Join Rhea Wong in this solo episode of Nonprofit Lowdown as she shares her top 10 insights and lessons learned from her journey as an Executive Director. This episode is inspired by Brittany, a new Executive Director Ria met during a recent speech in Vegas. Whether you’re a seasoned leader or just stepping into your role, this episode is packed with wisdom that’ll help you navigate the challenges and triumphs of being at the top.
Key Takeaways:
Choose Happiness: You can be right or you can be happy, but you can’t be both. Prioritize your happiness and team cohesion.
Perceptions Matter: Everything you do will be interpreted by your team, so be mindful of your actions and behaviors.
Manage Expectations: No one will meet your high standards perfectly; learn to manage your expectations and delegate effectively.
Protect Your Time: Focus on high ROI tasks and protect your most valuable asset—your time.
Face Your Fears: The tasks you avoid out of fear are often the ones that will move the needle the most.
Hire Slowly, Fire Quickly: Take your time to hire the right people and don’t hesitate to let go of those who are detrimental to your culture.
Adjust at the Top: The skills that got you to the top won’t necessarily help you succeed there. Adapt and evolve.
Self-Awareness: Your emotional state impacts your team. Be responsible for managing it.
Get a Coach: Even top performers need a coach. An external perspective can help you grow.
Find a Community: It’s lonely at the top; find a community for support and camaraderie.
Episode Transcript
RHEA 00:00
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Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown, I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey, Podcast Listeners, Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown. Today’s a special day. I’m doing another solo episode. So hit me up and let me know if you like the new format and if there are any topics that you want me to talk about. Happy to oblige. Okay. I am doing this episode for a friend I met at a recent speech that I did in Vegas.
We were chatting in the, uh, airport lounge. And she is a new executive director. So this one goes to Brittany. Brittany, thank you for the inspo. Brittany is a new executive director. And we were talking about all of the challenges and trials and tribulations of being an ED. I thought I would do the top 10 things that I wish I had known as an executive director.
In no particular order, and I will expound on these. So Brittany, this one’s for you. I hope it’s helpful. Number one, everything you do will be interpreted whether you know it or not. This is a very interesting one because I, when I started my organization, we were small, we were three people literally in a broom closet.
I talk about this a lot, but we literally had to stand up from our chairs to let people pass through because we had so little space. Fast forward a couple of years later, we were. a proper nonprofit. We were in an actual office space. And yet I was still acting in my mind like we were just like the three amigos in a broom closet.
Why this is relevant is what we know is that human beings like to be led. We like to see who the leader is. It’s a very kind of animal behavior, Simeon, who’s in charge here mentality. So in my mind, I was just one of the in the broom closet. But because my team had grown, because my staff had grown, I didn’t realize that I was being perceived in a different way.
So I was acting one way, but I was being perceived another way. So let me give you a quick example. There was this rumor, I guess you could say, that I had, I preferred some people on staff over other people. Not really sure where that rumor came from. Then it occurred to me that the people that I supposedly preferred or favored were actually people who were just literally on my way from the front door to the coffee to my office.
They were outside Bullring. on the outer edge of the bullpen. And I just happened to say hello to them more than I said hello to the people on the inside of the bullpen. Not because I like them more or anything like that. It was simply that they were just in the path between me and the coffee. It’s not something that I would have ever considered, but this was a rumor that I had legs because I said hello to some people over other people.
Again, I didn’t know this was the interpretation of what I was doing because in my mind I was just getting coffee and going to my office. But in the minds of my staff. It was interpreted. So I say that to you to say that everything that you do will be interpreted, whether you know it or not. It can be interpreted as benign as who you ask to have lunch with, who you sit next to, what does the seating look like, who you say hi to in the morning, who you might compliment, whose work you might lift up in a meeting for praise.
I mean, all of it. So that is just one thing I wish I had known. Okay. Number two, this is a big one. Nobody will ever be as good as you want them to be. And I know there’s a hard truth. I know there are people out here who are going to say that I’m being super negative, but look, the truth of the matter is, and especially for my type A high achievers, we care so much about the mission.
We want everyone to be. As good as they can be as leaders. We are out here putting blood, sweat, and tears into the mission. When we expect people to be as dedicated as we are to be as good as we are. We’re setting ourselves up for disappointment. This I think is particularly true of founders who have literally been in everybody’s seat.
So for the most part in my organization, I had done everyone’s job. So I knew when. I felt like they were phoning it in. Here’s the thing, no one is ever going to be as good as you want them to be because you are perhaps unreasonable in your level and standard of expectation, which is not to say that you should lower your standards, but just know that the gap between where they are and where you want them to be will always exist.
