The #1 Thing You Can Do to Improve Your Organization
Earlier in my career, I was a strategic communications consultant leading national awareness campaigns for a variety of organizations, government agencies, and socially-conscious brands. One of the things I loved most about my job was helping students and early-career team members see the possibilities in our line of work.
Understanding the good we can do by shedding light on critical issues, uplifting and centering marginalized communities, creating the right environment for the passage of important legislation, and changing people’s lives – we had an important role to play in all of it.
One evening, while speaking to a group of public relations students, I asked: “What is the most important skill in public relations and strategic communications?”
Hands shot up with many of the answers you’d expect: “Good writing,” “Being a people person,” “Social media savvy,” “Being a good team player,” etc. I smiled and replied that those were all valuable skills to bring to their careers in public relations, but they weren’t the most important.
The most important skill is listening.
In public relations, in strategy, in leadership, in the nonprofit sector, and in most fields where we have the ability and power to change people’s lives – listening is both essential and paramount. And yet, it’s a skill that many of us don’t spend enough time working on.
In the digitally distracted, pulled in every direction, inefficiently multi-tasking world we find ourselves in, listening has only grown in importance, and it can be a major differentiator for organizations and leaders who focus on building this critical skill.
In fact, the #1 thing you can do today to improve your organization is to listen to your people.
I hear you saying, “but I listen to my board members, my senior staff, our biggest funders, and our high-level volunteers every day – I am listening to my people.”
Okay – deep breath here.
Yes, you are listening to some people. The same people you listen to day in and day out. The same people who have had the biggest say or influence in your organization for a while now – years, maybe even decades. The same people whose checks have buoyed your organization and whose expectations you’ve been working to meet in a never-ending cycle of fundraising and stewardship that hopefully also includes some real impact.
I’m not here to say you shouldn’t listen to these stakeholders – they do have significant influence in the success of your organization.
Instead, I’ll ask you this:
Whose voices aren’t you hearing?
Who isn’t in the room when you’re discussing the future of the organization and its work?
Who knows more about the real, lived impact of the problems you’re trying to address than you do?
As more nonprofit organizations re-focus their efforts on equity and ensuring the needs of their communities are met, who we listen to matters. Leaders almost always have blind spots, but by making it a priority to listen well and continuously to voices and perspectives that are often overlooked, we improve the chances that our organizations will have their intended impact and achieve the good we hope they will.
Ready to expand and improve your listening? Here are two critical places to start.
Listen to Your Community
Whether you have direct program participants, provide hotline or information center services, or have an engaged social media audience, start by reviewing the data and feedback you already have from the people you serve. What are they sharing with your organization? What are they talking about in community forums? What unmet needs or frustrations are they expressing? So much of this information lays around, un-synthesized and under-used, when it could be informing program development and evolution efforts.
Then, identify who you’re not hearing from via these methods and reach out to them. Who is your organization well-positioned to support, but for some reason, there’s a disconnect? Speak with grassroots organizers, support group leaders, clergy, and direct service providers of complementary services in your community and ask for connections to individuals, families, and communities whose voices aren’t being heard.
Block time on your calendar every week to connect with these folks and listen to their needs, their desires, and their dreams. Document what you’re hearing and revisit these learnings on a regular basis – especially when you are discussing strategy, program design, alignment with funding priorities, or other plans for the future.
Listen to Your Team
Nonprofit professionals have a reputation for being unicorns, magicians, MacGyvers, heroes, and any number of other avatars that essentially mean they make magic happen with very few resources. This sounds like a compliment, but in many cases, it’s a curse.
When your team is chronically under-resourced or under-valued, they’re often spending more time fighting the self-made barriers and limitations the organization has constructed than they’re spending advancing the cause.
It’s important to remember that even the most approachable leaders are, by design, in a position of power. Expecting your team to feel comfortable speaking their truth to your power is setting yourself up to miss out on the insights of so many of your talented team members.
Your team members need to be invited and encouraged to share their ideas and expertise. As a leader, use your power to create ongoing opportunities for staff and volunteers to provide their thoughts and feedback about what they’re seeing in your programs, fundraising efforts, culture, processes, and systems. Incentivize ideas and solutions that can address pain points to reduce barriers and improve your ability to fulfill and fund your mission. Add a standing agenda item to meetings, use digital collaboration tools to create an ongoing space for sharing ideas and review it on a regular basis, schedule listening sessions for you and your senior leadership team or key board members to hear directly from staff.
When you create space, time, and forums for your team to share their insights, you’ll see that their ideas may surprise you – sometimes because the fixes are relatively easy, sometimes because they have a creative solution to a problem that’s been plaguing the organization, and sometimes because you had no idea there was a major barrier in your team’s way.
You may not be able to solve every issue or address every need right away, but by listening well to your community and your team, you can get to the heart of what your people need, enabling you to create a more equitable, finely-tuned, and successful organization.