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Hey, I'm Jon.
And I'm Becky.
And this is the We Are For Good podcast.
Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
So welcome to the good community. We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
So let's get started. Becky what's happening?
Superhuman in the house alert.
I know and our friend down in Austin, like I've been really excited about this day, because I got the joy of meeting Shain a few months ago and have been following his team, our whole team follows their team at the Mission Matters Group and just a shout out to all our buddies there from LinkedIn especially. They are culture shifters are this term that we've almost heard of culture mothers that are really shepherding people from afar of like, how to show up better how to have a stronger organization, really, from the DNA from the way that it operates. And I'll say I came into this conversation really kind of bias because I think I was scared about having an overly systems approach to anything because you don't want to think of ourselves as cyborgs, you know, just robots in this thing. But Shaun and his team have really lifted the veil of like, how do we actually operationalize and make a really dynamic culture and a place that people thrive, but you're also coming to outcomes that are successful for whatever your organization is chasing. And so I'm delighted to have Shaun on the podcast I've been counting down this day. But let me tell you a little bit about him. Shawn leads the organizational consulting services at Mission Matters Group. And in his work, they really focused kind of what I talked about threading the strategic vision, helping define that, and helping clients understand the six levers frameworks and tools and systems, which helped nurture and sustain organizational health. Before that he is an odd fellow entrepreneur, he served as president and co-founder of Farmhouse Delivery, which is an incredible story alone, but it was all about developing one of the largest and most sophisticated local food ecosystems in the country. And I mean, hs just brain was just wired to serve and to activate people in the community level. Because before that, he was the EVP of operations for Haven for Hope in San Antonio. And he did this incredible work in St. Louis. He was in the nonprofit space, serving on the ground. He knows us. He sees us as nonprofit professionals.
He's one of us.
He's one of us. But he's really channeling that in a way that really helps us all show up better through his work at Mission Matters. So he's got this incredible family. They have three kids and his wife, Dede. They live on the northwest side of Austin. So we're all a little bit jealous right now. But Shaun, get in this house. So glad to have you here.
Thank you so much for having me. I love your work and your show. It's been just so helpful for me. It's something that we actually refer to a lot of our clients, the great resources and guests you have so it's an honor to be here.
Oh, that's nice.
Thank you so much. I mean, I feel privileged because I've gotten to hang out with you and really hear a little bit of your backstory but connect the dots for our listeners today. Like take take us back. What channeled to be want to show up in this way today? And what really informed your steps take us back to little Shaun growing up?
Yeah, you bet. Well, I'm originally from the Midwest spent my early early years in Chicago in St. Louis. So still still feel like a Midwestern er even though I've been in Texas for a long time, I've, my family, we've been here for 14 years now. We spent a good amount of time in San Antonio. And then we've been up here in Austin for the last four years. I started my nonprofit careers. You were talking about John in St. Louis working for St. Patrick's Center. And right after I finished my MSW and just an amazing organization, very entrepreneurial organization for a nonprofit. They run a restaurant downtown St. Louis, they first season they had a small business incubator for people that were experiencing homelessness and had business ideas. So really cool organization that's been a pillar in the community for a long time. From there, I had the chance to I was actually recruited to help open a campus for people experiencing homelessness in San Antonio called Haven for Hope. So I got to be the second employee there. And again, kind of a very entrepreneurial mindset for that board as well. A lot of the business community came around and leverage support and they actually sent myself and a number of the founding team members and board members which included city council members around the country to kind of learn what was working in addressing homelessness and we got to learn a ton and take all those pieces and put them in place and say here, the best working elements. Here's some things that didn't work well. And we built this this this 617 acre campus, it was $100 million capital raise, it was a big project and it's kind of a BHAG come to life. So that was sort of my nonprofit experience. And then and then after about five years into my time at Haven for Hope, I got my MBA. And when I got my MBA, I realized that I've been kind of always doing these entrepreneurial things in my career, even though I was working in nonprofit, with a couple different nonprofits and felt inspired to start my own business. And that was kind of the the Farmhouse Delivery, we actually started, we started as Trucking Tomato was the original name, and then we, and then we, as we grew and sold that business, it merged with another company Farmhouse here in Austin and became that that, but really kind of channeled those, those organizing principles from our social work, my social work, career and collective impact initiatives to the food space. And grew that to grow kind of a big network of farmers and ranchers and artisan food purveyors and old proposition there was, how do we make it easier to access local food and, and we did that through commercial to restaurants and hotels, and then also right to people's doors and transitioned out of that and 2019 to do what I'm doing now, which is this man, it just feels like such a, a blessing and an honor to to be able to do the work that our team gets to do. I think we often say like, I certainly feel this way. And we're a team like we there's nothing else we'd rather be doing than then equipping organizations to be healthier, to create vision to achieve those plans, and just to have a tangible way to drive organizational health. So been doing that for the last three years with a great our great team at Mission Matters Group.
