Episode 161: Your Team Isn't the Problem - Your Leadership Might Be

Welcome back, nonprofit friends. Today's episode might sting a little bit, but I think in a good way. We're not talking about accounting or fundraising or a lot of the other topics that we typically are talking about. We're going to be talking about something I hear from leaders all the time.

I especially hear this from leaders because they're calling us to, you know, solve a problem around their financial management, their accounting, and I hear things like people just aren't performing, they're in over their head, it's really hard to find good talent, or there is no talent out there, no one takes ownership, or anything along those lines. But what we're going to be talking about today is really the question, what if the problem isn't actually the people? Maybe it's us as leaders, right?

I'm joined by Tiffany Slater. Tiffany is the founder and CEO of HR TaylorMade. Not only did you start the firm HR TaylorMade, Tiffany, but you are a senior HR specialist that works actually with the charity CFO too and helps us navigate some really tough conversations. And you and I met because we have clients in common.

We also do work together and I've learned so much from you and all of your wise words. And I always appreciate some of your truth bombs that you dropped for me over the years. And we're going to do a little bit of that today. I appreciate it.

These are always great conversations, Tasha. It's a conversations, I think people are always happening. And I'm sure Tiffany, you get the same way where people really open up or vulnerable when I talk to them. And some of their problems that I didn't realize we were going to end up talking about people related issues.

But I think as leaders, we face that difficult situation time and time again. And I don't think we really have any conversations on the podcast episode list that talks about this, but I think we should probably have more because it's something I know that I live with every single day. And I know most people here can really relate to it. So let's dive in with a big, bold statement that I heard you say once, people suck and it's our fault.

That is probably my favorite statement. As an introvert, one might think that I'm just saying it because I'm an introvert. But in fact, it's actually really true for leaders. A lot of times it's not always true, But I'm going to say about 75% of the time, people suck.

And it's our fault as leaders, because there's so many things that we didn't do. So many things that we didn't communicate, or we weren't effective at communicating. We didn't ask the right question, or we don't have the right systems in place to ensure that people are more effective at their jobs. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's a tough pill, because nobody wants to accept that it's their fault. But I think, you know, ultimately, as leaders, we have to accept everything's our fault, right? But also, it's kind of empowering, because if it is us, then, you know, we can fix it. Absolutely.

Let's talk about that, maybe. Where do leaders unintentionally create conditions of poor performance or disengagement, or we're just leading what could be high performing team members down a path of not being successful? Well, I can tell you, Tasha, we don't have enough time in this podcast to go through all the things, but I'm going to list some of the highlights. Let's start with onboarding.

There isn't an onboarding process a lot of times that is well thought out. We are so eager to get people to start the work and start delivering that we skip over the important piece, important pieces of onboarding, which include helping them understand why your organization exists and what their role in your organization is and how they're going to help move the mission forward. And that's for nonprofit and for profit organizations. We all have a mission to move forward.

So that's very important. We fail to give job descriptions that clearly outline what they're responsible for. Now, I can tell you what we're really good at. We're really good at giving people laundry lists of things that they should do.

But in terms of giving a job description that clearly says these are the top three to five results that your position is responsible for, and these are the metrics that you will be held accountable for, we don't do that in job descriptions at all. We just give them all these tasks that they're responsible for. So we fail to effectively communicate to them what we're holding them accountable for. The other thing is we don't give clear instructions.

An example that I use all the time is we may ask someone to order a printer for the office. So is the task done when the printer is hooked up to the network and ready to print? or is it done when it is on the way because it has been ordered? So we may have the expectation that it's done when it's hooked up and everybody's able to use it.

But the person hears you say, order a printer, and that's what they do. And so there's a miscommunication. We have to get better at telling people what the definition of done is. And I got that from the book, Buy Back My Time, which is one of my favorites.

So we have to be clearer. We have to leave room and space for people to learn and understand how they're going to be held accountable and then give them the tools to be successful at those things. I love your conversation on expectations. So often I say that most people do not wake up and say, I really want to suck at my job today.

I really want to be a low performer. No one intentionally goes out and says that. And for me, I think it's really coming down to expectations. expectations.

And when you're really clear about what those expectations are and how you're going to measure expectations, not just some, you know, how are you feeling emotionally about someone's performance 12 months later, right? How do you have conversations on an ongoing basis, going back to those expectations that you spelled out from day one? And then to your point, course correcting when you realize your instructions weren't clear. I had a moment just two hours ago where I was co-leading a training with a team member and they're responsible for kind of planning most of it you know it probably a little unclear with all the instructions I had a bit of moment of panic where you know is this an online training Is this an in training And is a training room big enough to accommodate the people that we had And I realized in hindsight, I probably wasn't crystal clear with the person I'd asked for help.

