Nonprofit Planner

After a big event or project, how long do you wait to evaluate how you did?

Some people want to jump right into a post-mortem. Others want to celebrate the win first and not let couda woulda shoulda kill the buzz.

What does the framing and timing of feedback say about your culture? How might you be undermining culture by getting this wrong?

Immediate review signals:
“We prioritize learning”
“We can handle truth quickly”
“Performance is always in play”

Celebration-first signals:
“We see and value effort”
“You are more than your output”
“Energy and morale matter”

Both are important. How you best balance them depends on the teams you’ve created and the culture you’ve built to support those teams.

Sometimes we’re so busy, we forget to keep an eye on what’s going on outside our organizations.
Or maybe we don’t trust news anymore.

Those are big obstacles to making room for external challenges in our decision-making.

We each have to figure this out for ourselves and for the nonprofits we manage.
No one operates in a vacuum. Ignoring the news is easier in the short-run; disastrous in the long-run.

What happens on the outside can be just as important as what is happening on the inside.

How do you get YOUR information? And how to you disseminate it through your team?

There are two types of people.
Those who need time to celebrate the win and those who seize the win and dissect it, hoping for an even bigger win next time.

Start focusing on “next time” before the celebration is over and some people will feel unseen.
Spend too much time celebrating and those who had a list of ways to improve will forget and move on.

Both approaches are necessary. Both post-event approaches are appropriate.

The management challenge comes when your team is comprised of both types. Honoring both requires intention. Timing is everything.

Describe your organization’s culture in 3 words.
Ask a team member. Did they answer the same way?
Now try it with someone on the outside looking in.
What culture do you project to your stakeholders?

Is it the one you want?
If not, what are you going to do about it?

What shields are your team members hiding behind?
What are they holding back, hoping that you won’t notice?

Perhaps it’s something they don’t know how to do or don’t understand. Perhaps they think you’ll be disappointed if you uncover some core truth about who they are.

A growth mindset springs from vulnerability. You have to admit you don’t know before you can open yourself to learn.

Too often, people want to hide behind whatever shield they’ve created, hoping they’ll figure it out without anyone watching.

As a manager, it’s up to you to look behind the shields.

Building the process is the fun.
Following the process is the work.

Most frameworks fail because of poor management, not poor design.
Implementation, ex*****on, and accountability matter.

Administrative overhead.
Shout out to author Cal Newport for the term.

It’s all the little business that rains down on you when you add a project or join a team. When you are tasked with doing something, often you underestimate the amount of time it will take because you don’t think about the meetings, the emails, the check-ins, the myriad of ways we as humans concoct work about work.

This hit home recently as I wondered why my output had gone down, even though my time spent working went up. A quick glance at my past calendar and inbox offered the answer. Meetings and emails. Meetings and emails about meetings and emails. Texts about meetings that referenced emails. Attachments to emails that were supposed to be discussed at meetings, but weren’t, so they engendered more meetings. And then time blocks set aside to prepare for the meetings, contribute to the shared docs that now crowd-source both agendas and minutes of meetings… And what about meetings to report on the work that we didn’t do since the last meeting but promise to do by the next one? Yes, a meetings to talk about what we didn’t do but should have. That’s the worst.

We are creating work about work. Administrative overhead.

Managers beware.

Accountability starts with shared agreement as to who is doing what when.

If your meeting notes lean towards verbs—a bunch of action words listing what needs to be done—but no one’s name and / or no date, you are setting your team up for failure.

Noun: who is going to do the work
Verb: action word describing the work
Prepositional Phrase: (by) when, the date you need the work done

Without this clarity, two weeks from now, when you go back and wonder why something hasn’t been completed yet, you’ll be layering on poor communication issues and challenging team dynamics on top of missed deadlines.

**Remember diagramming sentences in grammar school? Noun-Verb-Adverb (Adverbial Phrase)**

Eat your vegetables.

What part of your job do you like (or do) least well?
You are probably not doing enough of it. Maybe not even the minimum required.
It’s normal to set aside the things you don’t like. But eventually, it catches up with you.

We all have preferences, and that’s okay. But as managers, we have jobs to do. Take a quick look at what you’ve been focused on and what you’ve put to the side. It’s a new month—a new opportunity to reallocate your time and plan to take care of some of those bits that need attention.

“I’ve got a lot on my plate” includes the vegetables.

Are your meetings feeling like a merry-go-round? Same conversations, same issues, same problems. Going round and round and getting nowhere.

You need an accountability tracker.

Spoiler alert: it’s not a software. It’s you.

Only a strong manager can keep people accountable for decisions and keep the process moving forward.

Without that, you’re destined for a ride on the merry ground: flashy, noisy, perpetual motion, going nowhere.