jumping to offering solutions to problems posed by the employee, it is helpful to first get their perspective by asking what they think.
Example questions to engage employees:
What would a successful next week look like?
Are you on track? How specifically do you know? What would being off-track look like?
What are you most worried about with this project?
What might go wrong with your plan, and how can you mitigate those risks?
Is there anything we should start now to prepare for upcoming challenges?
Are there items we should reprioritize based on our current situation?
Know when you should get more involved
While it is important to delegate and protect your own time, sometimes you do need to get more involved. Remember your goal isn’t to just delegate no matter what, but to get results.
In one vignette, an ED and regional director had agreed on ambitious, critical goals, but the regional director fell behind. Rather than periodic check-ins followed by blame when deadlines weren't met, the ED temporarily implemented daily check-in calls — what some might call “micromanaging” —which turned things around within weeks. The ED then stepped back once thing were back on track.
Create Accountability
Creating accountability throughout and at the end of the project is important for ensuring employees know that you mean what you say when you set expectations. It’s important for employees to know that their quality of work will matter - as the manager, you need to correct negative outcomes and reward positive outcomes.
Another important goal is to surface lessons for the future - even if the outcome was positive, there likely are important lessons learned.
A good format for doing this is to take written notes and schedule a retrospective meeting between the manager and the employee to discuss. Ideally the retrospective meeting is scheduled in advance during the project planning phase, to ensure that it happens.
Delegating Roles
While delegating individual projects is essential, truly effective managers eventually delegate entire areas of responsibility. Let's explore how the principles we've discussed apply to role delegation.
Delegation usually starts by handing off specific tasks and projects, but the true power of delegation emerges when you can hand off broad responsibilities (e.g., put someone in charge of fundraising). This is done the same way you delegate anything else.
Each person on your team should be able to say what they are responsible for. You should create roles for each employee that clarify what they are owning, what the expectations for the role are, and how they should approach their job.
Goals
Roles let you shift a broad responsibility and goals let you create accountability around that, as well as stretch the employee to achieve more.
Goals are usually higher level than projects and are typically accomplished by the strategic culmination of multiple projects. Set SMART goals (Strategic, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic, Time-bound) that stretch employees but remain achievable (~80% completion rate is ideal).
Generally you want each employee to have 1-5 goals at any given time and to be established at a regular cadence (e.g., quarterly, annually). In a case where an employee has multiple goals, it might be helpful to assign them relative weight.
It is okay for goals to be interim goals. You should try to avoid changing goals midstream.
Each employee should be able to know their goals without having to look them up.
Goal Plans and Milestones
Supplement goals with concrete plans and interim milestones to track progress. Hold monthly "step back" meetings to review goal progress, morale, and development needs.
Organizational Mission and Goals
Organizational Goals
Just as employees have goals, the organization itself can have goals. Conceptually, organizational goals and employee goals aren't fundamentally different. Many organizational goals become individual employee goals. In fact, organizational goals can be viewed as the executive director's personal goals.
Just like with individuals, you should try to keep the number of organizational goals small (1-5). Ask “if we accomplish nothing else, what would we need to achieve this year to be successful?”
You should create a plan and milestone for organizational goals as well - this will end up forming your strategic plan.
You should create accountability around organizational goals by reporting them to the board, or even donors. They can also form the basis for the annual evaluation of the executive directors.
Mission Statement
The mission statement of the organization is a singular, higher-level goal that unifies all the organizational goals and sets out the purpose of the organization. While they usually can be derided as vague or vapid, a good mission statement helps clarify to everyone what you are setting out to do and why.
A good mission statement is a concise, action-oriented statement of your organization’s fundamental purpose. They usually start with a verb (e.g., reduce, eliminate, protect, make) plus a description of a problem the organization wants to solve.
Asking “Does this advance our mission?” should also be a useful question to decide whether to take on certain projects or go in certain directions.