They're responsible for the training room and all the logistics around that as well. So it's always a point of like reflection for me as a leader. When someone falls short on something, how can I be more clear with those expectations? yeah if I could just talk about the obvious frustration sometimes it's like how clear can I possibly get my goodness right and I can always go back and say I could have been more clear but then there's also elements of just the level of detail or the need for clarity and is there a fine line between painting what done looks like as Bernie Brown would say and being really clear on expectations, but also so much so that I think when I'm really, really clear about what those expectations are, what I've heard from my team, Tasha, we know you have opinions and I will have opinions if you ask me about it.

And if I'm really, really clear with those expectations, it almost like creates an energy of concern or, oh, I don't know if I have full autonomy because Tasha has so many clear instructions so for me it's almost like a fine line between these are my expectations I don't care how you get it done kind of thing to your point I need a printer and I need it hooked up in this space how you do that kind of up to you you want to ship it from Amazon you want to drive to Best Buy I don't really care but just get a printer in here that works versus sometimes I think so many explanations or as we talk about here at the charity CFO we have an SOP for everything which all the good leadership books and you know business books on buying back your time would tell you to do.

But to what point it then starts to kind of hindering some of the critical thinking and independent problem solving is something I don't struggle with. I don't know if you see that with others. Absolutely, I do. So one point I want to make in terms of the SOPs, we absolutely need those, because that ensures our continuity of service.

And it's who we are, it's kind of the blueprint to who we are as an organization. That does not mean that a person doesn't have autonomy in certain steps of the SOP. Because clearly, if all we needed was an SOP, we could all hire somebody in high school to do all the work, right? So that's not the point of it.

So SOPs are huge for us. I want to say that. But as it relates to how clear can I be and at what point am I stifling a person's independence, if you will, and ability to think critically and be creative. I think that depends on the individual.

So one of the things that I do, and I am not by any means perfect at this, but one of the things that I do is I tell my team, here's what I'm looking for. And I stop there. And I say, I want you to come back to me with the questions that you have, process what I told you, and then come back to me with what questions you have. And they do.

The other thing that we have to make sure that we do is we have to create an environment where people feel safe to ask what they may deem to be a dumb question. So if they feel like, oh, I can't ask her what color she likes or I can't ask her what room I should, you know, book this in. Then you're always going to feel like, oh, my God, I have to be so clear all the time because they're not going to ask you. And they're always going to feel like they're trying to play mind reader, if you will.

So we have to create a space where people are comfortable, one, getting things wrong, two, taking risks. and three asking you what they think may be a dumb question. I have lots of questions I could ask. See, I think I just have Tiffany on these podcasts so I could just share all of my own personnel grievance.

No, I'm kidding. But let's put a finer point on that too because I think that kind of piggybacking off the conversation just on stifling that kind of independent judgment and thinking, how do you balance leadership accountability as we kind of open this conversation up? It's our fault. And 90 plus percent of the time, I'm sure it is my fault with the individual responsibility.

And what point is it actually the employee? Yeah, we need to coach them or we need to change. Yeah. So that's a that's a great point.

And I would say that, again, it depends because if you come to me and say, hey, we've got this employee and they just won't do this thing. I'm always going to ask, how do how do you know they know how to do that thing? You should be able to say to me, well, we've provided them with training two or three times because some people just won't get it on the first time. Sure.

We've we've sat with them while they do it just to make sure that they had the support that they needed. We also have documented them. We've told them once or twice that this is a problem and they need to improve. And we also have asked them how we can help them.

So we want to make sure that we have done our part in making sure that they have what they need to be successful. At that point, they are making a either a conscious decision to not perform or be. They're just not able to do it. And it is at that point that it is their responsibility.

It's always their responsibility to perform in the to participate in the training and the support that you all provide. It is also their responsibility to ask questions, regardless of how difficult it is. It's their responsibility to do their part in being successful at the work that they are charged with completing. Hopeful.

Always helpful. I always learn something. Let's go back to leadership and what we can do differently. What are some real practical steps that we as leaders can do to better support our team members and our success?

You mentioned a little bit of training, allowing us to be accessible for the kind of dumb questions or creating a safe environment to ask those questions. What are two or three other ways that leaders can show up differently to support this goal? Two things come up for me is being vulnerable. I think that leaders also need to say, hey, I'm not perfect.

And there are going to be some things that you know better than I do And so you know perhaps there are opportunities for us to learn and grow in these particular areas together When we do that I think that it also allows people to feel safe to say hey I don know this thing either OK, Tasha said she didn't know this. So I know I don't know everything. So that's one way. The other thing, and this is something that you guys do really exceptionally well, is having conversations with the individuals all the time.

Not only do you guys have conversations with them, but you document the conversation. Every month. Yes, every month. I think that's fantastic.

