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- [00:01]
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. 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.
- [01:28]
Unknown Speaker
Every year the same thing happens. October, November rolls around and all of a sudden everything feels urgent. Your team is tired, your board has gone absolutely silent, fundraising plans are starting to feel shaky, and you're staring down a massive wall of goals. The goals felt totally doable six months ago. Right now, summer things feel doable. But it's October, it's November, and it's starting to feel like a sprint that you're maybe not trained for. The thing is, year end chaos doesn't start in the fourth quarter. It starts now. It starts during the summer with what I call capacity blindness. And today I'm going to walk you through how to spot it, how to fix it, and how to run a simple but powerful capacity check that will protect your time, your energy, and hopefully your goals. So let's start with what is capacity blindness. Capacity blindness is when we set these big, wonderful, bold goals ourselves, or as a team and completely underestimate what will actually go into executing them. It's the campaign plan that doesn't actually account for the 40 plus hours of behind the scenes copywriting the Emails that need to be written that go into the. Into the campaign. It's the messaging revamp. This has been a big one this year as organizations have been thinking about how do we talk about our work, especially if it is equity related or related to anything having to do with justice. Right. The equity revamp that we discussed, decide we're going to do, and the organization, you know, the board and the ED greenlight it. But we don't actually know what internal skills and capacity we have to own. A messaging revamp. Does anybody know what the strategy is that goes into a messaging revamp? Do we have to completely hire out for that? Do we hire out? But who manages that person? Right. These are questions that are sort of baked into the execution that when we're setting the goals, often get overlooked. So the first thing about capacity buying is to understand. So when we get to October, November and December, you and you're like, oh, my God, I set the wrong goals. That's often not true. It's not that your goals themselves were realistic or unrealistic. I'm sorry. It's that your plan quietly depends on invisible labor, invisible time, and invisible money. And the problem is that that happens so often as a survival response for organizations that are moving and growing faster than they can keep up with. So the first thing to understand capacity blindness isn't the setting of wrong goals. It's the setting of awesome, bold, ambitious goals and underestimating or keeping invisible. The labor, the time, the money, the resources that go into it. Why do we do this? So our brains are wired to simplify overwhelming situations. Every single person does it. When you are juggling a million things, which as an executive director, you almost always are, your brain protects you. Right? It steps up and it skips over anything that feels too big or too complex. And the complexity piece is important to focus on because goals are often more complex than we realize, right? Not necessarily hard. Hard and complex are two different things. Complex is there are lots of details baked into it, right? There are lots of things that will go into executing it. And so your brain's just gonna skip, or those it simply won't see them. This is what we call cognitive simplification. And it happens when you, for example, plan a campaign and think, yep, we're going to get it done. We're going to buckle down and push through and do it. But you don't actually list the steps and who is going to do them and what is the time that will be required. And then ask if these are the steps and these are the people that own the steps. And this is the time that is required to accomplish those steps. Well, do we have that time? Do the people that are supposed to do this have the capacity? That's the step. That's the process that you go through to get really clear about what goes into achieving the goals. But our brains skip over that complexity. Cognitive simplification serves a really important purpose. It helps us stay calm in the moment. The problem is if we don't create systems and processes that override the simplification in structured, intentional ways, what it actually winds up doing is creating chaos down the line. So you remember I said that year end chaos starts in the middle of the year. It starts now. It starts with this cognitive simplification because those skipped over steps, they don't actually disappear. They show up, they land on people's task lists, on people's plates, often the executive director or the leadership team, and often all at once, right? They show up in November when the year end campaign is behind schedule and the emails haven't been written and so they haven't gone out and therefore the calls haven't been made. That's how we experience the consequence of, of this cognitive simplification. So how do you stop this cycle? Why am I having this conversation now? This is. If you are listening to it live, this is July. Why am I talking about November? You now, because you can actually get out ahead of this pretty simply. What you need to do is run what I call a real capacity check, right? It's that second, third and fourth step in the goal setting that I just mentioned before. You lock in your year end goals. So I've been talking a lot and I will share a link to my mid year reset toolkit. I've been talking a lot about mid year planning and how it's different from year end planning. Year end planning is about sort of the journey you want to go on in the coming year, right? What are our annual goals? What do we want to accomplish? What does success, success look like, how much is it going to cost, et cetera. Mid year planning is like a gut check, right? Mid year planning is a reset. It is a recalibration of what is possible. Letting go of things that no longer make sense or have become distractions and, or are no longer possible, right? And so part of that is you're locking in what will be your year end goals, what will define success for you and your team by the end of this year? You want to include this real capacity check that I'm about to walk through so the first step is take your goals for each of the goals you think you're going to have and break them down into tasks, into activities. So it isn't just run our year end campaign, right? You're going to want to list everything, brain dump everything that goes into your end campaign. You're going to need to write copy for emails, you're going to need to design the emails, prep board materials and give them talking points. You might want a landing page if you're doing a peer led campaign, you want to update your donor page, you're going to need to pre write thank you letters. What is the post cultivation and stewardship going to look like? Right? What are all of the things that go into a successful campaign? Then