Communications Breakdown
A Friday Fable About Differentiating Culture, Capacity, and Process
Lydia was disappointed in how the meeting ended. The prospective donor was polite but didn’t connect to the stories she told about the organization and its work.
She left behind some glossy brochures and a promise to follow up.
Confident in her networking skills, she wasn’t dejected. She’d follow him on LinkedIn, send a nice email, and touch base from time to time over text. After all, isn’t it about building relationships? She was just getting started.
What a surprise, then, to find her colleagues a bit irritated at the next team meeting.
“You met with whom?”
“What did you tell him?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
It felt like they were questioning her job skills. But isn’t she consistently praised for hustle? For making meetings happen and expanding the network?
Frustrated with their insinuations that she needed to be a better communicator, she kept her head down for the rest of the meeting. With no sense of irony, she responded with silence.
What just happened?
Clearly communication is a problem. Why did it matter? Where was the breakdown?
What was the impact of poor communication?
The prospective donor went to business school with the Board President. Lydia should have checked in with the President before the meeting—or even extended an invitation.
He’s a major philanthropist but focused on a few giving pillars—one of which aligns to the organization. Unfortunately, Lydia didn’t know that and tried to sell him on a different aspect of the work.
His wealth suggests we could ask for a multi-year commitment, not the event sponsorship Lydia proposed. The Executive Director is better positioned to make that larger ask.
Had Lydia checked in with her colleagues before the meeting, she might have discovered any or all of this information, leading to a much more successful connection—and a higher likelihood of converting a prospect into a donor.
Seems like a no-brainer. Let people know who you are pitching to in order to gather information, prepare, and set yourself up for success. And yet, this was not the first time this communication fail happened.
What was preventing better communication?
Like so many things, it was a little of everything.
First, the organization’s culture values speed, grit, and hustle. Individual contributors are praised, over and over again. That means Lydia is receiving mixed messages. She’s celebrated for working independently and then chastised for not collaborating. Which is it?
Second, Lydia is a hard worker, willing to roll up her sleeves and figure it out. That’s how she manages to secure so many meetings and maintain personal connections. But job-specific capacity? No one ever trained her in major donor development. She can get a meeting on the calendar. But she’s not a researcher, schooled in philanthropy, taught to work within a team.
Finally, there is no process for communication other than informal chit-chat. No documents, no workflow, no CRM, no codified steps for sharing information. Lydia is quite sure she mentioned to someone that she had the meeting—was it at the team lunch? What was she supposed to do? The team had no shared system for building an institutional memory fed by regular communications. “You should tell everyone” is a suggestion, not a process.
Lydia was doing the best she could without being trained in how she was supposed to do the work. She was hired and praised for what she could do, even when she hit these so-called “communication” speed bumps with the team. And no one seemed to have a system for what they were suggesting she was supposed to be doing instead.
Confused but undaunted, Lydia went back to her desk—and her silo—to focus on her next set of individual meetings.
Moral of the Story
Common problems can be caused by misalignment of culture, capacity, or process. Or even a combination of all three. Naming the unsatisfactory outcome, in this case poor communication, is not enough to fix the problem.
You need to examine the root cause. Which is it? Culture, capacity, or process?
“Don’t move until you see it.”