React, Respond, or Reevaluate?
Deciding What Actually Matters
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Leadership doesn’t come with a handy filter for extracting priorities from the noise.
This presents two problems. Your first challenge is monitoring what matters. Your second is deciding what to do about it.
It’s tempting to tune out the constant onslaught of news, fake news, and opinion-disguised-as-news. And preparing for the future involves guesswork. The practical manager might say “I don’t have time for fortune-telling. I’m busy dealing with today’s problem.” Yes, but tomorrow comes quickly.
Receiving information, filtering it, and deciding whether you need to adjust is a core function of leadership. Doing it well builds a sustainable organization in an ever-changing landscape.
Invite Observation
Training your team—board and staff—to not only stay informed but to filter information through the lens of your organization takes time and intention.
In the nonprofit space, it can feel like everything matters and nothing does. Geopolitical crises create an existential threat, but don’t change how many shelter beds we need tonight in Chicago. Inflation hurts us all—but prices are what they are, exacerbating equity disparities but not changing the underlying dynamic.
So the work goes on, unchanged, separate and apart from today’s headline news.
Change perspective by incorporating short discussions of relevant news into team meeting agendas. Invite sharing. Create a sense of curiosity. What is happening right now outside our organization that might impact what we do inside our organization?
Monitor Incoming
Be careful. You want your team to pay attention and look for changing external conditions. At the same time, you don’t have time to insert cable-news-like debates about anything and everything at the top of your meetings. This is where filtering comes in.
After you and your team have surfaced some real issues, challenge the group. Review issues through the lens of how deeply it may impact the work. It could be as existential as “declining trust in institutions” or as tactical as “there’s a 5k closing off the downtown this weekend.” Which ones have the greatest potential impact on you, your clients, and your model? Prioritize three to five with the greatest ability to affect your work.
Decide whether implications are near-term or long-term challenges. The pandemic required us to incorporate immediate changes to program delivery, as in-person options disappeared. But it also foreshadowed long-term changes to how we approach mental health, fundraising, and the workforce.
The goal here is not to solve for the future in the five minutes atop your meeting agenda, but to assign thinking about it to the segment, team, or department in your organization best equipped to recommend a path forward—and evaluate urgency.
Pro tip: by delegating this kind of higher-level thinking to your middle managers, you are training them to think more broadly about not just the organization but their role in it. This is a terrific opportunity for professional development.
Assess: React, Respond, Reevaluate
As you and your team begin interacting more intentionally with external information, you’ll quickly realize that making a list of matters worth your attention is only the first step. You have to decide what to do.
“Focus on what you can control” keeps us from getting overwhelmed and ruminating. But that’s not to say we can’t focus on what we should do if and when something comes to pass. And prepare for it.
You have three options: react, respond, and reevaluate.
React: Often rooted in emotion or human connection, a reaction to an issue signals your values. You react when it is important to your community to acknowledge what is happening in the world and how it relates to what you stand for. Because reactions carry emotional weight and urgency that is often sensitive, you need guard rails to ensure your reactions are deliberate, thoughtful, and aligned to your ethos.
Respond: This carries action or a change that you will make to address the issue at hand. Some issues offer an opportunity to make adjustments or take initiative to manage—or take advantage of—what is happening externally.
Reevaluate: Significant changes to the world around you may call for you to reevaluate your business model. Strategic planning is an opportunity to reevaluate elements of your organization, but best practice calls for ongoing awareness and reevaluation. Waiting for the 3 or 5 year strategic planning process might be too late.
Everyone remembers the ice-bucket challenge from 2014. A viral sensation, the challenge brought awareness to ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and raised a significant sum for the organization.
If something similar happened today, what would your team do? A quick reaction might be to re-stage it. “We can do that too!” A more thoughtful response would be to structure your own campaign that captured the giving trends driving the ice bucket challenge. Seasoned managers will take the time to reevaluate their development strategy in light of the event, incorporating new information as to how younger donors choose to engage and contribute.
Best practice is to assign decision rights and align strategy in advance. A common problem occurs when the social media manager reacts in the moment with an emotional post that doesn’t represent the organization’s position. Knowing how much latitude managers have to respond without senior approval builds agency and efficiency. Reevaluation often demands both time and an opportunity for discussion at multiple levels of authority.
Make it a Habit
With intention and consistency, you can develop across the organization a habit of monitoring external events and forecasting how they might impact your organization. That will create space for adjusting message and operations as necessary or even changing your business model.
It’s a balance. Chasing the latest trend is a fool’s errand. But ignoring trends that can meaningfully impact your community, your stakeholders, and your business model is just as dangerous.
Don’t wait for the next five year strategic plan to consider the world around you. By then it will be too late.
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