New Year’s Resolutions for Nonprofit Leaders
New Year’s Resolutions for Nonprofit Leaders
Thinking about stepping up your game in 2022? Look no further! Here are five areas of improvement for your consideration; none of them easy, but each guaranteed to make you be a more effective leader. Well, not exactly guaranteed. . .
Develop comfort with your finances. Finances, from reports to strategy, can be intimidating. But if you aren’t. very good at working with them, your nonprofit cannot reach its potential. So push past your apprehension and come to terms with the money. Start by getting a handle on a basic tool kit—annual budget, monthly profit and loss statements and updated cash flow forecasts—that’s easy to use and provided the information you need. Keep these principles in mind:
Keep it simple. More complicated means less useful. Design each of your tools to be printable on a single page. If it doesn’t fit on one page, you’re probably looking at too much detail.
Prioritize. Focus on the very few income and expense lines (salary, benefits, travel, events) that matter the most to your financials.
Numbers are never self-explanatory. Identical numbers can mean good news or bad. The purpose of the numbers is to prompt questions, not to answer them.
It’s the future that matters, not the past. Historical reporting is indispensable, but the whole point of financial management is to address what’s ahead—to maximize your impact.
Here are a few articles from the Roundup archives to get you started:
Better Financial Decision-Making with a Monthly Cash Flow Projection Model
Talking Finances with Your Board
Communicate Better With Your Team. Sharing information with staff is a high-wire balancing act. Who should be told what? When? By Whom? What level of clarity is required before sharing? How do you manage expectations of transparency? How do you talk about mistakes—yours and those of others? Small wonder that many leaders prefer to spend time and energy doing almost anything else.
Unfortunately, simply throwing your hands up isn’t an option. Your staff needs to hear from you. Regularly. When you don’t communicate or do so exclusively through others, confusion develops, gossip spreads and your leadership is undermined.
So what to do? I’ll post more on this subject next month. In the meantime here’s four things to keep in mind:
Always be honest (and not just technically honest). If you aren’t credible it won’t really matter what you say.
Don’t try to make everyone happy. Trying to do so is likely to backfire. It also makes it tough to be honest.
Be repetitive. If you want a message to sink it, each person needs to hear and process it in their own unique ways. Increase your chance of success by delivering the same substance in different ways, at different times.
You don’t have to be perfect. If you discover that your communication didn’t land the way you wanted it to, just try again. Your staff wants you to succeed—they’ll cut you some slack.
If you haven’t done so already, send your team a Happy New Year email and let them know why you’re excited about for 2022. Baby steps.
On the pitfalls of over-emphasizing transparency:
Invest less energy in your Board. The ideal of an engaged, effective Board is enormously seductive. But it’s also enormously difficult to achieve. Chasing the dream sucks up time and energy that you can use far more productively. This year, take a different approach. . .
Minimize Board meetings. If your Board is meeting more than quarterly, that’s probably too often.
Reduce Board materials. More materials take more time to put together and invariably contains more mistakes. Short and excellent is better for the Board and for you.
Put your energy into individual Board members with the most to contribute (connections, expertise, money, etc.) to the success of your nonprofit.
Reducing group Board engagement may even result in more valuable Board member engagement. Busy Board members are only able to allocate so much attention to your nonprofit. If they can reduce their time digesting lengthy reports and sitting in meetings, who knows what they can contribute?
Here’s a couple posts on this topic.
Check-in on goals regularly. If you’ve gone to the trouble to set goals, whether for individuals, programs or the organization as a whole, don’t just put them in the drawer. Make sure you review progress periodically—at least quarterly and, depending on the goal, sometimes monthly.
Integrate goals into monthly meetings to track progress, shifts and challenges. If you only do this at the end of the year—or even the middle—there won’t be time to make necessary adjustments so the goal can be accomplished.
Not all goals will continue to be relevant. When priorities change after goals are set, the goals need to be revised or even abandoned. No one should be trying to accomplish things that no longer matter.
Build a culture around accountability, ambition and accomplishment. If goals are set but ignored as the year rolls along, staff will understand that they don’t matter. They’ll learn that commitments are contingent and that jumping into new opportunities trumps follow-through . That won’t simply inhibit your ability to achieve this year’s objectives, it will shape how staff will approach goal-setting—and achievement—far down the road.
Ask more questions. When you’re in charge, you’re expected to have all the answers. Folks ask you what to do and you tell them. But what if you asked the questions for a change? Use your questions to point out important issues and guide thinking. Asking questions both models curiosity and creates space for team members to wrestle with problems and come up with their own ideas. In other words, it allows them to do the jobs you hired them to do. Asking questions takes more time and energy than simply directing, but it can really pay off in the long run with a team better aligned to your thinking and freeing you from being the bottleneck.
You don’t need to do all of these at once. Start with the ones you’re most excited about—and the financials one. If you need help getting started, please give me a shout.
Happy New Year!