← Nonprofit Leadership Podcast
Nonprofit Leadership Podcast
Should You Focus on Team Development More Than Individual Development?
00:37:37
In this episode of the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast, Rob Harter dives into a transformative discussion with Bob Searle of The Bridgespan Group. Bob shares ...
Loading summary
Transcript29 lines
- [00:02]
Dr. Rob Harder
This is Dr. Rob Harder with the nonprofit Leadership podcast, Making youg World Better. What does it take to be an effective nonprofit leader today? What are the biggest challenges? What are the biggest obstacles? How should nonprofits fundraise in an economy that is constantly changing? All these reasons combined led me to start this show and it's my hope that through this series, people can learn not only what it takes to be an effective nonprofit organization, but to hear from effective leaders who are who are successfully making a positive impact in their communities. We hope you enjoy the show as together we hear how they are making their world better. Hey, welcome everybody to the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast. Great to have you here tuning in today. Okay, question for you. When it comes to leadership development, how many of you focus more on individual leadership development versus your entire executive team development? I'm just going to guess, but I would love, you know, reach out to me. I would love to hear from you, email me or text me or can put a LinkedIn message to me. Here's my guess and my hunch for my own experience and my colleagues that I work with. Most of us focus on individual leadership development and I think it's a good thing, of course, for many reasons. But the guest I have on today will talk a bit about the work they've done to really focus on strengthening entire executive teams, not just individual leaders. Now, let me just say this, that both are important, but when they focused on building entire teams, they found some really interesting results. And so let me tell you a little bit about the guest I have on the show. His name's Bob Searle. He works for Bridgespan and Bridgespan. I've actually had lots of guests on the show. If you're a regular listener and you know about Bridgespan, they do great work. They do a lot of research in the social impact field and sector and they always have really good data. And so I always enjoy when they reach out and say, hey, we've got another survey, we've got another report we want to share with you. So this one just real quick, I'll share a little bit more in the actual show itself when you get Bob on the show, but it's really referring to the Leading for Impact program. They had about almost 300 executive leaders participate in this program. And really the idea again was how can we strengthen an entire executive team, not just an individual leader of a nonprofit organization. So we're going to ask all kinds of questions like what did you find? What were the results? What were the risks of perhaps focusing on a team versus an Individual or what are the risks? The opposite as well. To focus solely on individual leaders rather than developing the entire team. This and more is discussed. I think you'll find some really practical takeaways for you individually as a leader, whatever role you play in a nonprofit organization and specifically for your executive team at whatever organization again you serve on. It's a fascinating organization. And what I'm going to do too is in the show notes. I'll give a link. Bob wants to share the results of the survey with all of you. And again, really interesting information. If you're into data and you would call yourself a data head. This is a great podcast. You'll get a lot of information that'll help you become a better leader and help your entire team become a better leading team. Anyway, always good to have you here. Now on to the show. This podcast is sponsored by DonorBox. DonorBox, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business. Well, welcome to the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast. I have Bob Searle here with us from Bridgespan. Bob, thanks for being on the show today.
- [03:27]
Bob Searle
My pleasure.
- [03:28]
Dr. Rob Harder
I want to give a little background for my listeners. I think a really interesting topic because of the work that Bridgespan does. As we were talking before we hit record. I've had a lot of people from Bridgepan on this show because I believe your organization really does a lot of important research, provides a lot of good data data for social impact leaders. And so I think bringing anybody from Brisbane on is very interesting, but sometimes we need to set the context a little bit. So let me do that for my listeners again. So Bob Searle, you took part in this work, part of the Philadelphia team specifically and their leading for impact program. So here's a quick overview of what that entailed. The survey entailed 299 executive leaders who participated and they were helping social impact organizations navigate the growing challenges they face today. Just a great, you know, purpose I think makes your program particularly unique is that you focused on strengthening entire executive teams, not just individual leaders. So I thought that'd be a great place to start. Let's start with why focusing on team based development is simply different than individual leadership development in nonprofit organizations. What has that been from your perspective and from this research?
