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Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
Burnout Looks Like Control: How To Lead Without Controlling Everything
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Brooke Richie Babbage
So I want to ask you a personal question. Do you read my newsletter Leadership Forward 321? Because if you don't, I really think you'd like it. If you like this podcast Every week I send a short newsletter that you can read in five minutes or less designed to help you lead more strategically and with less overwhelm. I share a three part micro lesson on a timely leadership theme that you can apply right away, two concrete resources that I stand behind and a quote or reflection to inspire and motivate you. I'm going to make it super easy for you to sign up. You can text the word impact to 66866 and I'll add you to my list. Enjoy the episode. As your organization grows, trying to keep an eye on everything becomes impossible or at least a recipe for burnout. You have to learn to lead at a different altitude and how to do this is one of the most common and emotionally fraught challenges for leaders as they scale. In this episode I give you three core areas for a dashboard to focus on to help you lead at that higher altitude so you can sustain your impact without burning out. 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 throughout of how to scale a high impact organization and how to do it in a way that's truly sustainable. So this topic has come up quite a bit in the last few months with the folks that I coach, what it actually means and looks like to lead when you aren't directly connected to overseeing managing all of the parts of the organization. The actual question that I got that really captured this from one of the leaders that I coach was this. I used to have my hands on everything. Now it's like the snowball is rolling downhill and I can't see everything. It's touching. How do I stay in control without being in everything? So I loved this question. It really pointed to, like I said, this sort of theme that's been coming up a lot with organizations as they grow. How do I lead differently? And how do I step into this different version of leadership? What does that actually look like? And my answer to him was that we actually want to replace the idea of control with the idea of alignment. So here's what I mean. You obviously can't be everywhere inside your organization as it gets bigger, when it's just you and, say, a program manager, maybe, right? When I first started my organization, it was me. And even when I hired my first director was me and two other people, a director of programs and the program associate that worked for the director of programs. And the three of us sat in one office in a wework work together. It was great. And I could literally hear their conversations. And we all met all together all the time, right? When you are in some version of that organization, even if it's not just three people, four people, five people, a small team, you see all the data. You meet with the grant writer, you oversee the setup of Asana. You're part of the onboarding of all new staff members, right? All of the things. But as your organization grows, two things start to happen or one of two things start to happen. Either as the executive director, you are still in all of the things, right? All of the things that I just mentioned, you're still part of, but it's overwhelming, or you sort of step back and are like, I can't be in any of this, right? I'm going to delegate everything. And then things veer out of control, right? I've seen both happen because you simply can't have your fingers touching everything. And so what does it look like to navigate the transition from touching everything to touching some things? And what do you keep your fingers on? Et cetera, right? The work and the operations are becoming more complex and trying to control everything, to be everywhere, to have your eyes on everything, crowds your calendar with low leverage work and leads to frustration and burnout. Or like I said, bucket two. You take your hand completely off the steering wheel and you look up at some point, three, six, 12 months later, and nothing looks the way you want it to look. The reality is you're not meant to steer a growing organization by gripping every lever right in the organization. I know I'm mixing metaphors, but stick with me. You want to think of your leadership as your organization grows, sort of like building a dashboard or a cockpit that shows you what matters most. And your job becomes to pay attention to that cockpit. Not all of the things that the cockpit is measuring and tracking and giving you insight into right? Leadership at scale Means that your oversight should actually narrow, not expand as you grow. That's the evolution that you're looking for. You're designing this dashboard or this cockpit to include high level indicators, a smaller number of high level indicators of the various parts of your organization to make sure that they are staying healthy. And your cockpit will tell you how the parts of the organization are functioning. Right. So you don't have to see all of the parts. You're going to pay attention to these indicators in your cockpit and your job is to get clear about what goes on that dashboard. Right. And then keep your eye, learn how to keep your eye on those things. That's what will tell you when and where you need to dig deeper. So it is not completely taking your hand off the steering wheel. Right. It's not leaving the plane. Right. You're still in the cockpit. But it's also not tracking all of the hires and all of the meetings and all of the data and all of the partners and all of the programs. Right. We want to narrow and get really strategic about the indicators of organizational health. So I'm going to, in this episode, tell you three things that should go into designing your leadership dashboard to make sure that you're flying the plane in the right direction without needing to be in all of the things all the time. Now, before I dive in, I want to lift something up here. What I'm talking about here in this episode, this sort of shifting how you lead and what your leadership activities are, it's going to feel really uncomfortable for most people. And part of leading a growing organization is normalizing that discomfort, understanding that it is part of the growth of your leadership and the growth of your organization, that as your organization evolves into a different kind of institution, a different kind of organism. And for those of you who have listened to a number of