Brooke Richie Babbage (0:00)

If you listened to last week's episode, you may have heard me say something that might have hit a nerve. Your operational chaos is not a you problem, it's a design problem. And if you're like most of the leaders I work with, you probably felt some combination of relief and an immediate follow up question. Okay, but how do I know which part of my design is broken? So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through the high level framework that I use to help organizations diagnose what's really going on going on before jumping into solutions 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. Start here. Most nonprofit leaders are trained implicitly or explicitly to solve problems fast. We are fixers. We are doers. But a big part of building a resilient organization that can have impact at scale is learning to zoom out and look at the pattern, not just the pains. That is where my strong framework comes in. S T R O N G. It's called the Strong framework because it is how we move from reacting to symptoms to redesigning systems that make our organization strong. Now, each letter stands for one of the six core pillars that make up the structural design of a healthy, resilient organization. And if your organization is struggling, or I should say more accurately, there is some piece of your organization that is struggling, the key is to figure out where your deficit lives, right? There's always going to be a deficit in one or more of these six areas. And so if we can get really crystal clear about where the deficit lives, then we can be intentional about solving it. So I'm going to walk through these six pillars and give you some quick audit questions to help you think through where you're experiencing your own design deficits. You can also text the word strong to 66866 to get my strong assessment. It is a quick diagnostic tool to help you Identify which of the following is your biggest challenge and what your next best step might be. Now, one thing I want to make super, super clear before I walk through these is that your goal is never to diagnose and then fix everything all at once. At no point does even the healthiest organization have everything functioning exactly right. That's not a real thing. So hopefully that is not the standard you are holding yourself to. I talk to a lot of leaders in my program where they've never quite articulated it to themselves, but they're really thinking, if I were doing this right, all the balls would be in the air, right? That's not a thing. So we want to let go of that vision. Whether it's explicit or implicit, what diagnosis, sort of honest diagnosis of your design deficits does is it gives you the power of insight, right? It sets you up for intentional redesign. One shift at a time. That's all diagnosis is supposed to do. I was actually talking with one of the leaders that I coach and she shared something really telling with me just sort of in passing. But it struck me and we sort of sat with it for a minute. She said that she had thought that once she had designed the right team, we'd been working together on reshaping her org chart to sort of step into a next C suite level of work and what that looked like given her three year strategic plan. And he's like, I thought that once I designed the right team and thought through all of that, then I'd be able to check that box, sort of the team box done, and then just focus on the other stuff. She's like, but now we're bigger and we're doing more and we're holding more and there's just different team stuff. And I loved that because I think that's really common for most of us, right? We feel like, okay, I built the fundraising engine, now I'm going to focus on my team, or I have a great board and now I'm going to focus on fundraising. So I share her story because she was highlighting something that I've learned about leadership. There is always a next step in your growth. There is always a next thing to diagnose and shift and sustain. So if you release yourself from the tyranny of feeling like you have to make everything work wonderfully all the time, right? That that's somehow the measure of your success as a leader, right? That everything's clicking, working on. What did they say? All, all cylinders. If you let go of that, then you can actually move more calmly and confidently. Through the ongoing process of redesigning. The alternative is that it can be overwhelming to even take note of where your organization is struggling. Right. You can't really even let yourself do an honest diagnosis because in recognizing the design deficit, you put yourself on the hook to solve it. So I want you to take yourself off that hook. Here's the reframe. Part of the skill of leadership is knowing which balls to strategically let drop and when to pick them back up. It is not to figure out magically how to keep them all in the air at the same time. Okay, so that's my little coaching reframe. Before I go through the framework, I'm going to go through each of the strong pillars, and you can note the strengths and challenges in each pillar for your own organization. I'm going to give you just a few guiding questions, and then in next week's episode, I'm going to give you some guidance on how to decide where to focus first. Right? What to do after the diagnosis. And remember, you can get some help with this by texting strong to 66866. Okay? So the first pillar is S. Strategic clarity. This is your North Star. This is what creates alignment with your external stakeholders, right? It gets your partners on board. It helps create your vision for your funders, your donors. This is also what guides your work internally. Who you hire, where and how you expand, who you have on your board, all of it, right? So everything starts with strategic clarity. What you want to look out for as a potential sign of a deficit is that it's hard. These are just examples, right? There are other sides of the deficit, but you may have a strategic clarity deficit or that this may be a place to focus. If you're finding that you. And this comes up a lot, you're talking with funders or donors who should be excited about your work, but it's not clicking right. There's something that they're not quite getting it. That little spark in their eye isn't going off, and it's not turning into support. Even though you're like, you are exactly the funder or person who should love what we're doing, another way this might show up. It's really hard to craft a work plan, an annual work plan, which is a critical tool with your team that feels manageable somehow. There is constantly more to do than you all collectively have capacity to. To actually hold, right? So these might be a sign that you're facing a strategy deficit or strategic clarity deficit. So the question, the audit questions to ask yourself here. Do we have A crystal clear North Star that's guiding everything we do. Is our vision clear? Is the cathedral we are all building together, as clear in the minds of my board members as it is in mine. Can they describe it? Can they see it? Can they talk about it? And then also, is that North Star shared, actionable and measurable? How do we all know if we're making progress? Right? What do we need to make progress? So that's strategic clarity. The second is team and ownership. This is how the work is led, right? So if strategic clarity is where the work is going, what is the work? This is how the work is led and held, and this one's really big. How are we going to get the work done? This is not about building out your org chart, right? Or making sure that you have an employee manual. Again, very important things to have a clear organizational chart and things like an employee manual. But what we're talking about here, sustaining impact at scale and sort of stepping into the kind of thinking about your team and about ownership on your team that actually helps you grow, right? Is that your leadership team has to carry its own weight, right? If you look around and