Latest / Nonprofit411 Podcast / Building Thriving Nonprofit Teams with Rachel Platt | Nonprofit411 Podcast

Transcript

Building Thriving Nonprofit Teams with Rachel Platt | Nonprofit411 Podcast · Nonprofit411 Podcast

Building a sustainable fundraising strategy can be daunting, but it doesn't have to be.
At Nonprofit 411, we believe grants are just one piece of the puzzle, but an important skill for every nonprofit to have.
Our Grant Writing Proposal Guide breaks down the grant process into simple steps, helping you align your projects with your long term goals and build lasting relationships with funders.
Ready to strengthen your fundraising game? Visit nonprofit411.
org to download your guide and take the next step towards sustainable growth.
Welcome to the Nonprofit 411 podcast, where we empower nonprofits to achieve sustainable growth and greater impact.
I'm your host, Sarah Barton, founder of Nonprofit 411, a fundraising growth partner, dedicated to helping you develop strategies and guiding you as you implement them.
Whether you're here to learn about building stronger supporter relationships, scaling your fundraising efforts, or creating clarity in your mission, you're in the right place.
Let's dive in and take the steps towards your nonprofit's success.
Hello.
Welcome to the nonprofit 411 podcast this week.
I'm your host, Sarah Barton, and I am joined with our guest, Rachel Platt, the CEO of Platinum Consulting.
How are you? It's so great to be with you, Sarah.
Thanks for having me.
Yes.
I'm excited to have a conversation with you before we get started though.
Let me ask you my favorite question, which is what is your favorite hobby? So I'm just at the point in my life where I am starting to have my own hobbies again because I'm not spending so much time on baseball fields and shuttling small humans around.
And my favorite hobby I would say is doing yoga.
I during COVID I joined an online.
group.
We could have gone back to in person, but we've picked up you know, a co an old college roommate from Michigan.
And we've picked up somebody else who drops in when, whenever they're traveling.
So, excuse me.
So we've stayed on zoom.
But it's just really a supportive community.
And I feel like I'm getting a little bit of exercise and I can touch my toes now and a little bit more.
Yeah.
I always say that yoga is my spirit exercise.
Like I do really love yoga.
I go in and out of practicing it, but every time I return to it, it's like an old friend.
Yes, always a good, a good place to be, puts me in a good headspace, so I enjoy it.
Yeah, and to be able to do it with people that you love and you wouldn't get to see otherwise, I think that is so much fun.
It is, and we have an amazing instructor, and I love that she is constantly, Calling us.
Oh, yogis, you're doing amazing.
Even though we're not, it feels very supportive.
I feel like I'm doing amazing.
Yeah.
I do.
I do like that about yoga.
Like it's very positive people projecting positive energy over others.
Yes.
So Rachel, would you introduce yourself and your business to our podcast listeners? Of course.
So great to meet everyone.
I'm Rachel Platt, the CEO of Platinum Consulting.
Where we really focus is on the small and mid sized organizations and not for profits that are or are aspiring to move beyond the day to day and compliance aspects.
of human resources and into really the people strategies and the initiatives and the programs that create the environment where both the organization can be wildly successful and the individual employees really can thrive and not for profits tend to have very much the Ethos and mentality of finding that balance.
The polarity between, you know, wanting the individuals to thrive and needing to be all about the business.
And that is where we uniquely spend our time.
Yeah, so I really love that because I think that you hit on a couple of really great points here that there is a science actually to supporting our human resources or the people who serve alongside us.
And it is hard to do that when you have a very small to medium size nonprofit where everyone has a very specific role and there may not be someone specifically targeting human resources.
Right.
Yes.
And yeah.
So, and I just, this is just.
Interesting.
Just last week, I actually did a training talking about policy and human resource policy.
And the room was made up of a variety of different you know, titles, you know, so there was the CEO, there was one person who did work with HR, there was another person who, you know, It's the finance guy who does the design of his desk and all of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so it is really, really hard.
So I love that you're focusing on this, this piece, this aspect of it.
And what do you generally, how do you generally start working with an organization? Like what is the process that you help that walk them through so that they can understand like what you might be able to bring that is different than what they're currently experiencing? So most often I would say that people come Because they have an immediate question or a need.
They, maybe they have an underperforming individual on their team.
Maybe they've decided that they're big enough now.
They need to be a little bit more formal than they have been previously.
