Brooke Richie Babbage (0:00)

If you've been following along in this series, you've probably had a moment where you thought, okay, this all makes sense, but where do I actually start? Because once you see your design, because you start noticing every part of your organization is broken. Every place you're carrying your organization that's causing chaos, every dependent on and your energy easy to feel your intention. In this episode, I want to while that awareness is low stress path forward and also not a blueprint for fixing everything because that is not the goal. I want to give you a method for making one small, powerful shift at a time so that you can start redesigning your organization from the inside out.

Brooke Richie Babbage (0:48)

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.

Brooke Richie Babbage (1:34)

I want to start with a core idea that's very important for you to take away. The key long term sustainability is making small structural shifts. It is not part of your job as the leader of your organization to keep all of the balls in the air all of the time. I'm going to say that again, it is not your job to keep all of the balls in the air all of the time. That may seem like what successful leadership looks like, right? You look at other organizations, you look at organizations that are maybe a few steps down the path, other leaders that you know, even leaders that you know very well. And it looks like they've got it all together, right? They're growing smoothly, they have this amazing board, their team is clicking, their strategic plan is beautiful. All of the things. I hear these all of the time. And for the leaders that I work with, what this really often translates into is guilt and low grade shame. This sense that because balls are dropping on their court right in their organization, things are messy, things are buzzy, things are a little bit unstable, that they are somehow not doing a good job as a leader. So I want to start off this episode by just naming that narrative and calling out that it is really, really false. Please believe me when I say that your job as the leader of your organization is to figure out which balls you can strategically drop and keep the rest in the air. And sometimes that is going to mean focusing on your team, and sometimes that is going to mean focusing on your fundraising campaign. And sometimes that's going to mean leaning into board conversations or thought leadership. And you'll probably, you know, focus on two of the areas at once. You know, keeping multiple balls in the air. But the takeaway here is that it's not all of the balls. So what I want you to hear in this, the sort of core idea is that it is small structural shifts that create long term stability. I'm going to walk you through how to choose one pillar, one pillar of your organization, one pain point, one structural fix that can reduce pressure and build clarity. For each pillar, I want to give you one simple question you can ask to help illuminate whether that's the pillar you should focus on. And then one possible next step you can take to start to shift that pillar again. For more substantive background on what each is, go back, start at the beginning of the series and each if you want a diagnostic that will actually help you pinpoint where you might want to dig in, where your block is, or what's causing chaos, you can take my strong assessment@brookeruchiebabbage.com strong, or you can just text the word strong to 66866 and I'll send it to you. Okay, so pillar one, as you may remember, is strategic clarity. This is what guides the work. So here you want to ask yourself, is it clear to the people on my team, including my board, what matters most right now? And the operational word there is most. So it's not all of the things that matter. You want to make sure it's clear what matters most of all. This is really about your strategic priorities. Are they clear for the next three years long term, are they clear for the current year and is clear how you are operationalizing them? What is the lighthouse that everyone's moving in the direction of? So that's the question, is it clear what matters most right now? And the action you can take is really a mini audit, right? Pull up your strategic priorities, 2 to 5, depending on how many you have. Fewer is better. And make sure that you and your team can articulate them. Does everybody know them and does everybody see how their work plan fits into those priorities? Right? So you can do this in a 60 to 90 minute meeting highly focused, not a lot of discussion. Just hear the priorities. Can everybody name them? And what is the work that you're doing in service of those priorities? And you will quickly discover one of two things or both. First, people can't articulate them clearly. They sort of know that there are priorities, but they can't name them and. Or they don't see how their work fits. Right? They're doing work that doesn't clearly align with a priority, which we should not be doing too much of that work, or they're doing work that does, but they don't really see what that alignment is. So this quick audit is a great place to start. Second pillar is team, and this is how the work is led and carried out. So the question here to ask is, who is holding what and is it sustainable? Right. This is really about do we have the right roles mapped out? Do we have the right people in the right roles and is their scope of authority and autonomy clear? Who's holding what and is it sustainable? You can literally write this down, map it out. Some people are visual people. I have a lot of folks in my program that think in bubbles, mind maps, I think in bullet points, it doesn't matter, but. But write that question at the top of a page and you can do this on your own, or you can bring in your leadership team. Is this clear? Who's holding what and is it sustainable? Is it clear? Is it systematized? So the action here is, I recommend choose one role in your organization and audit the responsibilities and decision rights for that role. Simply ask who owns what, who's doing what. You can do this with a Raci or Darcy. Some folks use moca, right? One of the project management tools. You can shoot me an email. Actually, I have a great resource for this, but you can do this with one of those. And just ask your team, okay, for this workflow, for this role, for this project, let's walk through the core responsibilities, what needs to be done and what the decision rights are, who owns what, who's taking the lead, etc. Again, I recommend starting with an audit just like with Strategic clarity, because it is a great way to illuminate where things are breaking down. I will say here that you will find if you do an audit for each of these pillars in the strong framework, something's breaking down somewhere. That's okay, that is normal. Things will break down all the time in multiple areas of your organization. So again, I want to reiterate, the key is not to fix them all. You're looking for the most friction, you're looking for the breakdowns that are causing blockages in other areas. Okay, so that is pillar two. Pillar three is resources. This is how the work is funded. This question is really simple. Do we have a strategic plan for how we will fund our work? Operational word here strategic, not a plan. Lots of organizations have a plan that is made up of a lot of activities, a lot of things that they're going to do around fundraising. What you're looking for is, are the activities in your plan connected to one another? Do they build on one another and talk to one another? Is your fundraising plan actually strategic? Does it talk to the right people? Does it say the right thing to those right people? Is it connected to your actual work? So start here, take one of your strategic priorities and map out how it ought to be funded. What is the cost, actual on the ground cost of funding, that