Brooke Richie Babbage (0:00)

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. Your organization's growth doesn't just strain your people, it strains your systems. And if you don't evolve your infrastructure at the same time that you expand your impact, you're going to hit a wall. Healthy, sustainable growth is supported by what's happening behind the scenes in your workflows, your data, how you track what matters. Today, I want to walk you through exactly how your infrastructure needs to evolve so your organization's bones keep pace with your growth and you can sustain impact at scale. 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. There are three phases of infrastructure evolution. Everything in an organization grows from organic to intentional to systematized. Those are the three phases Organic, intentional and systematized infrastructure. All parts of your organization follow the same pathway, even if it is not operational obvious to you that that is what's happening. And your ability to move through this progression from organic ultimately to systematized will determine your ability to sustain your impact without this sort of crushing sense of overwhelm. I want to do a deeper dive into why that is true and what that evolution looks like now. Most aspects of your organization's infrastructure start off Organically. What do I mean by this? Think about the infrastructure of your organization as the walls, the sort of inner walls of a house, okay? The bones that hold the flesh in place. Whatever metaphor you like or makes sense to you in terms of your organization. This means that whatever the system is, the bones are, they're in your head, right? They're on sticky notes, right? So if you're sticking with the metaphor of the walls of a house, think of it like my kids love to build forts. And so initially, if you're building a place to live, you might start out just putting up some sticks and like a sheet over the sticks, right? You sort of find what you have, you use what's on hand. It works, right? You have a domicile, you have some version of a roof over your head, even if it's just a sheet. But it's, it's based on what is available to you. And you sort of react and build as you go in response to your current context, what is happening right now or what has just happened. So organic infrastructure, as you apply it to a nonprofit might look like decisions that you and your team make that are gut based, that are reactive, or that respond to current situations rather than being reverse engineered from a future end desired goal or desired end goal rather than being anchored in priorities or okrs or values indicators. This might also look like manual processes, right? Or processes that are repeated each time, like recreating emails that you send to donors, impact reports that you create for funders, outreach to partners that you're writing from scratch each time. This might also look like, and this is really common information that lives mostly with individuals, right? In their individual heads, right? They just sort of remember it and keep it in their notes, in their individual files, on their desktop, rather than in some shared system that is set up with conventions, filing and naming conventions. And that means that that information has to be shared. If the person holds the information in their head or in their own little world, it means they have to share that information through meetings or through check ins, right? It has to be shared from them to another person rather than through something like a dashboard, right? Or shared filing system. Organic infrastructure might also look like tracking, evaluation. That is anecdotal, primarily anecdotal stories, quotes about programming for things like finances. It might be information that is tracked only in reaction to a need or to respond to a problem. So most organizations start off, and I only say most because you can't say all with like 100% certainty. But if I could, I'd say all Organizations start off with some or all of their infrastructure being organic, right? They are making decisions one at a time. They are gut based, they are responsive. Particularly when you are starting something new, starting a new organization or new program or a new way of being. Things move quickly, right? And so it's really hard to systematize or be intentional because you're just sort of responding, right? You're sharing information as you have it. One of the examples that I use is when my team, my leadership team in my last organization was growing. We hired the second director level position that we hired was a director of operations. So I had a director of programs and she and I worked wonderfully together. And then we were hiring this director of operations. And one of the first things that she did when she arrived was she took a look at how we were sharing files, just information, and she was like, this doesn't scale, right? When it's four people on your team, it was me, one director and then two people that reported to her. It was fine that a lot of our files were on my desktop or on her desktop as director, because we all worked in a common space and I could say, hey, send me that file. We had different ways of naming things. I had people on my team who would just sort of name things like Saturday meeting or notes from meeting with Peter because only they needed to have that file. And so the one of the very first things that my director Operations did was she came in and she said, we're going to set up a naming convention and a filing convention. And I'll admit, it sounded like a lot more structured than we needed. I did not realize that it. Nothing felt broken to me, right? We were getting the information we needed, we were sharing it as we needed it. And it was really only when she walked through, walked the team through what a filing and a naming convention would do, that we realized, oh, I'm saving definitely an hour a week just from tracking down Elisa, trying to get emails from, you know, someone's computer onto my computer, just sharing information between one another, as opposed to it being in a place where very quickly