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Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
The Day Your Organization Starts Running on “Unspoken Agreements”
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Every organization develops invisible rules, and for a while, they work. They keep things moving. They protect relationships. They help smooth over friction. But unspoken agreements are not neutral. They shape who has power, what stays broken, and what your organization is actually capable of. This episode names how they form, what they cost, and why surfacing them is one of the most important things a growing organization can do. 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 truly hold the weight of their mission. Welcome. So I want to talk about rules. Rules of engagement. Not the ones in your employee handbook or the ones mapped out in your governance document or your org chart. The ones that live in behavior, in what people do automatically, in the tacit agreements that people have, in what nobody says out loud but everybody accepts and adjusts to. These kinds of things are not accidents. They are organizational adaptations. They develop in the gaps right when formal systems don't cover everything, when a conflict maybe feels too risky to name, in the moment when a conversation is skipped or put off, when someone steps into a breach once and then keeps stepping in. These are the kinds of things that nobody announces but people learn from them and they learn fast. In the early stages of an organization and also when organizations are growing and changing quickly, a lot of these informal rules are actually useful. They fill in the white space and they allow you and your team to move quickly together without having to stop to negotiate and define and name and concretize everything. The problem is not that they exist, right? They will always exist. The problem is what happens when they stop being temporary workarounds or things that grease the wheels of growth and change and start being load bearing in the organization. They start crystallizing or concretizing into actual interstitial tissue that is holding things together. The problem is when the organization grows around them. And what you see, what you start to see is that decisions and relationships and sometimes even entire workflows start start depending on rules that no one has actually affirmatively agreed to. And and this is really what undergirds the problem that no one thinks about or maybe feels safe questioning. That is when Unspoken agreements stop being adaptive and start being a design problem. So let's talk a little bit about why unspoken agreements stay hidden. They are invisible by design because they don't live in documents or policies. These kinds of unspoken agreements live in patterns. Okay, that's what I want you to focus on are patterns in what people consistently do or don't do. The first reason that these are so hard to name is that they usually feel like kindness. That is often where this shows up. I work with a lot organizations that have grown quickly and they talk, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, they talk about their team as like a family, right? We like each other, we are kind to one another. Kindness is so important. Loyalty comes up a lot. Also, what this looks like in practice sometimes, often is, for example, the executive director absorbing the hard donor conversations because she doesn't want to put her development director in an uncomfortable position. This is one that just came up. Another example is the person who is in charge of operations and finance just sort of quietly covers or downplays budget gaps that she sees coming because she doesn't want to alarm the team. She doesn't want people to worry about their jobs. That's kind. And leads to cliffs that could have been avoided. These feel when they are being carried out, like thoughtfulness, like the kinds of things we do that are generous accommodations for people we care about. But over time, they harden into rules, into expectations. And expectations are much harder to renegotiate than affirmative, clear, agreed upon decisions. The second reason these are so hard to name and why they stay hidden is that naming an unspoken agreement can feel like making an accusation. Once it's visible, someone has to own it. And that can feel like you're calling out a person instead of a pattern. We don't know how to say this pattern that has developed or this thing that you and I constantly do or that you and the other person don't do. This doesn't work. We don't know how to say that. Most teams don't have sort of muscle memory around that. And so the pattern continues. And we sort of maybe hope that it is uncomfortable for everyone and will therefore change itself. It won't. That's just a spoiler alert. Think about a path worn into like a lawn, right? Or a trickle of water that slowly creates a crevice through stone. Nobody decided to make the path there. It just happened. People just kept walking the same rope because it was easier, because they saw some footprints ahead of them. Once that path is worn in, changing the course means stepping Deliberately into the grass. It's messier, it's untested, it requires more intention and more effort than just following what's already there. That is what surfacing these agreements can feel like. It's what surfacing these agreements can require. And that creates understandably emotional friction. That is the core of why these unspoken agreements and patterns and habits stay unspoken. But there's a cost, right? They're actually costing you. So I'm going to offer a reframe. Unspoken agreements don't just shape how your organization behaves, they shape what your organization is capable of. And that's the part that most leaders underestimate because the unspoken agreements are sort of hidden and unspoken and behind the scenes, the cost is also often hidden and unseen and unspoken about. But when the, for example, executive director is the only one who handles hard conversations, or when the team sees the executive director avoid hard conversations, the organization never builds that capacity. When budget gaps get quietly absorbed, the leadership team never has to grapple together with real definitions of financial health, with understanding financial trade offs and the role that they play in growing organizations. When a board member goes unchallenged, governance stays polite. That means it never gets sharp enough to actually be useful, right? These costs are about potential. They undermine potential. Every spoken agreement sets a ceiling on your team's growth, on accountability, on how clearly leadership can see what's actually happening inside the organization. This is what I think of as one of the quieter faces of the design deficits that I talk about. It's not always the chaos that's visible, the firefighting and the overwhelm, the missed deadlines. It's the friction that's been normalized. It's the politeness that is talked about as culture. Instead of avoidance, it's things like structural drag that no one talks about because talking about it feels risky or unkind. The things that everyone knows and no one says. I've worked with executive directors