What’s Your Theory of Change?

How will your organization change the world? That’s the underlying question behind a theory of change.

Every nonprofit has a theory of change, but I find many nonprofit professionals are tentative about defining it. Sometimes, they’re afraid they are using the phrase incorrectly or worry about making assumptions about the organization. Let’s unpack exactly what a theory of change is, and then talk about how to use it in your planning.

Many nonprofit professionals are familiar with the idea of an organizational mission. An organizational mission explains what you’re trying to accomplish, and maybe why you want to accomplish it. For example, you organization may have a mission to end world hunger or bring educational opportunities to underserved kids or safeguard a community’s cultural stories or end the surveillance state. The mission serves as a guiding light for the organization; everything you do at your nonprofit should be in service to your mission. Knowing your mission can also help you recognize when you are “off mission” — spending time and energy on things that aren’t moving you closer to achieving the change you want to achieve in the world. When you achieve your mission (which does happen sometimes!), your work is done; then you can either shut down operations or find a new mission.

Before you can have a theory of change, you have to have a well-defined mission.

The theory of change is how you plan to achieve that mission. It answers the question: how will your nonprofit achieve its mission?

Cooking offers a great analogy. The mission is what you’re trying to make (say, blueberry muffins). The theory of change is the recipe: the steps that you take that you believe will get you those blueberry muffins.

Different nonprofit organizations may take wildly different approaches for achieving similar missions.

Let’s imagine two hypothetical nonprofits that both have a mission of ending hunger. The first nonprofit might have a theory of change that is grounded in local communities and addressing food deserts. It might write its theory of change like this:

“We believe that ending food insecurity requires transforming communities so that they can connect those in need with healthy food. We will end hunger by mobilizing, educating, and supporting community groups. We provide education, resources, community organizing, and support so that community members can set up food banks, neighborhood kitchens, meal delivery services, and farmer’s markets. We also work directly with community planners and major grocery stores to bring healthy food options to low income communities.”

As you can see, this organization’s goals are about ending hunger, but their theory of change is grounded in the idea of empowering local communities. All of the important parts of the recipe are right there: supporting communities to set up food banks and neighborhood kitchens, working with community planners, etc.

Now imagine another nonprofit that is also focused on ending hunger, but with an entirely different theory of change:

“We believe that to end world hunger, we must reinvent our food supply on a global scale. By supporting agricultural research, regenerative farming technologies, and genetically modified food innovations, our nonprofit seeks to ensure a world in which every mile of farmland can support 1,000 humans while protecting the environment for future generations. We invest directly in agricultural research by sponsoring labs at universities across the world, host conferences that bring agricultural innovation, scholars, and global leaders together to collaborate on the future of food, and lobby for federal and international policies that champion food and agricultural innovation.”

This second nonprofit may have a similar mission to end hunger, but it has a wildly different theory of change. Instead of empowering communities, this nonprofit seeks to change the world through research and technology. This nonprofit is focused on improving the productivity of agriculture through innovation, and they invest directly in research and encourage innovative food policies. They aren’t talking to communities; they are talking to global leaders, universities, and researchers.

Can you see how the theory of change makes a huge difference? The first nonprofit has a theory of change that ending food hunger requires transforming local communities to better get food to those who need it. The second nonprofit has a theory of change that ending hunger requires reinventing the food supply through innovation.

Once you have a theory of change established, it makes it much easier to see whether to adopt new programs or partnerships. For example, a collaboration with a veterans service that delivers healthy meals to injured vets might make a lot of sense for the first nonprofit, but it wouldn’t work for the second. An opportunity to present ideas at a global agricultural summit fits right into the theory of change for the second nonprofit, but not the first.

A chance to engage in federal lobbying for foodstamps? That doesn’t fit into either theory of change. Advocating for healthier meals within prisons? Neither nonprofit. Sponsoring a mobile library for homeless youth? That still doesn’t fit with either nonprofit’s theory of change, or frankly with either nonprofit mission.

These may seem like farfetched examples, but I’ve seen many a nonprofit get enticed to do something wildly outside its theory of change. Sadly, these projects are often distractions that takes resources away from the more impactful programmatic work the organization could be doing. (That said, sometimes this can be a helpful experiment that leads to a nonprofit changing or updating its theory of change.)

Nonprofits should be able to explain why they’ve adopted that specific theory of change. The theory of change should be grounded in a reasonable belief that it will help the nonprofit effectively advance toward its mission.

Frequently, a nonprofit will cite one of three things: research (either formal academic research or less formal investigations), knowledge gained from studying the strategies of other organizations or movements, or the nonprofit’s own experience based on years of work. Not every theory of change is grounded in one of these justifications, but often at least one of them will show up.

