← Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
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I know you're not working as hard as you are in your nonprofit to stay small and keep struggling. You want to have real impact, spark change, and lead a team that feels like it's moving forward with purpose. But to do that, you need a strategy and a roadmap. I have a new quiz to help you. Take two minutes, answer six questions and get a simple custom roadmap that tells you exactly what to focus on next so you can grow your nonprofit without chaos. Go to Brookerichybabbage.com gameplan Chances are, if.
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A genie showed up tomorrow and granted you a pile of magic money to double your budget or all of the team members you need to fill out your entire dream org chart instead of more impact, a bunch of stuff would actually probably completely break. I'm going to talk about why and and what to do to avoid breaking under the pressure of growth in today's episode. 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. So let's talk about one of the biggest myths in this space. If we had more money or if we could just hire a few more people, everything would be smoother. Things would feel so much less overwhelming. Growth wouldn't feel so chaotic. If any of that sounds familiar, it's totally understandable. Because yes, chances are you do actually need more resources and more capacity to reach the impact that you're envisioning. But there's a problem with that belief on its own. It leaves out a crucial part of the story. It's out of context. The full story is that growth does not fix what's broken in your organization. It doesn't make smoother or easier what's hard. It exposes it. More money, more team, more opportunities, more program expansion. What those do is add pressure. And pressure doesn't heal weak systems, it just breaks them faster. So here's the question I want you to sit with for a moment. If someone handed you $2 million tomorrow or dropped five new staff members into your organization, what systems, roles or workflows would immediately collapse? Because that's what growth does. If you're not prepared for it, it reveals exactly what your organization is built to hold and what it's not. So I'm going to break these apart just so you get more of a sense of what this looks like and what I'm talking about. Let's look at money first. I want you to think of money like water. It flows fast, it fills every crevice that you want it to, and it finds every leak. If your container, your organization, is cracked, even a little more money will just flow through the cracks. There are three things that I very often see collapse under the weight of new revenue pressure, right? So an organization is humming along and a donor shows up and says, I'm going to give you $100,000, or here's a million dollars. And both of those have been scenarios that the folks that I work with and coach have experienced magic money that just totally magnifies their budget and what they're able to do and who they're able to hire overnight. And so there are three common sort of cracks places that I start to see collapse under this new revenue pressure. The first is budgeting systems. You have more money, but no clear picture of where it's going or what your true costs are. And so more becomes messy. A second is relationships with funders. And so you get this amazing grant that you'd hope for but not totally prepared for. That is amazing. And now you have more reports, more deliverables, more handholding, and maybe depending on the funder compliance, and you don't necessarily, or you haven't built the rhythm or infrastructure to track outcomes that you're going to have to report on to keep the funder in the loop to maintain that relationship. So you get to the end of that first year or funding period, and the organization isn't actually in a position to continue receiving that money. You haven't maintained that relationship. The third area is decision making. With more money comes more options. You can hire more, you can expand more, you can do more. But, and this is a big one, a lot of organizations haven't done the hard work upfront to clarify their strategic priorities they think they have, right? They have a strategic plan that names a bunch of stuff that they call priorities. But really, when the pressure is put on this plan, on these priorities, what we realize is that the thing that makes Them strategic, saying no, right. Foreclosing options. That hasn't been done. And so really, we have a laundry list of opportunities, of things that the organization wants to do in a 2, 3, 4, 5 year period. And so now we have more money, and we can do so many things on the list, but we haven't really done the work to say if this, then that, right? If we have 400,000, then we do these, but if we have 900,000, then these are the priorities, right? These are the steps we take. And so when you have more money, without the clear priorities, the strategic priorities, it's really easy to chase what's shiny and interesting instead of what's strategic. So now I want to flesh out the other sort of part of this myth or the other biggest myth that I hear, which is more people will make us stronger, right? A bigger team is really what I need. I need more capacity. So imagine adding more rowers to a boat, but there's no rudder on the boat, right? You're just rowing. So you've got more hands on deck, you have more energy, more paddling. But there's a really good chance that you will look up, you'll be going in circles, Faster, faster circles, but still just circles. You're not actually moving in the direction of the impact that you want to have. So here are a few things that often collapse under team pressure. The first is role clarity. This is a big one. The more people you have on your team, the more important it is to know exactly who owns what, right? What the scope of decision making, authority and autonomy are not just for the executive director and not just for the leadership team, but for every single person on the team, particularly as new people come in. So when you add more team members and you don't have a system in place to clarify who owns what, right. What the roles are, where one person's role begins and another person ends. What happens is people start to step on one another's toes, right? Or, and my husband calls this the doubles problem. There are gaps, right? People sort of look and say, oh, I thought you were responsible for keeping that ball in the air, right? I thought you had that. Nobody really knows. And it's subtle, right? It's not always gonna sort of knock on the door and be clear that balls are dropping. But it's. It shows up like work sort of not