across dozens of organizations navigating this exact issue, right? And it doesn't matter what the budget size is, I will say that the larger the organization, particularly as I said at the beginning, for organizations that have grown in size, in scale and in complexity, the more complex the organization, and so usually therefore, the more developed the organization, the more common this is, that there is some balance of written, understood, clear rules of engagement and these unwritten costs. Almost every single organization that I've worked with has some layer of these running costs. The agreements themselves, right? The unspoken agreements aren't usually catastrophic, right? So they can be missed. But when growth Comes right? Or when they're trying to recalibrate after periods of growth and how they're moving together and how they're creating impact and how they're sustaining themselves as individuals and as a team and as an organization. Things get pressure tested, right? The systems we've put in place get pressure tested, and that's when these organizations start to feel how much weight is being carried by these unspoken agreements. So I'm going to highlight three places, if this is resonating with you, three places worth looking. First, this is not a comprehensive audit. It's just three places that I consistently see these unspoken agreements doing the most structural damage. And so where I think it makes the most sense to look first. So the first is inside the leadership team's division of labor. This is not who's on the org chart. This is actually who is carrying what. Who is most accountable or who feels in practice most accountable for outcomes for success. These are things like who is quietly recognizing and absorbing and holding the consequences of things that fall through the cracks. Who consistently steps back when someone else has a strong opinion. Who does the emotional labor of keeping team morale steady even though it's not actually in their job description. These are things that show up in teams all the time. Even if you see them, it is okay. The key is making the invisible visible. These are informal distributions of labor, right? Informal distributions of burden that really often go unexamined the longest because they feel interpersonal. They feel like they're about culture or values or friendship or kindness. And I'm just going to say here, they are not. They are structural and they matter. They shape who gets stretched, who feels protected, and who is actually sustainable in their work. Okay, Second, second place to look how accountability actually works in your organization. Again, this is not about what's in a work plan. Every organization has or should have a formal accountability structure, right? This is about clearly identified goals, clearly identified scopes of ownership and what success, right? What indicators of success look like. There's a whole sort of backend infrastructure, and I'm sure I have other podcasts about. What I will say here is that every organization should have both a formal one and they also have a real one. And what we hope is that those are aligned. And particularly for organizations that have grown, they are often not aligned, right? The formal one lives in job descriptions or charts, work plans, OKRs, you know, outcomes and key results dashboards, key performance indicators. Right? The metrics that. The tools that we use to define, clarify, and track success, right? To systematize success. That's where the formal one lives, the real one lives in these patterns that I've been talking about. And these are things like who gets honest feedback and who doesn't, whose commitments get followed up on first and whose get quietly pushed down the sort of list of urgent. Also a great example. What kinds of misses get named out loud and what gets absorbed. That gap between the official structure and the actual one is visible to everyone on your team. Even if they can't name what they're seeing, they can see who is actually being held accountable and who is not. And they will assign their own meaning to that. And that undermines the ability of the team both to be accountable for what they ought to be accountable for and for the team to develop a set of cultural rules that actually hold everybody equal. Okay, Third, that I want to highlight is actually at the board level. So this is where unspoken agreements are the oldest and most entrenched almost always. I'm going to just give you three questions to sit with here rather than map it out for you. I. Because it's so ubiquitous on boards, even really healthy boards. So here's the first question. Which board members voices always carry more weight than their role suggests? And why do you think that's happening? Right. They're the loudest. They're the ones that people decide around because maybe they don't want to upset the person or they just know the person's going to make things difficult. And so decisions are quietly being made in a way that gives that person's voice or those people's voice more weight than they ought to have. Second question. What topics always get tabled for next time? What gets pushed? What is the board not engaging with and why? And finally, this is a big one. What does the executive director actually share with the board versus what she holds and manages quietly on her own because it just feels easier. Right? Answering those questions honestly with your board will help to make the invisible visible. So your goal here is not to consistently always be on alert, rooting out every informal norm in your organization. The informal norms, like I said, they allow organizations to be nimble. They are adaptive. Some informal rules are fine, some are even good. The goal is to build a not just a habit, but a skill around knowing which ones are actually running things and. And making conscious choices about whether those are the ones that you want. Right. It's about intentionality. And the first step in surfacing an unspoken agreement is almost always naming it as a pattern, not as a problem. Not why does this keep happening? But I notice this keeps happening and we talk about what's underneath it. That move from a place of inquiry is what makes it possible to look at it as a team, and that's where the work starts. An organization that runs primarily or too much on unspoken agreements has an operating manual that exists only in people's heads. What lives only in heads can't survive growth, change, or transition. You can't build on it. So if today's episode has you thinking about the invisible rules running your organization and where that might be keeping you stuck, it's worth following up my recommendation. Take my Design Trap quiz. You can text the word strong to 66866 for the free diagnostic. It helps you pinpoint exactly where your organization's design is holding you back, what trap you've fallen into, and a lot of leaders tell me that it surfaces things they've been circling around for a long time. Again, text strong the word strong to 66866 and we will send you the diagnostic right away. That's it for this week. I'll 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 Brook richiebabbabbage.com backslash strong to take the 90 second quiz and find out where to start.