I'm just so glad you're in the world, Shaun, because I gotta tell you, I think when people hear the word systems, they just start to get a little sleepy, like ugh that's gonna be such a long haul, we've got to really dig into the guts. And I think the beauty of hearing your journey helps all of us understand that you have a true heart for service. And you've taken what I think is just some really cool moxie, that you have and curiosity about how do we make things better? How do we make them more efficient so that we can democratize this and move faster. And think like a business and this is what we want people to think about in nonprofit is that we don't have to do things, the way that they've always been done. There are ways that we can modernize and create some innovations that help accelerate our speed, they help accelerate the mission, they get the money in faster, they get the impact out there. And I just don't think we talk about systems enough because there's such a stigma around them, but we can not exist without them. And culture is just one of those things where we love to hang out. We love to talk about it. Because I had to tell you, I don't know that I talked about culture very much at all in my 20 years in nonprofit and the importance of it. And we dive so much into it in this podcast, because we think it's the underpinning of everything that could be successful. And so I want you to talk a little bit about how you build healthy systems. I mean, give us a symptom checker here. Talk to us about the symptoms and signs of an unhealthy culture. And friends. I hope you're listening. And if you hear some things that might resonate with yours, that's not a stain on your organization. It's an absolute opportunity. So please lean in and Shaun, walk us through it.
Yeah, thanks. Such a great question, Becky. And thank you for the qualifier, it was one I was about to share. When you hear these symptoms, and it says this is important because we don't want people to hear these symptoms and think to themselves, gosh, my organization is a mess, a dumpster fire, whatever. However you might think about and get overly down on yourself. The truth is, every organization has an opportunity to improve no matter how great they are and how much progress they've already made. So with that said, the symptoms I'm about to share are our key observations over the last 10 years our group, even though I've only been full time with the group for about three years I did I have been associated and did some work with them over the last decade. And MMG has been around for 10 years. We've worked with over a couple 100 different nonprofits all over the country. So I'm outside of the US. And we've seen these issues and we've been documenting them and we've been saying what are the what's the common overlaps with the most common issues we've seen and eventually how can we help address those so those these key common symptoms that we see as characteristics where there's a lack of health. Let's run through a list of Um, the first one here, and this is probably the most common one we see is teams are not clear on what their priorities are. And so not individual priorities. But team priorities. This is a this is something that it feels like it should be easier to gain alignment on. But as we start working with clients, and we asked them, like, what are the top three priorities for you in the next 90 days, the next 12 months, where we hear answers that are all over the map, like there's very rarely is there an alignment and team members saying the same thing. The other one we'd say is very common is that the identity of the organization. And we think of this as mission, we have a term that we call theory of impact, which is really about the way in which you accomplish your mission, the underlying beliefs, certainly values and vitals, which I'll talk about a little bit more later, that being the identity of the org, it's not alive, right? So it's it, they may or may not have done the work. But even if they did the work, it's sitting in a file somewhere, maybe a handful of people are excited about it. But throughout the organization or throughout a team, it's not alive and in the in the form of rituals, and irregular reoccurring rhythms and activities. The next one, it says visioning. And I know you all have had some great guests that have talked about this, but visioning just happens like every three to five years, and there's like a burst of activity around it. Right, and sometimes too much activity like you'd take a full year sometimes to do it. And then you get done. And and it just quickly falls off a cliff. Team members don't, organizations don't know how to move it forward. They're not equipped with the tools and resources to move it forward. As opposed to thinking about like you're always planning and how can you? How could you move that into your operating system. Leadership development isn't intentional, is another one leader. So leadership, I don't know if this, this might resonate with you all. But from my experience, I think most people we talked to, it feels like luck of the draw, like who your manager is like, if you happen to have a supervisor or manager who really cares about their own development and your development, that's great, but if you don't, the organization isn't doing anything to say, here's our expectations, and standards for how we think about leadership development, here's how we equip all the managers in our organization so that people all get a fair opportunity to be developed. And I'll go through a few more here. I'll rattle these, these next ones off pretty quickly here. But these are these are ones that might feel more more, more familiar, lack of trust among team members. This is another huge one where we oftentimes when we get friction or engagements don't go the way we hope they're going with our clients, we come back and we're like, it's a trust issue, isn't it? Right. And, and, and oftentimes, for team members, it's like they can't make a decision and the core of what we get underneath it, it's like, they haven't taken the time to develop and nurture trust as a team. Low self awareness among team members is another highly disruptive characteristic. There's been some great Harvard Business Review articles written about this that we cite, often in our work with team members to help them see the connections between self awareness and team performance. There's a huge correlation, two or 3x, you know, higher performing, when the team members are more self aware. Lack of curiosity and learning. And then the last two are a lack of space to work through your most important issues, right. So they're not, they're not happening, like in the corner somewhere. But there's a space where everyone's together. And it's understood that we've got this carved out time to create space to work through our most important issues. And related to that, we consider that part of meeting design. And we spend a lot of time talking about meeting design with our clients. And what that means is most meetings lack an objective, right? Like, why are we even meeting? What's the intention of this recurring meeting? What do we hope to achieve when we get together? And if we know that, how do we design the meeting to achieve that objective? Right? So most, neither one of those in place for recurring meeting rhythms. And when we see that, that's that's a common characteristic of teams that could be healthier.
