Latest / Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for Startup, Small, and Growing Nonprofits / 4 Leadership Lies Nonprofit Leaders Need to Stop Believing (Ep. 64)
Transcript
- Matt Stockman (00:00) Some of the biggest changes I've made as a leader over the last few years have come from realizing that a few things I believed about leadership simply were not true. Things like believing that constantly watching the numbers would somehow make them grow, or that working more hours proved how much I cared, or that being involved in every decision was good leadership, or if that I was mature enough, rejection eventually just wouldn't bother me anymore. So in this episode, I want to walk you through four leadership lies that I've had to stop believing and what changed for me when I finally did. Matt Stockman (00:39) Welcome to the Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for startups, small, and growing nonprofits. This podcast is here to help you build your nonprofit from the ground up on a strong, sustainable foundation with clear frameworks, practical tools, and the real-world guidance that you can actually put into practice. I'm your host, Matt Stockman. I'm a nonprofit growth coach. I'm glad you're here. At Nonprofit Launch Plan, we believe that every successful nonprofit has to be operating. At peak performance across six key areas in order to be successful. Those six areas are leadership, fundraising, marketing, programs and services, operations, and finances. So on every episode of the podcast, we focus on one of these core areas to help you create lasting impact without all the complexity and to create a nonprofit that's around for a long time. Now, before we dive into the episode for today, if you like the kinds of things that you're learning on the podcast, there's more of that every week in my free weekly email called the Nonprofit Launch Briefing. Every week I just send out one meaningful email about something different than what we're talking about in the podcast. Strategies, practical tools, fundraising insight, the ideas, the thought starters that you need. For any startup, small or growing nonprofit. So if you're serious about building a nonprofit that's healthy, that makes a real impact for years to come and is fully funded, I'd love to have you on the list. Shoot me a quick email With a simple sign me up in the subject line. My email is Matt at nonprofitlaunchplan.com. Just sign me up in the subject line, Matt at nonprofitlaunchplan.com. This episode a little more personal for me because today I'm gonna drill down into four things that I've had to learn and in some cases continue to relearn over and over throughout my career through actually leading organizations and teams and now. My own business, and I'm calling them lies because each one of them contains just enough truth to make it believable, but it's actually not true. The numbers, they matter. Hard work matters. Your team needs leadership and direction. That's important. And yes, rejection comes with nonprofit work. The problem comes when a good leadership principal gets stretched just a little too far and starts driving. Unhealthy behavior, and I've fallen victim to it a number of times. So I want to give you four personal mindset shifts that have changed the way that I do the work, changed the way that I lead other people, and frankly helped me to find more capacity in my own life, each one of which has been a game changer for me in some way or another. So here we go. The first lie, I stopped believing about nonprofit leadership. Is that obsessing over all the numbers will somehow make them numbers move faster or grow more in some way or another. If you're a goal-oriented person, it's very easy to drift towards refreshing a dashboard 25 times a day or constantly looking at how much is in the bank account, how many people have opened that email that you just sent out 18 minutes ago, and which button are they clicking on? All of that stuff is important. But looking at it constantly or even periodically throughout the day Doesn't do anything for anyone. I know of one CEO that has their bank account open on their computer desktop all day and is watching, well, pretty much nothing, but the security of being able to glance over and know how much is in their account has become a serious security blanket to this guy. Now, dashboards are fantastic tools, but even the best use of the dashboard is to have all the most important numbers that you need to know all in one place so you can review them once daily and know they're accurate. Not every hour and know they're accurate. Once a day and know they're accurate. I wanted somehow to believe that my obsession with the data points was me trying to actually stay on top of things, but really. It was my way of trying to find validation for my own insecurities. For me, because I'm still very much in the growth phase of this coaching business, the numbers that I found myself obsessing over, even just recently, were names on my email list, meaning somebody downloaded a free resource to my website. The email open rates and podcast downloads. The problem is my coaching business is still relatively new. So all of those measurables are still pretty small. And aren't moving a tremendous amount any particular day, which is exhausting because the lack of movement, especially when I'm looking at it over and over and over again throughout the day, It can cause you to question everything and cause you to try to over-correct on everything, overanalyze or course correct before ever really knowing if we were on the right track to begin with, simply because the results I was hoping for weren't happening in my timeframe. So the first step to getting out of this mindset is to narrow the numbers on your dashboard. To only those that paint the clearest picture of the current status of your nonprofit and are the numbers that you can influence the most. In other words, determine what are the two to maybe four things that as the executive