- [04:40]
Bob Searle
Sure. When we originally did the research, as we were starting to think about what kind of a program could we provide, one of the we observed was that there is a lot out there, executive education, other types of professional development for individual leaders, but there is very little out there for executive teams for a whole team together and further, one of the things we realized was this whole idea of an executive team as a concept, as a management concept, is relatively new in the corporate sector as well as the nonprofit sector. Even as little as 25, 30 years ago, you think about the charismatic CEO, the Jack Welch's of the world, that sort of thing. So this is kind of a new idea, and it's even newer in the nonprofit sector. And the other thing we saw was a lot of opportunity, because what we heard. So we did a survey, we surveyed about 360 nonprofit leaders. And one of the things we heard from them was only about 20% of them, fewer than 20% really thought they were using their time with their executive team well. So you see, you think about a lot of these leaders, very scarce resource, they're coming together and they're not using their time together very well. So there's a huge opportunity there to create more effective executive leadership teams. And that was really the main thing we set out to do in this program.
- [05:56]
Dr. Rob Harder
No, that's really good to know. And I think that is always a question nonprofit leaders should be asking. Are you maximizing the time you have and are you really putting the time you're investing in your team or your nonprofit organization in the right places? So building off of that, what are the potential risks of focusing solely on individual leaders rather than truly developing the entire executive team from your research?
- [06:16]
Bob Searle
Yeah, and I think probably everybody listening has had a version of this experience. As an individual. You go off to some training, you have this amazing experience, you learn all these incredible things, you come back to your organization, you're super excited, and nobody knows what you're talking about because they didn't go through that same experience with you. And so if you bring the whole team together and you expose them to this program. So the leading for impact program, I should say, is a combination of things. There's what would look like an executive education type program. We bring a cohort of leaders together as a group. We work with them in full day sessions over the course of six months. But they also work on projects with bridge span coaches. And when you have that group of people together in that way, a couple of things happen. One, they're exposed to these new ideas together, and there's much greater likelihood that they'll get traction with those ideas once they go back to their organization. And then the second thing is they have this intense experience together, which is itself transformative. When we survey the participants at the end of each of the programs, the most common thing we hear is that that time together to have the space to have conversations about strategy, about how they're operating as a team, how they define success, how they make decisions. They never have those conversations. And so they come out of that experience operating at a completely different level.
- [07:37]
Dr. Rob Harder
Well, it really is clear that both the effectiveness and resiliency for leaders are, is so critical to the health of any organization. And kind of building off of what you just mentioned there, when it comes to social impact teams and their effectiveness, how does prioritizing team based development influence the overall effectiveness then and resilience of a nonprofit and a nonprofit leader specifically?
- [07:57]
Bob Searle
Yeah. So one of our clients put it best. She said, when the leadership team is firing on all cylinders, everything works better. And the converse is also true when it's not. And that can be any number of things. It can be lack of agreement on the strategy and how you define success, or just really being clear about what that is. It can be the team dynamic, it can be very big issues there, but it can also be little things. I mean, one of the simplest things that we identified was, and this is also in the survey, the single lowest score that we got back from our leaders was around communication. Only 11% of the respondents said, we communicate well with the rest of the organization. So, and here's what that looks like. What happens is everybody's super busy. They come together as a group, they have whatever meeting they're having, and they spend all of their time on whatever they're talking about. And then everybody rushes off to the next thing. Very simple thing. It takes discipline. But say the last five minutes of this meeting, we're going to say, what did we decide in this meeting? What are the next steps that we're committing to and what do we need to communicate to the rest of the organization? Because what happens is leaders go back to their teams. Some people are just naturally more communicative with their teams, other people less so. There's no malice or intentionality behind it. But what ends up happening is then you have information asymmetry in the organization and different people attribute that to different things and it just becomes a real problem. And so again, the executive team and how it functions just has ripple effects throughout the whole organization.
- [09:32]
Dr. Rob Harder
That's so fascinating you mentioned that because it's so true. I've been in meetings like that. I've led meetings like that where you get so busy and sometimes the meeting goes a little over and you're rushed and you have to get to the next meeting or the next event or agenda or fire that you're putting out or whatever it is, right. And you don't take that extra minute or two, that's all you really need, right. To assign what are the next steps, make sure everybody's clear on what we discussed and where do we go from here. So I think that's so true. Communication can be. A lot of social impact organizations just struggle, right. And let alone businesses, as you mentioned before. So I'm curious when it comes to, like, social impact leaders individually now, if we focus on team development, but we think about leaders and the skills or capacities that they really need to hone and grow as a leader, are there specific new skills perhaps, or capacities that you're seeing that social impact leaders really need to develop in order to navigate our increasingly complex challenges that we're facing in this social impact sector? And maybe you can say even over the next three to five years, what do you anticipate some of these new skills or capacities are needed for leaders to succeed?