And the bigger the gap, the unhappier you are going to be. This is true in life as well. So the answer is not to just accept mediocrity. That is not the answer. The answer, however, is to know that you are probably going to need to manage your own expectations. And that means that anybody who can do the job at an 80 percent level is probably going to be someone that you should delegate to.
Or 110 percent of what you expect, 80 percent is good enough to get it off your plate. Because that leads me to point number three. Which is you must protect your time. You are the asset. I just talked about Beyonce. So Beyonce is obviously the star of the show. She is the one on stage doing all the things.
Beyonce is not the person who is sewing garments in the back. She is not the person working the. Soundboard. She is not the person who is like sweeping out the auditorium. Now, I’m sure if she needed to, she would, but that is not her highest and best use. And so what we really need to think about is as leaders, as executive directors, and particularly as frontline fundraisers who are the base of the brand.
You must protect your time. And what I mean by that is that I want you to be spending your time in the highest ROI quadrant that you can. So what that means is that often we equate being busy with being effective. And there are two very different things. The way I think about it is when I’m doing a task, isn’t it a 10 task?
Is it a hundred dollar task or is it a thousand dollar task? Now, sometimes it’s unavoidable that you have to do the 10 tasks, but if To grow. If we want to focus on financial sustainability, I posit that we should be spending our time on the thousand dollar and up tasks and figuring out how to either eliminate delegate or automate the other tasks that are not going to move the needle.
And really in your heart of hearts, I know that you know, which activities move the needle. Usually it involves things like calling donors, which leads me to my next point. I don’t know. I think we’re at number five, number five. The thing that you’re scared to do is probably the thing that you need to do.
So. What that means is I would often procrastinate and do things to be busy to avoid doing things that I knew I should be doing, but it felt scary. That meant things like calling donors, having coffee with donors, talking to board members, going to presentations, being on stages, like these were uncomfortable things for me.
And yet I knew those were the things that would probably move the needle the most. So I think that’s number five. Know that the thing that you’re scared to do is probably the thing that you need to be doing. Okay, let’s see. Number one is everything you do will be interpreted. Number two is nobody will ever be as good as you want them to be.
Number three is being busy is not the same as being effective. Number five is the thing you’re scared of is the thing that you really need to do. Okay, number six. This is so important. Higher slowly, fire quickly. Now, I heard this said again and again as I was coming up. I did not fully embrace it and I got burned.
a lot. So let me delve into this a little bit deeper. Slowly means that you have a process and you are vetting people pretty thoroughly. One of the books that I love and I think changed my hiring game quite a lot was Who? The A Method for Hiring. Why that was helpful is that it actually provides a framework that is quite hard to, to game because I have had a situation, as I’m sure many of us have had, is that we’ve hired someone on the basis of a good interview.
Then once we hire that person, we’re like who is this person showing up for work? And this was not the same person that I interviewed. I’m, I hired the person who showed up for the interview, not this person. So hire slowly. The other thing, I cannot say this enough. Do the reference checks and important caveat here.
These are not the reference checks that people submit to you because obviously they’re going to give you the names of people who will say good things about them. That’s not what you’re interested in. What you’re interested in is actually talking to their direct supervisors and asking a series of questions that will help you to really get at performance.
So again, if you read Who, you’ll get some ninja hacks on how to do this. But unless you ask for specific references, specific people that you want to talk to, and by that, specifically people who have directly managed the person that you’re trying to hire. The references are going to be useless. So that’s another thing I learned.
That’s a sub lesson. Fire quickly is this. If you think that someone is detrimental to your culture, you need to get rid of them as soon as possible because a negative person in your culture is a cancer. They will eat away at the marrow of your organization and undermine everything that you’re trying to build.
And it will happen very quickly. Because bad behavior has a very strong gravitational pull. And so I can’t stress this enough. Please fire people quickly if they are undermining organizational culture. Think of it as a no assholes rule. And frankly, I don’t even care how good they are at their jobs.
Nobody can be good enough to undermine the culture. So when I think about firing them quickly, it’s both being very clear with people about the level of expectation of the job, the skillset, as well as the contributions to the organizational culture and environment. Both these things are equally important.
One of these things are a killer. Now, the other thing is, if someone is really underperforming, you have to fire them quickly as well. Because, to go back to point number one, everybody is going to be looking at you to see how you’re dealing with the situation. If it looks like someone gets away with phoning it in or gets away with behaving badly or whatever it is, then it gives everybody else permission to do the same or it undermines you because just like a kindergarten classroom, like if Bobby gets away with something, then Sally wants to get away with it too, right?