Onboarding
The book dislikes the word “onboarding” as it sounds too jargon-y, but I’ll carry on in using it for lack of a better term. Onboarding is important as the messages you explicitly and implicitly send on the first day has a large impact on the culture and expectations of the employee. Here are some good things to do:
Create an initial training agenda before the employee starts that lays out everything you plan to cover. Make sure the agenda makes it clear about the goals and desired outcomes for the first few weeks, as well as what the expectations are.
While not covered in this book, one really relevant bonus idea is for both the employee and the manager to write a “how to work with me” document.
Ensure the logistics (e.g., laptop, email, workspace, supplies) are ready in advance.
Check in very regularly in the first week or two to see how the employee is adjusting and whether they have any challenges.
Culture
Culture is the invisible message about “how things are done around here” and helps employees know how to conduct themselves without being told. A culture will exist whether you want it to or not, so you might as well try to actively shape it.
Although no two organizational cultures are exactly the same, high performing organizations usually have cultures defined by rigor and accountability around results, shared engagement around the mission, and positive energy.
Key attributes of effective cultures:
Results matter more than appearances: People persist until goals are achieved. Everyone works toward shared goals with goodwill and minimal interpersonal conflict.
People are genuinely dedicated: Employees proactively invest in organizational success and suggest improvements
There are high but achievable performance standards where people feel pushed but supported. This create a selective, excellence-driven environment.
Mutual openness: Ideas face rigorous debate regardless of source and both managers and employees openly acknowledge weaknesses and prioritize growth through feedback
Ways to enforce/create/cultivate culture:
The best way to create a culture is for the executives to lead by example. For instance, if you promise to email a document after a meeting but fail to do so, employees receive an implicit signal that missing deadlines is acceptable.
When orienting new employees, discuss your values and what they mean in practice. It may help to even have non-contrived hypothetical scenarios about how your values would play out.
You should give constructive feedback to people in the moment if you see them going against the values. Similarly, you should give positive feedback to people the moment you see them acting out the values.
You should periodically review and edit your list of values with your entire team or your most senior people.
Rituals, celebrations, and awards can be a good way to reinforce shared values.
How you wield authority
The best managers are neither wimps nor tyrants, but normal yet assertive people.
Wimp = bad. Wimps let their desire to be nice trump their obligations to hold the quality bar high, hold people to standards, warn them when they are falling short, and take action when the warnings don’t work. Wimps avoid conflict and present requirements as mere suggestions (though get frustrated when these “suggestions” aren’t adhered to). Wimps let consensus rule even when it shouldn’t.
Tyrant = bad. Tyrants yell, react with defensiveness, are passive-aggressive, and make unreasonable demands (e.g., ask someone to work over the weekend to complete something that isn’t time-sensitive). Tyrants block out other’s input even when they have something important to add.
Normal and assertive = good and effective. These managers act with confidence, directly lay out expectations, operate in a fair and straightforward manner, and back up their words with action. They are direct and don't avoid difficult conversations. They remain calm without hostility, stay open to being wrong, make fair decisions, and are comfortable with authority. Normal, assertive managers welcome what others have to say and recognize they can be wrong while also remembering that it is the manager’s job alone to make the final call.
Keep in mind that being normal and assertive might make some people unhappy. You should try to keep your employees happy within reason, but getting results is more important than making people as happy as possible all the time. Yet, don’t be so gung ho about messing with people’s feelings that you become a tyrant.
Ultimately, you should just try to be normal. Don’t overthink it. If you’re normally kinda quiet, don’t feel like you need to lead an office cheer. If you use humor in your personal life, don’t be afraid to use humor in your professional life.
Development
Contrary to popular belief, this book claims that you do not need to spend money on fancy professional development programs, formal mentorships, etc.2
Instead, employee development comes from strong, hands-on management with ambitious goals and lots of feedback. Managing to good outcomes provides substantial employee development. This happens naturally because feedback and goals are built into the process, giving employees opportunities to learn by doing. Asking an employee to apply new skills or apply their old skills at a higher level (e.g., moving from managing a team of two to managing a team of eight) often produces significant growth.
