A nonprofit can care deeply about people and still struggle to balance its budget. It can be wonderfully entrepreneurial and still need better policies. It can have excellent procedures and still lose the ability to imagine anything new.
These are not simply differences between good and bad management. Often, they are tensions between genuinely important values. The challenge is learning to hold those values together instead of assuming that your preferred approach is the only right one.
The Competing Values Framework gives nonprofit and ministry leaders a practical way to understand these tensions. It helps you assess your organizational culture, recognize your strengths as a manager, and identify the areas where you need to grow. The goal is not to abandon what you do well. It is to become more balanced.
Key Takeaways
- Healthy nonprofits integrate collaboration, entrepreneurship, business performance, and governance rather than relying on one dominant value.
- Culture assessments reveal differences between an organization’s current priorities and its preferred direction.
- T-shaped development builds deep expertise while broadening skills across less familiar management areas.
- Balanced leadership combines opposing strengths into caring confrontation, practical vision, and teachable confidence.
Understanding the Four Competing Values
The framework begins with a simple two-by-two grid. One axis moves from an internal focus to an external focus. The other moves from flexibility to stability and control.
Together, these dimensions create four quadrants: Collaborate, Create, Compete, and Control. Each represents a different set of priorities. In a nonprofit or ministry context, we can connect them to ministry, startup, business, and governance values.
Collaborate: Ministry and Relational Values
The Collaborate quadrant, also called Clan, combines an internal focus with flexibility. Its emphasis is working together, developing people over the long term, and building relationships.
This is often where frontline program staff and ministry workers feel most at home. They care about people, participation, and the relational quality of the work. For many ministries, these values are close to the heart of the mission.
That is a real strength. But caring for people is not the only responsibility an organization carries.
Compete: Business and Funding Values
The Compete quadrant, also called Market, combines an external focus with greater attention to results and control. It emphasizes speed, performance, and achieving goals.
In a nonprofit, this includes fundraising, bringing in revenue, and maintaining financial viability. The language may sound more business-oriented than ministry-oriented, but the organization still has to raise money and balance its budget.
This is one reason program and fundraising priorities can feel culturally different. One emphasizes patient development; the other emphasizes timely performance. Both serve necessary purposes.
Create: Entrepreneurial and Startup Values
The Create quadrant, also called Adhocracy, combines flexibility with an external focus. It emphasizes trying new approaches, anticipating needs, and doing something first.
These are startup values. They are especially important when an organization needs breakthrough innovation rather than another small improvement to an existing process.
Entrepreneurial leaders naturally gravitate here. They see possibilities and want to move toward them. I identify strongly with this quadrant, which also means I have had to learn to appreciate the values on the opposite side.
Control: Operations and Governance Values
The Control quadrant, also called Hierarchy, combines an internal focus with stability. It emphasizes doing things correctly through policies, coordination, and dependable processes.
In nonprofit management, this connects to operations, accounting, and governance. Improvement here tends to be incremental: making an existing system more reliable rather than inventing a completely new one.
To an entrepreneur, this can feel restrictive. But an organization cannot operate indefinitely on enthusiasm and new ideas. It also needs structure.
Assess Your Organizational Culture
Once you understand the quadrants, you can ask a more useful question than “Do we have a good culture?” You can ask, “Which values dominate our culture, and which need more attention?”
The Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument, commonly called the OCAI, offers a way to map an organization using the competing values approach.
A useful feature is the distinction between current culture and preferred culture. You describe where the organization is now, then consider where you would like it to be. The resulting profile makes that difference visible. Depending on the assessment report, industry comparisons may also provide context.
Remember that your responses reflect your perception of the organization. The profile is a starting point for understanding culture, not a reason to stop asking questions.
At City Vision, our assessment highlighted something I could recognize in my own leadership: we had historically been too entrepreneurial. We needed stronger hierarchy and market orientation, meaning more attention to systems, structure, and business performance.
That did not mean entrepreneurship had become a bad thing. It meant that our strength needed support from other strengths.
Use the profile to consider:
- Which quadrant receives the most attention in our decisions?
- Which values do we tend to resist or neglect?
- How does our preferred culture differ from our current culture?
- What capabilities would help us move toward that preferred culture?
Recognize How Organizational Needs Change Over Time
The Competing Values Framework also helps explain organizational life cycles. The balance that works during a startup stage may not be the balance an organization needs later.
Early Stage: Creativity Comes Naturally
A startup will usually be strong in the Create quadrant. People are experimenting, responding quickly, and building something that did not exist before.
It may bring in some revenue and take reasonably good care of its people, but formal policies are often weak. Sometimes that is almost a point of pride: we do not need rules, we do not need hierarchy, and policies only get in the way.
That attitude may feel freeing at first. It becomes harder to sustain as the organization grows.
Growth Stage: Relationships and Systems Need Attention
As an organization develops, it often needs to expand its collaborative capacity and introduce more structure. People development matters more, and responsibilities need greater coordination.
The organization may become somewhat less dominated by constant invention while building policies and processes that allow the work to continue reliably. This is not necessarily a betrayal of its entrepreneurial beginnings. It can be part of maturing.
Later Stage: Structure Can Become Bureaucracy
Eventually, the opposite problem can emerge. Policies begin to dominate, and the organization becomes bureaucratic.
