← Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
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I know you're not working as hard as you are in your nonprofit to stay small and keep struggling. You want to have real impact, spark change, and lead a team that feels like it's moving forward with purpose. But to do that, you need a strategy and a roadmap. I have a new quiz to help you. Take two minutes, answer six questions, and get a simple custom roadmap that tells you exactly what to focus on next so you can grow your nonprofit without chaos. Go to Brookerichybabbage.com gameplan today I want to talk about what it looks like in practice to think and lead differently. You hear a lot about mindset, but how do you operationalize that? How do you lead in a way that allows your organization to actually sustain itself and its impact as you grow? So if you're feeling stuck in the weeds, burned out, or constantly wondering if there's a better way to stabilize your organization, this episode is for you. Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast. I'm Brooke Richie Babbage. I've been in the social impact game for 25 years as a social justice lawyer turned two time nonprofit founder and leader turned growth strategist and coach for leaders around the country. I grew my nonprofit from me and an intern in a tiny closet to a high impact seven figure organization. And along the way I learned so so much about how to build an organization that has real impact and how to do it without burning out. In this podcast I share the nuts and bolts of all of it so you can do that too. We dive into the mindset strategies and tactics of how to scale a high impact organization and how to do it in a way that's truly sustainable. So I've talked about this topic quite a bit. Mindset and more specifically, how building a strong, resilient organization, one that actually sustains impact at scale, isn't about you and your team doing more about how it's rooted in large part in your mindset. Right? You sustain impact at scale by thinking and therefore leading differently. And mindset can sound wonky and esoteric and depending on how it's talked about, a bit woo. All of which I can be wonky and esoteric and definitely, definitely woo. And I'm a nuts and bolts kind of gal. And the how is very important to the work that I do with leaders. And so I always try to take concepts that might seem wonky and sort of big picture and say, okay, but actually what does this look like in practice? So I want to talk about two mindset orientations that are at the root of how I have always moved through my work as a leader, as a coach, even now as a business owner, and how you can operationalize them right, what they look like in practice. And when I look back at my biggest wins and successes as a nonprofit leader and as an institution builder and an initiative builder and leader, and I look at what also has gotten me through tough times in those roles, it is always these two mindsets and that's why I'm focusing on them today. So the first is what I would call an orientation towards abundance. And you can't see it in my notes, but I am talking about abundance with a capital A like abundance from the universe. So a bit woo again, I'm gonna notch it down for you. I've been in the nonprofit sector for a very long time. It turns out it's been almost 30 years, which sounds crazy for me to hear myself say, and I get the sector, I get how we are. These are my people. This is my world. And what I know is that there is a deeply ingrained belief that we don't talk about often enough in our sector. In the nonprofit world, the belief is that resources are scarce. There isn't enough. There are gatekeepers, resource gatekeepers, be they funders or government or major donors. Our orientation towards resources and money is often fear based and rooted in not having enough. And there are lots of reasons for that that I can go into in a different podcast. But what I will say here is that this sort of often unnamed fear, this orientation towards scarcity leads to also unspoken a belief that if someone else gets the funding, gets the partnership, gets the opportunity to speak on that stage or meet with that donor, then it will be harder for me to get what my organization needs. Now this shows up in big and small ways and I've heard this for decades from leaders that I've worked with, people that I coach, things like we have to protect our donor list or we don't want to tell people yet about the new partnership until we launch or and this is, you know, sometimes people say there just isn't enough funding for our issue. One of the most interesting experiences I had when I was pretty early on in running my second organization was I had been given the contact information for the executive director, the founder and executive director of a really amazing organization that I had always admired that did similar work to us. Right there was a we had totally different mission and theory of change, but the model, the way that they were working with young people was a model I really admired and I Thought was very rooted in resilience and self efficacy and all the things I was trying to build. And so I just was very excited to meet with this executive director and to sort of swap stories and strategies. And in the first conversation that I had with her, I'll never forget it because I, I don't actually think this happened ever again after this, in large part because I approach things differently. But very early in the conversation she basically said, why would I share anything about our strategies with you? We are trying to get money from the same funders. And I remember thinking, wait a minute, I'm not competing with you. That was just never my orientation. I was like, I think that our goal here is to do the best that we can for the young people we're serving. And if I can share information with you to help you do that better, and you can share information with me to help me do that better, particularly around strategy, isn't that better? Right. For the people that we are trying to serve. And she was very clear. She was like, that's not how I work. That's a. Our sort of internal ip and that is how we get funded. And basically if I give it to you, it makes it harder for us to fundraise. And I just, I've never forgotten that because I realized in that moment, especially as a young new founder, I was in my 20s at the time. I'd sort of always assumed that people moved through the world the way that I did in, in terms of building out sort of nonprofit impact, right? I was, I was coming out of the social justice space. I'd been an anti poverty attorney and the work that I was doing was sort of all hands on deck, right? Every. I worked with organizers and poverty lawyers and everybody was like, look, we're all in it together. Let's share resources and stories and try to build the best case for support that we can. And that's how I thought people moved through the world. And turns out that is not true, right? So here's what I've seen in practice when you flip