and easily I can find the information that I need. So that's just one example of sort of organic infrastructure, right? It was based on who we were and where we were at the time. And it works and it was fine, right? Like the sticks and the sheet, you have something over your head. But the problem with this is that it requires a lot of reinventioning, reinventing the wheel. Once you have a team of more than just a few people it's also really inefficient and a time suck. At some point, you realize that it's time to design, not react and guess. And that's when you shift from organic system design into this sort of next phase, which is intentional infrastructure or intentional system design. So this looks like you and your team actually taking the time to define what good looks like. These are things like workflows that are defined, right? This person owns this piece, this person reports to that person, this person owns this piece, right? That's a workflow. This also is things like key performance indicators, right? So everybody on the team understands that we are paying attention to one indicator of success for this area of work. We care about other outcomes. But the thing that will tell us if we are on the right track, if we are moving at the pace we need to move at, or achieving the outcomes we need to achieve, is this set of KPIs, right? When a process is a good one, you write it down and you commit to following that process. These become things like your standard operating procedures, which I have talked a bunch about on this podcast, right? Your SOPs, documentation of core processes, like how you fundraise, how you share data internally, how you hire and onboard people. These are things that are workflows and areas of your organizational infrastructure that hold the house up and that can be done organically, right? You do an event, you send some notes to your donors, and you move on. You hire somebody and you make sure that they get all the files they need and you welcome them through a breakfast, you know, or lunch. That's what we used to do. And then you move on, right? These are things that are working, but the intentionality is around saying, oh, this version of onboarding that we did worked. It worked really well. Or here's a different version, an even better version of intentionality. This is how we want onboarding to feel. This is how we want new people on the team to experience. Joining our team now, we're going to reverse engineer a set of steps, set of activities, a set of processes that get us there, right? We're going to be intentional about achieving the outcomes that we think are good. We're going to agree on what good looks like. Then we're going to set our systems up to get us there, right? That's intentional infrastructure development. This also looks like things like beginning to track specific data and then using that data to actually evaluate what's working and to be strategic about what you want to keep in your programming, in your professional development, in your finances, what you Want to keep what you want to change or what you want to cut, right? As opposed to using tracking to note what's happening. And this often happens as programs evolve. We become accustomed to tracking about using evaluation data to understand what is happening. Intentional evaluation, say, is about saying, actually, these are the outcomes we're trying to get to. Did we do things that will get us there? Right? Are the activities that we're investing time and money and energy into. The right ones, right? Let's be intentional about building towards those outcomes. Now, the key shifts that you make from organic to intentional infrastructure are not complicated. They're simple things like writing down what is working and why, right? Creating templates, creating checklists that standardize processes. Right? The standardization is like the undergirds, the intentionality using program and financial data for evaluation rather than just storytelling, like committing to specific processes and workflows. So none of this is complex. However, the added intentionality can feel really awkward in some cases and uncomfortable at best. At worst, it can feel like for growing teams, particularly ones that have worked in a particular way together for quite some time, it can feel like a violation of some unspoken organizational values around ownership, around trust, around collaboration. One example that I've seen of this is that asking people on your leadership team to begin documenting their workflows, right? Write down what you do or collect and report out on these KPIs as part of your work, those things can feel to the people on the leadership team if that is not how they are used to moving through the world with you, right? If they are used to a more organic way of relating to you. We meet, we talk, and then we each go do our work. That can feel like you're adding this layer of make work, especially if they're used to sharing updates with you on how things are going, right? During their meetings, checking in with you on Slack or in person, it can feel like a really unnecessary addition to their workload. And, and I hear this a lot, it can feel like you're sort of looking over their shoulders, right? You're asking me to document what I do. Why? So you can check on me? So we can evaluate me? You're asking me to collect data and report on KPIs. What happens if those KPIs are off like there? What's the added layer of accountability that goes along with this intentionality? And what does that mean in terms of our understanding of shared power of authority, et cetera? Here's what that discomfort might look like. Let's say your Director of Partnerships has always Updated you on potential partnerships, where things are going wrong, info like who they're thinking about, just, you know, who's in the pipeline. If they've always updated you on information like that in your meetings. Now all of a sudden you say, or it feels like all of a sudden you say, I'd like you to start to track the number of partners in the pipeline, where they are in the pipeline and how many get finalized in a quarter, right? A fair