moving at the right pace or work being done in a way that feels subtly subpar, right? Things are slowing down instead of moving at the speed of greater capacity. A second area where this pressure Often illuminates the vulnerability for collapse is culture and morale. The reality about growth is that it adds friction. It always does. Even with an amazing and strong team, more people are more people, right? More people to bring into both explicit and implicit norms. Every time you add people to your team, you need to revisit the norms. And a lot of times we don't have time to do that. And so growth adds friction. And the more people you add, the more friction you add. And I don't mean controversy. I just mean it's not as easy to work together, right? It's much easier for two people to work together than five people to work together. What five people need in order to work together are clear workflows, clear expectations, clear norms and agreements, and both explicit and implicit understandings of values and the role that everybody plays culturally in sustaining the health of the organization without those things, without taking time to actually build that interstitial tissue that keeps the team together in that way, as you add more people, what you actually find is that there is a slow erosion of trust, of energy and of momentum. And so this often shows up with actual friction on the team, right? Low morale, people reporting and feeling burnout a lot more. So I want to name what's happening when you experience these things, right? You take in this more capacity, and I gave you the example of a genie that hands over $2 million and, or, you know, five or ten new staff people. But this happens anytime you have outgrown your current organizational design, right? So anytime you grow faster than your systems and your infrastructure are designed to support, you're going to hit the edge of your growth ceiling, right? You can't grow past your growth ceiling. No organization can grow past the capacity that it can sustain. And that's when you start to experience chaos. That's when you start to feel sometimes crippling, overwhelm. It is a signal that you have outgrown your design. And it is time to evolve, to evolve how the organization is designed. And most importantly, it's time to evolve how you lead, how you think about building and leading your institution. What you do when you start to feel these things that are breaking as you grow is ask yourself what a new design for your organization needs to look like, right? Not what it looks like to be able to do more, right? To have more money, to have more team, but what it looks like to be able to hold more work, right? So ask yourself these questions, sort of like a little mini thought experiment or a little mini audit. And I recommend setting a timer for 20 minutes, pulling up a blank Google Doc or journal pad, depending on how you like to think, and just sort of brain dumping in response to these questions, right? You're not doing a hardcore diagnostic right now, but it is good to create some space just to think about these questions. So here's the first one. If your organization were to double in size, let's say revenue or team, what decisions would become slower, messier or more political? Right? If your priorities or roles, decision making, authority, if those things aren't clear now, adding more people, adding more funding, adding more options is only going to make decision making cloudier. So what decisions would become slower, messier or more political? The second question is where would things start slipping through the cracks even if we had more hands and more dollars Here I want you to think about things like donor follow up, task delegation, onboarding of new people, internal communication, board management, reporting. Growth actually magnifies messiness, right? So you don't have systems for sharing information, for making decisions together, for clarifying tasks and accountability and workflows. Then more hands on deck, more dollars actually just makes things feel harder and messier and heavier. So the third question is, if your organization doubles in size, revenue or team, what still depends on me to hold together and what happens if I leave? Right? If I were to step away for three weeks, six weeks, not that you will, but if you were, what is still sitting with you, this question helps you to surface bottlenecks, right? Over reliance on decision making that is centered in you places where you really do need to step more robustly into delegation and think about what that looks like. And if you have the people on the team that you need to delegate to, right? This is about gaps in what I call distributed ownership. Not just again to your leadership team, but to everyone on the team. So these are not just hypothetical questions, these are actual pressure points inside all growing organizations. Things like decision making, things like systems, things like bottlenecks and distributed ownership and strategic clarity and priorities. These may be pressure points that you're already feeling inside your organization. And so growth is only going to press harder on these points of vulnerability. And that's why now is as good a time as any to start thinking about what it means to build a structure that can hold the impact that you're running after and that doesn't lean on you and your team to sort of hustle your way there, right? So if any of this is resonating with you, I have a free quiz, it's called the strong assessment. And you can text the word strong to 66866 and I will email you the assessment directly to your inbox. It is a quick self check that shows you where your design is weakest and points you in the direction of resources to begin to strengthen it. Ultimately, here's the shift I want you to walk away with. Growth isn't just good. How good it is depends on what you're bringing more into. Growth amplifies whatever structure you already have. So the real question becomes is your organization designed to absorb growth? Because if your systems get shakier as you scale, then you're not going to keep growing, you're just going to become more fragile. So that's it for this week. Definitely. Join me next week to kick off the miniseries. These are going to be short, actionable, just like this week. Things you can do inside your organization right away. We're going to kick off next week with Design Deficit and again you can head to 66866. Text the word strong to 66866 to get the strong assessment delivered right to your inbox and get some concrete guidance right away. I'll 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 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@brooke richiebabbage.com podcast see you next week.