And a lot of that tends to be more transactional type.
Hey, I've got a question, or this is compliance, and I'm always happy to answer those questions and point someone in the right direction.
But when people come to me, most often what they get is that we will start asking them, Okay, we can solve this problem, but let's think about the bigger picture.
Let's think about how you want to be able to Attract how you want to be able to grow future leaders for your organization, how you want to set expectations, how you want to assess people, how you want to determine who maybe perhaps is not the best fit for your organization going forward.
And as we start to delve into that, and I ask some of those questions, I often can see, regardless of what the person's actual title is, whether they have an appetite for really both a financial, let me just clarify, both like a financial potential appetite to make an investment, and also A mindset, a leadership mindset that aligns, you know, there are lots of organizations who just, they're so focused on their mission that they forget that in order to meet their mission.
They need to create the environment where their employees and their team can really thrive.
And so I'm asking those questions.
And I'm kind of pushing them a little bit beyond solving today's problem.
And so sometimes it comes as policy questions.
Sometimes it comes as a performance issue.
Sometimes it comes as a We're having a retention problem.
Or my most recent one is we've hired three people.
They're all the wrong people.
What are we doing wrong in our interviewing process? And so again, we're trying to look holistically about how are you dealing with your people strategy? Yeah.
Well, and I really like that, you know, you brought that up because a lot of I think that leaders don't realize having strategy in place regarding our employees and human resources helps relieve a lot of stress.
and anxiety.
And misalignment for the leader.
Yes.
Right.
Because the most stressful thing as a leader is to not be able to meet the needs of your employees and the needs of your clients at the same time.
Right.
And I've been, so I've been a manager many times managed a lot of different size teams.
Up to 15.
That was my, that was my largest team.
And I know I have been in that space where I'm like, Ooh, this is not working.
And so you come to work as leader.
And you're like, this is not working.
What do I do? And I've done the gamut.
I have, at times, just cried in front of my employees, and I have had employees cry in front of me.
I have had really positive transitions, you know, so that we were transitioning very positively.
And I've had other transitions where it was less positive.
And actually, and in, when I worked in human resources specifically, I was at an organization with 105 people.
I think when I left that position, it was closer to 150 people.
And so like, I wasn't directly managing them, but I can tell you, like, those are the challenges.
And I don't know that leaders always realize, oh, wait, there are strategies that we can put in place that will help me.
And help them at the same time.
So, I mean, decades and generations ago, being a manager, that was your full time job.
It was not, I'm managing people while my own individual tasks are X.
Our marketing, our fundraising, our delivering services.
But that's not the case.
Now people are supposed to be doing their own individual tasks.
and managing a team simultaneously.
So, I love how you are talking about, and I say this to leaders all the time, this is an investment also in them being able to do their best work.
Because if you're spending all day, all week, all month, big percentages of your time managing people issues, that tells you that you don't have The correct supports in place that you aren't clear about what the expectations are that you aren't giving feedback on a regular basis that you, I mean, there's just so many telltale signs of.
really having an approach to how you interact and communicate.
And most of these issues really and truly do come down to communication.
What you say, how you say it, how they hear it, how it gets put into practice.
There's techniques to improve that how it's received, et cetera.
And That investment of a leader's time in getting those things right up front saves so much heartache, headache, and just general resources of time, of money, of humans if they, if they really invest in it from the From the beginning rather than always trying to play cleanup.
Yes.
Well, and you know, a lot of times if an organization actually just isn't clear about some of those things, what you find is sometimes it's not that the employee was the wrong employee, it's that they were really unclear about what they were supposed to be doing.
And so, it's very stressful.
I've talked to those employees.
It's very stressful as the employee because it's like you're chasing, you're chasing something, but you're not sure what you're chasing.
We're all running in the same direction, but we actually don't know what we're chasing, right? It is, you are exactly right.
It's also most employees.
very, very small percentage.
Nobody comes to work every day wanting to do a bad job and nobody comes to work every day wanting to be a jerk.
You know, they, they want to do well, they need direction and.
They need to understand what is expected of them and have a venue for receiving feedback, giving feedback, recalibrating where we are given this happened or that happened.
And so there's really a tremendous amount.
There's just opportunity.
To make work a better, more productive environment for everybody, which allows not for profits to meet their mission.
That's what, that's what we're all about.
