← Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
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When most of us think about a growth chart, we think of lines going up and to the right and the straighter the better. That's what we're taught. But I want to push back on that idea of the line that goes up into the right and zero in on an aspect of organizational growth that doesn't get nearly enough airtime. The Flat Part of Growth 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. Think about a period of time in your life right after something amazing happens, big or little. Right after you achieve something you've been working towards. Right after a friend leaves town, right after you get home from vacation, right after you get married. There's always a period of time that's like a reset. The same is true in the case of organizational growth. While you're busy growing your team and adding more people to your board and expanding your programs, the fabric of your organization changes. So there is always a little stretch of time. Well, sometimes not so little. There's always a stretch of time after periods of growth through addition, where things start to slow down, we look around and you don't fully recognize the organization you're running. In perhaps little ways, like your team talks to one another differently, or there are new board members on your board and they call you for different things or they don't and you're used to them calling little things that have become different, unrecognizable. And that is what triggers or should trigger the flat part of growth. Now, in practice, even if it makes sense that after spurts of growth there needs to be a reset time, this can actually be disorienting. A lot of the leaders, actually most of the leaders that I work with find this to be disorienting. It can feel like we should be moving faster, but things are feeling wobbly and that makes me nervous. So consciously or unconsciously they Slow down. It also can feel like somehow things are harder now than before. We got the bigger team, the new funding, the bigger board. So consciously or not, they start to slow down. I also hear, I don't even know what to tell my board about our goals for the coming year. We're just, we're not doing as much as we did last year. Now, that's not true. But the doing as much is often the sort of shiny bauble, bigger programs, new things. And so it feels, consciously or not, like you're slowing down. It's disorienting because the world around you is often expecting progress reports and shiny milestones in which you've added things. But internally, you know there's something that feels unsettled. When you've gone through a period of growth, things will naturally start to feel unsettled, as they should. So here is what I want to offer you today. Healthy growth is never linear. The idea of steady growth up into the right all the time is a fiction. Growth is always a step function. That flat part of the growth trajectory is not a stall or a letdown or a failure or a slow up. That feeling of being unsettled, pay attention to it and give it the attention it's due because it is a necessary strategic part of a healthy growth process. Think about it like stairs. The up part is when we're doing more. We're lifting our legs, we're moving forward. When we add more. But that flat step is where we stabilize. It's where we breathe. It's where we reflect and calibrate and redesign our systems and our structures and our mindsets and our people to carry what we just added. And this matters for two reasons. First, strategically, that flat period is when your organization matures. You design for the next level that you're stepping into. If you skip it, if you just keep climbing, you will just keep building pressure on top of systems that haven't caught up. Secondly, it matters from a leadership mindset perspective. If in your mind, in your heart, you expect non stop acceleration, then you'll misinterpret the pause as a problem. You'll scramble to manufacture momentum to burn out your team, not on purpose. And even worse, you'll start doubting yourself. You'll start doubting that inner voice that says, wait a minute, we need to slow up and pause for a minute. We need to figure out what's working. We need to let go of some things that we've been holding on to. Here's what I want you to hear. That disorientation doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. When you sit down to look at your plan for the coming year or the coming quarter and you don't want to add as much, that's often the exact right move. It means that you've hit the edge of your current design and now it's time to rebuild intentionally. I want to share a quick story. I worked with this amazing leader, I'm going to call her Maya. She had just pulled off a huge win. She and her team, they were really clicking and working well together. They had run this year end donor campaign and tripled her results from the previous year, which was just amazing. And they'd done it the right way, right. They'd built up relationships with their donors, they'd gotten their board involved. Everyone on their team felt connected to fundraising. It was, it was a true win. Everybody was thrilled. The board was excited, their donors were engaged. Her team was fired up. And a few weeks later she called me in a panic, thought, I feel proud for longer. She said instead, I just feel a lot of pressure because now everybody's expecting me to do it again, to keep rippling, to keep going. And I'm not sure we can, I'm not sure we're set up to do that. And I just