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Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
How To Evolve Your Role as Executive Director As Your Nonprofit Grows
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Today we're talking about how your role as CEO evolves as your organization grows, what you're supposed to do once you've built the actual leadership team you're supposed to have, and how to shift from being the one who does all the things to being the one who designs the system that does all the things. Ultimately, what does it mean to step into the next level of evolved leadership? Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind podcast where we name what's really happening inside growing nonprofits and what it actually takes to design a high impact nonprofit the right way. I'm Brooke Richie Babbage, longtime nonprofit strategist and coach. Each week I unpack the systems strategies and specific mindset shifts that help growing nonprofits get smart and intentional about growing their impact without burning out along the way. This show is about moving beyond grit to design. It's about building organizations that have the systems, structures and leadership capacity to to truly hold the weight of their mission. Welcome. I recently had a coaching conversation with one of my amazing next level nonprofit members. We'll call him Dylan. That put this question into such clear focus. Dylan has been leading his organization through a major intentional evolution. It's really been very exciting. After Strategic Pivot, he created and filled four director level roles in a year. He went from sort of holding top by himself to having an operations, communications and development programs and digital strategy director. Right. All four of those roles. He's been working intentionally to coach these directors through building their own strategic plans for the coming year. He's been doing it right. He's had them reflect on their strategic focus, define their priorities for their work work to make sure that their goals are clear and aligned with the mission and the values. He took them through the same framework that I walk through on this show all the time. The work has been thoughtful, it's been team owned, it's been mission aligned, it's been messy, it's been hard, and it's brought up a lot for him. A lot that I think has caught him off guard. In one of our calls, he said, now that they have their plans and they're doing their work and they're pretty good, I feel a little lost. What am I supposed to be doing now? Who am I in this new structure? That right there, that moment, that question, that's the moment we build awards in leadership development. And it's the moment where so many leaders freeze and retreat because they've never been taught how to step into what can feel like the empty space of next level leadership. Right. If you are not doing all this stuff, what do you spend your time doing? What am I stepping into as I step away from the hands on management? And it can feel. And I think this is what Dylan was experiencing. Like you're really unmoored all of a sudden. So he had just completed this amazing planning process, right? Visioning, retreat, alignment around priorities his team was leading. And it triggered this question, right, what's left for me to do? Who am I now? It was a really honest moment. And when I asked him what he was feeling in that moment, he said, a little bit lost. And I hear that a lot. Leaders hit this moment where for the first time, they are not holding all the threads. And anymore the directors aren't just giving updates, they're starting to take ownership. They're making decisions, they're crafting strategy so the leader who's used to being the glue can suddenly feel if they're honest, like they're not as essential and they're not as much in control, right? They're sort of losing control of what's happening. They don't have direct eye sight on every single thing. That's every decision that's being made, all of the output, all of the programs, all of the relationships. So I asked Dylan, do you feel any sense of possibility? And he said, yeah, and I also don't know what it looks like to step into that possibility. So that's what I want to talk about here in this episode. Naming what that new version of leadership actually is and offering what could be a path into that next level leadership identity. So the first thing that I'll highlight is, and it might sting a little, right? If you're in this moment right now, if you've built a good leadership team, you're not supposed to be the glue anymore. You're not actually supposed to be the person holding it together. And, and that might feel like it's a relief and it might feel like, again, what's my role on the team? So who am I, right? If things aren't going through me? And I know from experience that leading a growing organization as you build a competent, powerful, effective leadership team is not an emotionally binary experience. It isn't just the relief of having people on your leadership team you can trust. It is also a quickly evolving shift in your identity, right? I was the one who made the decisions, and that was part of my role and that was part of what I brought to the team. And now I have these amazing people making decisions in my stead. And so now what, right? But the reality is that's not your job anymore, as you have your leadership team. You're not supposed to be the one making everything work. And if you're still doing that, if the team is still boomeranging decisions back to you, still checking in on everything, right? If you're still functioning as the bottleneck, then you have what I call a capacity design deficit. Not a you problem. It's usually not a team problem. It's a structure problem. It means that you've grown the organization's surface area, right? There