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You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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In today's episode, we share how to five to 10 X your organization's capacity for building influential relationships with decision-makers.
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So stay tuned.
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If you want to have real and powerful influence over the money and policy decisions that impact your organization and the people you serve, then you're in the right place.
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I'm Kath Patrick and I've helped dozens of progressive nonprofit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter.
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It is possible to get a critical mass of the money and policy decision makers in your world to be as invested in your success as you are.
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To have them seeking you out as an equal partner.
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And to have them Bringing opportunities and resources to you.
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This podcast will help you do just that.
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Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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Hey there folks.
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Welcome to another episode of the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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I'm your host, Kath Patrick.
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I'm so glad you're here for today's episode.
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One of the frustrations I often hear from nonprofit leaders is, yeah, we got a handful of great allies and champions, but we can't seem to grow the bench.
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We can't seem to replicate that with all the other money and policy decision makers that we really need to engage.
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And you know, we'd love to build even more of those powerfully influential relationships, but we simply haven't got the bandwidth.
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I'm already devoting 60% of my time to this, and I still have to run the organization, and there's only so much of me to go around.
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I hired a policy person or a contracting person, and between the two of us, we're able to get a lot done, but it's not enough and I can't afford to hire more people right now.
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Well, there's a solution hiding in plain sight.
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And that's what I want to talk about today.
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There is a resource that is very seldom used, and yet when it's used correctly, it can 5 to 10x your relationship building capacity.
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That hidden resource is everyone on your leadership team.
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Plus all the people on your team who have a role in program leadership, fund development, contracting, and analysis and reporting at a minimum.
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And there could be more depending on how your team is structured.
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Obviously if this were automatic, nobody'd be struggling with it.
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The truth is there are a bunch of things that can get in the way of expanding your strategic relationship building team.
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There's some generic things that get in the way, and then there are some specific things that get in the way.
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A lot of what gets in the way are faulty assumptions, made by pretty much everybody involved.
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And how that plays out is that, first of all, some of the reasons that not enough team members are contributing to strategic relationship building is, number one, no one has asked them to take on that responsibility.
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And I see that playing out in two different ways.
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On the one hand, the primary leadership of the organization may hold the belief that only a select few people on the leadership team are qualified and appropriate to do strategic relationship building with high level decision makers or with money and policy decision makers in general.
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Or what I've also seen is they do want other members of the team to take on that responsibility, and they're frustrated that they haven't done it.
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In those cases, what often is the case when I start to work with them, is what we discover very quickly is that while the assumption was in the head of the primary leadership that they wanted others to take that on, they hadn't communicated that.
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And they're sitting there being really frustrated with members of their team who aren't stepping up into this role.
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And it hasn't been made clear to them that that's part of the expectation.
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Now, maybe you have asked them to take the responsibility, but you haven't explained what that actually involves.
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And made sure that folks have the skills and resources necessary to do that job effectively.
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And, because assumptions work both ways, most of the time, it's simply the case that most members of the team believe that it's just not part of their job to do that.
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That's what the big bosses do.
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We don't do that.
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Now, a lot of times where this comes from is that there are one or two top strategic relationship builders in the organization, and they spend a lot of their time on that, and they're very good at it.
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And everyone looks at that and assumes that those leaders have things covered.
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But what I hear so often from CEOs and other top organizational leaders is their frustration that more members of the leadership team or more members of the broader team are not understanding the importance of strategic relationship building.
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And they're not taking that on, and not seeing it as part of their job.
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Now, every once in a while, I'll run into a top leader who actually does believe that they have everything covered and there's no need for anyone else to be involved.
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And if that's you, I want to challenge you and ask, do you in fact have every single strategic relationship that you would find valuable?
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Do you have powerful influence with every money and policy decision maker in your world that is important to you?
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And if your answer to that is no, then you would benefit from having more members of your team contributing meaningfully to that work.
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Now, one of the challenges with building powerfully influential strategic relationships with any decision maker is that it requires consistent, sustained effort over time.
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And even when it's your primary job, there are forces that work against that.