So, our first hypothetical nonprofit might justify its theory of change by stating:

“Our nonprofit is replicating the extremely successful food programs pioneered by the city of Alexandria in 1998. Alexandria used community surveys to discover that hunger was often rooted in a “last mile” problem—healthy food resources that could help those in need were too far away or too complicated to access. Alexandria successfully addressed this issue by improving connections between available services and those in need. We modeled our efforts on these time-tested efforts, optimizing the delivery and access to food. We also spent several years honing in on the best way to deliver these food services, including organizing volunteers, app-based food delivery systems, municipal collaborations, and corporate partnerships. We found that partnering with existing local groups who had deep community connections made food delivery programs 80% more likely to exist beyond the initial 3 years, resulted in an average of 50% more people served, and helped us identify new populations in need of these services. As a result, we have made nurturing local community partnership the heart of our strategy.”

In this instance, the nonprofit relied on the lessons from other similar projects to inform their own theory of change. Additionally, the nonprofit analyzed its impact and optimized its programs based on what was working best.

The second theoretical nonprofit might explain its theory of change in this manner:

“We have adopted the theory of change of optimizing farmland to serve more people based on a foundational academic study about sustainable population support through optimized farming techniques as well as three large-scale studies on the impact of agriculture techniques on land development and the food supply. Additionally, we’ve surveyed the impact of our conferences and can show a clear connection between policy ideas proposed in our forums to legal changes made in target countries within two years as well as agriculture practices adopted by target countries within five years. Finally, our investments in academic research have resulted in the development of farming innovations that have created ways to improve soil regeneration by up to 80%, water usage by 30%, and productivity of target crops by 25-75%.”

For that nonprofit, the theory of change was grounded in academic research as well as the nonprofit’s own data from tracking the efficacy of its interventions and programs.

Whatever theory of change you develop, you should be able to explain why you think taking these actions is likely to have the desired outcome. You should also be tracking your progress. Over time, you may adapt your theory of change based on both the changing world and your nonprofit’s ever-sharpening experiences of attempting to achieve your mission.

It’s important for nonprofits to be honest with themselves about their theory of change. For example, if a nonprofit’s primary theory of change is grounded in federal lobbying to expand carbon-neutral energy sources, that needs to be at the heart of everything it does. The nonprofit may have other programmatic work such as digital engagement with supporters on climate issues, corporate education around environmentalism, school outreach, or state lobbying around energy—but all of these programs should be in support of and complementary to that core theory of change.

Unfortunately, many nonprofits add complementary and supportive programs around their theory of change, and then lose sight of that original idea that inspired this approach. This is where the role of nonprofit leaders is so important. Where each individual person at a nonprofit may be very focused on her individual task, a nonprofit leader should be able to tell the story of how that task fits into a larger theory of change for the organization—or recognize if it does not.

That’s an organizational theory of change. You can apply a similar approach to developing a theory of change for each specific programmatic project: in short, explaining how that project will help you achieve your mission and why you think it will do that.

Want to help your organization develop a strong theory of change? Reach out today to talk about trainings with Groundwork.

4 Time Management Non-Negotiables for Nonprofit Managers

Nonprofit managers have always struggled with too many commitments vying for their time. The post-pandemic move to remote-first and hybrid workplaces has brought even more meetings to the average manager’s overflowing calendar. The results are a disaster: managers complaining about exhaustion and zoom fatigue, managers mentally checking out from meetings, managers working weekends and nights to attempt to catch up on work, and managers finding it nearly impossible to have deep, uninterrupted work time.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. By bringing some thoughtful intentionality to your time management, you can claw back your days and make them feel spacious and productive again.

Here are my top four time management non-negotiables for transforming hectic, chaotic, overbooked schedules into productive, sustainable schedules:

  1. End every workday and every week with a planning session.

    This means blocking off the last half hour of every work day to look through your schedule for the next day and mentally plan out how you’ll use your time effectively. This plan shouldn’t just exist in your brain: write it down in your notebook, a Trello entry, a calendar event, or any other kind of note. The goal is to have a simple, organized list greeting you in the morning when you step into work so you know exactly how you’ll spend your time.

    At the end of every single week, do the same thing but at a grander scale: look through your entire coming week and note your biggest priorities, notice the rhythm of your days, and take notes on what you plan to do to get prepared. My personal preferred method of managing this is with Trello boards. I always have a column for “next week” which becomes “This week” on Monday morning, and I always include an entry for “Tomorrow plan” where I take notes on everything pending for the day.

    Doing this means you won’t be surprised. You’ll end every day with a clear sense of direction and certainty about tomorrow, and you’ll have a chance every week to reflect on how things went and bring intentionality to the coming week. It’s important to use this moment to ensure that you daily activities still align with your highest goals, and that you aren’t wasting your time on low-priority tasks that aren’t actually an effective use of your time.
  2. Win Mondays.

    Whatever your most important tasks are for the week, get a big head start on them on Monday. This is the day to draft your powerpoint presentations, write your grant reports, prepare your materials for the board of directors, write your article, whatever. When I ran an advocacy team and also blogged about digital rights, my goal was to end every single Monday having written a draft of a blog post. You need to find your own version of that: important, high-value work that requires your full attention and engagement. That’s exactly where you need to be focusing your Mondays.

