← Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
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Brooke Richie Babbage
So I want to ask you a personal question. Do you read my newsletter Leadership Forward 321? Because if you don't, I really think you'd like it. If you like this podcast Every week I send a short newsletter that you can read in five minutes or less designed to help you lead more strategically and with less overwhelm. I share a three part micro lesson on a timely leadership theme that you can apply right away, two concrete resources that I stand behind and a quote or reflection to inspire and motivate you. I'm going to make it super easy for you to sign up. You can text the word impact to 66866 and I'll add you to my list. Enjoy the episode. If your board keeps nodding yes, but acting no, this episode is going to walk you through three practical strategies to get real. Buy in for your top priorities so your goals drive action, not just discussion and blank stares. Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast. I'm Brooke Richie Babbage. I've 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. Okay, so see if any of this sounds familiar. You've clarified the organization's priorities for the year. Or maybe you've named a set of very specific goals for the quarter. Maybe you've just finished a really awesome strategic planning process. You are all set to move forward in a powerful, exciting way and yet somehow your board is still spinning its wheels. Or else maybe not spinning at all, not moving at all, asking questions you thought you'd answered. Or maybe they keep veering off course, focusing on things that aren't in the plan you just spent months creating. Or they're not actually checking in at all, they're sort of disengaged. They're not helping to fundraise or be ambassadors for the priorities you've agreed to. I want to offer a way to see this problem, to sort of reframe your understanding of the problem that you have. And I will start by saying There are lots of different reasons this could be happening, but the one I want to focus on here is about disconnection from the end goal. The problem if we have a board that isn't moving forward in the direction towards the goals that you thought you had all agreed on, is often not that they don't care about or haven't understood the goals or priorities or processes. The problem is often that they just feel disconnected from those goals or priorities. Even if the process that you went through suggests that they shouldn't feel that disconnection. I want to share three moves you can make to make sure that you have genuine alignment around these priorities or goals or processes. Whether it's launching a new initiative, raising money or trying to shift or sort of build culture on your board. Now, if you want to do a deeper dive into activating your board, particularly around fundraising and engagement, I have a free 3 part audio micro training called Board Activation Blueprint. You can get it@brookerichybabbage.com board board activation. It's free, it's highly actionable. Definitely check it out. It's a deeper dive into sort of the bigger context of what we're talking about here. Okay, so we have these goals or processes or priorities and we can't get the board to move forward on them. Strategy one or the first thing to do is to start with pain. Start with a shared pain point, a shared challenge. Now, as human people, we are highly self interested. This does not mean that we are all selfish, but it does mean that we are all more motivated to work towards something when we see ourselves in that thing. So you're always going to get more traction from your board when board members feel the why their own personal why in their bones when they can see that why in the goals, in the priorities, in the processes. Now in practice, this means that you don't want to do anything that smacks of announcing goals that have been predetermined. You may have predetermined the goals, right? For example, your team worked really hard to craft annual goals for the year and you were sharing those with the board. Right. It's not that you have to involve your board in all goal setting for, you know, we're all process design for all aspects of your organization. That just invites micromanaging. What it does mean is that you want to make sure that when you are presenting goals, priorities, processes, you want to start by connecting them to a challenge or a why that the board members care about impact, achievement, brand visibility, avoiding stagnation, avoiding burnout for the Team fighting mission drift, right? There is a deeper why that will resonate with each of them. Now, if you're involving your board in board level goal setting, strategic priority setting, etc. If you're involving them in the process, this would mean starting off by asking something like, what would meaningful progress look like for you this year? What changes in our organization, in our community around this issue that we all care about? What changes in the status quo would be most exciting to you and why? Then you want to integrate those responses into your goals. You want to make sure that where you wind up reflects some piece of the why that they've shared. Now, at the same time, as I said, there are many instances where you're bringing, you actually are bringing predetermined goals to a group because your board is going to be acting as your thought partners, your ambassadors, your network builders, your fundraisers. When you are, for example, sharing your team's annual goals, right? The work that the team is going to work towards, they have to care. The board has to care. If they don't care, really care, not say that they care, but actually care, you're not, it's going to be really hard to get them to help you raise money, be out