What To Do When The Team You Have Is No Longer The Team You Need

Summary

Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast: Episode Summary

Title: What To Do When The Team You Have Is No Longer The Team You Need
Host: Brooke Richie-Babbage
Release Date: October 8, 2024

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Introduction

In this enlightening episode of the Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast, Brooke Richie-Babbage delves into a critical challenge faced by growing nonprofit organizations: transitioning from an existing team to a team that aligns with evolving organizational goals. Drawing from her 25 years of experience as a social justice lawyer, two-time nonprofit founder, and growth strategist, Brooke provides actionable strategies to effectively rework existing teams and judiciously add capacity to foster sustainable growth without burnout.

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Identifying the Problem: When Your Current Team Falls Short

Brooke begins by highlighting common signs that indicate a nonprofit's current team may no longer suffice:

• Overreliance on Leadership: Feeling solely responsible for creating strategies and planning (00:00).
• Accountability Issues: Leaders being the go-to for troubleshooting when programs falter.
• Misaligned Goals and Execution: Clear objectives on paper, but inconsistent or ineffective implementation.

"As your organization grows, you will almost definitely reach a point where you look around and feel like the team that got you to where you are isn't quite working anymore." — Brooke Richie-Babbage [00:00]

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The Necessity of Evolving Your Team

Brooke emphasizes that as organizations grow from, say, a $500,000 to a $2 million operation, the team dynamics and skills required inevitably change. She asserts that it's rare for the same team to perfectly fit the organization's needs through various growth stages.

"The truth is, I've never worked with an organization that was growing that had the same team at 2 million that they had at 500,000." — Brooke Richie-Babbage [00:00]

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Two Pillars of Team Evolution: Reworking and Adding Capacity

Brooke introduces two distinct yet complementary strategies essential for team evolution:

1. Reworking Your Team:

   • Strategic Evaluation: Assessing current team members' roles, skills, and alignment with long-term goals.
   • Role Mapping: Determining the necessary roles based on organizational objectives, independent of existing team members.

   "Reworking your team requires strategically evaluating your existing team, assessing to make sure that you have the right people in the right roles with the right skills." — Brooke Richie-Babbage [00:00]

2. Adding Capacity:

   • Hiring New Talent: Bringing in additional team members to handle increased workloads or fill skill gaps.
   • Avoiding Redundancies: Ensuring new hires complement the restructured team without causing overlap or confusion.

   "Adding capacity means hiring people, expanding the team, bringing in more people to handle either more work or to fill in the gaps that are on your team." — Brooke Richie-Babbage [00:00]

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The Correct Sequence for Team Transformation

Brooke outlines the recommended order of operations to ensure a smooth transition:

1. Assessment and Reworking:

   • Begin with a thorough evaluation of existing roles against the organization's strategic goals.
   • Conduct future casting to anticipate the skills and structures needed for long-term success.

   "Start with assessing and reworking your team, then add capacity as necessary." — Brooke Richie-Babbage [00:00]

2. Adding Capacity:

   • Once roles are clearly defined, identify and hire individuals who fit these specific needs.
   • This approach minimizes redundancies and ensures each new team member has a clear purpose.

   "If you just add capacity... they end up with redundancies and overlap confusion." — Brooke Richie-Babbage [00:00]

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Role Mapping: The Foundation of Effective Team Structuring

Brooke underscores the importance of role mapping, which involves:

• Defining Necessary Roles: Based purely on the work required to achieve organizational goals, independent of current team members.
• Aligning Skills and Competencies: Matching or developing team members to fit these roles.

"When you are role mapping, you're not mapping your existing team. You're not looking at the people that you have and saying which roles do they fill." — Brooke Richie-Babbage [00:00]

She advocates for a clear separation between identifying needed roles and assessing current team capabilities, ensuring that organizational needs drive team structure rather than existing personnel.

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Navigating the Difficulties of Team Pruning

A candid discussion ensues on the emotional and practical challenges of letting go of team members who no longer fit the organization's evolving needs:

• Emotional Attachment: Acknowledging that parting with team members is often uncomfortable and challenging.

  "For me, I hate it. I have always hated it and the times that I've had to do it in my career, it has always taken me longer to make the decision than it should have." — Brooke Richie-Babbage [00:00]

• Stewardship of the Mission: Emphasizing that maintaining alignment with the organization's mission sometimes necessitates difficult decisions.

  "At the root of your job as the executive director is to be a steward for the mission of your organization." — Brooke Richie-Babbage [00:00]

Brooke encourages leaders to prioritize organizational health and mission alignment over personal discomfort, framing tough decisions as essential for sustained impact.

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Strategic Planning and Resource Alignment

The episode highlights the pivotal role of strategic planning in guiding team restructuring and expansion:

• Clear Goals: Establishing what the organization aims to achieve in the next few years.
• Outcome-Oriented Planning: Translating mission into specific, actionable goals.

"Everything starts with where do you want to be three years from now? What outcomes is your organization putting itself on the line to accomplish?" — Brooke Richie-Babbage [00:00]

Brooke references her strategic planning podcast miniseries and offers resources such as role mapping matrices and hiring bundles to assist listeners in implementing these strategies effectively.