balls are dropping or lines of accountability aren't clear, my husband calls it the doubles problem, right? You have people implicitly or explicitly looking at one another and saying, oh, I thought you had that. Or. Or there are lines of accountability that are overlapping, right? If every decision or too many decisions flow through you, all three of these are signs that you may have a team and ownership deficit. So ask yourself, there are a few questions here. Do we have the right roles to support our strategic direction? Before you get to have I hired the right people? What are the team members we need? You want to think about the roles, the areas of work that are mapped in your org chart. And then you ask, do we have the right people in those roles? Right. So do we have the right roles to support our strategic goals and priorities? Do we have the right people in those roles? Capacity and skill and interest? Is the scope of authority and autonomy clear? So that everyone on the team, not just my leadership team, everyone on the team, can truly own the piece of their work that is theirs to own. Do we have the systems and structures in place to support information sharing and decision making at scale? Okay, so the third pillar is resources. How is the work funded? This is about funding and finance, how you bring in money, how you organize money, how you think about your financial health. So look out for these signals. You're raising money, right? The organizations that I work with are high six Figures, well into seven figures. So they have money coming in, but one or more of these challenges is present. They're living in feast or famine mode, right? So money comes in, and at certain key points throughout the year, they feel flush, and then the money starts to dwindle, right? So there are always two or three times a year where they're just a little more worried than they should be. The money's not consistent or reliable. They feel like they are always chasing or hunting for money instead of planning for growth. They're not attracting or bringing in money. And that shift from chasing to attracting is really critical. These are often signs of a revenue deficit or a resource deficit. So the key questions here are, do we have a constellation of funding activities or do we have a fundraising system? Does our revenue model support our growth, or are we modeling how we bring in money after a different organization with a different set of strategic priorities? Another question. Do we have a clear, shared and measurable definition of financial health? What are the key indicators of health for our organization? And is our team on board with them? Is our board on board with them? This is really sort of stepping beyond just thinking about raising money and really thinking about building a system for consistent, reliable, sustainable revenue. So the next one is operations. This is about what holds the work. This is your operational backbone, your tech, your systems, your tools, your infrastructure. It's the unsexy stuff. I like to say, is your team constantly reinventing the wheel when it comes to executing core functions, things like volunteer onboarding? Are you sort of maybe not starting from scratch every year, but rebuilding the plane each year? Right. Fixing the wing and then the door fell off and you got to fix that. Right? Donor recognition is another place where I see this sort of rebuilding or reinventing the wheel. Partnership development, identifying and securing new partnerships for your programs. Also, look at whether manual tasks are sort of sucking up all the air in the room, Right? Do you or people on your team look at your calendar and you have too many meetings and too many manual things, Right? Those are big signs, red flags. Ask if your current systems and tools feel cobbled together instead of truly working together. These are all, all signs of operations deficits, right? What you want is for your systems to help you at scale, right? So here, ask yourself, where is there friction that can be reduced or eliminated through better systems, tech, tools, or automation? Okay. We're looking to reduce friction so that your team can move more easily together. The next one is networked capacity, and it's actually one of my favorites. It's something that folks Overlook all the time. But it's just such a high leverage space in an organization that's often untapped. This is about who is supporting your work. And I don't just mean donors. Your organization doesn't exist in a vacuum. You exist in a larger ecosystem of potential capacity, of different kinds of support, advisors and partners and ambassadors. These are people and institutions that can be sources of thought, partnership and capacity expansion beyond your team and beyond your board. So here you want to ask yourself, this is a simple one, but really powerful. Are we leveraging our full ecosystem or are we carrying too much of our mission and our work alone, institutionally alone? Right. Organizations scale and sustain impact at scale through their ecosystems when they are deeply connected to the other people and institutions in different ways in their ecosystem. So the last one is governance. And this is how the work is sort of overseen. This one can feel really murky to folks. What I want you to look out for here is I'm just going to sort of zero in on a signal that might be clear for a lot of you. Does your board overreach or disengage? Right. Are they too close to either end of weak governance? They are micromanaging or they are not engaging. Right. It's like pulling teeth. These are signs of a governance deficit. So your question here is, do we have the structures in place to ensure clarity and accountability for our board? Right. This is usually a structural problem. Governance is almost always a structural problem. The second question is, do we have the people on our board that are aligned with, and this is almost like with the team, do we have the right roles? Do we have the people on our board that are aligned with and set up to help us achieve our strategic priorities? So have we collected a group of people or onboarded a group of people that we think are the right people? Or are these actually people who have the expertise, the interest, the networks, the skills, the competencies, the passions to get us where we want to go organizationally? Okay, so I want to pause here for a moment. You just heard six pillars of a strong organization. Strategic clarity, team and ownership, Resources, operations, networked capacity and governance. These are six spaces where your organization may be absorbing pressure that should actually be held by better systems, better infrastructure and better design. So I want to be clear again, and I said this before I went through them, but it's really, really important, you are not supposed to fix all of these at once. This is not about doing more. Right? Stepping into the next level of operational clarity and leadership confidence. Sustaining impact at scale is not about doing more. This is about seeing your organization zooming out, seeing it with fresh eyes through a structural lens, not just an operational one. Now, in the next episode, I'm going to give you a simple process for zeroing in on your first step. Right? We're going to figure out how you can now that you've done your diagnosis, redesign and rebuild using what I call the one shift method. Now, in the meantime, text strong to 66866 and snag your free diagnosis. And if you already know, wait a minute. I want someone to walk alongside me as we rebuild and redesign. You can apply to work with me inside the next level nonprofit rookwoodgbabbage.com next level nonprofit application. For now, I'll leave you with this. Your problems are not random. They're structural. And once you know where your deficits are, then you can begin to redesign what's underneath them. So 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 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.