what motivates us

At The Management Center, we want to see more social change in this country, and we know that producing it is hard.  Powerful interests and a system designed to resist change mean that social justice advocates need to fight not just as effectively as their opponents, but more effectively. This is where The Management Center comes in: we work to inculcate outstanding management practices throughout the social justice sector, making it easier for leaders and organizations to get superior results.
 
Throughout our work, we try to instill an ethos that marries progressive values with the qualities we’ve seen differentiate high-performing organizations – openness with rigor, empowerment with accountability, and ongoing learning with a commitment to excellence.
 
Our clients regularly tell us, “You’re not what I thought consultants would be like.” And we’re not. We don’t write reports, speak in jargon, or maintain a polite distance. Instead, we are:

  • Hands-on.  We get in our clients’ business. We watch them delegate and conduct job interviews and run meetings. We look at their email so we can see real examples of how they’re interacting with colleagues. We watch them in action to see what’s really going on and what it would take to move things forward. We get in the trenches with our clients, grapple with their questions right alongside them, and get our hands dirty.

  • Grounded in our clients’ worlds. We’ve been in our clients’ shoes, and we understand firsthand the difficulties and complexities they face. We hear over and over that we “get” their realities in a way they didn’t expect.

  • Obsessed with results. Whether a client is grappling with a staff member’s poor performance, or lack of alignment over goals, or low staff morale, we look at everything through the lens of how it will impact what a client gets done, and emphasize not getting caught up in process for process’ sake.