for each of them, estimate time, energy, money. Right? For each task, you can do this in Google sheets, you can do this in mind maps, right? If you're more of a visual drawing kind of person, for each task, how many hours will it take? Who owns it? What will it cost? And then the next step is for the who owns it and what will it cost? The really important questions are who owns it? How maxed out are they already? Right? Or put more positively, what is their capacity to spend the hours that we've said it will take? Do they have those hours? Have them look at the rest of the work on their plate for the rest of the year, right? Will they have the time? Will they have the mental capacity? And then for what will it cost? Is that money already secured? How tenuous is that money? Right? Is it definitely coming? Do we have it? Okay, so that's step two and step three. What are the resources required and where are we now with those resources? Where are we starting from? And then finally think about expanding your definition of capacity. Right? So you now have this sort of resource map of this is what we need to do, this is what it will take, this is where we're starting from. Now think can we add our capacity to achieve these goals? Right? Capacity doesn't just mean staff, it also means how can we leverage board members to do some of these things? Do we have partners? Do we have allies? Do we have access to resources? So sticking with the campaign example, one of the resources that I offer is templates for pre drafted year end campaign emails. Right? If this is a resource, you might say it would take 15 hours. That's too many. Of course it would take three hours to write all of the emails. For our 10 day campaign, we have Jack on our team, who owns that. He's our marketing communications person, he's going to own the writing of the emails. And Jack is really tapped out. Right. Jack is also building a giving circle with the board. And so Jack is working on messaging for that and, and doesn't really have an extra three hours to craft these. Oh, actually we can expand our definition of capacity, build Jack's capacity by saying, let's cut the three hours down to 30 minutes. Here's some templates, right? You might look and say we need somebody to for our year end campaign to do follow up phone calls to everybody that gives. That's part of our stewardship plan. We have two board members that have been looking for a way in. They're maybe a little uncomfortable, they're new, they're a little uncomfortable with the asking part, but they're really great with the thank you part. So we're going to plug them in as capacity. Right? So this last part of getting clear about the goals is not just you don't want to stop at where are we now? You want to think about what capacity can we add. That's your plan, right? If after you've done that, you realize we don't have what we need to accomplish this goal, now's the time to pivot, now's the time to let go before you get to the end of the year and burnout hits and you don't achieve the goal and you feel bad. The thing is that this isn't just about sort of efficiency, right? It feels technical and I'm talking about Google sheets. This goes to the very heart of resilience, of what allows us to stay in the work and do it without hitting a wall, without burning out when organizations hit Q4, right? And I'm talking about a calendar year, right? When they hit the end of the year, October, November, December, and they feel frantic and they feel chaotic and teams are really reaching the end of what they have to give. It's not because they aimed too high. And if we put it in that box, if we see it that way, then when it comes time to planning for next year, we're not going to set bold, exciting goals. And that's not what our organizations need. That's not what the change we're trying to create in the world needs. It needs bold, exciting goals. They just need to be realistic. When we get to that year end chaos, it's just because we mistook effort for capacity. We assumed, as we often do, that people will just make it work, right? We rely on the hustle and the push and the grit instead of a system Or a process that makes visible those invisible resources, right? And in making them visible, it empowers us to make choices, right? Making things work, relying on grit is expensive. There is a cost. It costs morale, it costs momentum, it costs peace of mind. Those are real costs because they cut in to what we're able to do moving forward. So a real capacity check is about making visible those costs. Making visible and making choices about where you want to spend your time, your money, your mental energy, your resources, your capacity. And that's what builds resilience, right? Not grit. Alignment between our goals and our ambition and our resources. Intentional alignment between where we want to go and how we want to get there. So here is my call to you, my invitation. As you are thinking about your year end plans and you're starting to finalize them, right? Going into this last push, this last five or six months, months of the year, you may already have them in your calendar. This is your moment. Take a look at what's on your plate. You can do this with your team, Run the capacity check, right? Reassess what's possible, make anything that's been invisible visible and get honest as a team about where you want to invest and where it might make sense to pull back without torching your team or yourself. So I have a few resources that can help you if you want to have some guidance in running this process. So the first is my Reset yout North Star Mid Year Planning Toolkit. It has trackers, toolkits, a training guide, everything you need to actually look at your goals. Do what we talked about here, resetting and really assessing your capacity so that you go into year end feeling really clear about where you and your team are going to spend your time, your money and your resources. And you can get that@richiebabbage.com Midyear Reset richiebabbage.com Midyear reset I also have something that I call the Post IT Planning System, which is a really fun two to three hour strategic mapping process. Basically, you take your goals and you create your quarterly and your annual map of all of the activities. What goes into it? Everything I walked through here, it's a much more structured way to walk an entire team through that process. And on the back end you wind up with a very realistic understanding of the activities you need to focus on for the next quarter, for the next month and for the next week. And that's called the posted Planning system. You can get that@brookerichybabbage.com backslash post it planning. So that's Richie Babbage.com backslash midyear reset or Brooke Richie Babbage.com backsllash post it planning that's it for this week. I hope this was helpful and I will see you back here next week for more. Mastermind.
- [17:57]
Brooke Richie Babbage
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 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 at brooke richie babbage.com backslash podcast see you next week.