Congratulations! You’ve finally done it. After countless months of hard work and extensive planning, your board and your senior staff have signed off on your organization’s next big strategic initiative. Now, you just have to assemble a team that’s ready to handle the months-long process that will be planning for and implementing your initiative.
Whether it’s a new strategic plan, a brand refresh, or a capital campaign, you have a marathon in front of you. Every organization is different, as are every organization’s needs. Your senior staff will help you set the wheels in motion and your board will give you guidance, but a project with this many moving parts can easily go off the rails.
In short, setting your team up for success is just as important as picking the right people.
Here are four guiding principles to consider when you’re laying the foundations for your new team:
Look back to look forward.
Whether you’re new to the organization or a seasoned staff member, you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. Chances are that your organization’s last major initiative occurred within the past three to ten years. What did it look like? Who did you invite? How did your community participate? What went right? What would you do differently with 20-20 hindsight?
You don’t have to perform a detailed forensic analysis for every single question, but being able to answer them can give you valuable information and context for what your current project needs or is missing. Don’t be afraid to dig into its perceived failures as much as its perceived successes, either. Every piece of information is a learning opportunity for your future endeavors.
We recently partnered with an organization on a strategic planning initiative. The executive director felt proud of the progress he made on their last strategic plan, which the organization had almost completed. At the board meeting, many members admitted they didn’t know what was in the strategic plan or what had been accomplished. Because the plan was developed in isolation with a few trustees, those members thought that the organization was unfocused and not making progress.
This story clearly illustrates why the next step is absolutely crucial.
Establish a very clear decision-making process.
No one sets out to be stuck in committee groupthink for months. So how do you manage major decision points without going around in circles?
Depending on your organization’s structure, the key decision maker is your executive director, college president, head of school, or chief executive officer. Regardless of title, the person hired to lead the organization should be the one making the final decisions. It should only be a board officer or board member in extraordinary circumstances, and that should be signaled early and clearly.
Ideally, you want to designate a core project team of three to five people, including the head decision maker. Any number over six people muddies the waters and complicates decision making. Mission Minded once worked with a nonprofit organization on a brand project with a core team of twelve people. Against our advice the executive director wanted to accommodate everyone and ended up pleasing no one, including himself.
I want to pause for a moment and make a clear distinction between work and input. You can and should be asking for and incorporating input from a wide variety of people. But that’s not the same as inviting them into the day-to-day work. It’s the [small] core team that should make key decisions that shape the project’s outcomes. And they should seek enough input, to understand how your community feels, which brings me to my next point.
Reach out and invite in.
Your initiative will never suffer from inviting too many voices for input, but focusing purely on the numbers or reach is not the goal. What kinds of personalities did you invite into this conversation? Do you have naysayers? Big thinkers? Detail-oriented project managers? Anxious perfectionists who fear the organization may crumble if everything isn’t executed perfectly?
You want diverse thinkers to give their input on your project. Too many big thinkers may result in a plan that may not be practical. Too many naysayers may stifle creativity and the bold ideas that give you the best results. Conflict, debate, and discussion is necessary to unearth your best way forward. If everyone agrees with each other all the time, nothing will ultimately change.
I’m going to take this opportunity to quote my colleague Zach Hochstadt, Mission Minded Founding Partner:
“If we ever come away from a session with a client and they don’t have any questions or thoughts about what we’ve presented to them, which has never happened, we’ll know to ask ourselves ‘What did we do wrong?’”
Making sure that any conflict that comes up is productive, though, is key, which brings us to my final best practice.
Over communicate with everyone at every stage.
We routinely bring this up in almost every conversation we have with prospective new client partners. Whether the project is for strategic planning, brand, or campaign strategy doesn’t matter. The more you tell your community about the what and why behind your project, the less likely they are to question it. They’ll understand your major initiative because they see themselves in your work. One of the reasons that we emphasize community research as part of our methodology. People appreciate being heard and included, even if their ideas don’t ultimately sway final decisions.
When we’ve helped clients create and present plans and campaigns to communities, we delight in how well understood they are. That’s no accident! When you include them at multiple stage, they see themselves in the work and feel invested in it.
Ready to learn more? See these case studies about our partnerships with organizations like yours and the results they’ve accomplished. And then let’s talk about how your organization can reach its next level of impact.