that belief on its head, right? That belief that there isn't enough to go around. Many of you may have heard me talk about my sustainable Sisterhood. It was a mastermind group with six other brilliant, incredible, mission driven executive director women while I was running my organization. And we met the first Wednesday of every month for years and we called ourselves the Sustainable Sisterhood. And we shared everything. We shared funder leads, hiring, pipelines, program strategies, hard lessons, wins, failures, all of it. Everything that one of us did that worked from a structure of a successful funder visit to reimagining, hiring and onboarding. And this was a big one to building out our benefits programs. I remember when we had a breakfast where we were talking about how are we going to afford health care, right? We were all very small at the time, under 300k, most of us. One was over that, but small budgets. And we were like, this is really important to us, but how do we do this right? And we, we built it out together and we shared resources, we partnered with major donors in new ways and shared relationships in ways that at the time people just heard about and were like, what do you mean you're sharing information about your major donors. We taught and we shared with one another and we were explicit in the group, if I have it to give, than I give now. Here's what happened because of this orientation towards abundance and we were very clear with one another. We happen to be women, people who believed that there is enough. Actually the pie is bigger than anybody understands it to be. And if we move through the world that way, if we orient ourselves towards abundance collectively, then we will all do better. So what happened was we helped each other get funded. There were multiple times when an introduction led to another's organization's multi year grant. That happened multiple times. We learned a powerful fundraising campaign model from one of the women in the group and it translated for my organization into a 20k campaign for my tiny team of three. The first year we tried it for another organization. Three years later it led to 160k campaign, right? Because we learned this model from one another. We saved time and money, we shared vendors, we shared templates for things. If one of us had a job description that worked, we sent it around. We shared hiring recommendations. We were all growing our teams and we had new leadership teams at the time. And for each of us, working with a team of leaders of either directors or C suite people was very new. And we were figuring it out together. And we, as an example, all went in together on a deep long term management training program for our collective teams. They learned together, they formed bonds that supported, that allowed them to support one another. And it allowed us to do professional development for our entire teams at such lower cost so we could actually sustain it. Also, we grew as leaders. We had a safe place to troubleshoot in real time. We kept one another accountable to the goals that we were setting for ourselves as leaders and thinking differently and moving differently and managing differently. And for any of you who are executive directors in growing your organization, you know that what it means to show up as a leader changes as your organization changes. And that was very real for us over time. Over the time of our meetings and our sharing, I will just highlight My own organization grew from 180k to close to 1.4 million. Another organization grew from 250k to over 2 million. By the time a third had stepped away from being executive director, she had gone from 200k to over 4 million. Another built her team from just her to this incredible team of 13 that worked really well together. They set budgets together, they built work plans together and they grew her tiny New York City based program internationally in a way that they could actually sustain and they sustained it year over year. So we grew not in spite of our sharing, but because we shared. We made one another stronger. And I share these stories because it can be really easy to discount this mindset orientation towards abundance with a capital A as just woo, as just about feelings, as just about sort of a belief. But the way I'm talking about it, it's not an extra add on. It isn't a feeling. It's an actual strategy. It is a way of approaching planning and collaboration and partnership and budgeting and benefits and hiring. All of it. And it works. There is enough in the universe, in our country, in our sector, and when we work together and focus on giving and collaborating and partnering, we unlock so much more than if we guard right, if we try and work all on our own. Setting the right priorities and goals and focusing on the right activities is the only way to make sure that you're not wasting time and money as you grow. That clarity is what we do inside the next level nonprofit. You get a step by step growth plan for how to grow your budget, build a strong team and increase your impact in the next 12 months. Plus you get expert guidance, thought, partnership, coaching and hands on support to execute. From professional development for your team to discounts on work with incredible consultants. Apply and let's see if we can help you build a stronger organization in the next year. Brookrichybabbage.com Nextlevel nonprofit so that's my soapbox around the orientation towards abundance and what it looks like to operationalize that. The second mindset orientation that I want to focus on was actually a shift for me, as I assume it will be for many of you as well. It's a shift from working on and holding everything in my organization or feeling like I had to have my fingers on everything to guiding the work. It was really a shift from being an Operator to being an architect. Right, That's a metaphor that I really like. Operator to architect. Now, I was a founder and so this one was especially meaningful and important for me because there absolutely were in the early years, entire areas of the organization that I had to entirely hold, right? I had to own all of it. And as we grew, it could be hard to know what to let go of, how to let go of it, what it looked like to hand it off, to not own all of it, right? For any leader of a small organization that is growing, as your institution changes, how you understand and operationalize, your leadership also has to evolve. And so this mindset orientation towards being an architect, not an operator, becomes operationally very important. You simply cannot scale. You cannot grow. If you are stuck in the day to day, it won't work. You will burn out. Your organization will plateau. Every single time I have seen an organizational leader who is unable to make this shift, the organization gets stuck. I know it can feel really scary to think about letting go of things. So I want to break down three of the mindset gremlins that can hold folks back from making the shift. So the first is what I call the urgency spiral. It's just faster if I do