Where were you like 20 years ago?
He was learning this on the frontlines right at these organizations. Yeah. But okay, just a few things I want to throw together. I had a conversation completely not related to this yesterday, where I just casually said, you know, on the podcast, we always try to get people off tactics. And I got challenged by that, because I think some of the tactics are really great. And some organizations need to be doing these things. But when I was kind of rebutting against it, I said, No, tactics are fine. But I said, as a whole, we address the wrong problems all the time, and we try to fix the wrong things. And as you're talking about this, I'm like even through the lens of our own company, these things would be transformational if we could get them to the positive end of the spectrum, because everything is a spectrum. And that idea of just pursuing clarity on the most important things, it feels like the other stuff is just gonna come in line. And I don't know if that's, you know, how y'all teach a bit to to me, it just clicks that it's like, this is the big meaty stuff that you want to focus on. And not on the tactical. Is that fair?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that is one of the first things we do. And often with teams, we start getting them to just set an initial set of 90 day priorities. And sometimes they look at us and say, Well, how can we do that? We haven't defined our three year vision. And we say, Well, it's true, it would be in a perfect world, we'd be able to reference a three year vision and consider that as we think about therefore, what should we do right now. But what matters most is we just want you to get in the practice of setting priorities. Like even if you're, even if you look back, and you get to the end of the 90 days, and you're like, well, half of these didn't end up being relevant. That's okay, you actually learned in doing that, and you can set better ones next time, right. So and so much of the activities, the impromptu meetings, the you know, all the day to day work should be in support of those bigger activities, those bigger those bigger priorities, I should say. And the last thing I'll say on this is, it's revolutionary teams, because it should feel very empowering, right? It should feel if we know what our priorities are, right? Go do the good work that moves them forward. And I trust you that you are going to do that because we are aligned on what those priorities are.
You are the first consultant I've ever known when talking about visioning and systems, who has brought in soft skills. And I think a universal truth is that every leader wants to build a healthy current culture. But few know how. And we talked about so much this year about culture. And you've proposed that to build a healthy culture, you have to build these healthy systems. Talk to us a little bit about this, because I know that there are leaders listening to this podcast, and there are aspiring leaders listening to this podcast. And we also want to be really sensitive to the frontline worker who's trying to get an understanding of how to communicate and also empower their leader just as much as they want to be empowered.
I think we say this, because we realized that the idea of building healthy systems, it sounds a bit provocative, and that it's probably not the first thing that leaders think about when they think about building a healthy culture. But we felt we found there's so much pressure on leaders, when they when they don't, they don't have access to systems and tools. Instead, they just have to think if we just had the right, the right team member who was more committed to our mission, it was more committed to our values that would lead to healthier culture. And then ultimately, it struggled to know like, Well, how do we do that? What are what are the ways that we can that we can build a healthier culture and it's hard, it's hard to know where to stop to where to start. So what we what we have found instead is that if we help leaders think about this as an operating system framework, meaning clarity around their norms, their routines, their habits, like really defining the way work works, this can help stop leaving so much important activity and work to chance. Right. So oftentimes, the things that are the most important activities, the highest leverage activities are left to chance in organizations, right? So do that. Is there a universal and common way? Think about setting annual goals, not just the top of the organization, but within teams? Right? Do those then break down into into quarterly priorities? Is there a some guidance on for teams on how you might track those right? Is there some expectation around what it looks like to achieve those goals and make them measurable and by the way, just an appreciation for the fact that even in the nonprofit sector, people are people, and we all like to win and achieve things right. And so I think we're not very good at that. And then on profit sector, we don't celebrate the wins as much as we could, we were shy to set a target, because maybe it feels like in some way we're doing that we're diminishing the mission, because the mission is always bigger than that, right? But in the mission, you can certainly true that we're always working on the mission, but we shouldn't, that doesn't mean we shouldn't make progress towards setting targets and goals, and celebrating those wins and monitoring them along the way. So when we say systems, that just means bringing clarity to all those things, those norms, those routines, those most important habits, all the way down to how you run meetings. And our belief is that when you bring clarity to those things, when those when those are happening in a more common way. That is a big piece of what builds healthy culture.
I just gotta agree because I mean, we love Brene Brown, in a lot of things she talks you know about is that clarity is kindness. And I think it's true just kind of in relationships. And even the way that we write social post, you know, it's like, how can you most effectively connect with another human in that way? So I'm drinking this, you know, I love this so much. And I just wonder if you would kind of, you know, take us to the next step. I mean, what makes up this healthy operating system like I'm bought in that we need this, I see that there's a lot of kind of levers to pull, kind of walk us through how you would take a client to this next step.
