Latest / We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits / 463. The Founder‘s Journey: Growing + Leading An Organization You Love - Brooke Richie-Babbage

Transcript

463. The Founder‘s Journey: Growing + Leading An Organization You Love - Brooke Richie-Babbage · We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hey, I'm John.
• 0:02
  Speaker 2: And I'm Becky.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: And this is the we Are For Good podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Non-profits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: So welcome to the Good Community.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: So let's get started.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Becky, are you just so happy right now?
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: Yes, my face is grinning ear to ear.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: I mean, we're here in season eight and we're just so excited to kick off a new Founders series.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: And there's only one person that could kick off the Founders series and you know her well.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: She's been on the podcast, she's been on Evolve panels we've had at different discussions.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: It's our joy today to introduce Brooke Richie Babbage back to the community.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: She's the founder of Bending Art Consulting Y'all.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Today we are talking about organizational design.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: We're talking founder fatigue and building and leading an organization that you love, and Brooke is the one.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: She's like our phone, a friend for all leadership things, because she is so evolved in the way that she thinks about how nonprofit founders and leaders can launch, scale, lead their organizations with more clarity and confidence and leaving behind the overwhelm that I know all of us feel, not just founders.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: She is also host of the nonprofit Mastermind podcast.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: If you have not listening to that, please go immediately and add that to your queue and subscribe.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: But amidst all of that, she also has a thriving business.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: She's like a twice Harvard grad.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: She is an attorney, she is a nonprofit founder and leader and mom and she is the person who inspired my sustainable sisterhood that I talk about here all the time on the podcast Y'all, we're about to lead you through this founder's journey with such an incredible human Welcome back BRB.
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: I mean, I have to just start off by saying that, if I could like, bottle you guys and carry you around, carry you around with me all the time, that's just the most heartwarming, wonderful intro, and I am, as you know, such a fangirl of we are forgiving the community that you're building.
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: I love it too.
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: It's just, it's such a joy.
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: And we said this, you know, before we hopped on I will show up anywhere you ask me to, so.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: I'm so excited to be here.
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: And I think it's going to be a great conversation.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: I agree, and we've had you on before.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: I mean you've had some incredible conversations.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: You walked us through habits of an impactful executive director.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: You've talked about a involved leadership and I want you to start since maybe our listeners already know a little bit of your background since you've been on a couple of times I want you to share a little bit of your founder's story with us and where that started and maybe what you learned from it that led you to where you are today.
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: I love that.
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: I think the founder's story is so important and often it starts far earlier in our lives than we think.
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: We often ask founders how did you come up with the idea for your organization or what you're doing?
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: But really, when I look back at my own journey, there have always been two threats Social entrepreneurship, or what we call social entrepreneurship now, and coaching and teaching, sort of bringing people along with me.
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: So there's the sort of founding of the most recent nonprofit that I ran, which we've talked about.
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: But when I think about my actual origin story, I remember being 14.
• 3:49
  Speaker 3: I grew up in Michigan and a tiny well, I didn't think it was tiny at the time, but a small city called Birmingham, and I really wanted to create a theater program for children and I specifically wanted to do plays that taught social lessons, which you know totally resonates with who I am.
• 4:12
  Speaker 3: And so I reached out to the Birmingham City Hall Community Center and I was like, hey, I have this great program, can I come run it?
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: And I know the people on the phone was like what's happening right now?
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: Like who are you?
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: But I was very honest and I put together a whole plan, I typed it up, I brought it over and you know adult me understands what was happening in their minds.
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: But kid me took it very seriously and I was like we're peers and this is my plan and they let me do it.
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: And they paired me with an actual grownup and let me run a summer program of sort of social justice theater for 10 year olds.
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: Oh what in my word?
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: You know I share it because, looking back, I've just always wanted to do the thing that I am doing, which is find ways to create positive change in community with others.
• 5:11
  Speaker 3: And it looked different at 13 than it did at 23 or 33 or 43.
• 5:17
  Speaker 3: But those threads have always been there, I think.
• 5:21
  Speaker 3: More immediately to answer your question, I started my professional journey as an anti-poverty lawyer you mentioned here in New York City and even then it was very sort of entrepreneurial.
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: I had already started my first nonprofit while I was in law and policy school at Harvard and I just really love the messiness of those early years when everything feels possible and you're sort of always right on the edge of something and you have to quickly make sense of things that don't seem like they make sense Like.
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: I am drawn to that and that's partly why I think I love coaching founders and people in the early stages of their organizations.
