Episode 4: Managing Up

Episode 4 - Managing Up (Dec 2020)

Welcome to another edition of “Around with Randall” your weekly ten to 12 minute podcast making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here's your host, the CEO and Founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett. 

Thank you for joining me again on “Around with Randall” this week. Talk a little bit about the concept of managing up.

How do you work with your leader, your manager, your supervisor, and more specifically, if they don't happen to be a fundraising expert and we'll cover that. Kind of both sides, those that do dnd those that don’t. I think that you have to start with this concept of understanding really what we're talking about.

We're talking about creating a win-win,-win scenario. This isn't about brown-nosing and this isn't about sucking up. This is really about making your boss as successful as he or she can be. Creating an environment so the organization wins with the things that you're responsible for and you win because you build a better opportunity for yourself, and for developing the skills and reputation and outcomes that will propel you in your career.

And that's really important because there's some fascinating statistics around how bosses, in many ways control the world, your professional world. A great study done recently indicated that 57 percent of employees left their job because of their boss, not because of their organization or the responsibilities or anything else.

The study done by DDI also indicated that 32 percent of people were considering quitting because of their boss. Eighty-nine percent who are indicating in some way, shape or form, they don't like their boss. And so you can leave or you can find a better way to work with them. And I'm not saying leaving is terrible, but sometimes it's on us to figure out how to make it a more effective relationship.

Another study, this time by CareerBuilder.com, said that only 12 percent of employees leave their job for money. But 89 percent of the bosses think their employees leave for the money. Think about that. You have a scenario in which you have 12 percent saying there are other reasons, primarily the way their boss thinks about them or works with them that I'm leaving, but bosses don't see that.

And so the question becomes. What are you going to do about scenarios where your manager and supervisor are challenging and it's important because that manager and supervisor trolls your responsibilities, your upward mobility, your salary, to some degree, if they're near the top and they're publicly seeing the organizational reputation, which is tied to you.

So there's some things that we can do to make this more effective for our career. So today that's kind of the academic piece. The tactical piece is a little bit longer because there's some great things that are pretty easy to figure out that will make you happier and more successful in your job. The first is a thing you've got to do.

The tactical is you’ve got to work on yourself. There's a lot of different, easy ways for us to figure out who we are and where our pressure points are, how we deal with things. Some of them are more institutionalized. Many of us, if not, most of us have taken some kind of standardized testing around things like the Berkeley, emotional testing ,or interpersonal skills or DISC, which deals with behavioral and communication styles and differentials, our real self vs. our professional self, or Myers Briggs, which deals with, how we make decisions and the psychological preferences we have about people and how we view ourselves and how we want to be perceived. All of these tests are valid in many different ways. The thing I've always found is is that I see people take these tests and there's some type of report out and nobody ever really thinks about them.

It takes time to consider how it affects them and their communication and important more importantly, what other people's tests. Are telling you about them, the other individuals in particular, in this case, bosses and managers, there's three 60 evaluations that are done in terms of, of our annual appraisal.

Is there someone that you're close to that you trust that can give you some assessment and, and candid conversation about who they see you being. All of this leads to kind of a concept that I think is really important, but probably under-discussed. And that's the idea of social non-conformity meaning are you willing to stick your neck out and say something when you think something's wrong or there's a way to improve it, or do you retrench back in those moments when you have a chance to make an improvement for the organization?

The first step is knowing who you are so that you can best deal with the challenges that are coming your direction. The other side of it is a part of the realization that most of our bosses, and this gets more specifically driven towards those that aren't in philanthropy or fundraising, aren’t trained to be a fundraiser or a philanthropy or a fan of philanthropy driver, either in part or in total. If we think about The Lilly school of philanthropy at IUP UI, the first school in the world to be designated and draft  a curriculum that can support the needs of our profession. It only started in 2012.

So if you're a Dean of a medical school or a law school, or you're the chancellor of a university, or you're the president of a hospital, or you're the CEO of a museum, you never got the kind of training that many of us with gray hair have experienced more experiential over the last 25 years. There's no training ground for CEOs and chief executives to have a fundraising background. They learn it on the fly. 

So the second part of the personal is realizing they're coming into this responsibility with a deficit and which puts an onus on us to figure out how we work with them. I like to think of there's four specific things that we're looking for in our leaders and our managers, when it comes to fundraising, particularly those that aren't doing it naturally.

The first is about education. The second is about solution solving. The third is about procurement procuring and the fourth is about embracing and accepting. So education is really all about them understanding some of the basics of what we do. If you assume your boss, particularly a non-fundraising boss, knows what fundraising is you're making a huge mistake. 

I have been lucky enough to work in some amazing, large, complicated, Billion-dollar organizations. And how many times, either as a consultant or as a practitioner, my boss, or the people I'm consulting with that are CEOs, they don't understand what we do. They don't understand the professionalism we bring it, bring to the table. So basic things like understanding fundraising activities and their ROI and the difference between major gifts and special events. They don't understand that. They understand why we keep pushing towards this idea more of major gifts rather than annual giving. And I'm not saying you're giving to us to have a place, but we know the numbers that are driving philanthropy, as we've talked about in previous podcasts, are being driven by major gifts and principle gifts by a very small group of people.

Then there's this idea of the metrics that we particularly on major gifts, but on all kinds of philanthropy, the individual metrics, how many calls, how many visits, how many solicitations, if you're in education or healthcare or other places, there are metrics that drive the services side of the organization, the product.

When it’s clinical or, or hospital related, it’s about quality scores and patient satisfaction and the number of procedures that we do in the surgical ORs in education. It's about how many students and what's the acquisition rate and things of that nature for us, it's about the activities that we've all become accustomed to, but we don't explain very well.