And so if you've got the right people, you exponentially who know what they're doing and are aligned as far as.
You know, what the tasks are and what the outcomes need to be exponentially, you can have more impact than if you're constantly spending time recreating the wheel.
You know, it's really funny as I think about this, as I sit here, one of the things that I talk about a lot in fundraising is that, you know, when we're in relationship with donors, one of the things that we want them to be able to do is to tell our story.
Well, Right.
We want them to be promoting our story.
Like that's really how we grow because we're like, we tell our excited story.
We tell our, our donors and our other supporters, our excited story, they get excited and then they join in the telling.
Right.
And as I am listening to you talking about our employees and our human resources, it can be volunteers, employees even, even supporters, right? Yeah.
Any of the humans, it's the same thing, right? We want, we want them to be a really positive part of our story and telling that story to others.
And so like, this is our way to help them help them do that.
The employee experience has a direct, there is research that will show you time and time again, the employee experience has a direct correlation to the client, donor, participant, whatever your stakeholders are called that client, that employee experience has an impact on your external partner's experience.
Yes.
So that brings me to something that I also do tend to talk about because I am definitely recovering from burnout.
I would say I'm in a really good space now.
And, but I have, I have learned, I have had to learn how to recover from burnout and we know that it's a huge problem right now for nonprofits.
For all organizations, but nonprofits are at an especially high risk for burnout with their employees.
What do you recommend or what, where do we start when we think about burnout and our human resources? So, one of the low cost, easy to do, tough to do it well and consistently but easily learnable is to actually ask people.
Sit down and have a regular conversation about what are your aspirations.
How does this and what you're doing right now tie into your personal, professional, financial, emotional aspirations? And how are you connecting as a leader to whatever their why is? I think too often we are in a go, go, go, this is what we need to get done mode.
That we Forget to take a step back and think about the totality of someone's life, their experience.
I mean, I'm sure you know that, the saying, Sarah, like, you don't know what's going on in someone else's life.
But taking the time to appropriately and respectfully ask the questions, taking the time to see.
Someone as a full, well rounded human being really makes an impact and customizing for, within reason, for individuals so that they can avoid burnout.
What I mean by that is.
What's important to you may not be what's important to me and what flexibility means to you may not mean what it is to me and it's really interesting what I see within my not for profit clients is that some not for profit clients are so flexible and, you know, offer a tremendous amount of diversity in what people's experiences are.
And others almost to the point that it's to the detriment of Some of the other employees, and then other not for profits are so strict in how they set their expectations that there's no fluidity.
There's no customization to say, well, Sarah has this particular need.
How can we help her meet her needs, which may be different than Rachel's, but they're, they're equitable.
They're not the same.
But they're, yeah, that's really where the best nonprofits that have, you don't need to have a ton of money.
You don't need to, you just need to take time and you need to care.
And, and where you can, wherever you can give people grace, it doesn't solve the burnout.
It doesn't solve the outside needs, pressures, all of those things, but it does create an environment of understanding where people still feel that they can contribute in very, very meaningful ways.
Yeah, you know, it's really interesting.
So my first position after my graduate degree was at a university and I think that, and it was a liberal arts university, smaller in size.
And there's something wonderful about that particular type of organization because you have students and you know, students just kind of flop down in the chair and then they'll tell whoever is present, whatever they're thinking, which is a lot of fun.
But I, I see that in our work.
That is a piece of our work.
We maybe have neglected and it is the flopping down in the coworkers chair to say, Hey, how are you? Or I learned actually in that position I had twins and when I had twins, I had to adjust my work schedule.
So I went in at 5.
00 AM and actually my supervisor came in at 6.
00 AM.
It was wonderful because I actually got a couple of hours in before.
A lot of people came into the office, but because of that, I was supervising five women at the time and my schedule, I was working five to one.
So I wasn't taking my lunch.
I was leaving around their lunchtime and I learned pretty quickly how detrimental it was.
That I wasn't there for lunch because lunch is a time where if you can take it and you can eat with a coworker, you know, or multiple coworkers at this particular place, we had a cafeteria.
So we would eat in the cafeteria a lot of times, whether you brought your lunch or you were eating cafeteria food, you would eat in the cafeteria.
So you're separated from your office space.
And in that time.
You learn a lot of what you're talking about, right? You learn about what's going on in their life.
What's stressing them out, what is exciting and upcoming in their life.
