Growth Is Messy

We tend to romanticize growth – focusing on the bright, shiny results without examining how they came to be.

The truth about growth is that it’s often uncomfortable and messy – happening in pieces, in fits and starts, and following no perfect plan.

Just ask our bearded dragon, Kiwi.

Kiwi is shedding this week, and it’s clear she is not feeling like her most amazing self.

The process of growing, shedding your skin, and exposing your new self to the world is exhausting – and, frankly, it just doesn’t feel good. Because of that, during these times of change, she tends to hide.

The same is true for leaders – and for nonprofits at large.

For a long time, there’s been a paradigm in our industry that says we need to have all the answers.

That we need to have anticipated and flawlessly addressed every problem.

That our programs must be evidence-based, proven, and durable to be worth investing in.

The problem with that paradigm is that it ignores the fact that nonprofits are addressing some of our society’s most pressing problems – many of which don’t have easy answers.

It also ignores how change, innovation, and growth happen in organizations – and the very real discomfort and growing pains that are part of the process.

Our instinct can be to hide the messy parts so that we’re not going through the awkwardness and discomfort of growing out loud.

But what if we embraced the fact that discomfort and mess are an essential part of the process of getting where we want to grow and were willing to show that to our teams, colleagues, and supporters?

Here’s what I think might happen:

→ I think as leaders we’d develop more reasonable expectations, appropriate timelines and budgets, and a better understanding of how people change and our role in making change happen.

→ I think we’d come up with better solutions – not because we’re managing growth by committee, but because we’re sharing the hard parts with our teams and working together to find solutions.

→ I think we’d stop feeling frustrated that team members aren’t willing to come along in times of change and instead think ahead about the parts that will be awkward or uncomfortable – the parts that may even hurt a little bit – and think about how we want to address those when the time comes.

→ I think we’d see fewer “launch and leave” announcements from boards and leaders and more “learn and grow” efforts that help us think beyond just one new initiative and instead consider how we create an environment and culture that supports ongoing growth and change.

→ I think that instead of just growing bigger, we'd think more about what it means to grow wiser, to grow more sure of ourselves, to grow more effective.

→ And I think we’d develop the stamina to manage through the messy and uncomfortable parts knowing that those are expected and accepted – rather than holding ourselves to a standard that has never really made sense.