Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, suggests that one of those habits is the ability to manage work so that our time is not consumed only by those things that appear urgent. These short term issues are often crises, but are not often those things that help a person position themselves to be effective long-term.  The important, but not-so-urgent issues focus on strategic thinking, relationships and discovering and taking advantage of opportunities.

I think it is similar for organizations. Successful organizations take care of those urgent, important things, but they also find time to think longer-term, and proactively create their future. This section of our Annual Report has become important for us because it acts as a reminder, and an evaluation tool, that challenges us to plan for and act on our future, as opposed to just reacting to the future someone else hands us.

Let’s look at our goals from last year. So how’d we do?  I feel very good about our progress on each. Here is an overview:

• Harvesting the fruits of our labors.  We are just about to close on construction financing for our major housing with supportive services, received two major fund sources for housing rehab, successfully started implementation of the Bemidji community’s Shared Vision initiative, and are moving closer to defining Version 2.0 of our Community Stewardship efforts.  While we’ve had our fair share of challenges over the last year, we were also able to accomplish the things we set as goals.
• Staying the course on professional development. While there is a beginning and middle to professional development efforts, there really is no end. Not only have we retained our staff over the last year, I think we have gotten to the next level in our pursuit of professional development for all staff. More on this later in this article.
• Acting as one team.  Our internal structure has been radically changed to help us in this area. Our structure and culture has rewarded lone heroes in the past; it is now geared toward team success and teamwork.
• Being disciplined, and intentional. We’ve always been pretty disciplined; now we’ve improved the intentionality piece. We’ve targeted specific goals that pull us forward (see below).

While we’re well-positioned, I want to make sure that we do not “rest on our lead.” The following graphic shows our new internal structure, and also shows our goals.

As you can see, we’ve got some healthy ambitions.  The goals reflect both external desires for our customers, and internal benchmarks for continued improvement.
The internal goals reflect our understanding of what it will take to bring about long-term prosperity. They also reflect our commitment to make a difference throughout our entire region. These goals provide an answer to the question about what we intend to do.

The Resource Team goals are internal goals, and reflect our commitment to work on the “how” question – how we are going to improve our internal operation to more successfully accomplish external goals. These goals take a bit more explanation.

Succession planning is often thought about in a narrow sense – slotting people to take over positions as staff leave or retire.  Our view of succession is broader. Succession planning is our commitment to grow the skills and abilities of each and every staff to create an organization that is highly adaptable and very resilient as change occurs.  Change comes in many forms – staffing, external organizational funding priorities, and economic conditions are all subject to change.  Organizations that can position themselves to be adaptable can sustain great work.

Our strategy includes a variety of individual professional development activities and an emphasis on teamwork. Individual skill enhancement can broaden staff abilities; better teamwork allows the organization to take advantage of complementary, but different gifts.

I look forward to giving you my assessment of how we are doing in next year’s annual report.

I am excited for FY 2011!