my podcasts, you may have heard me say, what got you here won't get you there. Right? A $600,000 organization is not just a smaller vers of a 2 million dollar organization. It's a totally different organism. And so as you evolve into these different kinds of organisms, as the executive director, you're going to be most often at the growth edge of your organization. You're going to be the one standing sort of on the edge of the open field of the unknown, looking behind you at how you've always done things, at how you've always met, at how you've always led, at habits and patterns and practices that have become familiar. Then you're going to look ahead of you into this sort of vast unknown of new leadership, of new management, of delegation, of cockpits and leading at a higher altitude. And it's going to feel weird, it's not going to feel normal. And that's okay. That means that you are moving in the right direction. So I just want to name that the discomfort, the feeling like, wait, that's never been how we've done things. That's what you're looking for. That's a sign that you're evolving. Do not shy away from it. You're going to want to run into that discomfort. And the key is getting information and expertise, training, coaching, mentorship, learning about what you're running into. Right. What the next normal ought to look like. And so part of your job as a leader is not to turn backwards away from the growth edge and go back into the things that have felt familiar because they feel familiar. It's to get comfortable with and familiarize yourself with new normal. Okay, so that's my soapbox for a moment. Now I want to go into these areas of your cockpit. So the first area of your cockpit is about how decisions are made in the organization. Now, as your organization grows and your team grows and your leadership team grows, your leadership team ought to take on more ownership, right? That means, means a lot of things. One of the things it means is that you will lose track of or not be able to keep your finger on all of the decisions that are driving the work forward. People on your leadership team will be making important decisions to move the organization in the work forward, the part that they own, without you and as the organization grows, without you even knowing they're making decisions. And that is as it should be, scary, but good. Ok. That doesn't mean that decisions are happening willy nilly. It doesn't mean bucket two that you're taking your hands completely off steering wheel and being like, hope it all works. Good luck. Right? Do what you want to do. It also doesn't mean that you're constantly checking in after the fact. So I see a lot of executive directors shift from some version of check in with me before you make that important decision. Right. And for those of you who have downloaded or accessed my delegation ladder, I'll put a link to it in the show note. It's a great tool for how, you know, for how you sort of create a cadence of letting go of decisions and delegating in ways that keep the organization stable and healthy. It's called the delegation ladder and you can access it, access it in the show notes. So one of the shifts that you make is from check in with me before you make that important decision to it's your decision to make. But I see leaders go from check in with me before you make that decision to let me know after you've made that decision, what it was and why you did it. So that's not actually leveling up your altitude of leading. It's just changing the timing of your check ins. It's still in some way holding on to that decision or trying to keep your finger on the decision. Instead, you have to accept the fact that you can't be everywhere. So what do you do to make sure that the decisions are the right ones, right? Or that they are grounded in what you need them to be grounded in? The important thing here is values, right? You can't be everywhere, but the values that you want the work and the organization to embody can be everywhere. Right? You can't and shouldn't touch everything. But you can embed sharp clarity about what good looks like into every decision that is being made. So that as your leadership team is making decisions without you, you know that those decisions are being made in alignment with one another and with how you have defined for the organization what counts as good as right. What counts as a good decision. Think of a flock of birds that are all, you know, you see those like huge flocks of birds that are all sort of veering left and veering right together. You can't see me, but I'm like moving my arm back and forth. They aren't flapping exactly the same way, but their movements are aligned at a high level. Right? They're headed in the same direction, at the same pace, in the same way. That's what values alignment does. It keeps your leadership teams and organizational decisions aimed at the right thing moving in the same direction, moving at the same pace. Now, when I say values, I don't mean the sort of organizational values that you put on your website or sort of on the poster at the front of your office. I mean your organization's operational values. Those are the things that should guide decisions and behavior in your absence. So in practice, what does this mean? It means that you want to define operational values in action for each area of the organization and for each role on your team. What does this value look like in practice? For this area or for this role? For things like how you choose vendors, how you hire, how we show up in public, how we manage the people that that report to us. Right. As you think about areas where decisions need to be made, what are the values that you want to operationalize what do they look like in practice? And then how can we standardize indicators of each value? Right. When we say we treat one another with respect, well, what does that look like? What are the behaviors that we are expecting to see as a sign of respect? When we say that we value collaboration, right. Decision through collaboration, what does that mean? Do we all mean the same thing when we use those terms? This is so critical and foundational. It's so important that these values shape how your team interprets their goals, their priorities, their challenges, how decisions are made, how behavior is assessed. And it can sound. And I get this feedback not from the executive directors that I coach, but from. They get this feedback sometimes from the teams that they are managing. It feels like you're adding this sort of layer of structure or not bureaucracy, but it can feel cold, right? When you start talking