And if you're taking notes start here. Really important.
Yeah. Thank you. Well, I want to start by trying to define what an operating system is. It because most of us are framed for when we think of operating system, it's Windows or Monterrey, right. And, and we have to, we have to start there with clients.
Monterrey right here. iOs.
I knew you were going to be a snob about that. I knew it.
Clearly, there's a clear winner.
But there's a whole other category for how we even think about what an operating system is, right. And that's, and we have to start there with clients. Because we were trying to also educate folks on this idea of what it means to have an operating system in your model in your organization. It exists in a lot of entrepreneurial circles. And in some bigger businesses, not much at all in the nonprofit space. I said this before, but just to be clear, we define it as the systems of norms, routines, and practices that define the way a team or an entire organization works. In short, it's defining the way work works, right. And so not leaving those things to chance, but with intention, designing the way your organization works. And if you think about it, I mean, so much of this is just left to chance. And so how do we that the overarching theme you can think of when you think of an operating system is moving from a scale of from accidental to intentional, right. So how do we do all those things we've talked about in a more intentional way, John, appreciate that. You've kind of mentioned the spectrum, this is a spectrum, we can always be making progress towards being more intentional. So with that said, we have been seeking to answer this question over the last three years and define the answer to the question like so what if that's what an operating system is? What's a framework in which which organizations can access? To do that we develop this framework that we call the six levers of organizational health. Those six levers are identity, focus, rhythm, cohesion, leadership and momentum. And the idea is that a healthy operating system looks like teams actively working to strengthen their performance in each of those six areas. We call them levers because we want teams to feel like they're accessible, right? So as I identify whether through we have an assessment of whether it's through that, or do you just know, as a leader, like, you can often feel these things and say, like, our team cohesion doesn't feel great right now. Well, I'm gonna go to the team cohesion lever, and I'm going to access the tools and practices there that can help us do that. It's important to us that as we walk organizations through this framework that it feels always actionable, right. So we want to we don't want to just bring theory, that's important when we start there and bring the evidence and theory but then we want to say and here's how you can do a thing or two to strengthen each of those areas.
I want to compliment you on something I've noticed that you've said several times that I have never heard the word correlated with systems. And you keep saying it should feel good. And I want to thank you for that, of course, isn't Enneagram two and has a very high feeler on the Myers Briggs chart. Because if systems feel good, we want to live in them, we want to operate within them. And we're not going to be raging against them or trying to swim upstream. So, love these six, they are entirely disruptive, which is one of our favorite things about them. So start with identity at the top and kind of start to unpack each of these and the hallmarks of each.
Yeah, thank you, Becky, um, appreciate your feeler comment. There I am as well. I'm also a nurturer. And that's an there's another framework that we referenced called the five voices. And so we do I say that just said we do really try to bring that to this framework. And we want it to feel very people centric. And and I say before I go through starting with identity, just want to say that we want organizations to also feel like they can make this their own. Right. And so within the framework, we often have people say like, what can I call this and we're like, as long as you're working on the substance of and that fits for you. That's awesome. Go for it. Right. So know that if we are operating, making your operating that's right as your operating system make it your own. Right so so I'll go into identity first. So identity. These aren't by the way, these aren't sequential per se but we we do almost always start with identity. And an identity is includes mission statement includes something called the Theory of impact, which is a theory impact this isn't. This isn't a big like logic model or anything like that. It's just it's just a sentence or two. And all it is is for organizations, we find that most organizations, they know their mission, they really struggle to define the unique and differentiated way that they accomplish their mission. And so we often say, hey, there might be 30 organizations in your community working on foster care issues, what's the unique way in which you accomplish your mission? It's not to say you have to do it in a way that no one else is doing it. But you have to be aligned in the unique way you do it, because that the that's really the beginning of strategy, right? So beginning to know that is where you start to say, Well, what do we want to do in the next three years? Well, what's in alignment with our mission and the unique way that we accomplish our mission? We've answered and haven't answered the question yet, on the unique way we accomplish our mission, we could do anything under the sun related to foster care issues, right. And this is where Mission Drift starts to come in. And I would argue part of the issue is that we drift away because we need more than just a mission, if that's the only thing that we're aligning to, it's not actually enough to know if we're staying within alignment of our core identity, or if we're getting off track of our core identity. A couple other aspects related to this and our beliefs. And I'll share this one because this is often new for organizations, we actually start here because most, there's always something that precedes mission, right? There was a, there were convictions about the problem that you wanted to solve. And that informed the mission that that informed the mission. But there were first these convictions that came about, it's something that you saw, and you wanted to make a difference on. And so we help, it's critical for teams to align on those handful of beliefs first, and then move into mission. Right? This also is differentiating, and how you develop partnerships and how you work on cheering, whatever social issue, it is that you're that you're committed to values. I know, I know, there's been so much talked about values. And I'll just say that we're big fans and believers of Patrick Lencioni is framework in the book The Advantage. And so when we say values, they're behaviors, right, so sometimes we have to help organizations reset because they've had their values framed as principles. And these are, these are the way we interact with each other. Right. And that's, that's how we think about values. And we think about as a core piece of identity. And the last thing I'll say about on identity is that we actually go into helping teams define their measurable metrics of what is your desired impact look like? And I'll share a little bit about this, before we leave before the pods over, but measurement is actually a part of identity, which might be a a unique way to think about that that most organizations haven't. And what I mean by that is aligning on the handful, just a handful of measurable metrics that matter most to as it relates to your identity. Focus is the next one. And focus to us means what is your focus for what where you want to be in three years? What is your focus for where you want to be in one year? What is your focus for where you want to be in a quarter? What are you focused on this week? This is one from a symptomatic perspective that we see the most often. This looks like a leader coming into work, a team coming into work and saying I've got 47 things on my to do list, I have no idea how to prioritize the ones that are most important to our team. This feels like a new opportunity comes in and the team just starts doing it without without thought or consideration of what they're not now going to be able to do as a result of that.
