Episode 18- Five Steps to Manage your Nonprofit Leadership Team
Regardless of the size of your agency, most likely there is a group of senior staff who formally or informally serve as your leadership team.
This group should serve as your brain trust and implementers of agency initiatives.
When your leadership teams are high performing, they act as autonomous decision makers, providing you with an extra set of eyes and ears and allow you to focus on strategic issues.
But often that is not the case.
Your team may continually look to you for guidance, bogging you down.
There may be conflict between the members of the team, a dysfunctional form of sibling rivalry.
Their skill levels may be all over the map, so it is difficult to set consistent expectations.
Their capacity to work as a team has a tremendous influence on your effectiveness.
Today we are going to identify the five key steps to get your leadership team to work well together and move your agency forward.
You can find the transcript at relishyourrole.com/18
If you are lucky, you have handpicked your leadership team and hopefully have surrounded yourself with smart, motivated, and collaborative people.
But perhaps you inherited them from the previous director, and not all of them would have been your pick.
Either way, as the Executive Director it is your responsibility to work with this group to shape them into your dream team. Here are five tips to start the process of creating the leadership team you deserve.
1. Make Sure Everyone is Aligned with Your Vision
You have a clear sense of where you want to take your agency and your leadership team is the engine to get you there. You need to align your team with your vision and involve them by inviting them to contribute their ideas and thoughts of what it would take to move the agency forward.
Help promote their ownership and commitment to your vision by soliciting and incorporating their experience and perspective to inform your views.
Devote the time for extended discussions to develop a shared understanding understand how their work makes a difference and aligns with your vision
Be genuine and open-minded in these discussions, if you want their buy-in you have to be willing to hear their concerns. Take the time to clarify and if necessary, find common ground.
A wise leader is able show flexibility and be willing to make some concessions in service to goal of getting all your team members bought in to your vision.
2.Empower Your Team
Your team is made up of individuals with different personalities, experiences and skill sets. You should use your knowledge of these individuals when assigning tasks and responsibilities with the goal of building their professional skills.
Include them in decision making. Use your leadership team meeting for collaborative problem solving, not merely reporting to one another.
Judiciously assign cross department projects to help them build their collaboration and decision-making skills.
You also empower them by giving them access to the tools, training, and resources they need. You need to support them, by recognizing their achievements, offering constructive feedback, and creating a positive work environment. Encourage your team members to take initiative, learn new skills, and collaborate with others. Show them that you trust and appreciate them.
3. Communicate Frequently
You have to be clear about your expectations and communicate them frequently.
As a nonprofit Executive Director, it is your role to ensure that that you and your leadership team have a mutual understanding of what you expect from them and what they can expect from you.
I often hear my clients trying to untangle themselves from problems with a member of their leadership team because they have assumed that they shared a mutual understanding of expectations.
You cannot assume that they have the same expectation for work products, or timeliness of response. You need to be explicit in your expectations and initially drill down to a granular level to set you and your team up for success.
It is better to spend the time in the beginning of any project or task to iron out each other’s understanding of what the end goal looks like and how to get there.
Do not wait until things have gone off the rails to have a conversation about how things are going.
To get the best out of your team you have to check in with them often and be a partner in problem solving.
Make yourself available to them individually and as a group to probe on how things are going.
If you are trying to create a team of confident leaders you have to invest the time to listening and incorporating their concerns and ideas.
4. Acknowledge Success
It is tremendously important to take the time and celebrate successes. If you are trying to instill a collaborative approach and members of your team successfully collaborate on a project, make sure they are publicly recognized for their work.
Nonprofit work is hard and if you want to foster loyalty to your agency and your leadership, thank people for a job well done.
Let them know you see your team members and appreciate their efforts.
5. Attend to the Team Dynamic
There are a lot of personalities to juggle. Do not turn a blind eye when you see tension between members. Check in with each member about how they are working as a team and use the opportunity to support their own self-awareness about personality conflicts and what can be done to resolve them.
Resist the tendency to insert yourself in that conflict. I you want to grow leaders you want to coach them into understanding what is not working well and help them problem solve how to resolve it.
Do not let conflict simmer and put the onus on them to create productive work relationships.
Similarity if there is member who coasts on the work of others or allows themselves to be passive when they should speak up, spend time with them to help them assess their role in the group and trouble shoot with them on how to change it.
Attending to your leadership team- making sure they have a shared set of purpose and are able to work productively together is a key responsibility of an Executive director.
These five skills will get you one step closer to having the support of a leadership team that you deserve.