How to Stop Managing Your Nonprofit and Start Leading

It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day of running a nonprofit. There’s always another meeting to attend or another task to complete.

But it’s important to take a step back and ensure you’re working on the business instead of just in the business.

It may feel counterintuitive, but slowing down is often the fastest way to get to where you want to go. 

As a leader who has worked both in-house and agency-side for nonprofits, working with organizations large and small — from the hyperlocal to the global — I’ve seen it all.

Below, I’ve outlined five key mistakes leaders make when they spend too much time caught in the weeds and skip out on establishing strong foundational processes for their organization.

Mistake #1: Working Without a Plan

It’s long been said that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Depending on the size of your organization, the words “strategic planning” can sound daunting. It can mean thousands of dollars in consultants fees and months of time for a complicated document that ultimately doesn’t get used.

But strategic planning doesn’t have to be lengthy, or costly, or scary. Even a working plan is better than no plan at all.

So, how does one go about creating a plan?

First, reflect on your mission, vision, and values. Hopefully your organization already has these established, but if not, there’s no time like the present.

Your mission is the reason your organization exists — why you get up and do what you do every day.

Your vision is what you would achieve if your mission were met. For example, an organization that works with the housing insecure population could say its mission is to provide relief for its clients in its local area, with the vision to eradicate homelessness.

Exercise: Convene your leadership team and test your mission and vision — does it still make sense for the organization you are today? When was the last time you updated either statement? Is the language outdated or in need of a refresh? What no longer works? What’s missing? These questions should serve as a good jumping-off point for discussion.

Your values are HOW you do the work you do. While most organizations at least have a mission statement, not everyone has identified their working values. Your values dictate your company culture — how you treat the populations you serve and each other.

Exercise: Employee survey time! You will likely only get folks’ attention once, so make it count and ask everything you need to gather feedback for building your plan.

To determine values, I like to ask “What are three words to describe your organization?” You can then see which words and related variations rise to the top and discuss with your leadership team which to choose to help guide your work.

Other questions to ask: 

• What are your organization’s strengths? Weaknesses?
• What should your organization do more of? Less of?
• What’s the No. 1 challenge your organization faces today?
• What’s one thing you’d like to see the organization accomplish in the next year? In the next five?
• What drew you to the organization in the first place?
• What’s a misconception you believe people have about your organization?
• What’s one takeaway you want people to have after interacting with your organization?

The responses to these questions will help provide the outline for your plan, identifying gaps and focus areas for the coming year.

Your plan should include the following components:

• Goals: What you want to achieve
• Objectives: Ways to measure if you’re meeting your goals. These should follow the SMART guidelines:
  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Actionable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound.
  • (Note: Be as specific as possible when creating these.)
• Audiences: Identify anyone who will help you reach your goals, both internal (staff, board, volunteers, etc.) and external (partners, clients, donors, media, grantmaking institutions, and more).
• Strategies & tactics: Leaders can often get too bogged down in the tactics, the DOING, versus defining and keeping to the strategies that will reach the identified objectives.
  
  A strategy is broad strokes, like donor engagement, whereas a tactic is specific under that strategic umbrella, such as making follow up calls or hosting an event for your organization’s largest donors.
  
  Your audiences listed above should all be reached by your identified strategies.
• Timeline: You can make a beautiful plan, but if you don’t break it down into manageable steps with a suggested timeframe, it makes it all the more difficult to achieve.
  
  Keep your strategic priorities on the calendar just like anything else and make sure your team knows these initiatives are just as important and as much a part of their jobs as their other duties.

Mistake #2: Not Measuring What Matters

So now you have your plan and you’re executing your identified strategies and tactics according to your timeline. But if you don’t know where you are, how can you ever get to where you’re going? 

Hopefully, you’ve already figured out a mechanism to measure the objectives you identified above. Bonus points if the objectives are based on available data so you have a baseline for comparison as you execute your plan.

It’s important to determine a cadence of measurement based on your objectives (monthly, year-over-year comparison, etc.) so you can see:

• If your strategies are working
• If not, how you can tweak them to help move you closer to your goals.

No plan is perfect, but being nimble and humble can allow you and your entire organization to pause, reflect and adjust as you go.

Mistake #3: Not Clarifying Roles

As you know, in this line of work, no one does anything alone. So, it’s important to delineate roles and identify where each part of the plan falls so that other leaders in your organization feel ownership and a stake in the success of your organization.

Resentment and confusion often spark from a lack of clarity when someone assumes someone else is assigned an initiative or if there is overlap on work being done, which can lead to a feeling of disorganization and lack of trust in leadership communication.

When everyone is aligned and speaking to each other, you can spend less time talking about who’s doing what and more time firing on all cylinders. You go faster when everyone’s in the correct spot, with the correct task, and rowing in the same direction.

Mistake #4: Not Staying on Message

Similar to maintaining consistency of roles, leaders must all be speaking the same language to avoid confusion throughout the organization.

As part of the values and planning exercises above, you’ve likely come to some common language to use about your organization and your priorities, and it’s important to stay on that message — whether internally or externally — to build trust with your community.

One exercise I like to do with clients is to come up with an internal messaging guide that includes your basic “FAQs” about an organization (these can often be used externally on your organization’s website or in a media kit), along with an internal Q&A to be used on an as-needed basis only.

I like to ask my clients specifically what they don’t want to be asked and then work with them to develop the answers. This way, we’ve named the fear and prepared for it — and, hopefully, tied the answer back to the organization’s key messaging. 

Bonus: Practice your key messages in a mock interview— once you’ve got a practice round out of the way, you’ll feel much more comfortable speaking on the topic. This is just as true for media interviews as it is for internal meetings.

Mistake #5: Not Having Boundaries

Finally, everyone needs to rest, especially leadership. I mean boundaries here in all senses of the word — boundaries for when you are available to staff and board, boundaries for your time off. But also, boundaries that set a precedent for the culture in your organization.

Are you always the first one in and the last one out? Do you come in sick or work on your days off? Does everyone come to you for answers? Do people feel empowered to share their ideas in meetings?

These are all examples of hard and soft boundaries of what is considered acceptable in a given workplace, and many employees — including other leaders — take their cues from the top.

So do yourself a favor and set the tone you want for your organization and your team — they will thank you in kind.

Conclusion

Those are just five areas I see with potential for major impact within an organization. Hopefully these exercises have sparked an interest for more organizational soul searching. 

Interested in support with organizational planning, messaging and more? Visit the author’s website for contact information.

You might also like:

• When the Board Becomes the Problem: Reclaiming Power in Nonprofit Leadership 
• Why Human-Centered AI Adoption Matters for Nonprofits
• The New Sheriff in Town: Tips for Successfully Leading a Nonprofit Team (that Someone Else Built)
• When the System Fails Quietly: What I’ve Learned from Sitting Between the Frontline and the Data
• A Board Member “Contract”

 

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