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And for folks for whom it is not their primary job, for whom it is a small but an important portion of their job, there are some real challenges with that.
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Because people are frequently overloaded, they have too much on their plate, they're stressed out a good chunk of the time.
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And if they don't see strategic relationship building as central to their work or as something that the leadership has said, this gets done no matter what.
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I know it's only a small piece of your job, but it's a really important piece and we have to find space for that.
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If that's not being communicated, then what happens by default is that it gets put to the bottom of the list.
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And the thing that helps push it to the bottom of the list is when folks don't feel like they totally know what they're doing.
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They don't totally know what's expected.
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They're not sure what the objectives are.
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What am I supposed to be saying to this person?
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I don't want to get it wrong.
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I don't want anybody to get mad at me if I screw this up.
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And so there are tons of forces working against having additional team members really get their hands dirty on the strategic relationship building work.
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And yet when they do, it can be incredibly effective and powerful, and it massively multiplies your organization's influence.
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So it's a hundred percent worth doing if you know what to do.
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A lot of this is about organizational culture.
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as so many things are.
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It's about expectations and it's about assumptions, but it's also very much about organizational culture.
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And I ran into this with a client not too long ago.
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They had an experience where there was an entire set of significant donors, who had basically fallen through the cracks and had not heard from anyone in the organization for more than two years.
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When this was discovered, there was a big scramble to reach out to these people and begin to repair the relationships.
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Now, what's a wonderful end to that story, which speaks to how much those donors value the mission of the organization, is that even though they hadn't been spoken to or engaged with at all for a couple of years, they were delighted that they were being contacted now and were more than happy to re engage.
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Now, that's donors.
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That's people who are already your allies.
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But when you're trying to build strategic relationships with money and policy decision makers who are elected officials, government agency folks, current and prospective contracting partners, all those kind of folks, most of them are not automatically drawn to your organization to be your ally.
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A few of them will be, and you probably already have those relationships well in hand.
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But with those folks, we have to really work on that.
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And it is a process.
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And in the case of the organization where the donors fell through the cracks, it was largely a problem of organizational culture.
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The culture at the time said only a select few leaders should be involved in strategic relationship building.
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And no one else should be doing that.
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Which meant that all sorts of staff who came into contact with donors and could have been nurturing those relationships.
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Did not do so.
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It was not their job.
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Now there were also some significant communication failures resulting in people not being entirely clear on whose job it was to do these things, which is how entire relationships got ignored.
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But the fundamental problem of people not thinking they have a role in this is a culture issue.
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With your money and policy decision maker strategic relationships, this is even more critical.
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Because while the donors were forgiving and eager to re engage, that is unlikely to be the case with the other kinds of money and policy decision makers.
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We don't want them falling through the cracks.
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And then when we need them, come to discover that, oops, there's no relationship there.
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Or not a strong enough one.
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Not an influential enough one.
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So.
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How do you deal with that?
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Well, a big piece of this is about organizational culture and how we see the role of everyone in the place, or at least everyone who is in a role, who has any sort of contact with the outside world.
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Now you could have a whole cadre of folks who are working you know, in production internally, if you produce a product.
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Or who are doing something else where they just don't have contact with the outside world, they're busy doing their job they don't interact with people outside the organization in their role at all.
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Okay, so those folks probably are not going to be people that you tap for this.
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But anybody who is, for example, a leader in program services.
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Obviously, if they're a leader in the development space.
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If they're in data and analytics, there could be a role.
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If they do any sort of partnerships, with other organizations or other entities than they are possibly someone who can be tapped to be part of this.
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But it starts with organizational culture, which says two things, basically.
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That sets the expectation that building powerfully influential strategic relationships is an essential part of what we do here.
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Because the only way that we make sure that the critically important work we're doing with helping people, the only way we make sure that is sustainable, is if we have sufficient influence with money and policy decision makers to make sure that we can keep doing that.
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That we have the resources we need, that we have the freedom to provide the services in the way that we know works the best, and that we are appropriately compensated for the quality of those services.
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And so one of the things folks have to understand is that doesn't just happen automatically.
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And if you're insulating people from that, you're not doing them any favors.