I feel so exposed.
Do you feel nodding through the podcast right now?
This one, we've all faced it right? I mean, we've I've, we certainly face it, I mean, but when you face it, you say hey, I think we're having a focus issue right now, I think we need to go pull on that lever. And we need to go say, how do we bring more focus to our team. The next one is cohesion. And and this is one that is we've really only developed in the last year or so. But it was sort of out of like most of our I'm I'm so pleased to say that most of our engagements go really well. And we have awesome clients. But sometimes they don't. And when they don't, it's usually because of a team cohesion issue. And so we're, after looking in the mirror and saying like, what could we have done differently here? How could we get this project back on track? We usually come to the tough realization that this team's just really struggling working with each other. Right? And so some of those some of the tools and practices and cohesion, there's a term that we help teams with called agreements and agreements means there's a tension in the organization. It's a recurring one might be how do we make decisions as an example? Right? And and this is a very common once we use it as an example often but it says it's about is we're working through an issue or do we make decisions by consensus. Do we, does the leader hear everything, harvest all the information? And then make the thoughtful call, right? Or is it? Or is it some version in between like consensus plus one or whatever it is, most organizations don't take the time to, to align on how they do that. And then when things get rolled out, the rest of the organization is sitting there saying it's not that they have an issue with what's being rolled out. It's that they don't trust how it got there. Because they don't know. If you shine a light on that and say, here's how we make decisions. Here's our agreement to that right as an organization, what we have found is that you get less pushback and skepticism because there's transparency and how things are done. Right, so, so there's all kinds of agreements, anytime you see a tension, you can look at someone and say, do we need an agreement for that? Do we not have an agreement? That sounds like we need to align on that let's document an agreement. And it's sort of the answer to like the the never ending big policy and procedure manual that no one ever looks at, right? It's like how do you just create a quick agreement, right, and, and say, like, what are the two sentences, we agreed it to follow and to adhere to?
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Can I ask a very specific question about that? Because I'm really curious, because I think something that is really plaguing our community right now. And I wonder if this could be an answer to that is they really want to enact change, they really want to embrace these new ideals, new methods of work, new ways to move forward with the way that we connect, and they're getting stuck quite a bit at the top. And when you go through these assessments, and you find that there's a misalignment in trust and you find that there is not cohesion is what do you do in your process? Do you have to kind of stop your process and reset the room and have one of those really tough conversations with the leader, whether if it's about them, or be specific individuals? Like, where's the point where you can address why there isn't this, you know, complete cohesion? And how do you work through that? Because I think that's something that's really bothering a lot of people in our community right now.
Yeah, that's a great question. So there's usually two paths. One is, and this would be kind of like the the most dramatic option as that some doesn't, this rarely happens. But sometimes we have to do we do have to do a full halt, and say, these issues are so severe, that we recommend that you address them before you move on further to, you know, finish the strategic planning process. And I'll say one way to think about this is that teams, often misdiagnose what they need most. Right? And so they, they think the issues we're experiencing right now, if we had a more clear vision that would solve our issues. And that's so wrong, because what you're saying is we're in an environment that doesn't currently have high trust. And we think adding a lot of complexity is going to make it better, right? If we just go through an in depth strategic planning process, and get our vision clear, it's like, well, yeah, but that requires you to be able to have candid dialogue, to be self aware, to be vulnerable, to admit your mistakes to, to encourage and bring a balance of challenging each other, right, and to bring a curious mindset, right, and all these things. So the other path would be that we can concurrently do both. And so we can say, hey, the issues aren't as severe but we are hitting some, some roadblocks. You're experiencing these because we need to work on some team trust. And so there might be like a particular skill development we might work on like navigating conflict, or sometimes it's honestly sometimes it's just like a key leader or two and that's causing the disruption or a member of the team. And we might just say, Hey, we're seeing this, for that person's supervisor, usually the CEO or the executive director. We want to help you navigate this and help you understand how it's impacting the team dynamic. And let's work This concurrent path and help them see what it's like to be on the other side of themselves and how they're seen. Right? And in this team dynamic is what we're seeing in the engagement, we imagine this is probably what's going on when we're not around and address that with them. And then in many cases, we can continue to work on it, but we at least have to concurrently go down that path.
