Managing Indigenous Organisations

While it would take a substantial amount of time and study to understand your financial statements the way an accountant does (they study for an average of 6 years to qualify as a Chartered Accountant or Certified Practising Accountant), it is possible for the Directors on a Board of Directors to understand their financial statements sufficiently to fulfil their duties as Directors. As a Director, one of your duties is to be diligent in your role. This means that you must "pay attention". You cannot dismiss the financial side as "someone else's responsibility." Therefore, in order to fulfil this part of your legal duties, you need to understand how financial statements are prepared, what is contained in them, and what type of questions to ask when you are unclear. You do not need to understand them like a trained accountant - only sufficient to understand what's going on in your organisation and whether to feel comfortable with the results or make inquiries until you are satisfied. The best defence against fraudulent activity - or to recognise approaching insolvency - is not the Auditor, but your own sense of understanding what is going on. (more…)...

When many organisations conduct a planning exercise, they start with their goals for next year. They know their organisation so well, "This is what we need to do" they say. Unfortunately, we believe that this approach actually creates the stop-start phenomena that we see many Indigenous organisations enter into. Each year, there is a new set of goals to "fix" things or to "develop" new services or ideas. But each year, these new goals take the organisation in sometimes subtle, sometimes markedly different directions. So from year to year, the organisation is taken from one direction to another creating a stop-start culture. What the organisation needs to do is to take each step progressively toward achieving its purpose for existence. And there is only one measure of whether this is done effectively - "Are you getting closer to your Vision each time?" (more…)...

Executive and Line Managers in Indigenous corporations are a breed that has done it the hard way. In our experience, they are people who have worked their way through more and more responsible positions in Government agencies or not-for-profit and Indigenous organisations, learning the ropes as their careers progressed. Anything they know about managing people, project management, making decisions, analysing situations and organisational structures have been learned by doing, failing, and trying again. If you contrast that with the general careers of commercial company management, these people studied a management-related topic in college or university like Accountancy, Management, Business, or also came through the ranks but in the professional trades like Engineering. If they actually worked through the ranks, once identified as management material, they would almost certainly have been sent to a management course. This is a very different way of gaining knowledge and expertise in that strange skill called management. (more…)...

How do you effectively identify the risks threatening your organisation so that you can plan to mitigate those risks and avoid disaster, or even a relatively minor incident that could derail your normal operations and take time, energy and money to correct? It is just common sense to avoid yet another bushfire if you can. Identifying the variety of risks that could mean significant delays, or worse, is part of Risk Management Planning. Risk Management Planning is the process of:

• Identifying the risks that threaten your organisation,
• Analysing what effects those risks could have on the organisation,
• And then developing strategies to manage or mitigate those risks.

A Risk Management Plan is an important tool for your organisation and helps to support operational continuity when events threaten part of your operations, or even the whole organisation itself. While the risks – or even the types of risks – can vary from organisation to organisation or within an organisation from program to program, the process of preparing a Risk Management Plan is a logical step-by-step process that anyone can follow. (more…)...