about, well, what are the indicators of respect? It doesn't feel organic or natural, but the reality is the way that you make sure that all of the birds are flying in the same direction and veering left and veering right together is you have to be crystal clear about what that direction is and how you're going to get there and what matters. The only way to do that is to notch down and talk about things like, what does this look like in practice? What are the indicators of these values? So instead of leading by managing specific work, products or deliverables, you as the leader in your cockpit, what you're keeping an eye on is whether key decisions and behaviors are aligned with the core values. That is one of the sort of circles on your dashboard, right? Values alignment. These are the indicators of the values that we have said are important to us. This is what it looks like to make decisions or to behave in alignment with those values. And so rather than looking at all decisions, you're looking at your cockpit, at is there values alignment, right? That becomes one signal for where you need to dig deeper. If you start to see the misalignment. Now, in addition to decision making getting more complex, as the organization grows, the work also gets more complex. Programs and initiatives multiply. The team expands. Who is doing what expands. The outcomes that you're tracking, that you're funded to achieve and that you care about, they become. They multiply, right? They become more nuanced. And that growing complexity requires a second shift, right? Or a second. There's a second area that we're going to focus on. So decision making is one, and tracking outcomes, monitoring activities, and tracking outcomes is another. So as the growing complexity, as you have this growing complexity. You have to shift from outcome tracking to monitoring outcomes, right? Overseeing outcomes. So this is where it becomes really important to have the following four things in place. One, very clear and ideally narrow priorities that everyone on the team understands and is bought into. Two, team wide goals that are specific and measurable and so that people know when they've been achieved and know where they are relative to those goals. Three, individual person level goals for each person on the team that are clearly related to the organization wide goals and priorities. They see where they fit. And then four very clear outcomes and key results or okrs for each area of work so that everyone knows what counts as success and where they are relative to that success. Those four things team wide agreed upon priorities. Team wide goals aligned individual goals, preferably in work plans and OKRs, are how you lead and continue to understand your programs without micromanaging. This is the first time I felt like our organization's future isn't resting entirely on my shoulders. I can breathe. After years of running on instinct, I finally feel like we have a real structure behind us. Working with you helped me to step into a next version of myself as a leader. It's been a total shift in how I see my role and what's possible for our organization. That's how one leader described our work together inside the next level nonprofit. And it's only one of the things that we do inside the program. At the core. I help leaders diagnose what's making growth feel chaotic and then we work together to fix it. Whether it's refreshing a strategic plan to be more of a fundraising driver, redesigning the right team, activating your board, building an individual donor program from the ground up. If you're over $750,000 and feeling like growth is making some part of your organization break apply and let's see if you're a good fit for the program. You can apply@brookrichebabbage.com next level nonprofit. I'm going to highlight here that the priorities and the team wide goals, the individual goals, these and the ok, these have to be team wide, right? It's not enough for one or two people on your team to have a work plan or to have ok, everybody needs to be this is the key here is that everybody is looking at the the same core information, the same priorities, the same goals and they are anchoring their work to the same things. That's where the alignment comes from. So what you want to ask yourself is does everyone see how their work fits into and is aligned with our core priorities, what are goals that we all agree to, what does and doesn't count as success, and what are the indicators of success for each person on my team for the coming time period? That's the info that goes into your cockpit, right? So rather than keeping an eye on all of the activities and all of the evaluation data and all of the partners that are formed and the workshops that are done, that's too much information as the work gets more complex. So the info that you're tracking isn't what's getting accomplished, isn't the activities. You're looking at the okrs, right? What you're looking for is alignment between the outcomes, the things that are actually being achieved, the key results and the priorities and the goals. And if you see misalignment, then you know to dig deeper. Okay, so that's the second area of your cockpit. First area, decision making. Second area, tracking sort of outcomes, programming. The third area of your cockpit that I want to highlight is how you share information with one another. This is one of the trickiest things as organization grow. As organizations grow, in large part because the executive director and I work with a lot of founders. So people who have gone from just them to teams of 20, the kind of information that you get and that you need changes and that again, can be really uncomfortable for folks. So I wanted to highlight what this evolution looks like for growing organizations. Now, specifically you want to ask yourself, are you receiving or am I receiving and sharing information in a way that feeds me and gives me what I need to make CEO level decisions and not information that's going to distract me and pull me down into the weeds? That's the distinction, right? Is it the information that I actually need to make, the kind of decisions I need to make moving forward, or is it keeping me bogged down and that information is a distraction? So few things to sort of look out for. Are people popping into your office or popping into your inbox and sending emails with updates. You don't want that. Do you find that you're running your weekly full staff meetings with everyone on your team instead of just the people on your leadership team? You do not want to do that. That's too often for full staff meetings for you and it's the