director you really need to know about that are accurately measurable and are able to be influenced. Here's how I explain it to clients. If if you went on a vacation to a remote island and you could only get the internet for a few minutes a day and you wanted to know that the organization was in good shape while you were enjoying the time away on the remote island, what are the minimum numbers that you would want to see? Is it monthly percentage towards your fundraising goal? Is it new names added to your database? Is it your expenses against your incoming revenue? Is it number of families getting care this week? I worked on a project with a larger nonprofit organization that had an IT department and a data analyst on their team. They were a larger team, and they had created this really impressive dashboard that probably had, no joke, 200 or more data points on it, from revenue numbers to website visits to abandoned cart percentages to social media likes and shares, and there were all kinds of other. Data points. And there are so many, as a matter of fact, that no matter when you looked at it or how you looked at it, some of the numbers were always going up, which is good, and others were always going down. But there was so much, it was impossible to tell what was being influenced by the work of the team and what actually wasn't. You don't need to check in on 200 numbers every day. You should try to check in on three or four, and that's about it. And then force yourself to only look at it. Once or twice a day. The second lie that I stopped believing about my leadership is that more hours somehow equaled more dedication. Somehow, the more hours I spent on something I believed for a long time, it just signaled that I was more sold out for the cause. And those two things are not connected at all. But it took me a really long time to understand that. And working more. Is not a symbol or reflection of how much you care about the work that you're doing. This principle is not an excuse to not have to work hard or put in the necessary hours to get the job done or to maybe burn the proverbial candle at both ends throughout much of the early days of your nonprofit. Those things just kind of come with the territory. You will need to do all of that. But what I am calling into question has everything to do with the answer to the question, what is driving you? Are you doing the work, including the late nights and the weekends at times, because you love it, or because you are trying to prove to others, or probably more importantly, yourself, how dedicated you are. Especially if you're the founder of the nonprofit. You're the person that's put in the blood, the sweat, and the tears at the beginning. To get your shop up and running. Working to the point of exhaustion doesn't communicate anything to anyone other than you've got a really unhealthy approach to leadership. And if you have a staff or volunteers, that unhealthy approach is setting an expectation among your team that they feel like they have to meet as well. Unless your team has very clear expectations and boundaries, an email or a text from you at 9:30 on a Saturday night says a lot more to your team than whatever the subject of the message is or was. It says, I'm working, and if the employee doesn't pause to respond to you, then they are communicating that they are not as dedicated as you are. That's what's happening in their minds. And that's a lie of leadership that I've had to learn the hard way. Now, the third lie I stopped believing is that my guidance and oversight was how I showed the team that I cared about them. When I finally got honest about this and really got to the bottom of what was going on mentally for me, I thought I was caring for the team, but in reality, I was holding them back. Caring for my team was what I would say in order to rationalize the truth that what I was really doing was micromanaging and attempting to cur every decision. in reality, I was turning myself into a bottleneck. For the entire organization. When I actively started looking for ways to get myself out of more meetings and empower the team to make more and more decisions in my absence, the whole organization did better. More things got done, the team was happier, people stepped into their roles of responsibility. So give your to-do list a good long look to see where you might be the bottleneck that is stifling growth or productivity in your nonprofit. In what ways could your presence as a leader actually be hindering people's personal growth and development or taking away their passion to take on more responsibility? All right, line number four. The fourth lie that I stopped believing was that rejection is part of nonprofit or ministry work, and therefore you shouldn't let it affect you. Now, this is perhaps the trickiest of all four of these lies of nonprofit leadership because there's Quite a bit of truth in it. Rejection is a part of nonprofit and ministry work. And as an executive director, you do have to develop a certain amount of thick skin in order to do the job well. But the idea that eventually you get to the point where rejection has no effect on you at all, that's just not realistic. If you put a lot of time and effort into refining a presentation, for example, for a grant application. And the application gets passed over, you're gonna be disappointed. If you sit across the table from somebody who you thought really connected with the vision of your organization and they decide not to give, that can hurt as well. If somebody you thought would be excited to join the board just emails and says, no, or a donor who supported you for a really long time, has been there since the beginning, suddenly stops giving. It's really tough to just shrug your shoulders and pretend that none of it bothers you. So let's not try to, especially when the work is deeply personal to you. and for you and a lot of other nonprofit founders, you're not selling somebody else's product. You're asking people to believe in something