- [10:38]
Bob Searle
Well, I guess the first thing I'll say is trying to anticipate what we're going to need in the near future, much less three to five years, is getting increasingly difficult. One thing that's for sure is that we always talk about uncertainty. I think it's fair to say we are operating in an environment right now of almost unprecedented uncertainty. And so I think that's one of the key skills that I think leaders need to be honing here is to really hone in on what do they need to be paying attention to. How do you prioritize in this environment where things are coming at us almost every day and things are changing in such a rapid way? When we talk with leaders about scenario planning, for example, one of the things we try to help them figure out is where are the biggest risks that we're facing as an organization. When I think about financial risk, impact risk, reputational risk, whatever those risks are, and then where do we see the highest probability of something negative really coming at you? And so as a leader, being able to get up above the fray that's happening all the time, and making sure you're focused on the right things, that's probably skill number one and one of the hardest skills ever. But today more than ever, and then as you're doing that, I'd say there's two other things that folks need to be really focused on. And one is I call it around strategy, and that is staying really focused on your North Star. To say, what is it? That's the core of how we define impact. What we know we're Doing that is highest impact work. Making sure that you're nurturing that, protecting it, whatever that is, while also thinking about the innovation that you need to undertake in order to move to whatever's coming next. Because that's always going to be true. And I think again, that's true more than ever. So there's those strategic elements of leadership that again, always matter, but probably matter even more in times of uncertainty. And then I'd say the third thing which is so critical is taking care of the people on the team. This work is always stressful and one of the reasons I do this work is just the amount of admiration I have for the people who do it, my clients. It's so hard and it's only getting harder. So nonprofit executive directors need to take care of themselves first and foremost, because if you don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of your teams. But really making sure that this stress, the trauma that people are experiencing, you're acknowledging that you're helping them process that and do what they need to do. So I'd say those are the big areas where I think leaders need to focus.
- [13:13]
Dr. Rob Harder
Let's double click on a couple of those. The first one you mentioned about the risk analysis, I remember with my organization we did a both the systems slash organizational risk analysis. And at first you're like, well, what's wrong? You know, with the organization it's like, actually, luckily nothing really is wrong. We just want to make sure we're prepared for whatever's going to come in the future and so that we can avoid having any kind of issue. Right, because every nonprofit, every social impact organization can run across and run into risks that they're not prepared for often. And so I like that you are mentioning that. That's something that is becoming even more prominent, I think, and I think it particularly stems from one of my. I proposed this based on what you said. It's so uncertain in our current environment. I think you're exactly right. But I think when it financial uncertainties happen, that creates a lot of fear in organizations. And then all of a sudden that can really change the whole dynamic of an. So anyway, maybe talk a bit more about what are the benefits. What would you recommend an executive director to do if they're going to go ahead and do a risk analysis? What does that look like for someone who's never even thought about doing that for their organization?
- [14:17]
Bob Searle
Well, and I can share some materials that we've developed. This goes back to actually Covid, when, when Covid hit, it was Very destabilizing, as we all know. And so we developed an approach to scenario planning that really started with that, that piece, that, that risk assessment. And we looked across your team financial for sure. But what are your clients experiencing? How are they stressed? So there's a very systematic way to look across 10 or 12 different questions that you might want to ask yourself to think about. Again, where are my highest risks? But then it's really important to start to think about, well, what are the potential future states that we might see? And one of the mistakes that we see leaders make is underestimating the worst case scenario. So that's another place that I would urge when we do this work with clients, we say think about status quo, think about sort of a moderate case, and then think about a worst case. And don't just try to jump to the worst case because you'll almost systematically underestimate that. But then really quantify what those gaps are going to be, whether they're operational or financial or whatever that is. And then think about the actions that you would have to take if you found yourself heading down that path. Because it's really important to think about that ahead of time because when the moment's there, you're going to be under a lot of stress and nobody is at their best for making hard decisions. So you've got to think ahead of time about the actions you would take. And then last but not least, what are the indicators that we're headed down that path? The goal of scenario planning is not to predict the future that you don't get points for that. It's to say, what are some potential future states? And then to say, what do we need to be paying attention to, whether that's public policy changes or trends that we're seeing in how our clients are coming to us, or whatever that might be that indicate to us that this scenario that we laid out is where we're headed. And now we've already thought about the actions that we want to take, and then you're ready to go. And so that kind of exercise, it's painful, but it pays off if and when you end up in that spot.