loved that call because the campaign had worked, but they hadn't locked in the systems and so it felt fragile. It wasn't the word she used, but that's what I heard in her voice. We did it, we took that step up, but it's really easy to slide back down because when she looked around, she was still writing the donor emails. Her team was still tracking gifts manually. They were doing it quickly, but it was still manual. She was owning the follow up. Her board had chipped in and then sort of retreated. Collectively, they had scaled the outcome, but not the infrastructure. So here's what we did. We decided to hit pause, not to slow down, but to build. We mapped out a real cultivation pipeline. We treated her donors like partners and build out a stewardship plan. We created templates so that every email didn't start from scratch. And we set up automations so that donors were receiving touch points automatically without anyone on her team actually having to do it. We trained her new OPS hire to own all of the donor follow up. And the gift tracking, it was not glamorous, it wasn't sexy, it wasn't something that would go into an impact report. There were no new quote unquote wins to announce during that time. But six months later, she ran her Summer campaign. And she did raise even more. And this time it didn't feel fragile. That flat stretch, that was the part where she became the kind of leader and built the kind of organization that could hold success without burning out. So, yes, it's about growth. We want to grow impact, we want to change the world and do more, but we want growth that doesn't collapse under its own weight. We want growth that gets built to last. So what does a build phase actually include? If you're thinking, oh, this sounds like maybe where we are, there are four, essentially, parts of a build phase. First, reflection, what worked in this last growth cycle, this last growth sprint, and what broke. Second, redesign. Are roles aligned with reality? Is the strategy that we set out towards still relevant? Do we need to rethink how we are moving in the direction of our North Star infrastructure? Look at our systems, look at our workflows, look at our internal communications, how we meet, how often we meet, what we talk about. Look at our financial models and our definition of financial health. What are we tracking? How does that work and what is it telling us? And finally, and this one's really important, cultural recalibration. These build periods, these build phases are, are when you look at your team and make sure that you are all still reinforcing the values that make your team what it is. You ask yourself, how are we reinforcing our values now that our team is bigger, now that our norms need updating, now that we are moving differently together? So reflection, redesign, infrastructure, and cultural recalibration, these are not optional. They are required if you want to grow in a way that is healthy. Because if you skip them, if you rush from one up to the next up, you're just layering stress on top of cracks that will eventually appear. Now, here's the other piece of this that I really want to land with you today. We need to normalize this flat part. We need to stop treating strategic build seasons like their slowdowns or failures in some way. Because here's what happens when we don't. Boards start asking, what happened to our momentum. We walk around afraid that our funders are wondering, why aren't there more wins? Which hint they are not thinking that, right, they want you to be healthy too. And worse, you start questioning your own leadership when you don't listen to that voice that says, we're wobbly. We need to pause and we need to strategically build. So I want you to practice this language with your board, your team, your funders, and yourself. This is a strategic infrastructure year. Write that one down. I love that one. This is a strategic infrastructure year, or we're stabling after a really incredible growth leap so we can scale in a way that is strong. We're stabling so we can scale another one. We're building for what's next. We don't want to just react to what's now. Right? This is language that demonstrates that your build phase is intentional and internally. You can say this to yourself, I'm not slowing down. I'm building depth. This isn't stagnation. This is maturity. Because you have to lead that narrative. No one else in your team can do it. And when you do, when you really believe that, you reclaim that flat stretch, that pause period, as the essential leadership and strategic moment that it is. So if this is where you are right now, in that flat, messy, weirdly quiet part of growth, I want you to hear again. You're not stuck. You're not failing. You are becoming. Your organization is evolving. You are building something that can hold more. As we wrap up, I'm going to leave you with a reflection prompt as we head into planning season. Where in your organization are you in your team holding on to hustle when what you really need is a redesign? How might your leadership shift if you saw this season as strategic, not stalled? That is it for this week. I hope this 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 and they really do matter. I also share extra tidbits and resources building on what we talk 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 this episode@brookerichybabbage.com podcast see you next week. It 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 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 at brooke richie babbage.com podcast see you next week.