We’re always like looking at what we consider to be fair. So you must hire slowly. I can tell you a million horror stories of not being of creating bigger headaches when I did not move quickly, hoping a situation would get better. And frankly, it never did. And I have never been in a situation where I fired someone and thought, why is this happening?
That was truly. In every situation in which I’ve had to let someone go, I’ve always thought I should have done it earlier. And once you get to that point of decision that you’re going to let someone go, there’s a tremendous relief. I wanted to also just say that letting somebody go does not have to be a negative experience forever and ever.
Because even, first of all, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. There should be lots of conversations leading up to that conversation. But I think if we want to frame it, this is an opportunity for the person that you’re letting go to go and find the thing that they are awesome at, that they love, that they’re going to be really good at.
And it’s not this thing. And so in a sense, you are freeing them to find the thing. And I know that sounds very naive and Pollyanna ish, but it’s actually true. Okay, so hire slowly, fire quickly. Okay, this is a big one here. The job is different at the top. Now, I know that there are many of you listening out here who probably were like amazing program directors or really good development directors or whatever you were doing before to get to the job.
Um, Yeah. Yeah. But what got you here won’t get you there. What I mean by that is that we often lean on our competency because it got us to the point of becoming the executive director. But what no one really tells you is that once you have the top job, The thing that got you there, the thing that you were really good at is now not the thing that the organization needs from you.
So let me give you an example. Maybe you got hired into the top job because you are really good at development, right? You were the top fundraiser and you were hired as an ED. Now as an ED, you’re probably going to lean pretty heavily on your fundraising skills because that’s what you’ve been successful at.
That’s what got you the top job. But the thing is. The skills, the scope of responsibility, the things that people need from you, the level of leadership has actually shifted. And so if we are not also shifting our skill set, our scope of responsibility, and the way that we manage people and the way that we interact with people and the organization, then we are not doing our jobs.
So being an ED is not just a bigger. development director job, where it’s not just a bigger program director job, it is actually, you’re shifting the focus of the aperture of the responsibility actually gets bigger. And so the mistake I see, and I certainly made too, was focusing too much on the thing that I was good at and not enough on the thing the new challenge that I had to take on.
As someone who came up through program, I was really focused on program. I was probably a little too focused on program, honestly. And so because of that, I was not doing other things that could have been more beneficial, like fundraising, like being out in the community, like being the face of the organization.
And again, our brains like to be, we like, comfort. We like predictability. And so sometimes we will lean very heavily on the thing that we know that we’re good at in order to avoid doing the thing that feels uncomfortable or feeling incompetent at the thing that we know we need to be doing. Okay. So many.
All right. I don’t even know what we’re up to. I think we’re up to seven, seven, self awareness. And maintaining your own emotional state are key. As you go, so goes your team. So, I realized this, and I probably realized this a little too late, so my apologies to all of my staff members. I was very anxious. I was a very anxious lady.
I’m by nature an anxious person. I also really relied on grinding harder. As a way to ensure success, but what I did not realize, and again, this goes back to point number one, that everything that you do will be interpreted is I modeled for everybody running on anxiety, grinding harder, burning the midnight oil, doing all the things.
And this feeling of anxiety that I had. Which I thought I was hiding, but honestly, I wasn’t hiding that well. Reverberated throughout my team. And so they were also working on, they also felt a very high level of anxiety. Even though I said all the right things, I said things like, no, you shouldn’t be checking emails after seven.
No, you should be taking your whole weekend. Oh no, you should absolutely be unplugged during your vacation. I’m not going to do that, but you should do that. So also model the behavior. that you want to see. So I was communicating two different things to people, even though I was quote unquote, saying the right thing.
So I say that all to say that you have to be aware of your own emotional state and you have to be responsible for managing your own emotional state because that emotional state will be what impacts your team. If you’re modeling. ease and joy and comfort, so will your team. If you’re modeling, like I was, anxiety, high levels of stress, burning the midnight oil, so will your team.
Which leads me to my next point. Get a coach. Nobody teaches you how to be an executive director. And frankly, here’s the thing. Top people in the world, like LeBron James has a coach. Steph Curry has a coach. Serena Williams had a coach. You can be at the top, top level of your game and still need a coach.