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It's very important for absolutely everyone in the place to understand that the money that keeps the organization running does not fall from the sky.
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That it is an entirely intentional and strategic process of going out and putting together those resources.
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And that, to do that requires a ton of work.
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It requires engaging those decision makers, helping them understand the work of the organization, helping them understand the problem that we solve, and, the way our unique solution produces exceptional outcomes that benefit the people who are served, and that benefit the community at large, and that ultimately benefit often the people who paid for it in the first place.
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Those decision makers don't know that without us helping them understand it.
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And until they understand it, they don't turn over resources to help support it.
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So everyone in the place, no matter what their job is, needs to understand that piece of information.
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And it would be helpful if they had at least a basic understanding that how this comes about is through the building of strategic relationships.
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And then when everyone has that understanding.
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And by extension, an understanding that their paycheck depends on success of this strategic relationship building enterprise.
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There's more awareness.
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And you have to start there.
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If people in your house don't get why this is important, the likelihood of them focusing on it, placing priority on it, is pretty minimal.
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That message needs to go to absolutely everyone on staff.
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And the other thing that I think is very valuable as an organizational culture message and way of being, is to communicate to everyone in the place that they are all ambassadors for the work of the organization.
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And that even if they don't have a public facing role, even if they don't have this as part of their job description, that every one of them should be able to explain in a couple of sentences the message that you would want conveyed to a decision maker about what you do, what problem you solve, the impact you make.
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And they should all be able to connect the work that they do every day with that.
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So, there's a wonderful example that goes back a long way, but it's great.
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So I'm going to use it even though it's exceedingly dated.
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Because I think it illustrates how significant this can be.
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So in the 1960s, when President Kennedy declared that we were going to put a man on the moon in that decade.
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It was a massive undertaking.
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No one thought it was possible.
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Not really, but we're going to try.
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So at one point, President Kennedy went to visit NASA..
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And he bumps into a janitor.
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And he asked the janitor, So tell me what you do here.
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And the janitor said, I'm helping to put a man on the moon.
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That is organizational culture that imbues the importance of the mission deep into every single person who works there.
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If you don't have every member of your staff understanding and believing that the work that they do changes lives, in, and then fill in the details about the way in which you change them.
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But fundamentally, you change lives for the better by doing X.
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And so part of the organizational culture should be that absolutely everyone who works there understands that that's why they're there.
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Their job may be to enter data or put shipping labels on something.
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Or to clean the place up at the end of the day.
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But it is, every single person working there should understand that their work is essential in fulfilling the mission of the organization.
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And it starts there.
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Because once you believe that, once you understand that as a member of the team.
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And you also understand.
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that the only thing that allows that mission to go forward and be sustainable is the building of these influential strategic relationships.
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Then being invited to be part of developing those relationships and sustaining them becomes an honor.
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It is work that one feels honored to be asked to help with.
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there's a lot of motivation around wanting to do that.
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Now, that's just setting the stage.
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Where a lot of these efforts get in trouble is stopping there.
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Or maybe they go one step further and say, and therefore, the 10 of you in this room all have a role in strategic relationship building.
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That's part of your job.
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And then they stop there and everybody's like, That's awesome.
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I don't know how to do that.
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Or I'm not sure what you want.
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Or I don't know well, like, who am I supposed to build strategic relationships with?
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What am I doing here?
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If you're going to make it be part of their job, you then have to include them in the strategy and help them understand what the overall strategic relationship building strategy is, what their piece of that is, and then to check with them and make sure that they have the skills, the knowledge, and the space on their plate to do their part in that.
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So I will not lie to you, that part is work.
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But you don't have to do it every time there's a new relationship to be developed.
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You have to do it in the beginning.
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And probably over a period of months, because this stuff is not instant.
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You don't just say, here, let me teach you three strategic relationship building skills.
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Poof, you're ready.
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Go off and do that now.
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We know that's not how that works.
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And you're going to have some folks who really get excited about this and really take to it and others who really resist it.
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And then you'll have folks in the middle.
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Here is what I will say from painful experience about the folks who really resist it.