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: So I spent my first few years practicing in a fellowship called the Scadden Fellowship and basically you design a social justice law initiative and then you have to pitch it to a nonprofit to be your host, sort of convince them that it's worth, you know, bringing on this programming.
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: And then you go and have to pitch it to Scadden Law Firm, to the partners to see if they think it's worth investing in because they pay your salary.
• 6:23
  Speaker 3: And so I sort of hit the ground running with designing a vision and trying to get by in and that experience of building that initiative and running it.
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: And I worked for an incredible organization called the National Law and Social Policy Center for Law and Social Policy here in New York.
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: It was called the Welfare Law Center at the time and they really supported me in that and that led directly to the founding of my second organization where I spent more than 13 years and the rest is history.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: I mean BRB, it kind of all connects.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: I love hearing new threads of your story because I'm like, oh, that makes so much sense to know you are just this person that so has so many tentacles in this and you can just feel your heartbeat come through.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: And I love that we've already listed your podcast, because I also want to list your email list and you can hook people up to this because I will definitely yeah, just you need a drumbeat in your ear, you need a community around you to do this work, because it is so dang hard a lot of times, and I think you do that so well, brooke.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: And so you talk about life cycles a lot, you know, and I think it's so important to understand that life cycles in our organizations and the way that you describe this is helpful.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: So would you talk us through that and how we can use that, whether we're a founder or not listening today?
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: Why is that important to understand?
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: Absolutely so.
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: I love a good framework.
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: It's my Virgo brain and what I like about the nonprofit life cycle sort of concept as a framework is that it's super simple and it helps organizations at any stage Like you said, whether you're a founder or not stay on track as they grow, and I think that's really important sort of knowing what to focus on and knowing what you can give yourself permission to ignore for the moment or let go of can be one of the toughest things about leading a growing organization, because everything feels important.
• 8:21
  Speaker 3: And so the idea of the life cycles is that organizations move through set stages of development as they grow, from idea and startup all the way through maturity, and that there are benchmarks and processes and systems and structures and ways of leading that are sort of inherent to each stage and they're different.
• 8:43
  Speaker 3: And so knowing what those benchmarks are, knowing what you should be focusing on as a leader in each stage and letting go of the ones that are in later stages of development and saying you know, it's okay that my board is not raising a million dollars Like the number of times that I talked to nonprofit leaders, of incredible small nonprofits, say $450,000, who actually feel guilty because they can't, somehow can't get their boards to raise a million dollars or to raise $100,000, which is also crazy, I would say, and it's really interesting.
• 9:26
  Speaker 3: And so this framework, I think, can lighten the load a little bit by saying, oh, but actually here's where you are right, here's the stage of development you're in and here's what you should be focusing on.
• 9:37
  Speaker 3: When you get to that next stage, you can focus on that next thing.
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: So there are six stages of growth development.
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: There's a seventh that is about decline, but obviously we're not talking about that here.
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: So the first is and I talk about them almost like the stages of development of a person or an organism.
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: So infancy is the idea of birth, initial launch.
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: So that's when you are basically like I'm going to be a nonprofit or I'm going to be a social enterprise or a B Corp or whatever the entity is that is formed.
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: That's separate from me.
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: That's when you're born.
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: Infancy, the next stage is childhood, and that's post startup.
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: You're learning to walk.
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: Your identity, the identity of the institution, is becoming separate from that of the founder, slowly but surely.
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: And what does it mean to be an organization?
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: You're sort of figuring that out.
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: The next stage is your teen years and this is early growth.
• 10:35
  Speaker 3: The teen years Awkward is exactly right Messy, awkward, chaotic.
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: The focus is on growth, is on scale.
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: You're building your team.
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: Your board is shifting out of the startup board of friends and family.
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: You have new programs, you have new partnerships.
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: As a leader, this is one of the toughest times to run in a growing organization.
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: It doesn't always happen along budgetary lines, but often this sort of early growth phase is in the sort of low to mid six figures Right.
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: So 200 to 600 K budget.
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: You're learning how to raise money.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: Everything feels new, right.
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: Think teen years.
• 11:23
  Speaker 3: All the things you think about teen years Apply that.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: Raising six figures.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: As a teen, you know it's tricky, yeah.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Try on different identities.
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: It's like, oh, I thought this is who I was, but nope, that doesn't exactly fit.
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: And so, you know, as a leader of an organization at that phase, where part of what you feel like you are responsible for doing is stewarding others towards a mission or North Star, how do you stay out in front of that, messiness, right?
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: So that's one of the challenges of that phase, and I'm going to talk about some of the the hallmarks of each phase where I want to make sure folks know what the framework is.