that you have poured your heart, your time, and sometimes your own money. Into building from nothing. So when somebody rejects the invitation, it can be really easy to hear something much bigger than what they actually said. For example, they said, No, I can't give right now. You hear the idea is terrible. They said, We chose another organization for this grant. What you hear is what we're doing doesn't matter and it's not important. And if you're not careful, enough of those moments can begin affecting the way that you lead. You become hesitant to make the next ask. You start second guessing your messaging. You start to lower the amount you were gonna ask for because you're trying to protect yourself from another no. Or maybe you start avoiding fundraising conversations altogether. And that's where rejection. And not figuring out how to deal with it the right way can become dangerous. The goal is to become a leader who knows exactly what to do when rejection happens, and it will. When the no's come, you ask, what is there for me to learn from this? A no can be caused by any number of factors, and many of them are completely outside of your control. Maybe the timing was just wrong. Maybe the donor has some other financial priorities right now and they'd like to give, but they can't. Maybe the foundation just decided they're going in a different direction or another organization simply fit better for what they were looking for. But there may also be something that you can learn in the middle of a no. Was the problem that you identified for the donor was it clear enough? Did you explain the solution well? Did you actually make a specific ask in a clear way? And did that person understand why their involvement matters right now? Did they know exactly what you wanted them to do next? For example, in my fearless fundraising mini course, which you can get for free at nonprofitlaunchplan.com, I teach five basic steps to inviting somebody to partner with you financially. The steps are problem. Solution, ask urgency and action. And learning those five steps are not going to eliminate rejection. You can still do every one of them perfectly, and somebody can still tell you no. But becoming better at the things that you can control should lessen the frequency of those no's. And it gives you something productive to evaluate when they happen. So instead of asking yourself, why didn't they believe in me? You ask a different question. Was there anything I could have done more clearly? Learn what there is to learn, make the adjustment if one needs to be made, and then let the rest go. Because one of the worst things you can do is allow yesterday's rejection to change the way you approach tomorrow's opportunity. That's the mic drop moment right there. Let me say it again. One of the worst things you can do is allow yesterday's rejection. To change the way you approach tomorrow's opportunity. The donor you're talking to tomorrow shouldn't get a smaller, more hesitant version of your vision because somebody told you no today. So feel all the feels. Experience the disappointment for a few minutes. Learn what you can from it, and then make the next ask. You can be doing good work for all the right reasons and still develop some unhealthy ways of carrying that work as the executive director of your nonprofit. You can care deeply about the numbers, and then you can start obsessing over the numbers. You can care deeply about the mission, and then you can start measuring your commitment by the number of hours that you're working. You can care deeply about your team and accidentally become the bottleneck that keeps them from growing. And you can care deeply about the work. And still feel the sting in a really unhealthy way when somebody says no. So so the question I want you to take away from this episode is a simple one. What am I doing right now in the name of good leadership that may actually be making it harder for me to lead well? There might be something you need to stop checking, some boundary you need to put up, a decision that you need to let somebody else make, or a rejection that you simply need to learn from and then let it go. Your nonprofit needs your leadership, but it needs you and the healthiest version of you that you can give it. And sometimes becoming a better leader has less to do with adding strategies and more to do with letting go of things that you've believed For far too long. That might just be lies. Thanks for listening to the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast. Remember, if you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you can get more of it in your inbox each week. Sign up for my free weekly email called the Nonprofit Launch Briefing. Each week I send you this one email that's got something you should be considering or thinking about or working on as a nonprofit leader. And it's something different than the podcast, never the same stuff. It's designed to help you lead stronger, to raise more money, to get to 100% fully funded, and avoid maybe a few mistakes along the way. So if you're serious about building your nonprofit, one that makes healthy, long-lasting, sustainable impact for years to come, I'd love to have you on the list. All you do is send me a quick email with sign me up in the subject line. And my email is Matt at nonprofitlaunchplan.com. A T T at nonprofitlaunchplan dot com. Sign me up in the subject line and I'll add you to the email list. That is it for this episode of the Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for startup, small, and growing nonprofits. If you feel like this podcast is helpful in any way, would you consider sharing it with another nonprofit leader who may just be believing some leadership lies about themselves and they need the clarity and they need the freedom from those lies? Thank you for considering that. Also, thank you for doing all the podcast things like liking and sharing, leaving a review. Until next time, keep building wisely and keep making a difference.