If they have a dream, that's when they talk about it, right? At lunch.
And So over COVID, you know, we actually moved into a space where we had more back to back zoom meetings without rests and pauses in between, which is very difficult for many people.
I would say everyone is challenged with back to back.
Right.
And then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then we also have separated, you know, many times we have a lot more remote workers.
And so we've really lost.
Some of the rhythms of checking in and doing some of those things.
So I think it's so important that you're saying this is like an easy, low hanging fruit.
And it doesn't have to be.
So it's interesting.
The lunch, the casual, the drive by, all of that is amazing.
But it actually can also be just as effective to do it in a more, way.
So I often recommend to my clients, look, if you're having a weekly check in pick three questions and like rotate the questions that you're going to ask at the end before the meeting ends.
So things like What have you accomplished that you're really proud of? Yeah.
Are there any obstacles right now that I can help you remove either from your mind space or actually do get done, you know, help is another good question.
How are you doing against, you know, we're, we've met and checked in and we've talked about like very timely matters, but looking out big picture, how are you doing against what your goals are, do we need to adjust any of those goals that just, those are the types of questions that help people feel that you are better.
engaged in them as a human and engaged in them also.
I mean, it doesn't have to be all about your personal life and everything else, but how you're engaged in supporting them to be the best that they can be.
So those are always questions, even if it's not coming in person even if it's not in a casual environment, those are.
And you don't have to ask all of them, and you don't have to ask them every time, but just kind of having them as part of your rotation really can have an impact.
I've, I've had several clients come back to me and just say, you were right.
You were right.
Well, of course it feels good, but I, you know, and look, these are good people.
They knew it intellectually when I said it, but just reminding folks that.
These are things that, that can make a difference in their work culture and work environment and, and avoiding burnout, especially when it's coming at people, as you said earlier, everyone, but even more so people in the nonprofit space.
It's coming fast and furious right now.
Yeah, the external forces.
And especially when we know that, you know, some of them, like last week, it's we're the first week of February recording this.
And last week there was a lot of administrative announcements, you know, on changes potentially for funding and stuff like those big things are often triggers, right? Yeah.
Triggers for the, because we're already at high stress.
And so it just puts it over the top of what our normal stress was and now it's a little bit more.
So, yeah.
So, so helpful.
So Rachel, can you tell our listeners where they can find you? Of course.
You can find me on LinkedIn.
You can find me online just at platinumconsulting.
com.
It's two T's in platinum, like my last name, P L A T T.
Okay.
So those are the best ways.
And feel free, you can give out my phone number also when, when this gets posted.
All right.
Well, that's excellent.
And before we finish, my last question always is what is one piece of advice that you would like to give all of our listeners? The one thing, which I think you've given them a ton of simple things, but what one thing would you like to leave them with? My best HR trick, the one if I was on a desert island and only had could do one HR related people related thing forever is a very simple exercise.
called stop, start and continue.
Very simply, it's having a dialogue with another person.
It could be your boss, a colleague.
You could do this with your spouse.
You could do this in your personal life, but what are the things that I should start doing to improve our relationship or start doing to be more successful.
What are the things that I should stop doing? Either because they're no longer priorities.
Sometimes because I'm driving you up the wall, whatever the case may be.
Somebody crazy by doing something.
And one of the things that you value and appreciate so what are those things that you can continue? Almost any situation, if you can have that dialogue with someone, you can eliminate a whole host of misunderstandings.
I love that.
I love that.
And it's repeatable.
I could actually ask the same person next month or next week or whenever, you know, and it should be a two way dialogue.
If I'm telling you it, you should be able to tell me as well, the same start, stop and continue.
And I always try to end it with the continue because.
Those are really the things that I value and appreciate about you.
Everyone and every, everyone has some things that they do that are very valuable.
And that we should recognize.
So it's just a great technique.
Yeah, I love that.
Thank you so much to our listeners.
I want to thank you for joining us this week, and I look forward to having another conversation next week.
Talk to you later.
Bye.
That's a wrap for today's episode of Nonprofit 411.
I hope our discussion with nonprofit professionals and experts gave you actionable ideas to take your fundraising efforts to the next level.
At Nonprofit 411, I partner with leaders like you to develop strategies and guide you through implementation.
Visit nonprofit411.
org to learn more and let's take the first step together.
See you next time.
Bye.