It’s important to know what you can change and what you can’t — you can train someone in a new software in a few weeks, but you can’t easily train someone to become a critical thinker or strong writer in a few weeks if they aren’t.
It’s also important not to use employee development to procrastinate or disguise what really should be a negative performance review followed by a performance improvement plan, which is qualitatively different.
Opinions vary, but the book is against using separate development plans as this may risk distracting your employees from their main goals. Instead, development should arise as part of their approach to their normal work.
Delivering Feedback
Feedback is one of the most powerful tools to develop an employee, and direct feedback on how an employee can improve will go a long way towards that employee improving. Feedback should be given constantly to reinforce behavior you want to see more of, prevent bad habits from being ingrained, and foster an atmosphere of open communication. It’s good to address problems early and provide feedback while things are still small, rather than tell someone that they’ve been doing something wrong for months.
Feedback can be:
positive - recognizing someone doing something well
developmental - sharing a way someone is doing something good and how they can do it even better
corrective - telling an employee that something must change in order for them to meet your expectations
Positive feedback is a very underrated way of creating motivation and providing accountability.
Good feedback (positive or negative) looks like this:
Describe a specific observed behavior in a single sentence (e.g., “I noticed that when you give a presentation, you use the same presentation for both inexperienced and very experienced groups.” — note that this is not “You should work on your presentation skills.”)
Provide two or three specific and concrete examples (e.g., “In our last presentation, people had already been to this training before but you repeated all the introductory definitions from the first training. And in the presentation before that, you asked people if they ever have done this before when clearly everyone has.”).
State the impact of the behavior (e.g., “as a result, our attendees are leaving confused and are wondering if they are in the correct training. One person even asked for a refund!”)
Make a recommendation (“Try keeping your presentation the same for the introduction group but notice ahead of time when we are doing a follow-up training and provide different content.”)
Ask the employee for their perspective (“What do you think about this?”). Actually listen.
Follow up later to ensure things are on track.
Note that negative feedback should always be delivered to people individually, even if it is a group of people that failed to meet expectations.
Performance Reviews
A more formal way of delivering feedback is performance reviews. This is an important tool for consolidating feedback and creating accountability around it, as well as creating accountability around accomplishments and goals. Employees should be evaluated on what they did (projects), what they accomplished (goals), and how they did it (values/culture). This evaluation should be clear so that each employee knows exactly where they stand. It can also reflect on the retrospectives from each project and how the projects themselves went.
These performance reviews are a great way to let your employees know how you are feeling about their performance and for you to hear how they are feeling about their job. In the case of lower performers, it also lets you send a clear signal about the consequences of failing to improve. Though note that rarely should anything in a performance review come as a surprise — ideally you have been giving feedback throughout, early and often!
A good performance review will discuss each goal and how the employee succeeded or fell short and why. Pay close attention to your overall tone and ensure your main message about performance is unmistakable. A common mistake is giving a lukewarm-sounding review to a valued employee you'd hate to lose. Equally problematic is having to fire an underperformer after failing to clearly communicate needed improvements in their review.
Like feedback, performance reviews also benefit from being very specific and citing specific examples. You should also aim to make the review holistic and resist the temptation to overweigh more recent events. Even if a problem has been resolved, it is good to mention it and just note the resolution.
Promotions
Organizations often take their strongest performers and promote them into new roles only to see them flounder because the skills for the new role are not the skills that allowed them to do so well at their old role. This is especially true with promotion into people management, as people management is a qualitatively different skill than being good at doing what it is you are managing people to do. The world’s best football player is not the world’s best football coach, and the world’s best coach is probably not that great at football! Instead, it’s important to make sure the people you promote are promoted based on their strength and skills match with the role you are promoting them into.
You shouldn’t feel the need to promote employees in order to retain them.
