Episode Details

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

There is a moment most executive directors know.

A funder is hinting at money for a new initiative. A long-time staff member is pushing for an expansion. A community partner is asking whether you can serve a new population. Your inbox holds three more open questions just like these. Everyone is well-intentioned. Every option has a case.

You close your laptop on a Friday and feel the weight of having to decide.

This is the kind of tired most nonprofit leaders carry. It is not the tired of doing too much work. It is the tired of having too many decisions with nothing underneath them to settle the question.

The truth is, you are not overwhelmed because there are too many options. You are overwhelmed because nothing in your organization is sharp enough to make the right option obvious.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Dr. Tracy Baynes, the founder of STEP, a college access and leadership program in Arizona that has been running for 21 years. It sharpened how I think about what actually creates calm in a nonprofit leader's day. The ideas weren't new to me. What was new was hearing them explained as the source of clarity that lets a 21-year-old organization keep running without drama.

Tracy can tell you in one sentence what STEP exists to produce. She can tell you who STEP is for. She can tell you how she would know, years from now, whether STEP worked for any given student. (I've written more on the "how would you know" piece in 3 Tips For Measuring Your Impact.)

She is not carrying every decision alone. She is holding every decision up against one clear outcome and letting the outcome answer.

That is the difference. Most nonprofit leaders are running organizations that have a mission and a set of programs and a vague sense of impact. Tracy is running an organization that has a specific outcome.

• A mission is a direction. An outcome is a destination.

• A direction lets you go almost anywhere. A destination tells you which turn to take.

• When you have a specific outcome, every "should we?" question has an answer already built into it.

This is the upstream decision. Make this one well, and the next dozen get easier.

Right now, when someone proposes a new program, you weigh it on instinct, politics, funder interest, and gut feeling. You hold it up against nothing in particular. Which is why the decision is hard.

When you have a specific outcome, you hold the proposed program up against it and ask one question: does this move us closer to producing that outcome, or does it not?

Most ideas don't survive that question. The ones that do, you can move on quickly. The ones that don't, you can decline without guilt, without long deliberation, and without losing sleep.

The "should we add this?" noise quiets because there is finally something underneath the question that knows the answer. (For more on why this discipline is harder than it sounds, see Focus Is Not Optional.)

• Without a specific outcome, every new program idea is a debate.