are more people, there are more programs, there's more visibility. Often this comes with more funding. I see this a lot as people go from 1 million to 2 million, right? They have a good leadership team. And now it's like, how do we actually evolve into an organization where everybody's doing the right thing, right? So you've grown the organization's surface area, but you haven't grown the container that holds all of the new complexity. So when Dylan asked, who am I now? What he's really getting at is, if I'm not a doer, the operator anymore, what does leadership actually look like for me? So here's the answer. Here's what I told him. You are becoming the architect. You are no longer the person pushing the boulder up the hill, right? Or pulling the team as you run up the down escalator. That's another really vivid metaphor that another leader that I work with uses, and I love it, right? You are now the person designing the hill, designing the path, crafting the map, designing the systems that allow for the boulder to be moved up the hill. You are designing the container that holds the team, that holds the structure, that produces the outcome without relying on your constant intervention. That is the shift. So I want to break this down. What does it mean to be the architect in practice? There are three core responsibilities of the architect CEO. The first, define success. A huge part of your job now is to make sure that everyone on the team, including you, knows what success looks like before the work begins. And I do not mean just a vague set of vision and values, right? These are clear, tangible definitions of what good looks like for each area of work. When Dylan and I dug into his team's priorities, we realized that for some of them, he didn't actually have a way to know whether things were on or off track. And that definitely added to his feeling of being out of control, right? He felt like these are people making decisions. I think they're making good decisions. But I feel like I have to wait to see what happens to know if the Decisions were good, right? To know if what they're producing is actually what I would want to have produced. And that doesn't feel good. And, and that's not actually how it has to function. Right. You're not relinquishing control. You're shifting what control looks like, the altitude at which you ensure success or ensure excellence. And you do that by defining success. So one of the things that Dylan and I did was we built a simple CEO dashboard, two to three key performance indicators, or KPIs, her strategic priority. So the team was all on the same page about the organizational priorities, what the organization was going to center as important in their work for the year. And then each Director had these KPIs, these indicators of success as they moved through their quarter. And they set it up so that there's red, yellow and green status. Are they on track, are they having a hard time, are they stalled? This is something that he could check every month with his directors and know exactly where to ask questions, where he could stay out of the way and should stay out of the way and where to coach. Right. This is oversight without micromanagement. It's altitude. So your takeaway here is your job is not to have your finger on every pressure point. Your job is to design the system that will alert you when something is off. That's the role of defining success. Okay? Second key responsibility, equip your team for ownership, not just execution. Now, once you define success, you don't jump back in and do it with them and hold their hand as they grow. You coach, you equip, you step back. In one of our conversations, and this was something we worked a lot on together. Dylan and I talked about how he needed to go back to his directors and make sure that each goal had a single, clearly named owner that wasn't him. That doesn't mean that that owner does everything right. He's not going to his directors and saying, you're going to pull this, push this boulder up the hill by yourself. It did mean, it does mean that they're accountable for making sure the work gets done right. We worked through one cross functional initiative so he could see what this looks like in practice. Their leadership development strategy is the thing that we focused on. And this is the place where multiple directors were involved. Right? They all had to contribute to this outcome. They had clear definition of success as a leadership team. Dylan was very clear about what success looked like to him, what excellence looked like to him. But we needed one person, and it turned out to be the director of operations. To own the coordination and the outcomes. Not in theory, but in reality. In Dylan's dashboard, right next to the KPI, we wrote the name of the director of operations, and that was the person that updated the dashboard. And when that dashboard was yellow or red, that's the person that Dylan could go to to say, what do you need? What's going wrong? If something went wrong, that person was accountable. This is what creates true accountability and allows you as a CEO to stay at the right altitude. Architect level leadership requires you to trust the system you're designing, not just the people in it. Ownership. In this evolved design, ownership isn't a vibe, it's a structure. You can see it in a dashboard on paper. So the third core responsibility of the architect CEO is to monitor and coach, to lead from the right altitude. So this is where we bring it all together. This is sort of the interstitial tissue that makes the other two things work. As an architect, you design the system, right? So we've talked about the dashboard. You want to set up check ins and rhythms that allow for the system to work. Then you have to coach your team inside that system. Dylan and I talked a lot