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: Young adulthood comes after teenage and and I call this the late growth phase.
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: So a lot of times when organizations sort of Google growth stages, I get a lot of folks who email me and are like I looked at growth stages Just because it sounds so interesting.
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: People talk about startup and then growing nonprofits.
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: But growing nonprofits aren't actually a thing, right they're.
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: They grow in different ways at different stages, and so I split it up into early growth stage, teenage years, and then late growth stage, which is nearing maturity.
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: It's not coming out of childhood anymore and it means that some of the core infrastructure you've settled on it Right.
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: You have a team structure that feels like it's right.
• 12:38
  Speaker 3: You have programs that are values aligned, and you started to let go of the ones that that aren't.
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: You're beginning to have a board that actually sees itself not as staff, not as an extension of your volunteers, but actually a governance body, beginning to have that.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: Right, you have funding partners as opposed to just funders.
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: So those pieces are in place, and late growth, or young adulthood, is about ironing out the edges Right and bringing it all together into a coherent clicking.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: Everything's moving forward together organization, which is the mature adulthood phase, right, we call the zone of maximization, and the best way to describe that one is you look around and you think, huh, this is working Right, there's, and maybe you only feel that for one morning of one year.
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: Thank you for that.
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: But that sense of right, but that sense of my team, knows what they're doing, they're clicking.
• 13:37
  Speaker 3: I'm working well with a board that I like.
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: I don't constantly wake up at night thinking where the heck is this money going to come from, but, yeah, you feel like you know, you've got a point of view, you're building some thought leadership.
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: That stage feels good, right, mature adulthood feels good.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: Now, like all of us know about adulting, it is not every day.
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: As an adult, although I thought this would be the case when I was a teenager.
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: It is not every day that we look around and we're like I got this adult thing Right.
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: Most days I don't, and I think that's true for organizations, too, and so one of the other things that I highlight that I like about this framework is it reminds us that, just like any organism, just like being a mature adult, we don't always click and our lives are not always easy, and so sometimes we're back in this messy middle in some area of our lives.
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: Right, you mentioned like yeah, I'm a mom, I have a nine year old and a five year old, and they are wonderful, incredible.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: Hi boys.
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: Hi, and I cannot.
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: I can't describe the number of days where I'm like, am I just stuck in this messy middle?
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: Like am I ever going to figure this out?
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: Right, so that organizationally that's true as well and nonprofit leaders can beat themselves up, because they look around and they're like, hey, last year we were clicking, and now I'm back to like what's going on with my board?
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: Or my staff has friction, or we just ran headlong off a funding cliff and now our finances are off again.
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: That's normal.
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: Right, you will cycle through these stages of development, and that's OK.
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: And so I really I try to remind folks that so that they don't carry sort of any guilt or feeling like they're failing as a leader or even regressing, like if you're feeling that it's just a part of it, and I and I thank you for just walking so gently along with everyone on this because I feel like I can send some exhales from founders who feel seen in this framework.
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think the key is to know the hallmarks of your stage, know what the benchmarks are, so that you can set the right goals and address the right challenges for that stage and you can exhale and let go of the rest, right.
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: Knowing those benchmarks helps you know where to focus, where to focus your growth, where to focus your energy and your staff, and to understand that it's not always the right time to grow in every area.
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: Right, growth is not a monolith.
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: Growing every single part of your organization all at once can sometimes be one of the things that is fueling burnout, right.
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: Sometimes you want to focus on leveling up your fundraising, but your board is a bit stuck and messy and so it isn't actually ready for you to add new people, and that's okay.
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: I highlight five considerations to reflect on at each stage so that you can sort of make sense of this framework and operationalize it.
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: Can I go through the five?
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: Please, yeah, please do.
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: I'm such a step by again, Virgo, such a step by step.
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: I know I'm like I want people to be able to do things.
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: So the first is you want to ask yourself what is the nature and scope of my goals right now?
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: What should those be?
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: So, is it survival, Right?
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: So you are an early stage nonprofit.
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: Maybe thought leadership isn't the thing you should be focusing on and you really need to focus on.
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: How do I learn to fundraise?
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: How do I build a team so that we are still here in a year?
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: That's a different goal than how do we grow or how do we deepen our impact.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: So, being really clear about what the nature and scope of your goals should be.
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: Second, what's the mindset that I need to grow into or develop as a leader at this phase?
• 17:22
  Speaker 3: Just me personally, what am I being called to navigate or grapple with?
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: What do I have to learn to do differently?
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: And I think it's really important.
