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We have all had that day where it ends and we feel like we've done a lot. We have responded to 50 or 60 emails, we've scheduled several meetings. Not to mention the fact that we've had a few meetings, we've done some admin work, maybe update a record in the CRM or generate a report in the CRM, as well as manage some operational mini crises like a copier not working. We've had those days. They end. We feel like we've been busy. We might even feel like we have been productive. But we have this nagging sense that we know we are not doing the important work as chief executives that lead our organizations forward.
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If you were preparing to hire, you're struggling with turnover or wondering why some good on paper candidates just did not become strong long term employees, I am offering a free online training to help you recruit rock stars to your team. The training is on Wednesday, August 19th at 1pm Eastern.
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And real quick, when I say recruit
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rock stars, I don't mean the flashiest candidate or the person with the most impressive resume. I'm talking about someone who can do the job really well, fits your organization, shows up consistently, and is likely to stay. In this training I share how to strengthen your hiring process so that you're not just hoping you picked the right person. You'll learn a process that I have used to make better hiring decisions as an interim Executive Director and have seen many of my clients implement as well. And they have implemented this with strong results. So if you'd like to join me for the August 19th training, please visit successful nonprofits.comtrainings that is successful nonprofits.com trainings.
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Welcome to the Successful Nonprofits Podcast. I'm your host Dolph Goldenberg and I am a coach, consultant and confidant to leaders at small and large organizations across the country. And I bring over three decades of experience building, growing, leading and yes, repairing organizations. Today, friend, I'm going to be Talking about the $25 per hour work that we as Chief executives need to stop doing. I know at the beginning of this episode that could sound like an impossible feat. We might think to ourselves, oh my gosh, I gotta do this work. No one else is going to do it. My hope is by the end of this episode you see a path forward where you are not doing that work and instead are doing higher level work that will move your organization forward. But first I want to start by kind of outlining the problem. There is so much that just quietly eats away at our week. I will often say to my coaching clients that I bet they're spending eight hours or more every week on email and three or more hours every week on meetings. And at the end of the day, at the end of their day, that becomes a third third of their work life. Now some of my clients will push back on that and say, tov, I don't think I spend that much time on email and I'll do a couple quick math word problems with them. Oftentimes my clients will find that they're scheduling about 15 meetings a week and that it takes about 12 minutes of email and ping ponging back and forth and checking my calendar and going out another month in my calendar to be able to actually schedule every single one of those meetings. And that results in about 180 minutes every week being spent on just scheduling meetings. That's three hours right there. I'll also ask, hey, roughly how many emails do you get? A Conservative estimate is 50, but of those about 45 are routine emails. Those are ones that they feel they can quickly scan it and delete it or, or scan it and spend three minutes to write a reply and send it. But that averages to two minutes per email. So if you're getting 45 routine emails a day, you're spending 90 minutes a day or almost eight hours a full workday every week inside your inbox. I'm not going to ignore the fact that five of those other emails are ones that really only you could respond to and need a substantive, thoughtful, well written response. But because of where we're finding ourselves with calendaring and email, we are literally drowning in our inboxes. The time that you're spending on scheduling and emails and all of those operational and admin activities, it is better spent on CEO level work. Those are things like strategy that is future focused, leveraging your board. And when I say leveraging your board, I really mean engaging your board members so they open doors for you, so that you can tap their expertise and also to ensure that your organization has transparent, strong governance. It's also time that as the CEO, you can spend recruiting, coaching and building your team as well as cultivating and soliciting your largest donors. Whether you are a small organization without any fundraising staff or you are a hundred person organization and have a fundraising team of six, your largest donors, your top five to 10 donors, they really only want to talk to you. You might pull a board member in, but the person that matters is you. And so when I say cultivating and solicitation of your largest donors, that to a great Extent. Those are the folks that I'm talking about. And so often as chief executives, those are the donors that we don't pay enough attention to because we're so busy on email and we're so busy on operational tasks. So, friend, if I have convinced you, and hopefully I already