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Practical Resources and Next Steps

Brooke provides valuable resources to aid nonprofit leaders in executing the strategies discussed:

• Role Mapping Worksheet: A tool to identify necessary roles based on organizational goals.
• High Impact Hiring Bundle: Comprehensive guides, templates, and step-by-step instructions available at brookerichiebabbage.com.

She encourages leaders to engage with these materials to streamline the process of team rework and capacity building.

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Conclusion

Brooke Richie-Babbage wraps up the episode by reiterating the necessity of both reworking existing teams and thoughtfully adding capacity to achieve smooth, sustainable growth. By following a structured approach—assessing current teams, mapping necessary roles, pruning mismatches, and strategically hiring—nonprofit leaders can transition from their current teams to those that drive higher impact seamlessly.

"Smooth growth requires both adding capacity and reworking your team. But these are distinct processes and should happen carefully and strategically." — Brooke Richie-Babbage [00:00]

She invites listeners to join her next episode and engage further through ratings, reviews, and her newsletter, Leadership Forward 321.

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Key Takeaways:

1. Assess Before Hiring: Begin with a clear understanding of the roles needed to achieve strategic goals before expanding the team.
2. Separate Processes: Treat team reworking and capacity adding as distinct, sequential actions to avoid redundancies and under-resourcing.
3. Steward Mission Over Comfort: Prioritize the organization's mission and long-term impact over personal attachments to team members.
4. Utilize Resources: Leverage available tools and guides to facilitate effective team restructuring and hiring processes.

By adopting these strategies, nonprofit leaders can ensure their teams evolve in tandem with their organizations, fostering sustained growth and amplified impact.

Transcript

[Brooke Richie Babbage]