it myself. And if you're honest, you've thought that, right? I could delegate this, I could build out a system for handing this over, but it's faster if I do it myself. So here's the thing. It might feel more efficient today, that might actually be true today or even this week. But we are thinking about designing an organization that you can grow into, right? That will sustain your growth and your work over time. And over time, just doing it yourself will always turn out to be the slowest, most expensive, most frictionful way to grow because you will become the bottleneck and you will burn out. So the fix, the answer is, what's the actual fastest way to do it? Maybe it's delegation, maybe it's investing in systems. And this can be tax systems, this can be workflow systems, ways of working together, documenting your processes so that you do it twice. And then you hand over your standard operating procedure or your SOP to the person you're delegating to, right? The fix here is to build infrastructure as you go so that you don't have to keep doing it. And you can trust that when you hand it off, you're not losing the effectiveness, right? You might lose the speed upfront, but if you've built the right systems, if you've invested in systems and processes, then actually you'll take a beat and then the efficiency and the effectiveness will skyrocket and you won't need your hands on everything. So the second mindset Gremlin is what I call the standards stranglehold. This is about perfectionism, and I am a class A perfectionist. Look up perfectionist in the dictionary and in those old school dictionaries, they used to have, like, pictures of things. My picture would be there. This was something that I hopefully was able to move through. But this gets a lot of people and shows up in different ways. So the mindset Gremlin says, but what if they mess it up, right? If the urgency spiral is about I'll do it faster, this one's, I'll do it better myself. So that fear of imperfection is what leads to micromanagement. It leads to an inability to truly delegate. And guess what? It also burns you out and it kills your team's competence. So the fix here is to get really clear about success. Write it down, make sure everybody understands and is on the same page about what a successful outcome looks like. It's not just get the work done right, it's we understand what the North Star looks like. Not perfectionism, but a really good job. An A plus version of this outcome looks like this. And then I have to give my team space and time to get there. I have to make sure they have the capacity and the support to get there, the training, the encouragement, the authority and autonomy, right? I have clarified the goal and what A plus success looks like. And then my job is not to walk people up to that line. It's to build the conditions for them to get there. Right? So the shift here is they may not get it right exactly upfront, but if they're really clear, if you are all collectively clear about what success looks like, right? When you can check the box and say, yes, we've done a good job, then growth stops being about getting everything perfect and it becomes being about building a condition where you're moving towards positive outcomes together, right? This is how you build a team that can thrive without you. So the third mindset Gremlin is the bottleneck effect. This one shows up for everybody. It's, I'm just too busy to delegate, right? It's. It's a little bit like it's faster and better if I do it myself, but here it's about time, right? I just don't have the time to have the meetings where I hand this over, to pull together the resources to give to the person to delegate. I'm too busy to delegate. So if you're too busy to train your team and to delegate, to step back and to think strategically, then here's the reality. Your nonprofit's ceiling is you. There are so many reasons that you may be too busy to train your team and to delegate and to step back and design and think strategically. I get it. Like I said, I've been there. I see it all the time. I understand those reasons. And you have to decide if you want to get past this mindset, Gremlin. Do you want to build a team that can hold work without you, or do you want to stay in the weeds? If you want to build a team, you have to find the time to train your team, right? So the too busy is really just a different way of saying, I'm not prioritizing training my team and, and building a delegation system over other things on my calendar. And sometimes that's okay. And then realize if that continues to be the answer, right? If you continue to deprioritize these kinds of things, the training of the team and the delegation, then you will be the ceiling. You will be the bottleneck, and it will be annoying to you and frustrating. So the fix is block time. Set aside an hour a week to begin for this kind of institution building, for targeted training of your team, for conversations that are specifically about delegation. And then protect that time like you would a donor meeting or a board presentation, right? You have to begin to. If you have to force yourself to make time for these kinds of institutional investments. The thing is, and this is what all of this is about, your ability to lead, let's say from the balcony, right? And not the basement, right. To get out of the weeds will determine the future capacity of your organization. An organization cannot grow beyond the capacity of its leader. And at scale, leaders simply are not in the weeds. They can't be. So you have to design your systems, your organization, to allow you to have the impact you want to have. And this orientation towards abundance, this believing that there's enough and baking that into your plans, this orientation towards architecting and designing systems that allow you to step out of the weeds and vision and strategize and plan these two mindset shifts scarcity to abundance, operator to architect. Start collaborating, start designing. These will lay a strong foundation for you to step into the kind of leadership that your organization needs as you grow. So if you want more information about this topic, I have a great workshop. It's about the five design elements that actually allow seven figure organizations to sustain impact at that level without burning out and I talk about how you operationalize what you look at as you are designing an organization at scale. And you can get that workshop@brookratchibabbage.com backslash five design shifts. That is it for this week. I will see you back here next week for more Mastermind. Thanks so much for joining me this week. If you enjoy this podcast, I would love for you to leave a rating and a review. I read every single one and they really do matter. I also share extra tidbits and resources building on what we talk about here in my newsletter, Leadership Forward 321. You can sign up by texting the word impact to 66866. And finally, definitely check out the links and resources that I mentioned this episode@brooke richiebabbage.com podcast see you next week.