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: This one's really important because so often and I've been there and I know you guys have seen this too leaders sort of emesh themselves into the organization and only think about organizational growth.
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: But it's really important to separate out leadership growth from organizational growth.
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: They're related, they feel one another.
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: Who I am as a leader and fueling myself and building my own skills and pushing through my own sort of growth edges is separate and distinct in ways that are important from what's important for the organization.
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: So that's the second question how do I need to grow as a leader?
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: Third, what level of strategic clarity does it make sense for me to try to have right now?
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: What's the time horizon of my planning?
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: So how far into the future can I look with clarity and certainty for that to make sense?
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: If I am seven months into a new nonprofit, it may not make sense to have a five year strategic plan.
• 18:28
  Speaker 3: I just can't see that far ahead with enough clarity and certainty for that plan to make sense.
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: It's not going to actually guide my work.
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: I'd have to be a more stable organization for that to resonate.
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: So what is the level of strategic clarity that I should bring?
• 18:42
  Speaker 3: Fourth, what should my fundraising and finances look like right now?
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: Am I focusing on increasing income?
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: Should I be first focusing on diversification?
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: Should we be looking at stability?
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: Each of those are different areas of focus and a more mature organization can really focus on stability.
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: Multi-year, six or seven figure grants.
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: That doesn't make sense for a hundred thousand dollar nonprofit.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: That is in that sort of early growth phase where really we need to start looking at diversification and increasing revenue right.
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: So fundraising and finance.
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: And then the last one is capacity for sustaining your work.
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: How many people do I need?
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: What role should they have?
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: Am I thinking about my staff roles the right way?
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: Should my board be structured the way that it's structured?
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: One of the biggest examples here is people beat themselves up all the time about board committees.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: Like the number of conversations, oh my gosh.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: And the drain of the committees is real.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's real.
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: And I would say eight times out of ten, when I have conversations and I work with organizations under two million dollars that want to grow.
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: When I have conversations with them, my advice is, like all the committees right, you don't have a 13 person, two million dollar raising board.
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: That's not your board, that's not the stage of development you're in, and so if you only have five people on your board, committees are actually going to move you in the wrong direction.
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: It's going to drain people's energy, it's going to fracture their focus.
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: What you actually want are one or two clear goals that everybody works on together and then you identify how different people will plug in and, as you grow, those areas of focus that the individuals have will organically develop into committees and the exhaling that wait, I don't have to have seven committees.
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: I'm like you don't even have some people Like who's going to?
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: be on the committees.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: What a relief.
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think asking those questions is really important.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's lots of things that I want to say, brooke after I mean you've framed that, but I think a picture we come back to a lot on the podcast, kind of intentionally, is this iceberg idea.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: You know, I think it's really easy to see these other organizations and want to emulate or read this best practice.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: You need to implement it and I think what you're doing here is getting to the heart of like understanding what stage you're at and dialing in and maximizing that stage, because it really is an advantage if you really can view it that way and because you don't have to worry about everything, but the things you need to worry on need to be these key things.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: So thank you for that permission.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: I wonder we're going to transition, because in all of this, we want to talk about building organizations that we love, you know and.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: I know that exudes through you.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Just talking about your work, you know you just light up, but as a founder, or whether you're a founder or not, again, I feel like I need to keep adding that caveat.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: How do we pour into growing and building and leading these organizations into ones that we love, you know, and what are the systems and infrastructures behind doing that?
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: Such a big question.
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: So big.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: Good luck with it.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: I love it.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: Come on out, let's take this on.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: I'm ready.
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: I'm ready, I can do it.
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: So I think it comes down to, for me, two things.
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: I've seen sort of these two, not actually related to one another, but critical threads in my own experience of starting and leading.
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: You know multiple organizations as a board member for dozens of organizations, and then literally all of my teaching and coaching.
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: They're these two things that matter.
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: They are intentionality and networks of support.
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: So intentionality is basically this Getting clear about the organization that you want to lead and grow, how you want to feel leading it, and then designing and building that organization.
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: And this is why that feels so critical to me and why I think I keep seeing organizations that lean into intentionality, fight, overwhelm the best and I'm talking here to leaders of nonprofits.
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: But this is actually your entire team, right?
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: Your staff, your board, bringing intentionality to the design of their organizations, growing a nonprofit can feel.
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: I can't does feel chaotic.
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: There's so many decisions, growing a business I mean you know the three of us talk about all the time.
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: There's so many opportunities everywhere New partnerships, exciting programs, all of the things and it's really overwhelming.
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: It can be overwhelming.