That may be less disruptive in a relatively stable environment. In a rapidly changing field, such as technology or the web, it can become a serious limitation. An organization that once needed more structure may now need renewal.
Microsoft illustrates this pattern: entrepreneurial beginnings, increasing bureaucracy, and then a need for reinvention. The broader lesson for nonprofits is simple: do not assume that the capabilities you needed yesterday are the only ones you need today.
Map Your Own Management Strengths
The same framework applies to individuals. You can use it to understand the management roles that feel natural and those that require more deliberate practice.
The Workplace Behavioral Profile connects the four quadrants to specific competencies:
- Collaborate: facilitating participation, mentoring and developing people, and acknowledging others’ needs.
- Create: anticipating future needs, initiating change, and motivating others.
- Compete: focusing on competition, producing results, and driving achievement.
- Control: clarifying policies, monitoring work, and coordinating projects.
This gives you more detail than simply saying you are relational or entrepreneurial. You can begin to see which behaviors make up that strength.
Using the Workplace Behavioral Profile Spreadsheet
In our course, we use a Google spreadsheet to complete this self-assessment. The basic workflow is straightforward:
- Read the instructions before entering responses.
- Use the File menu to make your own copy.
- Rename the copy with the profile title and your name.
- Open the self-assessment tab.
- Mark the appropriate response column for each item with a lowercase x, following the sheet’s instructions.
- Review the calculated results, competency map, and summary charts.
The spreadsheet totals the responses and turns them into a visual profile. You can then identify your strongest areas and the competencies that need development.
For example, a profile may show a major strength in innovation, a secondary strength in business performance, and weaker relational or governance competencies. That person can continue developing innovation while also broadening the less developed areas.
If you already know the Myers-Briggs personality framework, some broad overlaps may help you think about these preferences. But that connection is optional. You do not need to know a personality type to use the competing values approach or identify skills worth developing.
Build T-Shaped Skills, Not Just Deeper Strengths
A central question in management education is how much to invest in strengths versus weaknesses.
I often explain it with sports. If you are right-handed, should you put all your effort into making your right hand stronger? Or should you also practice with your left hand?
There is value in developing your dominant hand. But relying on it exclusively leaves you limited. The same is true for nonprofit managers.
T-shaped development combines depth in your dominant area with breadth across the other areas. The vertical part of the T represents specialization. The horizontal part represents a working range of other competencies.
Ministry-oriented students often love ministry courses. Business courses may be harder to tolerate, and accounting may be especially uncomfortable. Yet those subjects address responsibilities their organizations still have.
I have experienced the same resistance from the entrepreneurial side. When I took governance-oriented courses, I sometimes argued with the teacher and assumed the teacher’s whole mindset was wrong. Honestly, I was not very teachable.
That is worth recognizing in yourself. When you dislike a subject in your weaker quadrant, the discomfort may be part of learning to use your off hand. You may not enjoy the exercise, but it can still be good for you.
Our Introduction to Nonprofit and Ministry Management course uses this framework to connect ministry, business, operations, and entrepreneurial competencies. The purpose is to develop managers who can go deep without becoming narrow.
Know What Happens When a Strength Becomes an Imbalance
Why make the effort to broaden your skills? Because every quadrant has an unhealthy extreme. The problem is not the value itself. The problem is allowing that value to operate without the balancing influence of the others.
- Collaboration without balance: discussion becomes endless and participation unproductive. The organization can become an inward-looking club that serves its members but produces little impact.
- Creativity without balance: vision becomes ungrounded, priorities change constantly, and the organization moves from one new program to another without a practical plan.
- Competition without balance: goals become oppressive. Performance pressure dominates, and the workplace can begin to resemble a sweatshop.
- Control without balance: policies turn into overregulation, coordination turns into micromanagement, and bureaucracy stifles the organization.
These risks apply to individual managers as well as organizational cultures. A person can be so committed to participation that decisions never happen, or so committed to results that people become secondary.
The framework helps you notice when a legitimate strength has moved into its negative extreme.
Integrate the Values Rather Than Choosing Sides
Balanced leadership is more than reducing excess. The deeper goal is to combine qualities that initially seem incompatible.
Collaboration contributes care, concern, and engagement. Competition contributes autonomy, confrontation, and challenge. Put them together, and you can develop caring confrontation: addressing a difficult issue while remaining genuinely concerned for the person.
You can also develop autonomous engagement. People can remain connected to the organization while taking responsibility for their work.
The same principle applies to Create and Control. Control contributes practicality, reason, and assurance. Create contributes hope, vision, and openness to learning.
Together, they produce practical vision. You can dream about reaching the moon, but you also need a plan for getting there. The answer is neither an impossible dream nor a refusal to dream at all.
They also produce teachable confidence: enough confidence to act, with enough humility to keep learning.
Start by identifying your dominant quadrant and the one you most resist. Consider what your organization needs at its current stage, then choose learning opportunities that strengthen both your specialty and your breadth.
You do not have to stop being relational, entrepreneurial, results-oriented, or systematic. You need to learn how those strengths work together. That is how the Competing Values Framework helps develop more balanced nonprofit managers and organizations.