there being ambassadors. So in those cases where you are bringing these predetermined goals, instead of saying something like, we need to raise $500,000, right? Or as the board, you guys need to bring in $100,000, we need to raise more money, right? That's the goal. Start with, so I've heard from many of you that you're concerned about the staff burning out, or I've had really great conversations with some of you, or we've talked as a board about program outcomes that are most exciting to each of you. Or I know we've talked a lot here about financial instability and just a concern that our budget is sort of fluctuating in ways that make a lot of you guys uncomfortable. And I get that and I hear that. So that's what this number represents, right? This hundred thousand dollars that we're talking about, this goal, it is a response to, it is connected to something we've talked about you caring about, right? We've talked about the program outcomes that are most exciting to you. This is what they cost, right? This is what's necessary to, to do these things you've said you care about. So you start with, here's the thing that we, that we all know collectively we care about or that individuals here care about. And let me create a bridge for you between this thing, the shared why, the shared pain, the shared challenges, shared thing we care about and the goal that we are now talking about or the priority or the process that we're investing in. So the second thing is treat resistance as really useful data. Invite and be open to pushback. Because pushback often isn't about the goal itself, it's about the impact of the goal on them. As people remember self interested, your board may have fears about what that goal, what the priority, what the process might mean in terms of more work for them, expectations that might feel unrealistic to them, being made to feel vulnerable in ways they don't want to feel vulnerable. Right? Not being heard once the process of working towards the goal has started, when you get pushback, when you invite concern, it doesn't mean you have to open yourself up to and we will change the goal based on what you say, right? There is a spectrum of inviting insight. You want to ask things like, where are you uncomfortable in achieving this goal? What part of this concerns you? Right? What does this make you feel in terms of discomfort, right? Because pushback is often about these fears. So instead of shutting it down, even if it feels personal or even a little annoying, which it can dig into it, use their raised eyebrows, their hesitancy, these, these indicators of lack of buy in. Use those as opportunities to say what's concerning you, right? Unearth the underlying fears and then address them visibly and explicitly and intentionally in how you roll things out. So again, this doesn't have to be changing the goals. This can be about thinking together, about how you implement the goals, right? Their, their role in implementing the goals in ways that acknowledge or hopefully assuage their fears and concerns and finally distribute ownership really early because ownership is one of the biggest ways to build buy in. Full stop. Ownership builds buy in. If you remember nothing else from this conversation, ownership builds buy in. So for each goal, each part of the process that you're trying to move forward, for each priority, assign each person on your board a part of that process or a goal to steward. You want to have explicit conversations. You can do this one on one. You can do this as a committee or as a full board, not about how they can help you, right? You know, what kind of help can I expect from you? Have conversations about which part of the goal or process they want to steward, right? We have had a conversation about our shared why. We've talked about why this goal is super important for achieving, for doing the things we want to do as an organization or as a board or supporting our team. We've addressed concerns and we've talked about implementation. And now I'd love to hear from you which part of this you would like to steward, which part you'd like to be responsible for. Right? That's the language that you use. And then let them shape the work plan and report on progress. Let them truly own Often helps to have sort of an ally on the board or respected board member or staff member share why they believe the goal or process matters and how they understand it to be connected to deeper priority or purpose or why for the board. And this can help to set the context for why you're now asking each board member to share ownership of this process. Now this has been a quickie episode. I want to offer one final insight. You're not just setting goals or creating processes at the board level. What you're doing is inviting your board into a shared journey, a shared direction towards a North Star that everyone is excited about. Your impact, your program outcomes, your mission, your theory of change. And so as you are experiencing disengagement or friction or you feel like you have this goal or priority or process that everyone should be bought into, they said they cared about and you're just not seeing that. Go back to the North Star. Go back to this thing. The deepest part of why everybody is sitting around that board table. The mission, the impact, the outcomes they care about and build out their buy in from there. Again, if you are feeling stuck with your board, if you want some more concrete strategies on how to activate and engage them and move forward with them, you can go deeper with my free 3 part private audio Micro training the Board Activation Blueprint. It's@brookrichy babbage.com backslash board activation that is it for this week and I will 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 episode at brooke richie babbage.com podcast see you next week.