strategic priority. And you notice I said strategic priority, not program you want to begin with, particularly if you are at the point in your organization's fundraising where you really are primed to secure general operating support. Major general operating support. The key to general operating support is that it funds organizational priorities, not organizational programs. So you want to take a priority and map out what it looks like to fund that work. Inside my elevate membership, which is for organizations that are under $750,000. And you can access that@brooke richiebabbage.com elevate. Learn more about it. One of the playbooks that we give you is a step by step process for mapping and aligning your strategic priorities to your fundraising strategies. It is a critical step in growing from project based funding to to general operating support. So if that's interesting to you, check out Elevate. Rick ritchiebabbage.com Elevate okay, so the action here, take one of your strategic priorities and map out the funding for that priority. You can do that by yourself. You can do that with your leadership team. It's also a really great project for your board so that they start to understand funding as general operating support. Right? And the part of that funding that is about your team, that is about salaries and benefits and infrastructure and systems, et cetera. Okay, so the next pillar is operations. And this is about what holds the work, right, the systems that hold the work. Here you want to ask yourself, where are we relying too much on memory or manual effort? Because if your team is bogged down in meetings because everything is in their heads and they have to communicate it synchronously or they're duplicating work, right? They're doing the same thing over and over in a manual way. You will only move as fast as those systems, right? You will stay bogged down. You and your team will stay bogged down. And you'll look up at the end of the week and think, why did we just work for 60 hours and only accomplish, you know, 32 hours worth of work? So start here. Quick action. Pick one repeated task. Think donor stewardship. Think running a team meeting or a quarterly board meeting or a retreat, onboarding new hires, volunteers, et cetera, and create a standard operating procedure, document the steps. It's just a Google Doc. You can pull it up, use bullet points. That's the beginning of your standard operating procedure. And if you can do that, you will start to build an operational playbook of systems. So start with one repeated task and create that SOP and see where that breaks down, where it creates friction, where it creates confusion. That's how you'll start to sort of suss out where you need to focus in order to build more systems. Okay, so the next pillar, next to last pillar, is network expansion and thought leadership. This is about who supports the work. And I put support here because the people and communities that support your work are not just about supporting it through money. Your community supports your work through partnership, through volunteers, through board membership, as advisors, as ambassadors. There are so many, many ways that you need your community to support your work. And so this pillar is about building that ecosystem of structured, leveraged support, building your network. So the question you want to ask here is, in which areas of our work are we carrying our work alone when we don't have to? So look for areas where your staff is maxed out, where your board is underutilized, and ask where can we expand our capacity into our. By stretching into our ecosystem, right, by building our network. So the action here is identify one area of your work and then think of one advisor, one board member, or one partner you can activate with a specific ask to build capacity in that area. This could be anything from a thought partner session or a brain trust, or reviewing a plan or a document, setting up a funder intro, right? It does not have to be a huge ask, but the way that you start to build your leverage network is going area by area and saying, where are we carrying more of this alone than we have to. Okay, final pillar, governance. This is your board, how the work is overseen. And the question here is, are we clear on the board about who decides what? So there are lots of questions that I could recommend that you Ask about board governance and strengthening your board. There is a spectrum of sort of decision making or ownership, and boards that are on either end of that spectrum, far end of that spectrum, are dysfunctional in some way. Doesn't mean they can't be fixed. It means they're not functioning the right way. So one end of that spectrum is they are overreaching, right? They are acting like staff. And for organizations, particularly those that are growing, you know, past half a million, definitely. As we get into the area of the folks that I work with nearing a million, well into a million, your board's not your staff, right? So the overreaching, the micromanagement, the doing things that people in your leadership team ought to do is a form of dysfunction. It's an easy one to fix, but it is a form of dysfunction. The other form to look out for is complete disengagement. Right? They're not managing anything. They're not your strategic thought partners. They show up maybe when they're asked, but they're not proactive in helping you move the organization forward, anticipate risks, future cast, et cetera. They're not ambassadors. They're not. They're disengaged. So this question is one of the best ways to begin to illuminate where your board sits on that spectrum from overreaching to disengagement. That then opens the conversation for what does it mean to make these decisions? Who should be owning these decisions, which. What are the decisions that we need to be owning together? And that allows you to have an elevated conversation with your board about even what's on the table to be decided. It allows you to have this conversation without coming to the board and saying, here's what's broken, Right? Because a lot of times board members don't even know that anything's broken. So we want to start with clarity about who decides what. And then that opens the door for conversations about what the what is and who should own own who should own it. So to get started, I want you to pick one area. Let's say your budget. And with your board, map out, what are the decisions in that area? Right? The decisions from goes into the budget, how big is the budget, changes to line items in the budget, right? All of the decisions, and then clarify who has the final say. That clarity helps the board to lean in where they're supposed to lean. So I walked through here for each of the pillars, six mini shifts, right? Questions that you can ask this week, right away, that will help you to begin to think, is this the area we need to lean more into. These are about shifts that are small, they are specific, and they are actionable. Each of the things that I mentioned is a set of actions or an action you can take. I will also say none of this is sexy. This is not sort of sweeping change that you'll be able to like share in your newsletter or talk about with your donors. But this is what it means to design and build an organization. This is the work. This is how you change how your organization holds its work and supports its work over time. I will leave you with that for this week. Come back next week for the last part in the series Again, if you want the assessment to help you figure this out. It's a quick assessment. It's like 90 seconds and you will get some really concrete information about where to focus my recommendations on some next steps and some resources that I have to support you in taking those next steps. You can go to brookerichybabbage.com strong or text the word strong to 66866 until next week. I will see you for more masterminds.