I mean, great solution, because if they're, if you're feeling that friction in the internal team, your donors are gonna feel that in the external. And so we've got to like start inside. And I love this so much do gooders. I hope that was helpful. Thank you, Shaun. Stay in your pulpit and keep going.
Thanks, Becky. Yeah, so the fourth lever is leadership. And I mentioned these of it already. But we think about we start by encouraging people to think about leadership is four different practices. And we call them practices, because we should always be working on these, we should always be engaging them and the four are self awareness, vulnerability, support, challenge, and curiosity, curiosity, and I'll come back to each of these,
I'm dancing, no one can see me, but go on YouTube, I'm dancing, these are amazing.
So I mentioned self awareness already a bit in some other parts of the interview here. But this one is, is key because what happens when, when people aren't self aware on teams, and they don't understand how they're seen, they can cause major team disruptions. And there's a lot of research and data that shows that they can just make for people not wanting to over time to show up and be a part of those teams, much less bring their best contribution, because they might have to say, I bring this idea. Someone says gonna react this way, it's gonna go this way. And there's and I'm just not even gonna bring it today, right? And so the self awareness can be fairly, a lack of self awareness can be very disruptive to team members. So there's all kinds of like, well, so what do I do? You know, how do I invite feedback? How do I get a coach, there's little things that I can do how to engage regularly to better understand what it's like to be on the other side of myself. vulnerability, I mean, I love that we often start with Brene Brown, just kind of micro-lessons to, to help people understand how vulnerability is a strength. And I mean, you know, I think it was 2009 or 2010 that Brene's first viral talk started moving around. But we still face lots of teams that have not yet made the shift to think of vulnerability as a strength. And so we usually just, were just helping teams understand the connection between courage and vulnerability, what it looks like to tangibly be vulnerable, how you can just do it in small ways and how it takes practice. The third one is might be new, and it's this concept called support challenge. There's another version of this called warm and demanding. They're both synonyms of the warm and demanding comes out of the education space, Teach for America and KIPP schools. One of my one of our partners in the framework, Joel Oway, came out of KIPP schools, and he's really helped us embrace this idea. We actually use Coach Pop. I'm down here in Texas, but if you're if you know. If you follow basketball, you'll probably
Popovich yes.
For the Spurs.
That's the NBA team in San Antonio Jon.
Appreciate that context.
You got it. The team in San Antonio. That's right. He is a great example of what what it looks like to live out the balance of a well calibrated leadership style of very challenging, but very supportive. Right. And so so yeah, we asked her our team, how could someone like Coach Pop who has led the winningest franchise over the course of two decades in the history of sports, who seemingly just seems like this, this very hard nosed Air Force guy who's always getting on and yelling at people, grumpy? How was he like, that doesn't feel very inspiring. Like, how does he How does he do that? Well, he does it because behind the scenes, he's taking the team out to dinner, and he's, you know, at times when they thought they were gonna get in the room and review game tape. He surprises them, and they're watching a video on civil rights issue. Right? And he's, he's teaching them that there's so much more to life than basketball, right? And so he's he's doing all of this supporting and building up and building relationship. And then he can move as Steven Covey would say, at the Speed of Trust, and go right into the heart challenge, right? Because because he's, he's balancing these things. And the other misnomer here is that this comes from a culture code if you're familiar with that book, but this idea of like, we don't, we don't need to think about these things like the compliment sandwich, right? Because that's not authentic. Like, right, we don't want to say I'm gonna give you a hard thing, but I've got to sandwich it with that doesn't. If you're on the other end of that it just doesn't feel authentic. did write it. This just means in the course of how you lead as a whole, you're calibrating your support and your challenge. And I want to say, as you can imagine, in the nonprofit sector, we are way skewed to the support side. Right. And it's good, but the challenge side is difficult to for leaders to access at times. So in the last one, I know it's been a little a long time on this one, but it's a curiosity. And curiosity just means bringing the learning mindset so that we can constantly work on getting better and improving and asking great questions. And in really bringing that to all the core core rhythms, too, so I'll move quickly through these last two here, y'all. But the last, the fifth one is rhythm. And rhythm just has to do with the, it's mainly it's mainly about the meeting rhythms that are recurring. And the intentional design of those, it does also include some recurring communication rhythms. But for the purpose of of I'll just focus on meeting rhythms today. And again, as I mentioned, a lot of meeting rhythms are left to chance. And, you know, how do we take our annual goals, and then and then prioritize quarterly? So we train teams on something called a quarterly sync. And here's how you do that. Here's how it involves a retrospective mindset of looking back learning, bringing curiosity, and then setting priorities going forward, how do we bring that down into a weekly format? And then we spend a lot of time on this weekly format with teams? And how do we blend a monitoring some really key sets of data activities, goals, with also creating space for what matters most. So we call