This last post on Governance and Management for think tanks deals with three important issues: line management, staffing, and monitoring for management.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0first one addressed the importance<\/a>\u00a0of dealing with governance and management. The\u00a0second post\u00a0<\/a>focused on think tanks\u2019 boards, the executive direction, senior management, central services, and research teams.<\/p>\n There is a set of very specific challenges related to managing staff and monitoring their performance. They may overlap somewhat with the challenges faced by the ED, SMT and the manner in which research is organised and how it relates to other teams within the think tank, but they deserve special attention.<\/p>\n Line management goes beyond what maybe the responsibility of Human Resources departments and is, in practice, the responsibility of line managers \u2013who are, often in a think tank, very busy researchers. Line management faces several challenges:<\/p>\n This is a recurring issue throughout the challenges described above.\u00a0Hiring staff<\/a>\u00a0is not always done professionally (relying more on word of mouth or personal contacts) and efforts to retain staff are limited to trying to find new funds for them. These are not sustainable nor appropriate options for a think tank.<\/p>\n Far form needing an HR department to deal with this, think tanks need to remember that everything they do is about people and their ideas. The organisation\u2019s governance and management needs to reflect this. Even more than policy influence as a guiding objective; the nurturing and unleashing of its staff full potential should be at the heart of everything it does.<\/p>\n Firing (or letting go) is a particularly contentious issue. Since their origins are usually in the NGO world or in academia, think tanks award firing a very negative connotation. Many organisations prefer, instead, to move staff around, promote it, create new positions for them, and change their status to associates (rather than full time staff members); anything except letting them go. And when they have to get rid of staff they inevitably do it in the least productive possible ways.<\/p>\n This has the opposite effect of what was intended. It creates more work for those who are performing effectively, it undermines managers and their power to define and decide the future of their programmes or initiative, it undermines formal procedures instituting, instead, an informal way of doing things, etc.<\/p>\n And in the long run, too, it increases the cost of staff.<\/p>\n A final Governance and Management issue to consider, and that has the power to tie everything together, is monitoring. Monitoring is often meant to focus\u00a0on the monitoring and evaluation of a think tank\u2019s influence<\/a>. Funders like to focus on this and think tanks tend to oblige \u2013maybe because it keeps monitoring out of their organisation\u2019s private space.<\/p>\n Monitoring for management is less interested in the impact that a think tank has or on measuring any degree of their contribution to change but rather places greater value to the organisation\u2019s internal functioning: to knowing about what it does and learning how to do it better.<\/p>\n There are a number of priorities in this respect:<\/p>\n Monitoring then is crucial to pre-empt the challenges that besiege any think tank. Better catch them early and do something about them while there is still time.<\/p>\nLine management and performance appraisals<\/h2>\n
\n
Staffing -finding, retaining, and \u2018letting go\u2019<\/h2>\n
Monitoring for management<\/h2>\n
\n
Re-caping<\/h2>\n