about this. We talked about how this played out, for example, in meetings and how important it was for him to move from ad hoc updates and people popping into his his office to a rhythm of coaching through check ins. So quarterly reviews against the key performance indicators, monthly check ins around the priority areas and making sure that their definitions of success were remaining aligned, and then weekly touch points as needed, but always tied to specific outcomes. Never just updates. He did not need to. And he had to get comfortable with this. He didn't need his directors to constantly bring him up to speed about what they were doing. He had to trust them, trust that they were working towards their shared definition of success. That when they were off track, they would let him know it's not just that this means that he's doing less, he actually is just doing things differently. His time is spent differently. He's no longer in the weeds. He's monitoring the map on the way up the mountain. And when something veers off course, when a KPI goes red, when a goal slips, he leans in with precision. Coaching, not panic. No more firefighting coaching. So those are the three core responsibilities. How I want you to understand your. The pillars of your role as the architect CEO, you want to define success. You want to equip your team to own that definition of success, and then you want to monitor and coach from the right altitude. Now this is hard Right. I am not going to pretend that this is easy for everyone. And I also want to name that there can be real grief in this transition, a real sense of loss or letting go. You're going to work differently with your team. I remember as my team was growing, we went from me and two directors essentially co leading around one table in a wework, to a team where, honestly, if I'm being a little vulnerable, I sometimes had to be reminded to make time for some of the people who didn't report to me and who on any given day, I might not talk to. Right. My team got to be that size, and that meant that my role in the room was different, my role in the organization was different, my relationship even to my leaders was different. So there's an identity loss, there's some ego work to do there. There's the vulnerability of not being the expert in every room anymore and looking to your directors and saying, you got this, and you got this because you're better at it than me. That was something that, for me created a tremendous amount of relief and spaciousness and just joy being able to turn to my director of programs, who was a social worker who was far better at our program work than I ever had been, and say, I trust you to get us up this mountain, and you are the better person to get us up this mountain than I am. And that means I need to get out of your way. Right. And that's what I said to Dylan. You have to have the right people in the right seats, create the container for them to succeed with clarity and precision and coaching, and then get out of the way and let them be good at what you are asking them to do. So Dylan shared that this transition was leaving him feeling a little lost. And what I want to to highlight is that that feeling is normal. Right. The shift from glue to architect is a shedding and a building at the same time. And it requires you to do the work, to rewire your understanding, your sense of your own leadership, to trade. I do it all for I designed something that works without me being in the weeds. And that can feel like a loss of control, but it's not. It's actually an evolution of control. It's control by design, not control by effort. Because a truly resilient organization doesn't rely on you. It doesn't rely on your heroism. It relies on your architecture, on your design. You should be able to step away and everything still works. And that's what gets you from surviving to scaling with sustainability. So if you're in this moment, if you're looking around at your team and wondering, I'm not in it all anymore, what am I doing? I want to leave you with a reflection. I want you to ask yourself this question. What are the three signals I need to see every week or every month to know we're on track, to feel safe letting go? Not all the metrics, not all the updates, just the top three. What are those indicators? It could be a five figure donor in the pipeline. It could be a green engagement index, right? If you use the kind of dashboard that Dylan and I set up. Whatever it is, define it for yourself, build it into a dashboard, make it visible, talk to your team about it, and then design everything around it. Design your meetings, your rhythms, the team ownership that allows you to see those signals, to monitor those signals. That's your CEO role now. That's what leadership looks like at the right altitude, right at scale, not being the operator, being the architect. So that's it for today's episode. If this resonates, if you're in this moment and want my support, figuring out your dashboard, your team design leadership at your next level of altitude, I'd love for you to stay connected. You can follow me on LinkedIn. You can head to Brookerichybabbage.com backslash fit check to apply to work directly with me inside the next level Nonprofit Mastermind. I want you to remember one thing. You don't have to hold everything together with grit. Resilient organizations are about intentional design. That's it for this week. I will see you back here next week for more Mastermind. Thanks for listening. If this episode resonated, leave a review. I read them and they do matter. And make sure you're subscribed so that you never miss a deep dive into building your resilient nonprofit. And finally, if you're ready to move from grit to good design, head to brooke richiebabbabbage.com strong to take the 90 second quiz and find out where to start.