this the set agenda, and the emergent agenda and you bring them in, you're holding space for both. And the emergent one is that this is the most important piece. This is where a lot of leaders just like minds get blown, like, Well, wait, am I'm gonna walk into a meeting? And I'm not going to know what we're going to talk about for half the meeting, or like, That's right. You're gonna you're asking everyone to bring it. Like what's the most important one or two issues that we need to talk through today as it relates to our work health, our performance, achieving our vision, what matters most right now, right. And I had this epiphany or years ago, I was a Haven for Hope. And I had just an incredible friend, and colleague, I was leading the menus, I was executing the agenda, got through it all felt great. And I walked out in the hall, and she grabbed me and she said, you know, Shaun, you can successfully help us get through the agenda every week. And yet, we still may not talk about the things that matter most. And it haunted me for years. Right. And I was like, and so I tried to change immediate, but over time, that's been the driver to design this meeting, they said, We have to hold space for the emergent for what matters most. And the last, the last lever is momentum. And this is about like our belief that there's so much learning in the doing.
We have found oftentimes in the nonprofit space, there's there's a heavy influence from academia. And that's good. But it can be hard to figure out how do we move these theories into action. And so this idea of momentum, we we have learned quite a bit from the entrepreneurial space as entrepreneurs, having pure entrepreneural relationships, just this idea of get into picking some priorities, get into picking your vitals and measure them go after them. Hold retrospectives so you're learning about how you're doing embrace feedback, think of action over analysis, embrace continuous improvement cycles, but get into doing it get into making momentum momentum.
This is not your grandmother's operating system. I don't know what I expected?
This ain't dos, folks.
But, this blew my mind. Yes.
I mean, I love that you ended with kind of how you tied up momentum, because I feel like I had an epiphany early on, in your conversation where you were saying, if you don't have the bigger plan fleshed out, it's better to just get started, what's your 90 day objectives? Because you're getting in this and retraining your team. And I think everybody can relate to that. I mean, there's nobody listening that probably didn't feel exposed at some level as Shaun so kindly walk through that. But I think the impetus is start, like start moving intentionally toward this. And, you know, prioritize this. And, you know, we talk a lot about growth mindset as people on the podcast, but I think growth mindset as an organization is something we don't talk about a lot of, like, how are we investing in our organizational health to? And that looks like budget that looks like time that looks like thought power and leadership discussions and all that as well.
Professional development.
Yeah. Oh my gosh, it's so good. Yeah, I mean, so thank you for this. I mean, your group is just a powerhouse of thought leadership. And so we'll round out at the end and tell you to follow everybody but this is why following this team is so vital because it just kind of buoys you and kind of sees you through all this stuff. So okay, you know, we have to Bring it back to philanthropy because this is like the heartbeat of why we love and want to pour into these missions. You've had some incredible experiences. Is there a moment of philanthropy that has really resonated and stuck with you and your journey, Shaun, that you'd share with us?
Yeah, I think I feel like this is a funny example. Maybe like a classic operator's coos example.
Oh, I can't wait.
Well, it's, you know, when, when I was at Haven for Hope, we had a, some really challenging things to raise money for. And because we were this big campus, and we had these huge operational expenses and big overhead, right, and as you all know, and I've heard you speak so eloquently about the overhead myth, and just in general, some of the challenges there, you know, there were things that were really easy to raise money around, we could raise money for the family dorm, and for the childcare center, and, and for the the, the, the, where we kept the pets, and for people that brought, we would always raise money for the animals and kids. And we can even raise money for some of our programs. But we did general ops were so hard. So so we had this emerging partnership with the United Way in San Antonio. And I was set me and the CFO were set together, we're set we're gonna, we got to convince them to pay for utility bills. And in the utility bills were huge. They were there's like almost a million dollars a year. And of course of you know, what the monthly electric gas, water, sewer maintenance, all that stuff. And so over the courts have said, I think we took like, half a dozen meetings with them, where they kept saying, like, Hey, show us your outcomes model. And like, we can give you those like, we will give you those if you want those, we will give you them. But we want you understand, we're asking you to pay for our utility bills. And we can give you like this has an impact. I mean, you're helping us upkeep the overall operation in campus. And without that, we wouldn't be able to run all of our programs. And we wouldn't be able to achieve these outcomes of people getting getting jobs and getting access to mental health care and substance abuse services and moving into permanent housing. We wouldn't be able to do that without this. Overtime, we were, they finally said yes. And and I and what was amazing was we were able to convince them to do it. Because we told them that I you know, I'm not a fundraiser, by the way. So when I say these things, I'm like, this is not gonna work, like trying to do it, but it actually worked with them. So we said, hey, this is the least interesting story of impact to tell. And because of that, we think that that makes it the most impactful gift to give.