have, that it would be worthwhile for you and for your organization if you gave up those $25 tasks and moved to to tasks that had a higher value, there are four questions I need you to ask about every task that you do. The first is, does this need to be done at all? Can I just stop doing this task? The second, hey, could this be done less often? The third, could I delegate this to someone else? And the last one is, can AI or automation do this for me? Now, I've quickly listed all four of those questions, but we're going to dig a little bit deeper into them. The first one you may recall is, does this need to be done at all? Can we stop doing it? Now? I acknowledge that some tasks are essential. If you're the chief executive, you're always going to have to review bank reconciliation statements every month. You're also probably going to have to write a board report before every board meeting. And some decisions only you can make. But some tasks honestly don't need to be done. They're just habits. An example that I love to use is a client that used to send a weekly email to her board. She would start composing it on Thursday and she would send it on Friday. She felt so discouraged because almost no board member would ever respond, and the one that would waste was the board member who she had the most friction with. And as you can imagine, that board member was replying all to the entire board and essentially airing grievances based on what that person had read in the chief executive's weekly email. What a disheartening way to end your week. When I talked to this chief executive about what was in the email, it was essentially kind of a check in. Hey, here's what I did this week. Almost a justification of my job as your chief executive. It listed the meetings that she had done. If she'd submitted a grant, what grant? She had submitted any other big project that she had taken on. Honestly, it was more like what you might expect someone to send to their supervisor if they were on a performance improvement plan. I encouraged her to have a conversation with her board chair, and she and her board chair ultimately decided to stop sending this email. She got about 60 to 90 minutes back every week, and she used that time to build deeper relationships with her board. She started to schedule one on one meetings with her board members. She would do one a week. She'd schedule each one for 45 minutes. And literally she took that hour that she was spending on the email and instead of spent it on building board relationships. And while I can't tell you that the relationship with the board member who kept replying all that she has some friction with got a whole lot better, it did improve a little bit because she was spending one on one time with that person as well. So the next question we ask ourselves is, could this happen less often if it happens multiple times a day? Like for example, some people check email 5, 10, 15, 20 times a day. Could they maybe just only check it once or twice a day? When I'm an interim chief executive, typically that's how often I check my email. Once or twice a day. Or is there something that happens on a daily basis that could happen on a weekly basis? I'll give you a couple of examples there. When I step in as an interim executive director, I almost always step into a role where the prior chief executive had received, reviewed and approved payables and invoices every single day. That is a tremendous burden because there's task switching. In other words, when you're ready to start reviewing and approving invoices, you put other things away, you get out the invoices that you're going to review and approve, and you get your brain ready to do that work. What I like to do as an interim executive director is say, okay, we need to be streamlining our payables process and I'm going to be reviewing and approving invoices on Wednesday afternoon. And if I'm going to do that, that means everybody who wants an invoice paid needs to have it in by Tuesday the prior day. They need to get the invoice in along with their justification and any internal approval form the organization has. Then I review it on Wednesday. By Thursday morning, I hand it off to the bookkeeper or the finance office, who then does an additional review and then pays the invoice. This not only saves the time of task switching, but it also means that I don't get interrupted multiple times a day because there's suddenly an urgent invoice. No, this is just something that I schedule, I take care of, and it's done. It's off my plate, and it no longer occupies space in my brain as something I need to do. Friend, let's take a short break and when we come back, I am going to give you some real world examples and practical strategies for delegating tasks to people and technology.
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If this episode is hitting close to home for you, I want you to
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know that this is the kind of
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work I do with nonprofit chief executives and their board. Through strategic planning, executive coaching, and board retreats, I help organizations get clearer about where they are going, what matters most, and what needs to change. I'm also there as your partner in implementing those changes.
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So if your nonprofit is at that
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kind of an inflection point, reach out to me@dolphuccessful nonprofits.com that's dolphuccessful nonprofits.com.