    To really win Monday, you also need to minimize meetings on Mondays. That doesn’t mean zero meetings; a few can sneak in there without ruining your productivity. But don’t let them choke up your day. You also can’t lose Monday to administrative tasks and email.

    Ideally, you are shipping something on a Monday, as in some sort of project leaves your care and goes for the feedback of someone else. Often that’s just a draft for someone else to review. If you aren’t shipping something, then you should have made substantial, measurable progress on a project that you can then continue to chip away at the rest of the week.

    Mondays will always be in high demand, so defending them takes a lot of work. Nonetheless, you should defend them mercilessly. Blocking out a few hours on your calendar is a good tactic.

    But why are Mondays so important? There’s something strangely magical about Mondays. When you have a productive Monday, you will find it cascades out to the rest of your week. Not only will you get far more accomplished throughout the entire week, but the rest of the week will also seem surprisingly easier. And (and this is weird but I promise this is true), everyone who works with you will be infected by this productivity bug. When you as a manager bring intentional, focused productivity and energy to your Mondays, those around you will be more productive for the rest of the week, too.

    I think of this a little bit like a plane getting to cruising altitude: you’ve got to expend extra energy early on to get to the right altitude. But once you’re there, you can cruise a little bit and still be highly effective. Think of your Mondays as your ascent: you’re breaking free from the quiet weekend and putting in the energy to get back up to cruising altitude.

    If you’re a Monday skeptic, then that’s fine. I urge you to try it for a few weeks and see if you can catch that magical transformation that will make your own weeks seem productive and impactful. And you may well find that this energy spreads to everyone around you.

    One thing to navigate is that Mondays are also a day that is frequently taken as a federal holiday. Also, some people choose to take Mondays as a vacation day more often than other days. My suggestion is, when possible, try to organize your three day weekends to take off on Fridays rather than Mondays. If you’ve got to get in an appointment at the DMV or go to the doctor’s office or take a few hours off for some other reason, try to make it any day other than Monday.

    Because just as winning Monday can set the tone for your week, losing Monday can disrupt an entire week.

    There’s a longer post I could write about how to reorganize your weeks to ensure they are impactful when you do have to give up your Monday workday, and there are some specific techniques you can employ around that. But for now, I’ll just say: just try to not let it happen too often.

    Finally, I know that it can be hard to jump start a Monday morning, especially if you took a real weekend and actually got to disconnect from work a bit. My biggest piece of advice for this, and the mantra I use for almost all my clients, is: motivation follows movement. You can spend your whole life wishing to get motivated to do whatever big boulder of a project is sitting in your to-do list. And the longer you sit there, the less motivated you will be. You must train yourself to begin without motivation, and then have faith that the momentum will create motivation in the wake of your actions.
  3. Schedule one weekly deep work session (minimum)

    You should have a minimum of one deep work session on your calendar every week. Ideally—and this isn’t possible for every manager—but ideally you carve out a day a week without any meetings or distractions. If you can’t jam a whole day into your calendar, shoot for two half-days (say, a Wednesday morning and a Thursday afternoon) with no meetings whatsoever. If you can’t manage that, then you can get started with just a single half-day where you can get deep work done and then work to arrange your calendar to get a full 8 hours into your week.

    Can you make your Monday into an all-day deep work session? Yes, if that’s possible then that’s a great option. But for most managers I know, that’s a very difficult thing to swing because Mondays are in high demand.

    Organizing your time to make this happen won’t necessarily be easy, especially if you work is very interruption-heavy environment or of your nonprofit has a culture that swings from emergency deadline to emergency deadline. But always remember that as a manager, you set the tone for your team and your vibe helps set the tone for the organization. When you carve out time for deep work for yourself, be transparent both about what you want to do and why you want to do it—and encourage others to do the same.

    On the other hand, you might be in the kind of role where you have a lot more flexibility in your schedule and fewer meetings vying for your attention. If that’s the case, then err on the side of grouping your meetings so you can have a maximum amount of deep work time during the week.
  4. Finish your existing project before starting something new, and minimize how many projects you do at once.

    This is the simplest concept but it is very difficult for nonprofit managers, who are famously pulled in a thousand directions, to actually implement it. But committing to this approach can massively increase your productivity while eliminating the overwhelm in your schedule.

    To do this, you can stack projects one after the other, but try to avoid letting them overlap. If it’s possible to work on just one thing at a time, that’s great. Two also works well. I would not go beyond three or you’ll start to see a nose-dive in your productivity.

    The reason this works is that all projects come with administrative overhead costs that can eat up your time and energy: project updates, meetings, coordinating calls, a slew of emails, updates to various stakeholders, plus countless other little bits of admin that are unpredictable. Whenever you take on a project, you’re taking on all the administrative overhead of that project again. And that can destroy your schedule and leave you burnt out and overwhelmed.