As your organization grows, you will almost definitely reach a point where you look around and feel like the team that got you to where you are isn't quite working anymore. So today I want to talk about how to go from the team you have to the team you need, and how both reworking your team and hiring to add capacity can work together to get you where you need to go. 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 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. Here's how the wrong team shows up sometimes See if any of this sounds familiar. You're the only one on your team creating strategies and actual work plans. You still feel accountable for the outcomes of the work. When things are working in your programs, great. But when they're not, everyone looks to you to figure out the way forward. Maybe you feel like the goals that you've set with your team are clear, but somehow the work still isn't getting done, or just not getting done the right way. Basically, the team you've had and built with isn't clicking and the work isn't getting done, or it's taking too long and it's too hard and you're concerned that the team you have won't get you to the next level of impact you're shooting for. The truth is, I've never worked with an organization that was growing that had the same team at 2 million that they had at 500,000. You have to evolve your team and the way forward requires two distinct things that sometimes get lumped together and I want to separate them out today. It requires both strategically rethinking your current team and and this is a separate thing, adding people, hiring to add capacity. The thing is, and I've said this multiple times in this podcast already, these are entirely different endeavors. And while you need to do both if you want to grow, not treating them as distinct steps in your growth process will make your progress feel harder and it will take so much longer than it needs to. So first, what do I mean by each reworking your team? This is basically about strategically evaluating your existing team, assessing to make sure that you have the right people in the right roles with the right skills. This is about revisiting your structure, the roles on your team, the skills and competencies that currently exist, and that you believe you could develop your team into so that they are in alignment with your organizational goals, where you want to go. And you should always be looking to what you're building towards, right? So the team that you have, is it the team that is going to help you accomplish your long term goals? It's called future casting and it's one of the most important things that an executive director does. So you're looking to see, to evaluate your existing team to make sure that they are the right team to get you where you have to go. Adding capacity is also pretty clear. It means hiring people, expanding the team, bringing in more people to handle either more work or to fill in the gaps that are on your team. This usually happens when you are growing, right, and you have new initiatives, new goals, roles on your team that cannot be filled with the current people. And like I said before, this is going to happen, right? You will absolutely, at some point look at your team, at the people on your team, and some subset of them or all of them won't fit anymore. And it's not that they never fit, and it's not that they're not wonderful people and fantastic workers and highly capable. But as your organization grows, your goals change and the work shifts and what is required to accomplish the work shifts and changes and evolves. And it is just highly unlikely that the same people that had the exact right constellation of skills and competencies for what your organization required at one stage, two or three stages later, will still have that exact same constellation of skills and competencies. It's very rare. I. I'm not even going to say it never happens. My husband says to never say never, but I've never seen that. So the expectation is that at some point you will need to do both of these things. Rework your team and add capacity. If you just add capacity, which I think a lot of organizations want to do or lean into, I think that's where our mind goes first. And that's why rethinking the team or sort of looking around and realizing you don't have the team you need can feel overwhelming because our minds immediately go to crap. How am I going to find somebody, what do I need them to do? Adding capacity can be overwhelming because it is often not rooted in that first revisiting of roles and skills and structure. If you go ahead and add capacity, a lot of organizations, particularly ones that are going quickly and don't feel that they have the time to do the first step, they end up with redundancies and overlap confusion. People who have a title but know that the role doesn't fit right, or what they were hired to do isn't really necessary on the team. And so you can sort of underutilize what they are able to do and their skills. Conversely, if you just rework your team and don't keep your mind open to adding capacity, you. You end up with a streamlined team that is very often under resourced. Right. As the organization grows, you will need more people overworked, burning out, and typically, and I see this really, really often in organizations that are hesitant to add capacity or that add the wrong capacity. Nobody is picking up the slack of skills that are missing. And so you just don't have the people on the team that you need. So the order of operations that I recommend starting with or using, when you look and see that the team you have is not the team that will get you where you want to go is to start with assessing and reworking your team, then add capacity as necessary. You look at the goals that you want to accomplish. Like I said, everything starts with where do you want to be three years from now? What outcomes is your organization putting itself on the line to accomplish? Right. What impact are you saying this is usually in your strategic plan or it should be in your strategic plan. What is the impact you're saying you're going to have and how does that translate into goals and outcomes that you will accomplish? So what needs to happen? If you're a longtime listener, then you probably know that I believe that most strong strategic decisions grow out of a powerful strategic plan and that in that plan there are clear and aligned priorities and goals. I will include a link in the show notes for my strategic planning podcast miniseries where I sort of walk through how to either create or tune up your strategic plan so that it can serve this purpose in your work. Okay, so you start by looking at your goals. Then your next step is to map the jobs that must be done and the roles that must be filled in order to achieve those goals. Everything starts with the correct role map. So you have your goals, and then you say, in order to achieve these goals, what roles have to exist on this team? I have included in the show notes a link to the episode where I go through the steps of creating a role map. So if this is a new activity you can check out that podcast episode. I also include the role mapping matrix and worksheet along with a step by step guide for both reworking your team and hiring the exact right people inside my high impact hiring bundle which you can get@brooke richiebabbage.com HighImpactHiring it includes a guide, a much more in depth guide to all of this, plus worksheets, templates, etc. To sort of walk you through this restructuring your team and adding capacity. So you do the role mapping separate and apart from the people in your team. And this is a really important point, right when you are role mapping, you're not mapping your existing team. You're not looking at the people that you have and saying which roles do they fill? You're doing the opposite. You're actually starting with what is the work that needs to be done separate and apart from the people on your team. Pretend you have no team and you are just looking at your goals and you are asking yourself in order to achieve these goals, what's the work that has to be done? Then and only then, after the roles and the jobs are clear, do you look at the team you have and see what skills you have inside the organization and how they match up with the roles and the jobs that you need. Which of the necessary roles and jobs can be filled with people on your team, either now or with a little training and support? Now here's the critical step. If there are people on your team that no longer fit into a necessary role and that cannot be trained to step into the roles that are required to support the organization in moving towards its goals, then it's probably time for them to go. This is the part people never want to do. For a lot of reasons, letting go of people absolutely sucks. It's the worst. And well, I cannot say that for everybody. For me, I hate it. I have always hated it and the times that I've had to do it in my career, I will just share with you that it has always taken me longer to make the decision than it should have. I will find every excuse in the book and resist and rework. And I learned through some painful lessons that that doesn't serve the team to do that and it doesn't serve the organization. But I share that here because I get it right? So people just don't want to do that. And so often there is resistance to the idea of reworking the team, we'd rather just keep the people we have and hire new people because that feels less emotionally fraught. So I get it. And the answer is you have to, right? You have to be willing to let people go when the skills and competencies don't match the roles that your organization needs. Because at the root of your job as the executive director is to be a steward for the mission of your organization. And the goals that you have set are a reflection of the execution of that mission, which means that filling those roles is one of your primary tasks, not having those same people on your team. The roles have to come first. So the other reason people don't want to do this piece, sort of assessing their team, and this is a big one, is because acknowledging gaps on your team usually means you have to hire. And that can feel scary and overwhelming, particularly for growing organizations where the need to hire can outpace the money to hire. But you won't get to the right team if you don't do all of these steps. Honest assessment, role mapping and pruning. Now, once you've done this, you'll have so much more clarity about your way forward, about the team you actually need, how it should be structured, who you need to hire, who can be developed and trained, who can step into different and bigger roles. You can hire and assign roles with so much more precision, which means that you are more likely to hire correctly. This is how you'll be clear about what's missing on your team and why. What skills and competencies do you need to fill the roles you've identified? Focusing on roles, not people, will also help you get structurally clear about the right team. Do you need a full time director or do you already have the management skills on your team that you need, but not the execution? In which case maybe you can hire a. A part time person would fractional support work because you realize that the role that you actually need is smaller than you thought. These are the kinds of questions that you will have more insight into when you've assessed and mapped and pruned. So to recap, smooth growth requires both adding capacity and reworking your team. But these are distinct processes and should happen carefully and strategically. Assessment, then role mapping, then pruning, then planning and hiring. If you do it in that order, it doesn't have to take a long time, but it will help you move from the team you have to the team you need. I'll see you 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 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 [e-mail] podcast. See you next week.