- [16:32]
Dr. Rob Harder
We'll be right back. Are you looking for an easy and effective way to boost your nonprofit's donations? Well, look no further than DonorBox, the online fundraising platform that streamlines your fundraising efforts, maximizes donations, and simplifies giving for your supporters. With DonorBox, you can create beautiful donation forms, accept digital wallet payments, track donations, and send auto receipts. And the best part, there are no setup or Monthly fees and no long term contracts required. So what are you waiting for? Visit donorbox.org today to get started. That is www.donorbox.org. i'm really glad you mentioned that though. Very helpful. And I think I do recommend nonprofit leaders to invest in something like that because I was amazed how important it was for us. And we would refer back to it on the risk analysis because it was just helped us be proactive and to look ahead and to start looking at things that we kind of assumed were fine. But then we realized, you know what, actually we've really not given a lot of thought of how to prevent this be from becoming an issue. And then, okay, second thing you mentioned, I thought would I want to double click on that true north? I think that's so good too because I think there is a sense that every organization assumes, well, this is our mission, here's our vision. We're clear on that, aren't we? As you grow and as you scale your nonprofit, I find that is one of the most difficult things, particularly as your programs grow and you're getting more funding from different sources that want you to emphasize different parts maybe of your organization, even to the point where you start experiencing mission drift and you do get away from that true north. Talk about that. How can people continue to grow and scale and really develop that team that, that you're talking about without losing that true north and without having mission drift?
- [18:19]
Bob Searle
Well, this goes right back to the very early days of Bridgespan where we were bringing how do we think about strategy in a nonprofit context? And it's one of the foundational elements of the leading for impact program as well. This idea of strategic clarity, and the word clarity is really, really important. It's not necessarily focus, but it's being really clear about how you define success. And in a direct service context, it's really who is your target population? Who are you designing your programs for? What outcomes are you holding yourself accountable for as an organization with those clients that you're working with? And then your theory of change, the how, how do we believe this happens? And as a leadership team, it is really critical to be crystal clear and aligned as a team on those things. And the more specific you can be about it, the better off you'll be because that becomes then a tool for making decisions. So it's not a theoretical exercise, it's not academic exercise. It's really saying, okay, here's how we believe we as an organization have impact. This is how we define success. You can use that tool then to look at what you're currently doing and say, okay, are we actually doing what we said we do? Are we serving the target population that we said we want to work with? Are we achieving the outcomes or not? And if not, what do we do about that? And you can use that same tool to think about new opportunities because what you're describing happens all the time. The leaders that we talk to, we work with, and I'm sure you do as well. Opportunities are coming at them constantly. So how do you filter those opportunities and make choices? Anything that's coming at you probably is doing some good, it's having some impact. But when you're a nonprofit leader, the challenge is how do you translate your limited resources into the maximum impact you can? And that's where that tool, that strategic clarity really comes in to say, we need to say no to this or we need to say we can't say yes to the way you're, you're offering it to us. Here's why, here's how we could do it. Now you're in a conversation instead of just saying yes or no.
- [20:23]
Dr. Rob Harder
Good advice. No. I appreciate you sharing that. And with this survey, then let's talk a little bit more about the results. What did the results indicate when it came to high percentages of participants who really reported gains in strategic clarity and team effectiveness? Can you elaborate a little bit more on that of what these outcomes really look like in day in and day out situations within organizations?