    Let’s imagine, for the sake of a grossly simplified hypothetical, that every project you take on comes with an hour of daily administration. If you have just one project, then you might theoretically be spending seven hours a day in productive work contributing to ending that project and just one hour in admin. You’ll finish the project swiftly and be ready to take on the next task very soon.

    If you have four active projects, your productivity plummets. Suddenly, you’re losing four hours a day to administration and only have four hours left for making progress on those projects. Projects will linger. A project that might have taken you a week could easily blow up into a two month project, with a massive amount of time spent in updates, meetings, emails and check ins.

    You can see where this is going: with enough projects on your plate, it’s easy to start treading water where you are making little to no progress on any of your projects and instead just spending hours in administrative maintenance. What a recipe for burn out!

    Stacking projects means deferring the administration until you are ready to get started on the project. It means that you don’t start engaging in emails and meetings on something until it’s prepared to move to the top of your queue. And once it is at the top of your queue, you have the capacity to give it your full attention and get it done so that it won’t linger unresolved for months.

    Nonprofit managers typically have a few hours every week that are just the work of managing: replying to emails, check ins with their direct reports, reviewing and approving work, sending reports to their own managers, coordinating between teams. This means a nonprofit manager’s time is already at a premium. That’s why nonprofit managers must be even more intentional about how their maximize their impact by being rigorous in their project management.

    As with everything, blocking out time on a calendar for various projects is a great way to make sure that you can get the time you need for important work. And for a larger conversation about stacking projects, I’d recommend Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, which really highlights the dangers of overlapping commitments and the power of doing less to do more.

Interested in bringing intentionality to your work weeks? I’m happy to offer time management and intentionality trainings for nonprofits as well as coaching for nonprofit managers. Schedule an initial call today to talk about your goals.

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Spending Energy Where It Matters

There’s a pattern I see all too often at nonprofits, and it goes something like this: a manager has a troubled team/employee/division, and spends a lot of time trying to address it. They meet with those troubled team members and spend hours sorting out a plan to address the problems. There are follow up conversations, performance improvement plans, and often very tense meetings trying to get on the same page. Often, managers try to solve the problem by throwing resources at it, like additional employees, training, and a bigger budget.

What gets left out? Those productive team members who are doing strong work and getting results. Often without making a conscious choice to do so, managers are spending less time with the most impactful members of the organization. Decisionmakers may repeatedly choose to direct additional resources away from the teams that are doing well because there’s an impression that those teams don’t “need” it.

This can turn into a vicious cycle, where unproductive or struggling teams and team members get more and more resources while your top performers are frustrated, overlooked, and under-supported. More than once, I’ve seen a strong performer leave an organization over just this problem.

It’s very useful to watch for this, especially when budgeting and thinking about resources. As a manager, ask yourself: which of my team members is doing the absolute best work right now? And then: how can I support them so they can have a bigger impact?

Then take a hard look at how you are allocating your time and organizational resources. Are you spending the majority of your time with the lowest performers on staff, either directly or indirectly? Are you allocating a lion’s share of the budget to addressing underperforming teams? If so, what message it that sending about the organization’s priorities?

Managers have to expend energy addressing low performance; that’s a reality. But it is a grave mistake to let low performance be the primary issue you’re working on. Instead, remember that a big part of your role as a manger is seeing what is working well, elevating it, and helping to increase its momentum, its impact, or its sustainability. That attention and support on high performance will have an outsized impact on the organization’s effectiveness and culture.

Interested in doing a deep dive on your nonprofit organizational culture and thinking about how you can spend energy on what matters most? Schedule an initial call today.

Note: featured images are generated AI provided by WordPress. I find them entertaining; hopefully you do as well.

Nonprofit Team Retreats in the San Francisco Bay Area and Beyond

I’m extremely pleased to be offering team retreats for nonprofit leadership teams in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. 

Typically two days, these facilitated retreats offer a chance for your nonprofit’s leadership team to have in-depth conversations about the issues that matter most for your organization, craft a vision for the future, reconnect as a united team, and so much more.  

In the past few years, I’ve found particular joy in working with nonprofit leadership teams, which is why I’m making this a major focus of my offerings in 2025.

What is a leadership team? The answer to this question depends on the organization. Typically, a leadership team includes the executive director and the top-level staff (sometimes called the executive team or the leadership team) and may include all managers or all directors at an organization.

What are some of the problems leadership teams face? Nonprofit leadership teams can face any number of different problems: disagreement about the future of an organization, communication issues, knowledge gaps, uncertainty about the future, unresolved disagreement and personality conflicts, resource management issues, work style issues, and so much more. Left unchecked, these problems can fester and become bigger problems later. Building deep connection across the leadership team around the organization’s mission is the first step to mending these fractures.

Sometimes, there isn’t a problem at all – but an opportunity. Even teams that are working great together and in total alignment can benefit from a retreat. A retreat can help the team adopt the same strategy, identify opportunities for improvement, and celebrate recent wins.