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: They talk about positive stress.
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: It can be exciting and really fuel burnout and if you just sort of let it happen around you and respond and react, you're just going to be sort of pulled under the current.
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: Their current is going to pull you out into the whirling chaos of the ocean.
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: The greed to which the leaders that I work with feel a diminished sense of overwhelm is directly tied to their level of intentionality.
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: Right, are they getting out in front of the decisions, the choices, the processes, the structures and designing them on the front end and saying this is actually how I want my team to feel together, this is how I want us to move through the world?
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: Now let's reverse engineer that, rather than building your team and saying, huh, we aren't actually moving through the world the way I want us to move through the world.
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: That's more overwhelming than the intentional design, right?
• 24:39
  Speaker 3: So you and I have talked about this concept of organizational design.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: For this reason, I think it's really powerful.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: It identifies nine building blocks that make up every single organization.
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: Every organization is made up of the same nine building blocks and it provides a way for those organizations to be hyper intentional about how they want to bring those building blocks together, how they want to design the organization from the structure to compensation, to how teams will work together, to meetings, to how they want to deal with issues of power and authority and autonomy and mastery Right by naming what these core building blocks are and saying this is how I want power to show up in our relationships.
• 25:25
  Speaker 3: This is what that's going to look like.
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: This is how we're going to operationalize it.
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: This is what's going to happen when we feel ourselves bumping up against somebody else's area of autonomy.
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: By getting out ahead of those conversations, you can co-create an organization that is much closer to your ideal than if you just wait and sort of let things develop and evolve on the room.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: I just have to compliment you on this.
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: This is such a radically different way to operate and to move forward.
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: And, yes, we dive into strategy at the onset of things, but the intentionality of purpose and of design and of abundance, it creates a shift, I think, in the cultures and it really creates healthy cultures.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: I think having that very difficult conversation about power alone is shifting.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: So do you have time and can you kick through?
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: Kick through all of those nine for us, because I'm sure there's a lot of people out there saying where do I start?
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: Which ones do I need to focus on that aren't represented in my organization.
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: There are, like I said, nine building blocks, so I'll just walk through them quickly and give just a few examples of how you can think about bringing them into conversations with your team.
• 27:18
  Speaker 3: This works with your staff.
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: This works with founders who have no staff and want to be intentional from the beginning.
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: This works with organizations that have hundreds of people on a team and boards of dozens of people, just to get on the same page about the design element.
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: So the nine building blocks that make up every organization are purpose.
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: That is, how clear are we about our reason for being and how is our purpose showing up in all aspects of the organization Strategy?
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: How do we plan?
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: How do we prioritize?
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: Are we clear about the path we'll use to get to our North Star purpose?
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: Is everybody on the same page?
• 28:00
  Speaker 3: This is always an interesting conversation to have, because different people in different parts of the organization think that everyone's on the same page and often they are not Right About our core strategy.
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: The third is resources.
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: How do we define and allocate our resources?
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: Are we including things like our time, our energy, our space, not just our money, in our broad definition of the resources that we need to do our work?
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: We're not.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: Let me just, let me just interject.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: We're not.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: Imposter syndrome ignited.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a tough one.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: I think, just like the sector as a whole, we think resources is money and it's like that.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: The problem you know.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: so thank you for that framing so good.
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: Oh, it's a huge part of the problem.
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: And maybe we think about time, right.
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: So when you look at people's calendar, they talk about time management.
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: But here's the kicker energy, right Like.
• 28:58
  Speaker 3: You can look at your calendar and see 10 meetings a week, let's say, but it's not actually just the time, it's the mental energy after the meeting.
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: It's decompressing, it's planning like.
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: Energy is a resource and you know, I have always done a lot of social justice work with organizations that work in communities that have experienced trauma and the energy.
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: What made me start focusing on energy as a resource is, even if the social worker that was on my staff only met with one young person a week, so if you look, there's no money being spent other than her salary the time is, say, a two hour meeting you would actually have a false understanding of the resources being expended because that one meeting so we worked one of the groups that we worked with were young women who had been trafficked.
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: That one meeting she could only do one of those a week.
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: Right, like the energy that was required to come back and then to switch into talking about strategic partnerships.
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: So that's a real resource.
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: And so having a conversation as a whole team about.
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: How are you guys expending your emotional resources and how, as a leader, do?
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: I need to take that into account when I think about how we meet and you know who you're partnering with.
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: So, absolutely, and actually one of the things that's important about these building blocks is they aren't so much, they aren't static and they aren't separate.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: So how we talk about our resources and the reason it's I talk about it as a canvas or a matrix, right, they intersect.