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Welcome back, friend. Before the break, we explored the first two questions you need to be asking yourself about those $25 tasks. Does this need to be done at all? And could this be done less often? Now let's go to the next question. Could someone else be doing it? If there are necessary tasks that someone else can do, you've essentially got three options. The first is looking at your current staff and determining whether or not someone has has the bandwidth and the ability to do it. The second is to consider hiring more staff. And I would suggest you consider an executive assistant and we'll talk about that in a minute. And the third is determining whether or not automation and AI can help you with this. But my friend, this is not just about getting the work done. This is really about helping your staff develop themselves professionally so that they are able to grow with your organization. If you've determined that there are current staff that can do some of this, let's talk about the types of tasks that you might be delegating. There's unpredictable tasks, like for example, a copier repair. You don't know when it's going to happen. There are predictable tasks, things like front desk vacation backup. You know it's going to happen. Typically your front desk staff member puts in in advance for that vacation time. And then there's routine tasks that might be a facility or a program report or maybe some audit administration. Now I'd like to give you a real world example from when I serve as an interim executive director. So often I will come into an organization and the prior chief executive has essentially been the staff meeting coordinator and facilitator. They're the person that reaches out to the entire staff to ask about agenda items and they put together the agenda if there's going to be any special presentations, they often actually even put those together and then they come into the meeting after making copies of the agenda and Facilitate it. That's a lot of work for a chief executive who already has a really stressful big job. So as the interim, I will normally, at the end of my first staff meeting, ask staff members what, what they're hoping to get out of staff meetings and ideally what's not currently happening at staff meetings that they'd like to see happen. We start to make a list and then I ask for volunteers for a small staff committee. And that committee is charged with helping to create a standing board agenda. So kind of a template, but also creating a peer facilitation rotation. In creating this committee, I'm super clear that I have to review and approve whatever recommendations and proposals that they have. But over the years and across several interim executive director engagements, I have seen some staff come up with very creative ways to both share staff meeting coordination and facilitation, and also as standing items on the agenda. One particular group actually had a 15 minute team building exercise that was going to be built into every meeting agenda, and different programs or staff groups would take turns in facilitating that exercise. Another group used a randomizer to pick the three staff members who'd be responsible for coordinating and facilitating the next meeting. And a third group, and I love this, had a standing meeting agenda item that was called Pass the praise. And it was essentially five minutes where staff members could just shout out praises about other staff members. So in this particular case, it not only took the work and burden of coordinating and facilitating staff meetings off of me, but it also gave staff a more engaging, more fun, fun staff meeting that they looked forward to attending. Now, if you're looking at this and you're saying, okay, I've got some items that are definitely $25 hour tasks, but there's no staff member available to really do it, if that's the case, I would encourage you to consider budgeting for and recruiting an assistant. So often in my work as a consultant and an executive director will come to me and say, dolph, my organization is finally at a place where it can hire its first staff fundraiser. When they tell me that, I encourage them to take a step back and really think about what tasks are on their plate that are $25 an hour tasks that could be shifted not to a fundraiser, but to an executive assistant. An executive assistant can do a lot of the drudge work around, fundraising, can manage your CRM, can pull reports in, the CRM can schedule meetings for you, et cetera, but they free up your time to do those higher level tasks because as long as you are bound down by email and calendars and operational matters and admin matters. Unfortunately, your fundraising activities as executive director are always going to play second chair. That 20 hours could probably be enough if they're a small organization and their assistant could manage their calendar, their inbox, the routine logistics of meetings, and once again the CRM and other fundraising admin that frankly is often painful for us to squeeze in. As a chief executive, you know I love real world examples. So I also want to share with you that I had a client whose organization had an annual budget of just over a million dollars. And she was sharing with me how incredibly burned out she was beginning to feel because she'd find herself working at 7, 8 or 9 o' clock at night. So I suggested that she consider an assistant and her first reaction was why? I don't know what that person would do. I maybe have three or four hours a week that they could work for me, but gosh, I just can't think of enough tasks for them. So I asked her to track all of her tasks for the next two weeks. To be clear, this was not a time study time. Studies take a lot more time and a lot more effort. I essentially just said, you know, as you're doing things, just jot down what you did that day and roughly how much time you think you spent on them. And then the next time I saw her, we talked about what tasks she might be able to to have an executive assistant do. Even then she was still hesitant. She was not yet ready to budget for and recruit an executive assistant. But a few months later, the pain had just become too much. Now she was working till 9 or 10 o' clock at night multiple days a week. And she finally agreed to hire a 20 hour a week EA. And once that person was was fully onboarded, the result was amazing. She suddenly was able to end her day by 5, 30 or 6, the vast majority of the time. And also had the bandwidth to go out and seek multi year funding that makes her organization more sustainable. One of the reasons that she had the bandwidth to go and get that funding is because her assistant protected her time. And that's what we need from our assistants. We need them to be defending our calendar, to be making sure that we don't get overbooked with meetings, and also to make sure that we only book meetings in the times that are best for us, for meetings, so