Retreats are uniquely impactful. I’ve restructured Groundwork Strategy in the last few years to prioritize in-person retreats specifically because I’ve seen how effective they can be at creating lasting, positive change at an organization. A well-executed retreat can be a catalyst for massive evolution in an organization, where crucial conversations unfold safely and new visions for the future are co-designed by participants.

Through custom leadership team retreats, teams are able to:  

  • Identify the biggest points of tension and uncertainty among team members and proactively address those issues;
  • Rebuild relationships that have gotten out of alignment;
  • Design a shared vision for the future of the organization;
  • Make crucial decisions;
  • Address burn out among team members;
  • Build key skills that will help leaders be far more effective;
  • Create a sense of connection and teamwork that will help the team thrive; and
  • Inject new energy and purpose into a leadership team.

Leadership team retreats are not the only retreats I offer; you can also reach out for retreats for your full staff, coalition, board of directors, or other teams within the organization.

If you’re curious about working together to plan a retreat, don’t delay. Schedule a meeting today and we can talk about your hopes for the organization.

Please note that I currently offer in-person retreats, either in the San Francisco Bay Area or beyond. I do not offer remote facilitation (over Zoom or similar) nor do I offer hybrid facilitation (where some participants call in and some are in person). That’s because the retreat I co-create with you will be designed to be a catalyst for change, connection, and renewal—and I haven’t found any way to reproduce that virtually.

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Strategy Consulting for 2021

While I made ambitious claims in 2018 about pausing on taking on new clients, the world shifted a lot since then. In 2020, I found that many leaders were facing crises like never before, and organizations were facing unusual and difficult challenges.

With the pandemic still raging across the world, I’ve been on hiatus from running team-building retreats. Instead, I’m focusing on strategy consulting. I partner with leaders and organizations as they face unique challenges and help them map a course of action that is true to their mission, realistic about their resources, and will position them to grow and build anew. Together, we build a strategy to help the organization thrive and advance its mission even in trying circumstances.

If you’re interested in learning more about my strategy consulting work, please drop me a note.

New Remote Course in Nonprofit Management

I’m excited to announce that this September I’ll be teaching a course in nonprofit management. It’s designed for managers and leaders who are looking to improve their skills and take their management to the next level. It introduces a range of management philosophies, concepts, and best practices, and offers practical tips and exercises to help integrate those ideas.

The whole class is remote, so you can participate from anywhere. It’s scheduled for Fridays at noon Eastern/9 AM Pacific, each class 90 minutes long, and will last 5 weeks.

I’ve workshopped the materials for this course over the last year, and the truth is that there’s a lot more than five weeks of material I want to present. I had originally designed this to be a twelve week course. However, after getting some feedback from a few nonprofit managers (who, let’s face it, are super busy), it became clear that a twelve week commitment was too much to take on. I’ve thus split the class up into bite-sized pieces. I’m piloting the first section in September, and I’m accepting applications now.

If it’s a huge success, I’ll offer Part One again, or offer Part Two and Part Three to graduates of the first class.

The class structure requires that the cohorts stay small and intimate, as a lot of the class design is driven by discussions and exercise.  For this first course, I’m seeking to build a cohort of nonprofit leaders whose experiences and perspectives will benefit one another. If you’re interested in participating, please fill out an application.

If this appeals to you but you have a scheduling conflict or aren’t sure you can take on a class right now, drop me a note so I can keep you in mind for the next class.

This is a bit of an experiment for me. My work in management consulting in the past has been delightful but a bit unpredictable. Often, I’d go a month or longer without anyone contacting me for a contract. Other times, I’d get multiple requests for a contract, coaching gig, or retreat facilitation at the same time, and I’d have to turn down one or more potential clients. My hope with the course format is to build a sustainable rhythm for supporting nonprofit managers that works for my schedule. It’s also structured to be more affordable than one-to-one leadership coaching with me, which I think is important.

The class starts Friday, September 27, 2019. Learn more here.

 

The Future of Groundwork

I’ve had the pleasure and honor of running my own consulting business over the last two years, assisting nonprofits of all shapes and sizes. Going forward, I’ll be focusing on one nonprofit: the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I’ve accepted a full-time role as EFF’s Chief Program Officer, a newly-created executive level role that is intended to ensure that the programmatic teams at EFF, comprised of the legal team, activism team, technology projects team, international team, and press team, develop and achieve impactful strategies. The role helps me bring my passion for organizational development and management coaching into EFF, an organization I’ve loved for many years.

Previously, I led the activism team at EFF, which gave me a chance to spearhead communications and advocacy strategy as well as recruit and develop a team. Over the last two years, I’ve balanced my work leading the advocacy team at EFF with outside consulting projects that gave me an opportunity to go deep on organizational development. This came with some costs (like committing my vacation days to facilitating retreats and sacrificing my morning runs to morning conference calls with East Coast and European consulting clients), but also many rewards. I loved the advocacy work I was doing at EFF, and I also loved the organizational development work I was doing through Groundwork. I also noticed that my intention of Groundwork being a part-time project was hard to manage; I was tempted again and again to take on big consulting projects because I loved getting to work with progressive and tech advocacy groups I admired.