wrong role for you. When you do have your leadership team check ins, Are you getting updates on what people are doing right? Are they sort of letting you know, hey, this is what's been going on, not what you want? Are people checking in with you before or as they make key decisions? Also not what you want. So these are some things that you want to be on the lookout for. Each of the things that I mentioned is the wrong. Is a. Is an indicator that you are leading at the wrong altitude. Right? You're. You're still too close to the ground instead, in terms of the information that you're taking in and that you're having to hold. And actually, before I sort of share what you want to be doing, the consequence of staying that close to the ground with the information that you're taking in and being asked to hold is that it gets very heavy. Right? There is a lot of the mental load of leadership gets to be too much when you are taking in and trying to hold the wrong information. So what you want instead is for the cadence of your meetings and the information that you're getting and the discussions that you're having to be focused on reinforcing priorities, looking at key outcomes and checking for values alignment. Right? You want to notch up to this higher altitude. You want information that will allow you to understand the information in your cockpit. That's what you need. Your leadership team should be running those close to the ground full team meetings. You can be there, but you should not be the one running them. Your leadership team should be keeping their eye on what's happening on the ground and how things are happening and which activities are getting accomplished and how decisions are being made. Right? You're looking from your cockpit to surface risks before they escalate to understand where things are healthy and where you need to do a deep dive, not to keep things on track. That's what your leadership team does. Your ultimate job is not to feel and watch every pain point. It's to design this cockpit, to design the system that alerts you when something's off. And then you can lean in, then you can say, wait a minute, this behavior isn't values aligned. Or I'm noticing that, you know, only 40% of our OKRs are getting accomplished. Where's the breakdown? Right? That's. That's the altitude. That's how you lead at this higher altitude. Now, as a reminder, and I mentioned this at the sort of top of the episode, this shift from controlling to alignment to oversight can feel hard. It can feel like you're losing control. But as I've said, your job or the type of leadership that's going to support your ability to scale without burning out. And really, that's what I mean when I say your job. What I mean is we want you to be able to run your organization in a way that reduces the mental and psychological weight of leadership. Right? You want to build institutions, infrastructure systems that hold the weight of growth, not you. You don't want to hold that. So everything that I'm talking about, the sort of leading at a higher altitude is about focusing on or narrowing, not expanding. What you have to pay attention to, right? You want to ask yourself what is absolutely vital for me to see on a weekly or monthly basis. And if it's not vital, if it doesn't help me lead at this higher altitude, I have to build my capacity for letting it go. And I say build capacity because not everybody does that easily, right? I have to figure out, who do I delegate this to? What does it look like to get this off of my shoulders? You're going to want to resist the urge to widen your lens when a ball drops or someone does something wrong or, and this happens more often, someone does something differently than you would do it, that is going to happen. Particularly as your team becomes more comfortable owning more and relating to you differently. Balls are going to drop. Things are not going to work smoothly all the time. And so the instinct can be to say, oh, nope, okay, I gotta, I gotta somehow look at everything again, right? I gotta put my hands back on all the things. You want to resist that urge. When that happens, what you want to do is lean into making the key drivers of your dashboard clearer. So if you are seeing decisions and behaviors that are not values aligned, don't start checking in and putting your fingers on all the decisions. Ask where is there a breakdown of understanding around these values? Are the indicators not clear? Do we not agree on the values? Right. Stay at the level of the cockpit and make sure that the clarity about the values is there, the clarity about the priorities. Do we all understand the okrs? Do we all know how to use the okrs? Instead of doing check ins, do you understand as a leadership team why you're giving me the information you're giving me and how we ought to be using it to move the work forward? Right? When balls drop, when something goes wrong, which it will happen, the balls will drop, something will go wrong. You will not be pleased with something at some point, right? Make sure that you lean into clarity about the cockpit, clarity about what people need on your team to allow you to stay at the altitude you're supposed to be at. Right? Your ultimate aim is fewer, more strategic things to keep an eye on. And you protect that at all costs because that is what will allow you to hold the organization at scale. Right? It's not all sitting on your shoulders. You do not have to somehow magically have your eye on everything to make sure that everybody's veering left and veering right together. So I'm going to leave you with this single reflection question, just something to take with you until next week. What is one thing that you need to know each week so that you feel confident that you are stewarding your organization in the right direction? What's one thing? And if you think about that one thing, what is the information you need to know that one thing? If you start there and begin to get comfortable with and I will let go of all the other things, right. I need these three pieces of information so that I feel comfortable or confident about this part of our organization and I'm going to learn to let go of the rest. I don't need the updates or the check ins about the rest. You, you sort of make those small adjustments psychologically and you bring your team along and over time you will find that you are able to sit in your cockpit pit and lead at this higher altitude with comfort and your team will be comfortable with it as well. So 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 in this episode@brooke richiebabbage.com podcast. See you next week.