that our deep think work can happen in the times when our brain is best suited for doing that work. A good executive assistant will also be scanning your environment for that low value work that you're doing and, and literally coming up to you and saying, hey, that's something I could do for you. And that's where you also have to empower and authorize your executive assistant. If that person comes to you and says, hey, I see you are making copies, or hey, I see that you're taking time to reformat this form, you could give that to me to do. You need to let go. You need to let them do that, because again, then you can walk away and, and do the work that only you can do. Now some folks that are listening are saying, dolph, all of this sounds great. My organization cannot afford an executive assistant. The economy is tough right now. Things are uncertain. That's just not a reality for us. And that's when I want you to be thinking about leveraging technology. In my own consulting practice and also in my interim executive engagements, I often use automation and AI so that I can get more done. So I'm going to share with you some of the things that I do in my consulting practice. Many of these definitely carry forward into executive director types of responsibilities. The first is I have an AI scheduler that's called Clara. And Clara locks down about 15 meetings a week for me without me doing anything more than. Than copying Clara on an email. It's amazing. Clara works across time zones. She'll do three or four follow ups, does all the work so that I don't have to think about it after I copy Clara. I also use AI as part of my weekly newsletter workflow. Now I write every word of my newsletter. I do not let AI write it for me. But there's a few key ways that I do use AI. Here's the first one. When I'm done writing, I upload it and I'm very clear. I say, don't rewrite it, but I want you to point out issues with spelling, grammar, logic, flow, etc. And it does that. And then I'll actually go through several rewrites and return to it as my editor. Additionally, I use AI to process out of office replies from my newsletter. Now, there are so many subscribers to my newsletter that I might get 100 or more out of office replies instead of me or someone else manually going through them to find the two or three that left their position. I have AI do that. They literally just go in, they scan them all, and they say, okay, Dolph, these are the three that need to be removed from the email newsletter list this week. So literally, they make my newsletter list hygiene, painless and easy. I also use AI for document designs. Once again, I'll write everything. Sometimes I'll even sketch it out on a sheet of paper. And then I upload it to AI and it creates the form. And by the way, it creates the form faster than I could and makes it look better than I would ever be able to. AI updates my website specifically. It will post the blogs that I've written. It also will post the podcast as well as the podcast, audio and video onto YouTube. AI does all of that for me. I also use AI to process my monthly credit card transactions. Potentially, like you, I've got a corporate credit card and at the end of every month I have to turn receipts in that are tied to legitimate expenses of my organization. I actually use two tools for this. The first is Microsoft Office Power Automate, which monitors my inbox and whenever a receipt comes in, saves it as a PDF to the folder on the network where all of my receipts should go. And then at the end of the month when I get my credit card transaction list, I upload that to Claude, which is One of the AIs that I use, and then it goes into that folder in my network and literally will identify every single receipt and notify me of the one or two receipts that might be missing. It saves me two or three hours of work every single month because I'm not saving receipts. It's doing it for me and then it's making sure that the receipts are there. And of course, like many people, I use AI for data analysis and visualizations. You might be thinking, how much are you spending on AI? Roughly 300 to maybe $350 a month. And it's giving me back 40 hours of my work time every single month. When I talk about AI, I also want to acknowledge that many of our staff are very nervous about artificial intelligence. So I encourage you to be a leader by modeling a thoughtful and ethical use of automation and AI, and to do it openly when people see that you're using it in a way that makes sense and is reasonable and protects others, but also are using it in a way that you can get more done and that you can be more effective. That's the first step in starting to lead change in your organization. Once you have freed up some time in your calendar, I urge you to not backfill those $25 hour tasks with $50 an hour tasks. I'm going to give just a quick example if Getting a new $1,000 donor will take 20 hours of your time over the next year. And now keep in mind that means you're identifying the prospective donor, you're having conversations with them, you're cultivating them, you're asking them for money, you're following up, and then you're continuing to cultivate them and make them feel good about their gift. If you're going to spend 20 hours in a year on that thousand dollar donor, that's only $50 an hour. So in that case, you literally replaced your $25 hour work with $50 hour work. And that's good, but it's not as good as it could be if you did the same for a $5,000 donor. Now, we're talking about some different math. And if you spent 20 hours to identify, cultivate, solicit and thank a $10,000 donor, now the return on your time really changes. And it changes in a way that it moves the needle for you and for your organization. So make sure that the time that you recover goes to that higher impact work. I now would like to leave you with some homework. I'd like for you to find an offload five tasks, just five. And you can offload them in one of four ways. You can stop doing it, you can do it less, you can delegate it, or you can automate it. And then on each one of those five tasks, I want you to determine how you can use that recovered time. Well, I hope you're going to use it on things like board leadership, major donors strategy, staffing, and of course, preparing your organization for what is going to come next. That, my friend, that is our episode for the week. I hope that you have gained some insight to help you and your nonprofit thrive. And here's the disclaimer because the lawyers make me say it. I'm not an accountant nor an attorney, and neither I nor the consulting practice provide tax, legal or accounting advice. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied on for tax, legal or accounting advice.
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Please.
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If that is what you need, find a licensed qualified professional in your area and get the help you need.