- [20:44]
Bob Searle
So the whole program is designed around those two pillars, the leading for impact program. So it's strategic clarity and executive team effectiveness. And I mentioned before, there's, there's an executive education element to this. We have over over six days that are spread out over over five or six months. We go through a set of modules where we introduced a set of tools and frameworks around intended impact theory of change, how you use those tools to assess your program portfolio, how you use those tools to develop decision strategic decision criteria. And these sessions give the teams that are coming together an opportunity to do a little bit of us sharing with them the frameworks. But then they roll up their sleeves and they apply those frameworks to, to their organization in those sessions. So they start to think about, well, how do we define our target population? How should we agree on that? There's another set of modules that are focused on executive team effectiveness and all of the different pieces to it. So I mentioned before that team members, they come together as a team, but they don't necessarily feel like they use their time together very well. Well, that's mostly because they haven't done a good job of defining why they come together. So we have a whole set of tools around defining the work of the executive team. Simply saying, what are the things that this organization needs to accomplish that only that group of leaders can do? And they are the things that are, that have a high degree of cross functional interdependence and are the highest stakes to the organization, very strategic things. So we take them through an exercise. Let's look at your organizational priorities, let's map them along those two dimensions. What are the things that really rise to that level? How much of your time today do you spend on those things versus giving each other updates on what you're all doing? You know, things like that. So we ask them to do that. We talk about does the composition of the team really support that work? And then do the processes that you go into as a team, the meeting agendas you use together, the follow up, the mechanisms there, that and then team dynamics. You know, do you have good trust as a team? A lot of the team dynamics are things that every team should be doing. Trust, accountability, collaboration. But for executive teams, there are a few things that matter that are distinctive. We call it shared ownership. This idea that when you come together as an executive team, you're not there as a representative of your function, you are there as a leader in the organization and you are tasked with making the decisions that are best for the whole organization and in fact, the most strategic decisions. So we talk a lot about decision making in it as well. So in the course of the program, we're exposing them to all of these different elements of strategic clarity and team effectiveness. And then their project, which they work on at the same time, is looking at a priority that they have as an organization that allows them then to really more deeply apply some of those tools to that particular priority. And so by the time they get to the end, they've had an education component, a very hands on, practical component to it. And so at the end of the survey, we asked them a series of questions on a Likert scale around strategic clarity, the team effectiveness, whether their project is on track to have high impact. And that's the data that we use then to improve our own, because we also asked for qualitative feedback to improve the program, to report to our donors and that sort of thing.
- [24:12]
Dr. Rob Harder
Now it's an interesting process that you're going through and you've worked with a lot of different nonprofit organizations and social impact organizations. What have you seen when it comes to social impact? Organizations that are really good at ensuring that they're continuously evolving their leadership capacities in order to meet these future challenges. We were talking about what do successful social impact organizations do to make sure their leaders are ready for that?
- [24:36]
Bob Searle
I think one, one of the first things is you start with strategy and in particular start with where the organization is headed. And when we think about capability building or competency building, skill building, it really does start there. It starts with where are you headed as an organization and what does that imply for the capabilities that your future leaders are going to need. And we've developed a competency bank over the years with core competencies, things like communication, managing others, things like that, as well as leadership competencies, strategic thinking, things of that nature. So they're not job specific, but they really are the kinds of competencies that you need, that organizations really need to build. And we recognize that those things take time, takes time, intentionality to do that. And so with leaders it starts with this idea that where are we headed? What are the capabilities we're going to need? And now how do we put systems in place to systematically build those capabilities over time? And it really boils down to a couple of things. One is working with the people whose capabilities you're trying to build. So it's a co creative process to say where are you headed? What are your career aspirations, what are the capabilities that you need to build in order to do that so that this is not something that's being done to them. And then to get really specific about what good looks like. And that's where this competency bank comes in. This can feel very mushy and abstract, but the idea that when we think about communications, written communications, verbal communications, what is early stage, what is intermediate stage, what does advanced look like? And then to say how do you actually build skills? The research is really clear that training is a very small component and probably the least important component of skill building. People build skills by doing and more importantly, reflecting on the doing. And so as you're starting to build skills, you start to think about, well, what are the job related projects, tasks that will help people stretch and deliver and start to build those skills. And since you're putting people in those stretch roles, it's really important that they have somebody they can go to for advice and guidance. So coaching, if you will, and to make that really explicit to say, here's your stretch assignment, here is the person or people who you can go to for advice because by definition this is new. And here's a training program or a book, you should read or an article or something like that. So it's that combination that, that it really takes. And again, it takes time to build those skills. So starting with the strategy, thinking about where you're going, being really intentional about what the capabilities are, and then investing over time and building those skills, that's what we people really need to do.