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: So how we talk about our resources and how we talk about meetings, those should intersect with one another, right?
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: So I'll go through them and then talk about some of the intersection.
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: So the fourth one is culture and norms.
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: What are the relationships and practices that we want to have, define our work together, right?
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: What do we promise one another?
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: What do we need from one another?
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: How do we want to show up for one another and together as a collective, and how do we operationalize our values?
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: So, naming those and getting clear about those.
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: The next one is structure.
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: How do we organize our team?
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: How do we organize and by team I mean our board, our structured network, our advisors?
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: How do we structure our relationship to the people and to the work.
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: How are we organizing our programs?
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: Do we have too many?
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: Are they the right ones?
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: Do they relate to one another?
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: All the structural questions that undergird our work.
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: The next one is information and workflow.
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: How are we dividing and organizing both independent and shared information and work?
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: So for growing organizations, this one changes a lot, because when I was sitting at a desk right next to my first full-time hire, my director of programs and it was just the two of us how we shared information and how workflowed between us was so simple.
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: I turned to her and I said what I need to say and maybe she sent an email if I was out of the office.
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: Like super simple.
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: Three years later, we had 13 people on my team, and so me as the executive director.
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: How do I get information from somebody that I don't manage, that I might not see in a given week, that works for somebody else that I also don't manage?
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: Right, that there's complexity there and getting out in front of that and naming that can be really important.
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: Next is compensation, and this, similar to resources, is not just about money.
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: This is actually, I know, how do we signal to our team that they are valued, part of that in our society is money, but if you just stick with money, particularly in our sector, you're not having the expansive conversation about value and demonstration of value and shared value and collective work that you need to have, and so this is an opportunity to say what does compensation full compensation for your work look like?
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: How can I, as a leader, support you and make you feel valued?
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: The next one is meetings, and I referenced this one.
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: How effectively and efficiently are we meeting and coordinating our work?
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: Another thing that I think we get wrong Most of us get wrong.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: I'm feeling the collective nod of everyone listening Absolutely.
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: The right.
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: The next one is authority and power, and we sort of reference this one right who gets to make decisions about what?
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: Who gets to hold accountability?
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: What does that mean?
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: What does that look like?
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: And then the last one and these are not in order of importance, like I said, they all intersect.
• 33:40
  Speaker 3: The last one is mastery and innovation.
• 33:41
  Speaker 3: This is about how we learn.
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: How do we learn?
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: How are we supporting learning?
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: How are we supporting failing forward?
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: How are we supporting personal and professional growth and evolution as individuals in the sector, not just the organization?
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: How are we growing as an institution?
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: And how do we give permission, like I said, to fail?
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: What does that look like in our organization, both explicitly and implicitly, there's so many leaders that say, oh, I'm totally fine if you try something and it doesn't work.
• 34:16
  Speaker 3: But actually that's the explicit sort of rule.
• 34:20
  Speaker 3: But a lot of times and one of the reasons I love encouraging organizations to take a retreat and just talk through each of these boxes I sat in a room and listened to one of the most amazing leaders I've ever worked with here in the city, who works with and organizes collectives of collectives.
• 34:37
  Speaker 3: He very earnestly said I want us to innovate and experiment and try and if it doesn't work, okay, we'll come back together and learn.
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: And he couldn't figure out why people weren't doing that and what.
• 34:52
  Speaker 3: When they had this organizational design conversation at a retreat, what he heard people say was we don't want to let you down, like we don't think you're going to be mad.
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: That's not, you know.
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: We know you said that, but you raised money for us to try this and we don't want to let our people, our arch, our teammates down, so we want to do what we know is going to work.
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: That's a totally different challenge.
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: He thought he's like maybe I'm not, maybe they don't trust me, maybe I'm not articulating, maybe they don't feel safe.
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: So he was fighting one challenge, totally different challenge.
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: Right, this sense of letting one another down is a different thing to work on.
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: And so it was really important for him to hear that when they talked about this box, this mastery and innovation and failing forward box, because he realized what I'm saying is great, but it isn't the thing they need to hear.
• 35:49
  Speaker 3: I need to have a different set of conversations with people.
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: So I think that was a really powerful example of how I've seen organizations use this clarity and sort of bringing to the surface the implicit understandings and ways of working that are beneath the surface.
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: So those are the nine boxes, those are the nine things.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: Brooke Richie intentionality Babbage right here.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: Right, I'm just so glad we're kicking off this founder series with your guiding light, because this is the stuff that matters.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: This is the stuff that's going to keep people in the game, that keep us fighting together.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: Even what you're talking about risk we just came off this powerful conversation with Seth Godin.
