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Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
Why Your Burnout is a Signal—Not a Flaw. And What To Do About It.
00:11:59
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Brooke Richie Babbage
You've been told that resilience is about pushing harder. But what if the real threat to your organization's growth isn't lack of effort or even lack of funding, or your team's motivation or your calendar? What if the real problem is that your organization simply isn't built to carry the weight of the impact you're trying to achieve? In this episode, I'm going to walk through why the pressure you're feeling isn't a personal failure and how to think about and fix the structural flaws actually causing the strain. 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. If you're like the nonprofit leaders that I work with and support, you're doing deeply mission driven work. All of my folks are trying to create real change in the world to make our world more equitable, more just more beautiful. Especially these days. That's what we're all trying to do. It's why I personally have done social impact and social justice work for the past 25 plus years and why I pour so much into, into the leaders that I coach and support. But the thing that I learned along the way, one of the things that I have learned along the way, and this can be really hard to see from inside the work, they say you can't see the label from inside the bottle. One of the most important things that I had to come to understand as I grew my own organization is that it's not possible to create real transformational impact in an organization that's held together by passion and grit. The root of our collective problem in our sector and I think one of the main drivers of burnout, this idea that we've talked about now for years around hustle culture, right, it's being shifted now to talk about resilience, but it's, it's a misunderstanding of resilience, right? Our collective problem is that we've learned to equate resilience with grit. We are, in a weird way, normalizing burnout. We treat constant stretching and capacity stretching as just part of what it means to lead a growing nonprofit. But the reality is that grit and doing more with less and constantly stretching and wearing, being under resourced and pushing ourselves harder as a badge of honor. Those are not strategies. They are short term survival skills. And eventually for so many people, I am seeing this already happening. Eventually they stop working, your organization simply stalls, or worst case, you collapse. Either way, you look around and your organization is not having the impact you know it can have, right? It might for a little bit of time and you look around and I remember the feeling of sitting with my team and actually thinking, we are doing the work, right? It's working. But if that is not sustainable, then what you actually start to see is less impact, diminishing return on investment, and you and your team are slowly grinding down. Now, this is really important that you hear me. If this is resonating with you, the problem is not you. This is not a leadership problem, right? And I wish more people had said that to me when I was in the growth stage of my organization, bumping up, especially when we were bumping up against a million dollars. I had so many of the systems and processes and sort of I duct taped together or cobbled together a bunch of systems that had gotten me all the way there and I wasn't leveling up and I felt like I just wasn't managing my team well or managing my time well. You are not the problem. Here is the real problem. When you look around and see operational chaos, it's not because you need more funding or a better team or learn how to manage your time or to delegate. Those are all very important things. But the operational chaos of growth that you see is always because you're trying to scale change on top of systems that were never built to hold your current level of work, your current level of impact. So what this looks like is constant firefighting. Everyone or too many people on your team still looking to you for key decisions. Even if you have a leadership team and are pretty good at delegating, right? Somehow the weight is still sitting on you. This might look like tension on your team, right? Fragile staff dynamics that you can't quite explain or put your finger on what is at the root of them. This often looks like a board that is drifting, right? That is available instead of leading, instead of being a real partner. These are not as simple as capacity problems, right? These are design Problems. I'm going to say that again. These things that you're seeing, this operational chaos, this burnout, it's a design problem. You're growing, but you're still operating on systems and structures and roles and ways of moving together that were designed for a smaller version of your mission. And that mismatch is what I call a design deficit. And that design deficit doesn't stay buried over time. It surfaces. It's in your inbox. It's in your team's burnout. It's in the friction between what you know needs to happen and what your organization is actually built to deliver. And you are absorbing the pressure of that deficit. So I want you to take two things away from today's quick episode. First, true resilience is not about how much you can carry. It's not about bracing against the weight of leadership or growth. It's about how well your organization is designed to carry what it's trying to do. And designing an organization that holds the weight for you. In practice, this means upgrading your roles and your rhythms and your reporting and accountability lines to match the current size of your team and the nature of the people on your team and the scale of your work. It means replacing sort of a hustle mode or vibe with systems, systems you can breathe into, systems that you can relax into that will hold the weight of the work. Right? They're proactive systems you can set up. It means building clarity, real clarity about your impact and data and your brand into your messaging with partners and advisors and stakeholders. It means designing workflows that allow your team to move fast and smoothly together in sync. Right? Like you see those birds that are moving, you know, 50, 60, 100 at a time, and they all just sort of seem to know how to flow together. That's a well functioning team, right? That all comes from design. These are not things that just happen by accident. So the second thing I want you to take away from this, and this is a big one, and it builds on the first. This is all figureoutable, right? Everything that I just said is doable because design is doable. Design is something you can control. There are so many things about leading a nonprofit that you cannot control. And I would never suggest that. Well, does you know, a well designed organization gets you all the way there and you just, you know, sort of float to your impact on a cloud of rainbows and happy dust. But. And design gets you really close. Strong design takes so much more weight off your shoulders than you think it will, right? Design isn't complex. It just means three things honestly diagnosing what's broken or blocking your growth. Being intentional about making shifts in the areas that are broken. Redesigning those specific areas to align with where you are one shift at a time. Right? Not everything at once. And third, embedding the systems and the rhythms that will allow you to sustain what you've redesigned. That's it, right? And if you go one blockage or one thing that's broken at a time, you are actively and intentionally designing the system that you need. Now, if you are nodding along, I want to give you a couple practical things you can take away. So if you already know that you're navigating this kind of chaos right and you're ready for it to stop, apply to the next level nonprofit and we will work together over the next six months to fix what's broken. You can apply at Brookerichybabbage.com backslash next level nonprofit application. If you want a lighter touch, help diagnosing where to focus first, you can text the word strong to 66866 right on your phone and I will send you a free quick diagnostic, my strong assessment that will pinpoint exactly where your organization is structurally misal, what that design deficit is, and give you some ideas for your best next move. So before I wrap up, I want to say this. If your leadership feels really heavy right now and your systems or your organization feels a little fragile, if you feel like you're holding more than feels sustainable, there's nothing wrong with you. You're not doing it wrong. You're leading an organization that's simply outgrowing the structure it was built on. So you don't need to keep bracing against the weight. You just need a better design so that your organization will hold the weight for you. That's all for this week. 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 this episode@brookerichybabbage.com podcast. See you next week.