When you are running a nonprofit, your success depends on the strength of your leadership team.
Your leadership team should be engaged in a variety of daily tasks that involve managing the organization and overseeing its resources and employees.
They are your decision makers and problem solvers.
As the Executive Director, your leadership team serves as your eyes and ears as well as your arms and legs.
When your leadership team is high performing, they allow you to focus on the big picture strategic issues with confidence as you know the daily operations are in capable hands.
But how do you manage your leadership team and in a way that advances your agency’s mission?
Today’s episode will identify five issues every woman nonprofit executive director should consider to get the most from her leadership team.
You can find the full transcript at https://relishyourrole.com/20
Whether they are called a leadership team, an executive team, senior directors’ team, their role in a nonprofit is the same. At the most basic level, they share departmental information and receive updates from the Executive Director about recent decisions.
The role of your leadership team
The Bridgespan Group has written extensively about nonprofit leadership teams and the best way to leverage their potential. I encourage you to read their work.
But you want to move past the basic level of functioning. You need want a team that takes on tasks that transcend the work their programs and work across department silos to provide you with high- level problem solving.
What would it be like if you had a team that routinely collaborates to shape organization-wide decisions and shares responsibility for the results?
It does not have to be a fantasy.
There are five issues to be aware of to help you shape your leadership team into effective, mission-focused decision-makers.
1. Setting expectations to define the leadership team’s work
As the agency leader, you shape the priorities and decision-making style of the group.
Make sure everyone understands the function of the group and your expectations for the type of tasks they need to take on. areas.
Typically, their work involves guiding the organization toward achieving its top priorities and ensuring effective cross-departmental decision making and resource allocation.
In order to achieve these goals, each member of the team is able to think past their own sphere of responsibility and look at issues from an organizational perspective.
2. Identifying a clear focus for the leadership team
Leadership teams can home in on critical areas by focusing on those which are interdependent and have high impact.
Interdependent issues involve multiple units or functions where cross-leader discussion are critical for effective decision making.
High impact issues are those which have the greatest effect on strategic priorities, programmatic and organizational effectiveness, creating a leadership pipeline, external reputation, and financial sustainability.
Once a leadership team is clear about their work, it needs to determine what role it will play in that work.
3.Being Intentional about the composition of the group
All leadership team members must be able to take a big-picture perspective. There may be specific issues when you want to include others whose unique skills are essential to the team’s work. If you chose to do so, they should play an advisory role rather than becoming a regular participant in your leadership team meetings.
You need to make sure the team remains at a manageable size and is consistent in its membership so they can build their own team dynamic.
4. Your communication and processes should support high level decision making
Well-managed processes around meetings and internal communications are essential for a successful leadership team.
Effective meetings require:
- sufficient advance notice,
- clear and focused meeting agendas, (don’t overpack the agenda if you want deep discussion and problem solving)
- thoughtful consideration of the scheduling of meetings to avoid daily distractions,
- time to review material to prepare everyone for productive discussions,
- follow up on decisions or actions from previous meetings to keep the momentum and hold each other accountable.
The most productive use of time also requires management of agendas to ensure that urgent—immediate or unanticipated problems—doesn’t consistently crowd out the high-priority work the team needs to do.
Teams often need longer, meetings to wrestle with important decisions or dive deep into ongoing issues, such as developing talent or budgeting.
Sometimes teams may need day-long or multiday retreats for team building, annual planning, or strategy sessions.
The timing and cadence of these different types of meetings should be planned around the organization’s calendar, including talent reviews, budgeting cycles, and annual board meetings.
5.You have to attend to and build the team dynamic
Building a cohesive leadership team is essential. A cohesive team also sets the tone for the rest of the organization, modeling the importance of collaborative behavior.
A team is not created just because people convene and sit next to each other.
You have to give the group time to grow into a team.
As a rule, nonprofits tend to have a pervasive culture of conflict aversion. This translates to team members hesitating to question a colleague’s view or openly disagree.
This aversion to conflict and hard conversations works against what you need from your team.
Through a series of team- building exercises and experiencing collaborative solving problems you can build a healthy team dynamic built on trust, collaboration, accountability, and shared ownership.
As with so many other organizational relationships, creating a high performing leadership team takes time and intentionality. These five considerations can get you one step closer to having the team you deserve.
As always, I believe you can do it, and I am here to help.