This year, I realized I needed to make some hard choices about which of my two passions I’d prioritize, as either EFF or Groundwork could happily balloon to fill up all my time. I spent many sleepless nights wondering how I could let go of either of them, when I found them both so meaningful.

The answer was a new opportunity that combines many elements of both my Groundwork role and my commitment to EFF’s mission. Over several months of discussion and consultations, EFF developed a new position to scale its leadership team to meet the challenges ahead. Adding the CPO role also frees up EFF’s Executive Director to focus on some of the pressing challenges facing the organization, including long term planning and deeper engagement with the media.

This is a bittersweet moment for me. The work I’ve done through Groundwork Consulting has been less public than my work at EFF, but deeply fulfilling. I’ve had clients across the country and enjoyed digging into the complex management challenges facing nonprofits of many different sizes. Through this work, I was exposed to an array of fascinating and complex management challenges, more than I would have ever experienced working within a single organization. I worked with incredible collaborators and I feel a deep and abiding connection to those individuals I coached through management and strategy challenges. I also had the privilege of only working with organizations I supported on a personal level.  

To step into this new role at EFF, I realize I need to give up both of the positions that brought so much meaning to my life. The new role will come with its own host of challenges, and I need to be able to give it my full attention.

Over the next 30 days, I’ll be wrapping up the last of my outstanding commitments to Groundwork clients. I’ll be reaching out to those individuals who requested me for contracts in late 2018 and 2019 to let them know I’ll be unavailable. I’ll be transferring the leadership of the activism team for EFF to Elliot Harmon, a strategic and thoughtful individual previously working as the Associate Director of the activism team.

For now, my intention is to keep the Groundwork Consulting website up and functional as a place for me to blog about management challenges, and to continue to provide some coaching to existing clients. But I plan to indefinitely pause taking new clients.  Once I’ve settled into my new role, I will reassess whether I’ve got the capacity to occasionally facilitate retreats, but I’m not taking any bookings now that aren’t already in my calendar.

I want to thank everyone who supported me in launching Groundwork, whether that was sending me clients or working with me on consulting projects or just reaching out to share support. I had always imagined that consulting was sort of lonely work, but instead I found it to be full of new connections and friendships.

 

Booking Now for 2018

It’s been a busy year for Groundwork, and I’m pleased to say I’m now booking many months out. I’m currently booking up 2018, and the first half of the year is already locked in. I will have one opening in October of 2018 and a second opening in January of 2019. Note that I strictly limit how many clients I take and tend to work with each group or individual for 2-12 months. While October 2018 may feel far away, it’s not!

I’m increasingly focusing on retreat facilitation and organizational audits, but also happy to talk through other management, leadership, and organizational challenges you may be having.

Interested in transforming your organization and leveling up your nonprofit management game by working together? Please reach out and we can start planning today. Even if I don’t have capacity to take you as a client, I’d be happy to hear about your challenges and refer you to someone else in the field.

How to Talk to Your Employees About Their Careers

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Photo CC BY 2.0 from https://perzonseo.com

What do your employees actually want out of their careers? What do they enjoy, excel at, aspire to, dream of? What skills are they lacking to actually achieve their long-term career goals, or do they even have career goals?

This article is designed to present a framework for considering career conversations, and offer a few ideas on techniques that can help you be supportive while talking honestly about an employee’s future career. As always, I’d love your feedback and suggestions, either over email or in the comments.

Why Bother Talking to Your Employees About Their Careers?

Having regular conversations about your team members’ career goals can have long-term, positive consequences for your relationships with your employees, employee retention, and job satisfaction.

Let’s start with the most basic, but perhaps least comfortable idea for many managers: your employees will probably leave you. Sooner or later, most of your employees will eventually find a different job. Some of them will move to a different role within the same organization, but many will leave your organization completely. A few will stick with you for years, and—rarely—others will stay for a lifetime.

And that’s OK. In fact, it’s totally expected. There are reasons to check in about career goals regardless of whether someone is going to be with you for one year or twenty.

For employees who will be transitioning in 0-5 years, career conversations can help you get the most out of the time you’ll have together. You can help them gain insight into their potential career opportunities, reflect back to them where you see their greatest potential, and offer them chances to improve the skills they’ll need as they head toward their ideal career. You’ll also benefit: employees that are gaining valuable experience and skills will have ample reason to stick around longer and, when they do decide to leave, it can be something discussed more openly and supportively, so you aren’t blindsided.

For longer term employees, career conversations can help ensure that they are regularly given new ways to sharpen and improve their skills, as well as transition in roles and responsibility in ways that make sense for both the employee and the organization. Together, you can craft a win-win situation, where they are gaining fulfillment from their careers over many years and the organization continues to benefit from their continued enthusiastic engagement.

Career conversations aren’t just for your strongest employees. Honest career conversations can help employees who are under-performing understand what opportunities are and aren’t available within your organization, and can help them learn what skills and insight they need to develop for the future, whether they stay at your organization or go elsewhere.