- [27:20]
Dr. Rob Harder
So talk about when you're doing these things, you're putting into practice all the things you're recommending and it becomes clear to an executive leader or an executive team, there's either a member of the executive team or maybe there's another person at that next level down a management level or whatever, however structured your organization is. And this person is just not able to go to the next level or be stretched. These ideas of a stretch goal or a stretch opportunity. And it's clear that just it's outside of their gift mix. No matter how much they get trained or they shadow or they learn or they're mentored or coached. What do you do in those cases? Those are sticky ones. And I know that's something I've bumped into as an executive director. I know a lot of my colleagues have as well. What do you recommend in those situations?
- [28:02]
Bob Searle
That is a very tricky and difficult situation and there are probably a couple of different paths I could imagine going down. So one is to say if somebody is performing well in their current role and they're happy performing in that role, and I think importantly they're not blocking other people who have greater potential, then it may be totally fine for them to stay in that role. They're contributing, they're happy contributing, et cetera, et cetera, and that. And that could be totally fine. And certainly I see that. However, if they have aspirations and in spite of your best efforts, and I think it's really important to make those efforts and sometimes certain opportunities don't work well or certain coaches aren't a good fit, whatever that is, but you've made that investment, good faith effort and it's just not working. It may be that this is just isn't the right fit for them and maybe there's another role in the organization or maybe they just need to pursue another opportunity. At Bridgespan, we do see that as much as there's a skill progression through the consulting ranks, being a manager does require some different skills than being a good analyst. And being a partner requires different skills. And some of that is growth. But sometimes people do kind of hit a ceiling. And then it's important to have an empathetic conversation, but an honest One, it doesn't do anybody any good to just let somebody sit in a bad situation for a long period of time.
- [29:29]
Dr. Rob Harder
All right, so when it comes to leadership traits, I've asked a lot of my guests who are in the midst of helping leaders get better and particularly. And you've been, obviously we've been talking about team leadership specifically, but which leadership traits do you find most essential when it comes to fulfilling the responsibilities of an executive director who really wants to lead with this team based approach? Are there specific skill sets perhaps or key traits that a leader needs if they're going to have this team based approach? What have you found that cultivates those leadership gifts and talents?
- [30:01]
Bob Searle
Well, and I recognize I'm talking to somebody who specializes in this, so just recognize that. I think some of the things that I see. So the first thing is I think self awareness, particularly for leaders who have taken an organization from a pretty small scale, whether they're the founder or not, to a pretty substantial organization and maybe was running it. Everything went through them for a long time and now they have a leadership team around them and they are saying all the right things. They want to delegate, they want to enable, they want to create a distributed leadership setup. But they may not even recognize what they might be doing that's getting in the way of that. So there's something about self awareness there that I think is really important and recognizing your own personal style and that sort of thing and making sure you have people around you who will tell you the truth and making sure it's okay for them to do that. And then I think one of the things we talk about when we talk about effective executive teams is that every team that we saw that was high performing had effective CEO leadership. And I'd say there are a few elements of that. So one is to set very clear expectations of the team. What are you looking for from it? Because in a very real sense, you are commissioning the team to co lead the organization with you. And it's this idea that the collective is smarter than any individual. And so but as the leader, you know, your job is to make sure that you're unleashing that potential in that group. And then we talk about once you've set those expectations is actually lead the team. And there's two things there. One I think is holding people accountable. So reinforcing good behavior, holding people accountable. If you're seeing things that they're not delivering on or there's bad behavior, I'm sure you've seen this. So many executive directors will See something, there's conflict and say, well, you guys have to work this out. That's not what needs to happen there. The executive director needs to step in and help things happen. It's also really important that you are developing people. We just talked about the skill sets. Well, if somebody's moving from a functional leader to an enterprise leader, that is an enormous leap. And so one of the executive director's jobs is to help that person develop that into that enterprise leader. Somebody who's sort of define themselves as a finance person or a program person or whatever, now is all of a sudden having to make decisions that are in the best interest of the whole organization, which may actually be to the detriment of their own team. That is a really hard thing, and that's important. And then I'd say lastly is continuous learning and development of the leader. Whether so no matter how senior you are, how many years you have having a mentor or multiple mentors for almost every leader, I can imagine having an executive coach that really helps and can be that external viewpoint, truth teller. All of that is critically important because we all have room to improve. And so I think those are the qualities that I think are most important.
