Toward a High-Performance Culture: From Strategy to Strategic Human Capital at The Rhode Island Foundation

Keywords: Community foundation, strategic planning, talent developmentIntroductionOn April 11, 2012, Neil Steinberg, president and chief executive officer of the The Rhode Island Foundation, announced the first two winners of the Rhode Island Innovation Fellowship. How the foundation arrived at that moment - embracing a program that would provide individuals up to $300,000 for up to three years for ideas that could dramatically improve life in Rhode Island, a program that has as its motto "not to try is to fail" - can be traced to the foundation's strategicplanning process, which began just three years earlier.That process, which started in April 2009 and would serve as a model for cross-functional teamwork, led to a clear focus and strategic priorities for 2010-2014. Foundation leadership recognized early on, however, that implementing the plan, which was approved by the board of directors in December 2009, would require a more proactive, high-performance culture than had ever been in place at the foundation.It is said that luck favors the prepared mind. As soon as the ink was dry on the strategic plan she had played a leadership role in crafting, the foundation's special projects officer, Jessica David (now vice president for strategy, planning, and special projects), seized the opportunity to apply to the Talent Initiative, a new organizational fellowship dedicated to building capacity in the nonprofit sector through strong human-capital management. The Rhode Island Foundation was one of six nonprofit organizations selected through a request-for-proposals process for this pilot program. Launched in October 2010, the Talent Initiative led to the creation of a strategic human-capital plan, which serves as a companion blueprint to the foundation's strategic plan.1With its concentration on three key areas - talent, systems, and culture - the strategic humancapital plan has bolstered the implementation of the foundation's strategic plan. More important, however, it has enabled the foundation to embrace the dual nature of the community foundation mission: to address the long-term needs of our communities through careful stewardship of resources and investments in system change and to be visionary, proactive, and immediately responsive to the issues of the day.Setting Foundation StrategyTo fully appreciate the importance of the strategic human-capital plan to the foundation's increased efficiency and effectiveness, it's important to understand why and how the foundation developed its five-year strategy.The Rhode Island Foundation is one of the oldest community foundations in the United States and ranks 25th2 by asset size. Established in 1916 and modeled closely after the Cleveland Foundation, it was originally part of Rhode Island Hospital Trust Bank; in 1984 the parallel corporation, the Rhode Island Community Foundation, was established. Ten years later, the foundation began to more actively raise money and work to increase its visibility, although most funds came from bequests until the mid-2000s.The period of the late 1990s through 2008, when Neil Steinberg became the foundation's fourth president and CEO, saw tremendous growth largely through investment performance. In 1999, the foundation terminated the original trust and began operating solely in corporate form.Steinberg's background as a community leader, banker, and leader of the largest fundraising campaign in the history of Brown University, his alma mater, positioned him to lead The Rhode Island Foundation into a new era. Within seven months of his appointment, with the encouragement of the board and staff, he charged a small group of employees to embark on a strategic-planning process.Steinberg believed that in its role as the largest and most comprehensive funder of nonprofit organizations in the state, the foundation had a responsibility to continue to grow and change in order to meet the needs of Rhode Islanders. …