How to Frame a Career Conversation

I think good career conversations have three characteristics:

  1. Entered into without expectations. We are no longer living in an era where people climb a single career ladder within an organization. Many employees make lateral leaps in their career, or “step down” in order to maximize flexibility or satisfaction in their jobs. When setting up a conversation with an employee, let go of preconceived ideas about what “growth” must look like. It may not mean a new title, a bigger office, or more direct reports. Does your employee want to increase her interactions with the public? Does your employee want to pick up a new skill set that the organization needs and wants? Were certain projects especially fulfilling to her? Or maybe she’s serving as a caretaker for a relative and career “growth” right now means transitioning to work that allows her a flexible work schedule. Try to step into a career conversation without baggage about what career advancement looks like, and try to notice if you tend to think that “success” for someone else needs to mimic how you perceive success.
  2. Iterative. Some employees know exactly what they want their future to be and exactly how they want to get there. But for the rest of us, the future is a roiling mass of possibilities, uncertainties, and fears. The ideal future today may look wildly different from what it looked like two years ago. Career conversations can be iterative in a few ways. First, because your employee and you slowly gain more insight into what career path is truly the best match for her skills and passions. Second, because career paths can change. This can happen because of a serious life event—such as a health scare or change in family situation—or just because time and experience has impacted an employee’s goals and job satisfaction. It’s totally normal for someone to feel different about their career at 30 than they do at 55. Rather than lock an employee into a single path for “success,” offer flexibility for the career plan to change over months and years. Don’t be surprised if it evolves in ways neither of you were expecting.
  3. Collaborative.  You and your employee aren’t trying to simply come up with the best career path for her as an individual. Rather, you’re trying to find that perfect mix of what she wants to do, what the organization needs, and what she is good at. She may have more insight into the first, but as a manager you’ll have a lot of insight into the second and third. Reflect honestly where you see her skills and what brings the most value to the organization. As you continue to develop your relationship, search for ways that you can construct win-win scenarios, where your employee taps into her passion and skillset in a way that benefits the organization. Be willing to be active and engaged in helping show the employee ways she can contribute to the organization’s success.

Practical Career Conversations

Ready to actually try a career conversation? The first step is letting your employee know you’re up for it. Many people make the annual review process a place to check in on career development. I think there’s no harm in that as long as both you and your employee know that’s the plan. You might also decide you want to carve out time during your one-to-one meetings, or set up a dedicated meeting just to talk about career growth. Regardless of how or where you structure it, I’d suggest you tell your employee it’s coming.

When you’re scheduling the conversation, you might say something like, “I’d love to set up a time to talk about your career more generally. I know we can get stuck in focusing on day-to-day tasks, but I’d like to step back and talk about the future of your career. How about two weeks from now?”

That may feel very stilted to you, or not the kind of language you normally use with your team. Adapt the language to find something that does work. The key factors are that you signal that this will be a conversation at which you talk about their careers specifically and that you schedule it a little bit out. That ensures your employees have time to think about it, and hopefully they’ll be able to step back from their day-to-day work and think more generally about their career as a whole.

Once it’s been scheduled, I’d suggest that you as the manager take the lead in the conversation. I suggest you let them know why you’re having the conversation and what outcomes you are hoping to achieve.

Examples for why you’re having the conversation:

  • “I want to talk about your long term career goals so we can make sure you’re developing the skills you need over the next few years to achieve those goals.”
  • “I realize we’re always heads-down focused on the task at hand. I want to talk about your career more generally so that we can make sure you’re heading down a path that you find fulfilling that also helps the organization.”
  • “I really value you as an employee, and I want to make sure you’re fulfilled. I want to hear if you have thoughts about your career over the next few years, and talk about where I see you shine, so that we can keep an eye toward the future.”

What outcomes you expect:

  • “I don’t expect to figure everything out today. But I want you to know that I’m open to these conversations. I value your work, and I want you to start thinking about where you’d like your career to head.”
  • “This isn’t going to be a conversation where you come up with a finalized plan and present it and then I say yes or no. I want to collaborate on this, and give you a chance to think things through openly. Maybe you have a firm idea of where you’d like to be in 10 years, maybe not. Either way, I want to be able to start talking about it.”
  • “I know that people define success in many different ways, and I don’t want to presume what career growth looks like for you. I want to hear what matters most to you in your career.”
  • “By the end of this conversation, I’d like a better understanding of what work you find most fulfilling. And I’d like you to know where I am seeing a lot of potential for your growth.”

During the conversation, you can ask guiding questions to try to solicit information from the employee on what she finds most fulfilling and engaging, as well as offer your reflections on where you see the greatest potential for growth. Some guiding questions could be:

  • What projects did you most enjoy in the last year or two? Why?
  • You took on a new set of responsibilities with X project. Is that something you’d like to do more of in the coming years?
  • Are you enjoying collaborative work or have you been enjoying the solo projects?
  • What aspects of your work are you finding especially uninspiring? Why?
  • Have you seen other folks with career paths you find especially inspiring? What factors do you notice in those?
  • What are you looking for in your career?
  • What would you hope to change about your career in the coming years?
  • What skills do you want to develop in the coming years?