Motivation and Retention
If you have the right people, you shouldn’t have to spend too much time actually motivating them. Instead, spend your energy creating an environment that breeds motivation naturally by…
giving your employees meaningful roles with lots of genuine responsibility
giving them clear feedback about how they are doing and how they could do better
holding them to ambitious but attainable goals
helping them make progress and mentoring them along the way
giving them a sense that they are learning
giving them opportunities to work on more and progress (though this may depend on the employee - some employees will welcome the new challenge, but other employees would see the challenge as a burden)
helping them connect their work to the bigger picture
praising their efforts
showing them you care
This also applies to retention - it isn’t just about salary and bonus, but also about the above list of things. (Though money and bonus are also important, and it is worth investing in compensating people well.)
Also, don’t underestimate the value of asking employees about retention directly. While this is rarely done, taking a valued employee out to lunch and asking them “How can we make sure you stay around for the next two years?” can open a discussion to valuable feedback. It can also be helpful to list all your employees and list the strategies you can use to retain them.
Termination
If you notice yourself not feeling excited about working hard to retain an employee, you should consider whether they should remain in your organization.
It’s always sad to have to let someone go, but it’s clear that managers frequently don’t fire people when they should and the costs of letting low performers remain in the organization outweighs the costs of firing them. Many managers are shocked by how much more gets done by a superior replacement relative to the person who was just fired.
Managing Up
In addition to managing others, most people have a boss too. Even the Executive Director or CEO is usually accountable to the Board. Just as you can get better results through improving your ability to manage your employees, you can also get better results through managing up. This is basically management in reverse - take a look at all the principles of good management and figure out how to set yourself up to enable the manager to implement those principles as easily as possible.
For example, it’s helpful if your manager works with you to form goals and keep you accountable to them. You can help this along by being proactive about your goals, get clear about what success looks like, and talk explicitly about this with your manager. When you think you might encounter challenges, try to anticipate tricky situations and talk through with your manager in advance how you will handle them.
It’s also helpful to proactively discuss what decisions of yours your manager wants to be informed about, what they want to be consulted on, what they need to pre-approve before you do, and what they don’t even want to be bothered with.
You should make sure you have a system for checking in regularly and put yourself in charge of making sure it happens. If your boss cancels the meeting, ensure it gets rescheduled.
While ideally your boss should be providing you with regular feedback, it can be helpful to prompt this by asking your manager to debrief on how things went.
Throughout managing up, it is important to understand what you can affect and what you can’t, and focus only on ensuring what you can control goes as smoothly as possible. Try to work within your manager’s context and style, though also do give feedback (and definitely don’t tolerate abuse!). It’s important to remain emotionally intelligent and understand that your boss is a human too.
One Hand Rule
It’s also helpful to make it easy for your boss to give input by applying the one hand rule:
Imagine the person you’re emailing going from one meeting to the next and checking their inbox between meetings. Could they reply to your email while waiting for Zoom to launch? Could they send off a response in the time that it takes to walk from the bus or their car to the office? Or will they glance at the email, see that it requires a longer reply than they have time to type, and set it aside for later (which may never come)?"
This involves keeping questions to yes/no or multiple choice, make an initial recommendation / default, make everything clear upfront but provide background at the end as necessary. This link has some examples.
Conclusion
Despite its idealistic title, the book delivers pragmatic tools. It shows how transformation happens through consistent application of basic practices: clear expectations, regular check-ins, and specific feedback.
Green and Hauser's strength lies in addressing management's true challenges — the interpersonal elements of direct performance conversations, maintaining accountability without tyranny, and balancing guidance with autonomy. These are the real tests of management, and they're precisely where most managers falter.
"Managing to Change the World" strips away leadership mythology, offering techniques that are simple to understand but difficult to implement consistently. In a world fixated on charismatic and bold leadership, it proves that effective management happens instead through routine practices that empower others.
I hope you get as much value out of it as I did!
Though we should also keep in mind that delegation is not costless - there will be less direct control over the quality of the work, more work for the employee, and two people’s attention needed now instead of just one person.