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: That's like our work necessitates it, because we're trying to figure out some of the world's most hard issues.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: We've got to keep trying.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: We can't get down on trying.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: So getting this stuff right, dialing it in, is just so crucial.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: We got to talk about this because I'm feeling the weight of this conversation as founders talking to a founder.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: The heaviness is real, though the fatigue can be real, and I think we want to create safe space community to talk about it.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: How do you move through founders fatigue, compassion, fatigue, just in general, because all of this kind of compounds to a lot of pressure sitting on the weight of that founder.
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: Talk to us about that.
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: I'm so glad you said that Weight and pressure are, if you do, a word cloud of what leaders and founders experience on a day to day basis.
• 37:20
  Speaker 3: I think those would be the biggest words.
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: It can feel very heavy.
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: So I'm really glad you guys are focusing this and I think you've always been really good about bringing that to the forefront and creating spaces for folks to talk about it.
• 37:33
  Speaker 3: For me, this second thread right so the first one was intentionally the second thread is directly about that and its networks of support.
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: And I don't mean networking, I don't mean the funder briefings and all the things, I mean how the three of us, for example, can measure and support one another.
• 37:56
  Speaker 3: It's your squad, my sustainable sisterhood that we've talked about were the group of seven executive director women.
• 38:04
  Speaker 3: We met the first Wednesday of every month for over a decade.
• 38:07
  Speaker 3: We still meet, even though none of us are executive directors anymore, and we got one another through, not just in terms of emotional support but operational and strategic support.
• 38:18
  Speaker 3: These were other women for me that I knew were out on that proverbial limb.
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: Also.
• 38:26
  Speaker 3: There's a way in which, if you think about again sort of the metaphor of growing up, the older you get or the more mature your organization gets, you're not all sort of in the trunk together.
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: You branch off and organizations look different and they function differently.
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: They have different challenges, and so finally you look up as a leader and you're sort of out on this limb by yourself.
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: You've got a team, they're there to support you if you fall right, but the buck stops with you and that's where the weight comes from.
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: And so, having the sustainable sisterhood, having this group of peers, this crew, where I wasn't out on their limb with them, but I was out on a limb and they could look across to me on my limb and say, hey, how did you navigate benefits I need, I want to give my team benefits.
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: We are underpaid.
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: I don't know where the money is going to come from, but it's really important from a values perspective.
• 39:20
  Speaker 3: What did you do, right?
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: So there's the emotional support, and then there's the I can be as close to a co-leader with you as possible.
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: Right now.
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: I'm in a mastermind with amazing women.
• 39:32
  Speaker 3: Actually, I think they just released a podcast Cindy and Jess, Cindy Wagman and just Campbell Confessions did a whole episode where we were driving back from one of our two in-person gatherings and we pulled out the recorder in the car and we're like, let's just talk about this mastermind thing because everybody's like me, real ones.
• 39:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's amazing.
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: So, to zoom out this thread, to answer your question more directly, john, how do you fight fatigue?
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: You have to have a crew, you have to have a structured network of support or you will burn out as you navigate the chaos.
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: So the crew is important, but I actually think there's three types of people that you want to focus on.
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: Actually, my newsletter today just talked about it.
• 40:19
  Speaker 3: You'll see it, becky, when you open it.
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: So your crew, your mastermind, your sustainable sisterhood my sustainable sisterhood was really important those peers the second is a coach, so I've always had a coach.
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, going back to this organizational growth, the five questions that I said, who do I need to grow into as a leader?
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: That investment in yourself by getting a coach, by working with a coach.
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: It could be group coaching, it could be a one-on-one coach, but at every stage of development where things got really messy for me and really heavy, having someone who wasn't in the mess with me but understood the mess and could say here's some best practices, here's what I hear you saying why is that the narrative Right, like, why are you understanding it this way and does that serve you, was so, so powerful.
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: I cannot emphasize that enough.
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: So that's the second, and the third are advisors and mentors.
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: So most of us have mentors, most of us have advisors, but organizationally, some of the most powerful people in my sort of structured network that I could leverage were people who weren't on my board, weren't on my staff, but they had strategic expertise.
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: They knew something about an area of work that I wanted to.
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: We started doing corporate partnerships and I knew nothing.
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: I knew one person that worked in a corporation.
• 41:48
  Speaker 3: That was my dad, and he was a brilliant source of information.
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: But I was like I should probably bring more people into my world to take some of the weight of figuring this out the strategic weight of figuring this out off of me.