So helping them see this bigger picture is really important about the professionalism of our occupation. The other place is figuring out where the nexus is kind of thinking of a Venn diagram, where the three circles overlap in a very small place. One of those circles is organizational need. What are the needs of the organization?

The second is this idea of big concepts are changing the community. And the third is the donor's interests. All three are independent in terms of their movement or their involvement, but. When they meet together in that one small narrow place, that nexus where organizational need meets up with this idea of donors interests, and it changes the community in major ways.

That's where you see the biggest opportunities. And yet I think sometimes our supervisors, our managers, our leaders don't understand that nexus because we don't take the time to explain it. We also need to help them understand what donors are actually telling us. In a previous podcast, I read from a letter that Bill and Melinda Gates talked about, and this correlates to a study done by a legendary pioneer in our field, Gerald Panisse, who talks about why donors in both cases, why donors choose to give.

And it's not because of their community responsibility or they have money, which is what nonprofit leaders tend to think. It's because as bill and Melinda Gates articulated in that letter, it's fun. It's joyous. It brings great joy to them and to most philanthropists. And it's because they want to make a difference in the world. They want to change lives. It's not because the organization needs the money. It's because they want to make a difference in your organization. Your organization can provide an avenue to do that. You need to help your leaders understand that that's a different perspective. Instead of, as we've talked about before us going and saying, Hey, we need this.

You, you should give it to us. It's asking the question. What is it that moves you? And how do we fit into that picture?

So that's the education piece, the solving piece. First of all, it's our job to bring solutions to our leaders, whether you're a gift officer and you're looking to bring an issue to bear with your CTO or the CTO with the CEO, it doesn't make any difference. If you only bring problems to your boss, then at some point they don't need you. Because they’ve got enough problems. They’ve got to solve many problems. Our job is to bring solutions, even if it's options, even if we're not quite sure exactly what the final opportunity or final result might be. We have a series of things that we can bring to the table to have a conversation about figuring out which is the best one, and we need to solve their problems.

Usually their problems should be our problems, particularly in philanthropy because revenue and investment can solve a lot of those issues. Have you ever bothered to ask your boss what keeps them up at night? How they're evaluated? If you can solve that problem or those problems, you become unbelievably more valuable instead of figuring out what we need, let's figure out what our bosses need, and then figure out how we can fit into that process.

We probably also need to speak their language. We need to turn what we think of as common vernacular in fundraising, to more of the industry in which the organization actually sits. I use always healthcare as an example, we know that it, it takes about, about 7,000 patients to equate to $1 million in additional new net revenue.

But you give us $250,000 and the right people, we can turn that into a $1M. We're a better investment. If you're looking for more resources in your budget, you need to talk about it like the way in which your boss normally thinks about in terms of investment, ROI, going and saying, I just need more money is not effective talking about it in comparing it to what they're currently doing and using as metrics to increase the organization's outreach. That's a value. 

Third. We need to figure out and help them understand exactly what we need from them in the partnership. We need their time and we need to let them know we're not going to waste it. We're going to use it in the key places at the highest dollar levels and those individual meetings that we have.

If you're a chief development officer, or if you're a major gift officer with your CDO, you're going to go into those meetings, prepared a written agenda objectives, and you're going to get out of their way because the one thing that's valuable more than anything else is time. Also, we need those big ideas. What’s the grand scheme that we're trying to accomplish? How can I help solve that problem? And finally, we need to be able to justify our existence with ROI? We’re going to talk about why we're valuable or what we do. It's valuable. The last is embrace. We want to help them embrace fundraising. And by doing that, we're going to alleviate fears.

We're going to help them understand that we'll do the heavy lifting. If you're a major gift officer, it's setting up your CDO or the CEO or someone. So they should have to walk into the room and do their job and really talk about the mission and the direction of the organization what's trying to accomplish.

If you're a CDO with your CEO, all they have to do is show up. We do the heavy lifting. We're going to make sure that they understand that we would prefer them to ask, be the solicitor. But if not, we can still do that. And that works on lots of different fronts. Sometimes. It's that little moment that they can't get over.

Okay. Can you advocate, can you be the biggest cheerleader for this? Maybe we have to make the ask. We have to convince those that don't understand that giving is joyful and people won't resent them for engaging at a high level to say, we need your help to make the community a better place. And finally, we need to fit into what the CEO sees as their goals.

We need to create alignment because usually the CEO's goals are the organization's goals. How do we find out what those are and then find the solutions to make their job easier. So a little bit longer tactical along with some overall thoughts, but don't forget the four things that we're looking for the most are this idea of education solutions, solving procurement and embracing.

Hey, don't forget to check out the website. The blogs are up. Go up to three times a week. Various thoughts that I have on our profession or on professional life. And maybe even some things I do at home hope they're of enjoyment. That's Hallettphilanthropy.com. Hallett philanthropy, two L’s, two t’s, H a L L E T T philanthropy.com.

And again, if you have a comment about the podcast concern, that's reeks R E E K S @hallettphilanthropy.com. If you disagree with something I've said, or if you have a suggestion or question podcast@hallutphilanthropy.com, make sure to check those things out. We are part of a great profession. I say it every week and I'm going to keep saying it it's really important.

You're doing amazing things. Philanthropy can help change the world. It solves problems, the community, the government and others can't - we step into those moments and find solutions for people's huge problems. 

And don't forget my favorite all time saying some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen.Then there are those who wondered what happened well, where people who make things happen primarily for people who are wondering what happened. And if there's something more noble out there professionally, I don't know what it is because this is a calling and I'm glad it called to you. And I hope this podcast helps you be more effective, making sure that you can be all that you can be representing an organization and mission that you believe in.

I appreciate your time this week. I look forward to seeing you next week. It's on “Around with Randall” and make it a great day.