Working OK is not the Same as Flourishing
If your firm’s own operational updates read the same way, we are keeping up and things are working okay, it is worth sitting with what that phrase is actually reporting.
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The Founder Bottleneck
It is a matter of deciding, on paper, who owns what, sized to the firm as it is now rather than as it started, so that once the decision exists, someone on the team can act on a client’s behalf because they hold the authority, not because the founder finally relaxed enough to allow it.
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The Step Smaller than Most Leaders Assume
If your firm depends on someone carrying the operational layer alone, staff or outside partner, the question worth asking is not whether they are capable. The data says they almost certainly are. The question is whether the layer they are carrying was ever built on purpose, or whether it has just been getting absorbed, one gap at a time, by someone who has already proven they can do it the hard way.
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The Guest In The House
A Guest Post from Chris Tobin, Founder of Flywheel Advancement
Workforce instability is a common challenge for many nonprofits, especially when recruiting experienced senior leaders. To help navigate these important transitions, many organizations turn to interim (or fractional) management as a short-term solution to maintain stability and stay aligned with their mission goals.
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The Fence Your Team Needs
A Guest Post from Jen Wasem, Jenerous Philanthropy.
Ownership is about being responsible for your role. It’s also about allowing others to be fully responsible for theirs.
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What Good Looks Like: Ownership
If your team keeps asking who was supposed to do that, you are not behind and you are not alone. It is one of the most common things a growing organization runs into, and it is rarely about effort
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What Good Looks Like: Offboarding
If your organization loses something every time a person leaves, you are not behind and you are not alone. It is one of the most common things a growing team runs into, and it is rarely about the people who left.
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Ownership is the Variable Nobody Names
When the room does not know who owns something, the comfortable move is to talk about the tool. Naming the owner does three things: it tells the owner this is theirs, it tells everyone else it is not theirs, and it tells the system what to optimize for.
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The First 90 Days
The new development associate was three weeks in, two of her logins had not been provisioned, and her manager had rescheduled their one-on-one twice. The organization was, at that moment, in the slow process of giving her every reason to leave by month six, by accident.