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: So having those strategic advisors that agreed to pick up the phone when you call and agreed to leverage their expertise on your behalf is really critical.
• 42:16
  Speaker 3: So those are the sort of three core types of people that I think you need to have in this network your crew, your coach and your advisors.
• 42:26
  Speaker 3: And it may not feel like rubber on the road, it may feel like I don't have a Friday afternoon or a Tuesday morning, or you know we met on Wednesday mornings to like meet with my crew.
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: But making that time and building those relationships creates that foundation, almost like the base of a well right.
• 42:48
  Speaker 3: It is fresh, clear, healthy, rejuvenating water that you can tap into when you need to.
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: And I just want to add if you think you don't have an hour to give to yourself, to pour back into yourself, relook at your calendar, because you're worthy of being poured into and you're worthy of pouring into others with the learnings that you're finding and the insights and the failures.
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: And I think when you have a hype squad of people who've been there, it just changes the game and it underscores the whole thing that we say here, it's our final value of our company, which is community, is everything.
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: Find your community, find your hype squad.
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: You are worthy of that, and so I want to ask you how are you going to round this all out?
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: It's your one good thing that you would leave for our audience today bring it home.
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: Right, that's it.
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: My one good thing is actually something we haven't talked about, and it's meditation.
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: I think that the a secret to success, a good habit, something that has sustained me that isn't organizational but is really foundational, is finding time every day to quiet my mind, and so I am a huge proponent.
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: My husband and I meditate.
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: We're teaching our children to meditate.
• 44:11
  Speaker 3: That the world can feel like a lot, adulting can feel like a lot.
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: Add to that leading an organization, founding an organization, holding the weight of other people's needs and salaries and all of the things, and if you can, even for five minutes, sit in silence and just let your brain relax, it can actually refuel you in ways that might not seem immediately obvious but are so like in your soul core.
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: So that's my one good thing.
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: And here's the thing I just love this so much.
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: I mean, Brooke can be part of your squad because of how you show up so generously, and so, as we round out, I want to point people to how they can connect with you, how they can listen to your podcast, how they can get leadership forward in their inbox.
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: Point us to all the things, Brooke just such a fan.
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, and it's one of my favorite things coaching training, being other people's hype squad, helping them sort of sense make so that it's not so chaotic.
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: So the best ways are my newsletter is called Leadership 4.321 and you can sign up for that at brookrichybabbagecom.
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: Backslash Leadership Forward, my non-profit mastermind podcast.
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: You can subscribe on my website and that comes out every week, and then I'm actually launching a new private podcast just for founders.
• 45:32
  Speaker 3: Yes, yes just for founders and people can join that.
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: That'll come out later this month.
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: People can sign up for the waitlist.
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: That's going to be every Friday and it's going to be a sort of call and response right.
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: If you sign up, you get to ask me questions and I will answer them for you in this private podcast.
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: I will do many trainings, all the things that founders need.
• 45:54
  Speaker 3: I will be your hype squad so you can get that at brookrichybabbagecom Backslash.
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: Non-profit founder.
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: BRB.
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: We love you so much, we learned so much from you.
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: Thank you for what you're doing to help us navigate this world in a way that feels good, that feels like it's controlled and strategic, and open-minded and abundant, and I just think you're radically wonderful and I hope everybody goes and follows Brooke.
• 46:20
  Speaker 3: Thank you, and I will just wrap up by saying I am a firm believer in abundance, in the abundance of the universe, and I think that what people are doing nonprofits, social enterprises we're bending the arc of history towards justice.
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: We really are, and it's hard work and it's important work and it's possible if we do it together.
• 46:42
  Speaker 3: That's it Me too.
• 46:42
  Speaker 3: That's why I named my company Bending Arc.
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: Oh, it's such a powerful quote.
• 46:46
  Speaker 2: I want to be a part of that.
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: We call it impact uprising over here, and it's going to take many hands to do it, many belief systems, one conversation at a time.
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: Thank you, my friend.
• 46:56
  Speaker 3: Love it.
• 46:56
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for being here.
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: Friends, and you probably hear it in our voices, but we love connecting you with the most innovative people to help you achieve more for your mission than ever before.
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: We'd love for you to come join our good community.
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: It's free and you can think of it as the after-party to each podcast episode.
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: Sign up today at weareforgoodcom.
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: Backslash hello.
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: And one more thing if you love what you heard today, would you mind leaving us a podcast rating and review?
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: It means the world to us and your support helps more people find this community.
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much, friends.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: Can't wait for our next conversation.