That's awesome.
Because no one else is going to do it. No one else will do it.
In to your point, if you can show up and be vulnerable, and tell the story of need, and address it right at the front and make a case for support. It is not babies and puppies. Utilities is not a sexy ask. But it is 100% essential to mission delivery. I think the way that you position that I would absolutely give to utilities. And I think just reframing that is such a great example to all of us that anything can be a powerful case for support and how you present it and how you present the need. That was beautiful story. I love that you picked an operational example, just warms my heart Shaun. Okay, Shaun, you've listened to the podcast, you know, we end all of our conversations with one good thing. What would you leave our community with today?
Yeah, I want to talk for just a minute about this concept of vitals that I mentioned earlier. Because it's unusual to a lot of organizations. We call them vitals, because just like your physical health, your heart rate, your blood pressure, they always matter. They're differentiated from vision and strategy and that those have horizons, and you achieve them or you don't and you reset for the next horizon. Vitals for organizations are they matter in perpetuity, right? And so the thing that we would just want to encourage organizations to do is to try to pick and land on your five to 10 most important metrics that indicate mission accomplishment and mission achievement, and overall health and sustainability. This is challenging because lots of organizations we find they're on their own one or two spectrums, or they're not tracking hardly anything, or they've got 100 things they're tracking, right. But to say the handful that matter most again, we think of this as part of identity is really aligning to your point of clarity, being kindness. It's super clarifying. Therefore, if we're working to achieve these, which grants, which opportunities, which partnerships will help us achieve these measurable results. It's so helpful in that way. And the last thing related to it is, don't get stuck in the messiness of measurement. Oftentimes, people can then land on those, but then they get stuck on how we're going to measure them. Right. So we work with an organization right now who cares so much about spiritual formation. And they're really stuck on how you measure it. It's hard. It's so hard to measure spiritual formation in individuals. And we have actually, we're doing some partnership with a with an awesome, awesome friend who's in the Wharton School who's helping us, like figure out how we, how we measure it, and the basic encouragement to them, start small, pick something, right, that that you think will help you get some insight on how people are being formed. And step back, learn from it and keep adjusting. Right, keep adjusting, you're gonna stick with the messiness of it, and understand it's okay. Like, you don't have to get the perfect measurement right out the gates. So pick some vitals, pick a way to measure them and embrace this idea that you can get to continue to make it better.
Boom.
I think that's the uppercut at the end. It's like I feel I feel
One, two.
There's my sports analogy for everybody.
So proud of you.
Right? That's really where you're on that out. So tell us about the Mission Matters Group, you know, I mean, y'all are a powerhouse group to follow. But how can people connect with you and get this incredible resource you walked us through today? And just tell us about your team? And how to find y'all online?
Yeah, well, thank you all, again, for the opportunity. We're such big fans here of y'all as well, now that you're like glad that you're following us on LinkedIn, we you can definitely track our team on LinkedIn, see all of our, our team there were active there. And, you know, we, our work centers around helping teams to implement the six Levers framework, oftentimes, our work, the entry point is into strategic planning. And so we don't take a traditional approach to that as you can hear, but if that's a need, we're happy to help in that way, and then help those teams be introduced to the framework. We do have, you know, we, we do traditional engagements like that. We also, we also do, starting in the beginning of next year, in 2023, will be standing up some sprints where, where leaders within organizations can go through kind of a six to eight week course, and how to learn about the six levers and start applying them in their organization. So that that will be coming soon. You can check all this out at sixlevers.co Mission Matters Group as a whole, you can find out about missionmattersgroup.com. And our team there also does technology implementations, specifically for the nonprofit space. So we do a lot of work. And in Salesforce, they all might appreciate this in the fundraising space, but also program management. So we didn't talk about that much today. But that is it. We have a whole team that just focuses on technology implementation specifically for nonprofits, and you can reach me at Shaun@missionmattersgroup.com If you want to send me an email, find me on LinkedIn, we'd love to connect with anybody if you have questions about any anything that I talked about here today.
And if you're even just a little bit curious if this has piqued your interest at all, please go follow Shaun, Tony, Christie, Josh. I mean, there's so many incredible people within this group who have thought leadership on LinkedIn, we're watching and learning from you guys all the time. I think it'll get your mind in the right place to possibly take this leap because it will change the way that you work with each other. And the way that you push out incredible content, mission, impact all of it, start in the inside. And and go for it. Friends, you've got this. So thank you, Shawn, thanks for coming in. Thanks for getting us excited about systems. This is a first for me, and I'm really geeked out about the potential for it. You're great.
Thank you so much for having me ya'll. Really appreciate it.
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