- [33:07]
Dr. Rob Harder
Well, you said something really powerful, actually several things there. But one of the things I want to jump on a little bit and tease out a bit more. I had a guest, Dave Garrison, and he mentioned this phrase that you basically kind of almost quoted. That was the idea of all of us together are smarter than any one of us with this idea that we're really. It's about the team and coming together and leaning into that team for the best decisions. Why is it so difficult? Like, what did you find when you were developing teams versus the individual development? Why is such a difficult concept? I'm guessing initially thought would be just people's ego, right? Or we all have an ego and maybe we want to be in charge. Maybe it's the leadership that was modeled to us when we were moving up the ranks, so to speak. Or what have you found when it comes to why that's difficult? Easy to maybe understand, but difficult to actually implement.
- [33:54]
Bob Searle
I think all of those things that you said are true. And there's another thing that I would add and it get. It actually gets back to team dynamic, which is this idea of diversity of perspectives around the table. And if you said that to anybody, they would nod their heads. Yes, yes, yes. But it's much harder to do in practice because by definition, what you're doing then is having people who have a different point of view who disagree, who maybe are looking at something differently. And as a leader, the experience of that can be challenging, especially if you're used to a more homogenous team or the node, the sole decision maker for the organization. And it always feels like it's taking time that you don't have to hash these things out. But there's a ton of social science research that says diverse teams make better decisions, they consider more options and at the end of the day it's better. But I think in practice it can be very difficult because we're just so busy. We experience it as, as, as, as disagreement and people just not being on board and, and that sort of thing. So I think it can be hard for leaders to remember that if it feels that way, that probably means you're headed to a better answer.
- [35:15]
Dr. Rob Harder
Well, I think my listeners may be wanting to find out a little bit more about the research, the results of the survey and find out a little bit more about bridgestand because you have so much other data in addition to this. So yeah, for those who are listening in and want to find out a little bit more, first of all about you, how would they connect with you? And number two, they can get the survey results and more information about what you found with this research.
- [35:36]
Bob Searle
Sure. So to get in touch with me, probably the easiest thing is LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn and I'm happy to respond. Would love to chat with folks if they want to talk more. I think for some of the content that I've said and I'll send you a few links to some specific things that I've alluded to. But if you go to www.bridgeband.org, that's our website, you'll find articles, you'll find information about some of these cohort programs leading for impact. We have some others as well do a lot of webinars. Those are all posted on different topics. We did a webinar recently on scenario planning. Today there was one about transformative scale, different ways that organizations can scale their impact without scaling the size of the organization quite as much. We have one coming up next month that I'll be doing related to measurements, a recent article that we, that we publish. So that's probably the best place to go and see things.
- [36:26]
Dr. Rob Harder
Okay, well Bob, thanks again. This fascinating conversation and this whole focus on team development as opposed to just individual development. Like you said, it's not necessarily better, it's just different. And I like that you're doing some more research and find some really interesting results. So again thanks for sharing some of those results with us. I encourage my listeners again check out the information Bob mentioned because there's a lot more there we just didn't have time to cover. So thanks again Bob for taking time to be on the show.
- [36:50]
Bob Searle
It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [36:53]
Dr. Rob Harder
Hey friends. Well I wanted you to know that this podcast can be found on itunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google Podcasts and wherever you listen to other podcasts. I also want to encourage you to like subscribe and share this podcast with others. This will actually help us get this great content out to more nonprofit leaders just like you. You can also join the nonprofit leadership Podcast community, find other resources and interviews of past guests all on my website nonprofit leadershippodcast.org well thanks again for listening and until next time, keep making your world better. This podcast is sponsored by Donorbox, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business.