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I would say two things.
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Or maybe three things.
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First, have a conversation with them to try to understand the source of the resistance.
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It may just be fear.
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It may be that they are really uncomfortable talking to people in authority.
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There could be some fear based stuff that could be an incredible personal and professional development opportunity for them to work with and get past.
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So if it's that, you want to help.
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Or it could just be, I really don't feel qualified.
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I don't know what I'm doing.
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I'm scared I'll mess up and I don't want to be responsible for screwing up something and then the organization's in trouble.
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Again, you can work with them on that.
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So always ask multiple coaching questions to get to the bottom of what is the source of this resistance.
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But sometimes quite honestly, the source of the resistance is basically, that sounds like more work and I don't want to do more work.
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Or that sounds manipulative.
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It sounds like cozying up to powerful people just to get something from them, and I don't do things that way or whatever.
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If there's something along those lines that is causing that resistance, don't force it.
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You may have other decisions you need to make about whether that person is a good fit in the organization overall.
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It might be worth looking at how valuable their contribution is these days.
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It can happen that there's somebody who's really good at what they do and they really just don't want anything to do with this.
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And, If they really don't, for whatever reason, then don't force it.
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And the other thing I will say, I have seen this happen, on teams that I have coached.
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I work with clients' leadership teams and advocacy teams a lot.
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And I have more than once run into a leadership team situation where there were a couple of people on that leadership team who frankly weren't being leaders and who didn't want to step up to that level.
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And those CEOs had to make some decisions about whether that person was really appropriate for a leadership team, because they were resisting anything that smacked of leadership.
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and it was simply the case that the work I was doing with them brought that to the surface when it hadn't happened.
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It's been as obvious before.
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So then that raises issues that you have to deal with internally and decide what you want and need from your team.
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But, don't force it because you know what, if people are determined not to do something, it won't get done.
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And you don't want to be depending on them for something that's important if they're just going to sandbag it.
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But you do want your expectations to be clear and specific enough as to be actionable and so as to get the actual result that you want.
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Now, another key piece that I think leaders often think they're doing, but it's not clear to the rest of the team.
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And that is you want to model the behavior that you're looking for and build it into as many internal interactions as you can within the team.
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What'll happen a lot of times, if a couple of people in the organization have kind of been the primary relationship builders and they're off doing that thing and they do it outside the office and people don't see it happening.
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They don't know how it works, they've seldom seen you in action doing that work.
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There's a bunch of things they don't understand.
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They don't know how much work it takes, how many times you have to engage that person to make progress with them, that it's a process over time of developing relationship.
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And so part of the way you model that internally is you take the time to develop relationships internally, and you are helping your team develop relationships with one another that are grounded in trust.
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and people liking each other.
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And you're creating opportunities for that to happen.
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big thing is that if they don't get to see you doing this work, then you've got to figure out how else they're going to learn it.
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And one of the easiest things you can do is basically set up an informal apprenticeship model, or job shadowing, however you want to call it, where the folks who are going to be learning how to do this, who haven't done a lot of it before, come along with you on these relationship building engagements.
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When you're going to a decision maker's office or getting on a Zoom with them, or however you're engaging them.
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That they're involved primarily as an observer, but you give them a role that is appropriate to the work that they do in the organization.
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And so, if they're a program person, then their role is to do the piece of the strategic messaging that you have taught them beforehand.
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And you've taught them not only what the messaging is, but what is the strategy behind it, and why is it being done that way.
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You have them do that part of the engagement.
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And then you're there to add a few things or redirect if they go wandering in a direction that's not helpful.
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And then when you're done and you come back, you debrief the whole encounter with that person that you brought along.
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And first, ask them for their impressions about what they noticed, how they thought things went, what did they see as small wins, what did they see as potential issues or problems, what did they see as opportunities that surfaced for further engagement.
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Just their whole take on it.
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What do you think we got from this?
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What do you think we should do next?
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www.
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podcast.
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com And what would be the most valuable follow up we could do?
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And what would that accomplish?
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Also ask them, and how do you think your part went?
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You know, of course, people are their own greatest critics.
