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So this is a question that every executive director should ask, at least quarterly and ideally monthly. Where am I Bracing instead of Leaving?

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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.

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This is a mindset and a systems audit all in one. It's a way to surface where you've defaulted essentially to endurance, to overwork, to avoidance, to overwhelm. Instead of doing what can sometimes feel scary and stepping back to actually lead intentionally and strategically, you're ultimately asking yourself, where am I unconsciously absorbing the pressure of our growth instead of designing a container to hold it? So when I say bracing, what does that look like? This looks like you saying yes to tasks or to work, or stepping in to fix things because it just feels easier than delegating them. It looks like you continuing to push forward and make it work with a team that is really too small to carry the work without slowly burning out. You holding tension in your body about something like a deadline, a deliverable for a funder. But you haven't actually designed a system with your team to do that work. You respond to overwhelm by tightening up, right? Bracing looks like working harder, working later, working more, not stepping back and architecting a fix for whatever is causing the chaos, right? Here are a few other examples. Trying to make all of the programs that have always existed continue to work instead of sunsetting legacy initiatives that don't really fit for where you're going and what your strategic priorities are moving forward. It looks like hustling through year end campaigns or summer campaigns or summer events and not analyzing what actually worked last year. Bracing is what happens when you absorb all of this pressure of growth and it feels like you're holding everything together with urgency, with grit, with sheer willpower sometimes. But underneath, you know, it's unsustainable. It's the mental equivalent of white knuckling your way through A six lane highway merge. For those of you out there who have ever done that, say, I don't know, in la. It's terrifying and it really puts a lot of strain on you. Leading, on the other hand, is about intentionally designing the clarity, the structure and the capacity that your organization needs to carry the weight itself. Not you, not your team, so that growth feels supported, not like it's slowly suffocating you. Here's what leading looks like. Lead looking at where the chaos is in your organization and taking time to name the root design problem behind the stress, right? Is it not enough leverage? Is it unclear priorities? Is it that you don't know who your donors are? Right? There's always a design problem that you can point to, which means it's fixable. Bleeding looks like identifying that design problem and then creating the structure, the systems, the boundaries that address it, that solve it, right? That allow you to scale without being suffocated. It also means letting go of that false and dangerous story that somehow you should be able to make this all work. It means redesigning your organization when and as necessary so that the pressure of growth doesn't fall on you or few people at the top. It falls on some systems and structures, right? Setting clear annual priorities and using them to say no to things, no to new opportunities that create misalignment or add to your chaos. It means defining roles and decision rights and even performance metrics that are based on the team or the staff that you need to get you where you're going. It means things like using your strategic plan and your theory of change to confidently push the boundaries of what you ask your funders and your donors for so that your revenue high grows over time. Now, this distinction between bracing and leading, it matters not just because it can actually mean a meaningful difference or create a meaningful difference in how it feels to lead your organization energetically. Racing drains capacity quietly and constantly, even if it's not always obvious or immediately clear that that's what's happening. I work with so many amazing leaders inside the next level nonprofit, and almost all of them are on the surface, holding things together really well. That's not their problem, right? The problem isn't falling apart publicly. The problem is that they're doing this absorption thing, right? They're absorbing pressure silently through over functioning, over owning, overworking. And they don't really know how to shift out of that mode, out of that version of bracing. But the chronic tension is there and it shows up as signals that their growth is pushing them to the breaking point. See if this feels or sounds familiar, the signals that growth is pushing to the breaking point are things like team stagnation, delayed decisions, balls dropping, fundraising insecurity, right? You're raising money, you're bringing in money, but it feels fragile. What raising does is it eats capacity from the inside out. No board retreat or extra grant is going to address that because the inner structure isn't there. Bracing also matters because ultimately your organization can't grow beyond the strength of its design. You can raise more money and hire more people and launch more programs and speak on more stages, and you're growing and you're gaining visibility and everything looks great above the surface, right? The top of the iceberg. But if that base of the iceberg is, if the systems underneath aren't designed to hold the weight of all of that more, then you, and often your team, your leadership team, become the container. And that is where burnout lives. Leading instead of bracing means strengthening the external container, strengthening the actual institution, so that as you add more money and add more people and add more visibility, your organization is growing on purpose, not just, honestly, adrenaline. A third reason that bracing matters is that you model the operating system your team adopts. If you're bracing, they'll brace. If you normalize and signal the normalization of overwork, of last minute pivots, your culture is going to mirror that. Even if you have good intentions, even if you are explicitly naming other intentions, other ways of working. When you design instead of absorb, you give your team permission for clear roles and ownership, for transparent decision making, for a confident pace and an ability to fail forward. It changes the emotional climate of your organization in often imperceptible but really powerful and important ways. And finally, bracing erodes strategic clarity. When you're in bracing mode, you default to solving the problem right in front of you. Right? It's the tyranny of the urgent, not the real one beneath it, not the one four steps behind it. And not designing to actually proactively move in the direction of the impact that you want to have. You find that you look up after three months or six months. And no matter what has gone into your annual plan, you've been chasing short term relief, not long term design. So leading instead means getting upstream, diagnosing, fixing the design deficit, not the symptoms, and designing for impact. So here are a few reflection prompts that you can use to see if you are bracing instead of leading as you think about what goes into your plan for next year, your work plan, your goals, et cetera. What am I tolerating or carrying that a system could actually solve? Where am I overworking to compensate for a weak container? What am I white knuckling right now? What did I white knuckle this year? And what would leading through that instead actually look like? What part of our organization feels heaviest or most fragile? And what kind of design upgrade could fix that problem? And finally, and I love this one, if I stepped into the role of architecture instead of operator, what would change, right? What would the ripple effect be? So think about those reflection prompts as you head into the planning season. I hope this has been a helpful quick episode and I'll see you back here next week for more Mastermind thanks.