It’s very hard. to perform surgery on yourself. And so many of us are out here trying to perform surgery on ourselves. But the truth is, if we want to be able to be the most effective we can be, we must have an outside perspective to help us work through it. I think it is imperative that executives get a coach because it will not only help to develop them and give them an outside perspective, but it will also help to Focus them because often when you’re in the weeds, it’s so easy to get into these busy tasks where I’m just responding to email, but actually not moving the needle on something.
So it’s important to have some outside person. It’s the same reason we have therapists. It’s not that we’re not smart enough to figure out our own problems. It’s always helpful to have a third party who can see a problem objectively. So get a coach. Leads me to, I think it’s point number nine here is find a community.
I think it was Harvard did a study where they looked at two companies, both of which had the same amount of work. And in company A, people were burnt out in company B, they were not burnt out. And the difference was not actually in the amount of work. The difference was in the feeling of loneliness. As I say, it is lonely at the top as an AD, you have a bunch of stuff that you can’t talk about with other people that you can’t talk about it with your team.
You can’t talk about it with your board. You can’t talk about it with funders because maybe those people are the problem, but there’s a level of discretion that you must have as an AD. And there aren’t other people in the organization who understand what you’re up against. And so it’s really important to have a for support, for Camaraderie for community because it is a lonely job and it is a hard job.
And if you don’t have that community and the support, you will burn out. Number 10. And this is true both in life and in being an ED. You can be right or you can be happy, but you can’t be both. So choose. It feels good to be right, but you can be right or you can be happy. Let me, let me do an example for you.
Let’s say there’s Bobby and Susie, and Bobby and Susie are coworkers, and they have a disagreement about a course of action for a particular program. Susie thinks she’s right. Bobby thinks he’s right. Susie is so convinced of her being right that she goes to the mat. She is to the death on this, right? It creates tension with Bobby, et cetera, et cetera.
In the end, she gets her way and she is right. But she’s essentially burned the relationship. So I say this all to say, not that you shouldn’t fight for things that you think are right, but when you are so focused on winning and being right and adding too much value, that you forget what the bigger purpose is of working together for a common good.
It is a recipe for being miserable, frankly. And then finally, an extra bonus one for you. Water the flowers, not the weeds. Okay, what do I mean by that? Oftentimes, and I think this is just human nature, we are so obsessed with plants. What’s not going right. I can catastrophize a million different things in my mind.
It’s just how my mind works. What that means often, I will speak for myself, what that meant for me was I would obsess about that grant proposal we didn’t get, or that board member who’s not doing what they need to do, or that staff member that’s underperforming. Completely ignoring the 10 staff members that were doing a great job or the 10 proposals that we did get, or the 10 other.
Board members that were doing what they had to do. And so I would put all of my attention and mental energy and emotional energy into what was going wrong and not into what was going right. And so often we are looking at it through the lens of corrective actions that we miss what is actually going right.
And so this is a very teacher thing. Teachers will often stand at the front of the classroom and they’ll say things like, Oh, I see little Sally has put her book on the table. Great job, Sally. I see little Zach has a sharpened pencil. Good job, Zach. Instead of pointing out the negative, because when you’re pointing out the negative, That is where your attention goes and where your attention goes, you’re just giving it more power.
Instead, focus on watering the flowers, not the weeds. By what I mean by that is lift up what’s working and call attention to the stuff that’s working, not the stuff that isn’t working, because people will learn better by what is working and why it’s working well versus what’s not working. And we’ll also make you a happier person because we have this thing in our brains called the reticular activation system.
And essentially what that is, it is a way that our brains filter out information. And so when we are training our brain to notice the good instead of the bad, it will automatically pick up on more of that. However, if we’re focused on the bad, it will also pick up on more of that. It’s like when you’re, let’s say there’s like a new shoe that you want to buy, and all of a sudden you see that shoe everywhere.
It’s not that all of a sudden the shoes appeared, it was that all of a sudden your brain started paying attention to those particular shoes. Similarly here, if all I’m paying attention to are the things that are going wrong, and I’m watering the weeds and not the flowers, then I’m constantly going to be in a state of misery and noticing what’s going wrong, not what’s going right.
I know, it’s hard to fight against human nature. Anyway, if this has been helpful to you, please let me know. Shoot me an email at hello@rheawong.com and let me know what has resonated with you. Also stay tuned. We have a bunch of new stuff coming up for new executive directors out here in the ecosystem.
Cause I know a lot of you are new eds. I know a lot of you are in startups. I know a lot of you are in grassroots organizations. So. If you’re interested in that, make sure to go to my newsletter, sign up, and you will be the first to know about new stuff that we are offering for you. In the meantime, have a great week.
Take care.
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