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So, if you create safe space for it, they will probably tell you they think they did much worse than they did.
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And that's an opportunity for you to be very clear and specific about the parts they did that worked really well and what they could do a little bit differently that would make it even more effective.
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And you just keep supporting people as they develop those skills.
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But the easiest, most efficient way to take people's skills up several levels in a fairly short period of time is to have them be in apprentice mode.
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Because the learning by doing, and the learning while watching someone who is highly skilled is incredibly valuable, and it will accelerate their skill development dramatically.
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It will also give them a greater appreciation for what it is you do all day long, and why you're gone from the office so much.
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Now, something I want to be really clear about is that even though your goal is to have a lot of different people taking on pieces of relationship building work, that does not mean that everyone who is involved in that work will have the lead on a relationship.
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Unless the number of people who are involved is pretty small.
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But there could be a direct service program person, there could be a counselor or a case worker who takes on a piece of relationship building work.
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.Possibly with a contracting partner or something like that.
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But they might not be the lead.
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The lead might be the program services director, if you don't have a contracting director.
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But that doesn't mean that that caseworker doesn't have a role.
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So, you make the scope of the role proportionate to what the person's primary role is.
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But anybody who's on your leadership team absolutely should have lead responsibility for at least one strategic relationship in one of the arenas in which you're working.
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The most critical things are to set clear expectations.
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First of all, create a culture that values strategic relationship building.
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Make sure that everyone in the organization understands how their work furthers the mission.
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No matter what it is they do, they should have a crystal clarity about how their work furthers the mission, and they should understand that the mission can't be sustained without ongoing strategic relationship building with money and policy decision makers.
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And that that work, is the responsibility of many in the organization.
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We all need to carry that load because it's a big responsibility.
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And the more strategic relationships we're able to build, the more resources we can attract, the more influence we can have on policies that matter to the people we serve, the more opportunity we have to expand our work, reach more people, help more people at a higher level, and make their lives even better.
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The culture is one where everybody just understands that as core fact, core reality.
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This is who we are and what we do at this organization.
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And then setting the expectation that number one, everyone who works there is an ambassador for the mission and for the work and for the impact.
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And they should all be able to say two or three sentences about that, coupled with what they do at the place.
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And that anytime anyone asks them about it, that they're ready to say that.
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Because you just never know.
00:27:03.289 --> 00:27:11.135
The more those ambassadors are out there carrying that basic message, the more people are going to hear it, the more traction it's going to get.
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And that has value all on its own.
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Your leadership team is your core group for strategic relationship building along with your advocacy team if you have one, and I hope you do.
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And then the place where you 5 or 10x your reach is when you start involving that middle layer of folks who have the ability to go out and work on one or two strategic relationships that are tied to the work that they do in the organization.
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Probably with the support and guidance of the leader they report directly to who's part of that leadership team, who can help coordinate and guide them.
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But that they have that responsibility.
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And then you create an apprenticeship model so that people can learn this and become confident and good at it.
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My experience is that when people start to have a little taste of success with this.
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First of all, they survived their first meeting with a decision maker.
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And then they realize that nothing bad happened.
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And that, in fact, good things happened.
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And maybe even on the very first meeting, something good happens because of something they said or something they did.
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A way they framed an idea or a concept hooked the decision maker, pulled them in, and had them saying, tell me more.
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But even if that doesn't happen in the first encounter, it will happen in subsequent encounters.
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And once people begin to experience that, and you help them understand what it is they're experiencing.
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Say, that was awesome.
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You had them engaged.
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They really were invested in what you were saying.
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They see you as an expert.
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They want to know what you have to say.
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That's powerful stuff.
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And so you're not only dramatically expanding your organization's strategic relationship building capacities when you build this concept out in your organization, you're also developing more leaders.
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And that is always a good thing.
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So whatever scale you start at is up to you.
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But the basic idea here is that the more you can strategic relationship The job description and the skill set of the vast majority of people working in your organization, the more you will be able to exponentially grow the powerful influence you have with the decision makers that matter.
00:29:39.509 --> 00:29:44.789
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