question could be why? Right. We've been, I've been keeping you up to date, everything's been fine. Like why this additional layer of what feels like oversight? The answer to that, organizationally, just as an example, is that those KPIs that I mentioned, number of partner, potential partners in the pipeline, how many at each stage and where they and how many get finalized in a quarter. Those KPIs are how we as an organization will become more intentional about evaluating where the partnership process is strong and where it's leaking. It's how everyone on the leadership team can stay on the same page about what's working and where we want to iterate, innovate, think differently, evolve in that process, right? About our collective understanding of the strength of different parts of that work. That's how we elevate it from a set of practices and habits and activities that are in your head and carried forward organically to something we can intentionally, as an entire team, lean into, understand, and be strategic about. Now, the final stage of infrastructure development is systemization, right? So we go from organic to intentional and finally to systematized. This is when you take parts of your infrastructure that you've intentionally designed and you set them up to run without you. You systematize what's working. This stage of infrastructure development involves things like using automation to reduce manual or repeated tasks, setting up things like email sequences for things like donor cultivation, onboarding, stewardship. This is things like dashboards to make information more streamlined. Things like showing real time revenue outcomes and team metrics that are pegged against KPIs or outcomes and key results OKRs. This is things like standardizing program reporting to make it easy to communicate impact with different donor segments and funders. Right now, most organizations have the toughest time with the shift from organic to intentional. And I've talked a bit about how and why this can feel awkward. The other reason is that that shift can feel like the biggest, right? It can feel like a qualitative shift as opposed to intentional to systematize, which is sort of doing more of what is working right the shift from organic to intentional very often requires people on your team to step out of the daily grind of their work long enough to design something better. Now, for the leader, it can also mean unlearning practices and norms around being the expert or being the fixer. Right. Being hands on, it can mean for the entire team relearning what it means to collaborate, to work in partnership, redefining ownership and authority and autonomy. Right. Having conversations about changing lines and boundaries of who owns what and who's responsible for what. For everyone, it definitely means slowing down. I talk a lot about this idea of sharpening your ax, right? Abe Lincoln said, if you give me. Well, it's Abe Lincoln and lots of other people said some version of if you give me eight hours to chop down a tree, I'm going to spend the first six sharpening my axe. So in order to shift from organic systems and infrastructure and processes to intentional ones, you have to slow down and sharpen your axe. And depending on where the organization is, that can feel like a luxury or even a waste of time. And even more different people on the team can see it differently. It can feel really important to some people on your team and like a total waste of time to others. Right. So this internal culture around infrastructure development and infrastructure design, it doesn't always move at the same pace, Right. Everybody's not always in the same place, and that's something to navigate as well. I work with leaders whose teams often fear losing their sort of special magic by over systematizing. And I hear this a lot, right? We have a special sauce, we have a way of working together. We're collaborative. All of those things are great and they don't go away by having intentional design and systems that are automated and processes that are systematized. The truth is, if information and processes live in one person's head, it takes more effort and more time to get it out of their head and either into somebody else's head or into a form that the whole team can use. It takes more effort to do that when your infrastructure is organic than when it is intentional. And even more than when it is systematized, it also dies when that person is gone. So as you think about institutional stability and health and efficiency and the kinds of things that reduce a sense of overwhelm and the potential of burnout, the more intentional and ultimately systematized your infrastructure is, the less weight individuals are carrying. Right? You have to make the invisible visible and shared institutionally by everyone. Right. The institution holds the weight, the walls hold up the roof of the house. So how do you start systematizing? How do you start this process? Look at the parts of your organization that are creating the most friction. Think about things like your fundraising processes, onboarding, hiring, financial tracking, evaluation, right program, data collection, reporting and internal communication rhythms. Things like how often you meet, what you talk about in the meetings, how you share information, slack, email, et cetera. Those are the pieces of infrastructure I recommend looking at and see where you are experiencing the most friction. Where things feel particularly heavy, they take a lot longer than you'd like them to take where people are feeling weighed down and start there, right? Ask yourself in what way can we make anything that we're doing in these systems more intentional or more systematized? How can we get the weight off of the person and make how we move together as a team more structured and more institutionally held by making it more intentional? So that is what I have for this week. I hope that was helpful and 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 about here in my newsletter Leadership Ford 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 at brooke richie babbage.com podcast see you next week.