I also think it’s important that you reflect back to the employee the skills and experiences that are most beneficial to the organization. You might say things like:

  • I’ve been extremely impressed by X, and I was wondering if you had interest in doing more of that.
  • Your experience in X is a fantastic asset to the organization.
  • I appreciate X in your work.
  • You are very skilled at X.

When Passion and Skills Don’t Align

If you have enough of these conversations, you’ll notice that what an employee most wants to do doesn’t always align with what the organization needs or even with what she’s good at.

At a recent retreat, I heard other nonprofit leaders discussing the problem of “the firefighter who wants to be a ballerina.” I think of this as a metaphor for the nonprofit employee who is skilled at what she does now and fulfills a vital need for the organization, but her career goals are pointed at something else. Maybe she’s great at handling a crisis and keeping the organization afloat during even the most difficult of times, but during a career conversation she confesses that she wants to step away from the fray and focus on long-term projects. Or perhaps she’s part of your support team, but longs to move into programmatic work. Unfortunately, this firefighter has no experience being a ballerina. Even if you could shift her to a different role, the learning curve would be painfully high, and you’d have to replace her with someone who is less talented at firefighting.

Some people avoid having career conversations because they’re afraid this exact situation will arise, and their best people will ask to shift to roles where they aren’t qualified and aren’t helpful to the organization.

If you find yourself in this situation, know that you aren’t alone. Many managers have been where you are. Here are a few concepts you might consider if you find yourself in this spot. First, consider whether you can appreciate that at least this conversation is happening openly and with trust, instead of having your best firefighters secretly applying to ballerina roles at other organizations after hours. Second, if someone is expressing frustration with their current firefighter role, are there changes that can be made to make them feel more fulfilled in it? Third, are there small aspects of the ballerina role that could be integrated into her current firefighter work, so that she can continue firefighting most of the time but spend a percentage of her work on the ballerina tasks? (Though be careful about this one: you don’t want to end up with someone who works 20% more to try to add in extra ballerina hours while still holding down a full-time firefighter job!)

Fourth, remember that career goals change. Someone coming to you with dreams of being a ballerina today might find they’re less interested in that work in six months or two years, especially if they had a chance to dip a toe into it and found the waters less glamorous than they expected. So even if your very best people are in the firefighter/ballerina dilemma, remember to take a few deep breaths, be a little flexible, and give it some time. Maybe they’ll eventually leave you to pursue that ballerina life full time, but there’s a good chance that if they feel supported, heard, and appreciated and can integrate a touch of ballerina in their current roles, they may remember what drew them to firefighting in the first place.

Finally, remember that the worst case isn’t that bad. If your very best firefighters are hell-bent on becoming ballerinas, and they are terrible ballerinas, and your organization doesn’t need ballerinas, it’s actually OK. You can still acknowledge their interests and your limitations clearly and empathetically. That acknowledgement might sound something like: “I hear you’d like to work on more long term projects, which you have less experience with. Right now, you are doing fantastic work on the quick-response projects, and I want to keep you there for as long as you’re willing. I’m not sure that there’s ever going to be a full time role for you in the long-term project department. But I’m glad we’ve started discussing it. I’ll keep my eyes open over the next year for opportunities to help you build those skills while keeping you in your current department. I’d like you to think about it more, and let’s keep this discussion going. I’d like you to find fulfillment in your career, even if that might mean you go to another organization one day.”

Your firefighters may not want to hear that, but at least they’ll know where they stand. Even better, you’ll have created a relationship built on honesty.

Uncertainty is Fine

If you start chatting with your employees about their careers, don’t be surprised if a few of them are a bit mystified at the idea of a career trajectory. You may find the conversation stilted, uncertain, or even a bit suspicious. Such a conversation can also be successful. You’ll still have an opportunity to flag your investment in your employee as well as talk to her about what skills she’s bringing to the organization. Knowing that your employee is uncertain about her career goals is also useful for you; it can prevent you from making unnecessary assumptions about where she’d like her career to head.

Try to take the pressure off and acknowledge that uncertainty is fine. You might try starting smaller: what are a few tasks or projects she enjoys? What skills does she want to develop? It doesn’t necessarily have to lead anywhere right away.

Don’t Drop the Conversation

If you’ve had an initial conversation with an employee and established a good dialogue, then try to keep it going. Schedule a time later in the year to discuss it more. Look for key take aways from your early career conversations. Were there skills your employees hoped to develop? Projects that would give them valuable experiences? Remember to keep that career discussion in the back of your mind and remember it when you prioritize projects, responsibilities and opportunities. When you schedule your next check in, talk about those choices.

Want to discuss this more? I’d love to hear about your career conversations. Please shoot me an email and let’s start a discussion.