I would even venture to say there's nothing wrong with doing it once a week. Just a five minute touch base. Hey, how you doing? Need anything?

anything I can do to support you this week. It doesn't have to be a long drawn out conversation, but just do a little drive by and make note of that conversation that, Hey, I stopped by to see Tasha today. She said she didn't need anything, but I told her I was available and keep it moving. So that that's, that's another thing.

We also have to, it's not always about employees doing things wrong or sucking, but there are also leaders who are just ineffective. They suck too. Tell us more about what are signs that you are a crappy leader and you don't know it? Because I don't think anyone really realizes that, but your employees might know it.

And I don't think most people that end up in leadership positions have formal training and they don't know the science of their poor leaders. Yeah. Well, turnover is one. That's a pretty glaring, obvious one.

People not coming to work or if you have a hybrid work environment, you may have a majority of your team members may want to stay hybrid all the time. Um, maybe they are not hitting deadlines. Um, they're not giving you the, the, the work product that you have asked on a regular basis. Um, let's see what else.

Um, the other thing is, you know, how is your team talking, uh, responding to you? Are they dismissive? Are they rude and disrespectful, that's a sign. Because even some of the some really ineffective leaders still have respect from their team.

So that that is definitely a sign that you you've got some things that you need to change. I would say too, because I see this a lot on my side. When you are a leader and your team does not understand roles and responsibilities across the team. We see this a lot in our work where we'll start working with, you know, a particular organization and we're, okay, great.

Who are the players here? What are the different departments? What's everybody doing? So we know who to go to, who's responsible for this, who's responsible for that.

Think about, you know, hey, we're the financial people. Who opens the mail in the office or who makes bank deposits or who enters stuff into the fundraising platform or who responds to the grant reports, you know, and interacts with the funders, that sort of thing. And if your team does not know who's doing that, I recently found myself in a situation where on the call, the team acknowledged, we have a lot of conversations we need to do offline and get clarity on this. And these folks have been in seat for a while.

And if we're going and asking pretty basic operational questions on just like day-to-day things, if your team doesn't even know who's doing what within their team, it really needs to come from the leader to clarify roles and responsibilities. Going back to how we opened this conversation, defining expectations and getting role clarity, number one, defining expectations within that role, number two, and then having a system of accountability that's transparent and people know how they're performing at any given time, for me, is kind of step three.

And like you said, frequency and having the conversation and feedback to talk about that performance and accountability is really, for me, kind of the golden circle, if you will, of how to really have a pretty high-performing team. So we've probably talked about this more. I'm curious if you have any practical tips or advice for a nonprofit executive director listening to this and thinking, OK, where do I start? What is one step this week that maybe they can go out and do to get some clarity on some of this stuff?

Well, I don't know that they can do that this week, but definitely the first place to start is to ensure that you have highly effective job descriptions. One way to tell if your job description is effective is if you look at it and you go down the list of things that are on there, will you be able to tell that if that person is doing their job by looking at the job description? Can you use their job description next to your performance evaluation tool to say, yes, Tasha is effective.

Yes, Tasha is doing these things. Now, if you have basic things on your job description, like open the mail, sweep the floor, things like that, that don't necessarily move the mission, you know, unless the person is a is a housekeeper or janitor. Then those are not things that are going to move the mission. You need to have more substantial things on your job description to help you understand if the person is contributing to the organization in ways that you're paying them to.

So that's the first thing I would do. Make sure that your job descriptions are really good at telling people what they're responsible for and why. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, you've seen this on our front where we've taken this, because I think some people want a really exhaustive job description. What are all the things I'm going to be responsible for? And like you said, some of these things are really important. Some of them are, yes, you're going to be responsible, but might only happen once a year or they're very infrequent.

But, you know, we want to be as exhaustive as we can be in our job description. So we created what we call a success profile and much of what you just described that we have boiled down every single position in this company has no more than four goals something that we actually measuring into most of our team members only have two or three right so you take the job description and you boil it down to what are the most important things that if you're doing this will consider you successful yeah maybe you're kind of missing the mark on some of these less significant things but if you're doing these things really well we're good we're good um and it's not just the goals on like what is the most important thing but it's how you show up in your job so we call those attributes or skills right but it's not just what you do the goals but it's how you're showing up and doing it so that's the skills um living into our core values just being overall good team member dependable communicating well you know all those sorts of things that are important to the positions that we offer that success profile serves as our agenda um that we meet with one of our team members every single team member has a one-on-one every single month where we formally go through that success profile, which again is an abbreviated version of their job description.

And it's the same, it's the same template. So there's no surprises. Everybody knows. And what's great about that is the goals are defined by very specific metrics that, by the way, are reports that can be ran by each employee.

They know what the conversation is going to look like. Yes. They have access to those reports. They already know they can run the report.

This isn't a Tasha's in a bad moods today and didn't sleep well so this conversation is going to go left no it's very result driven and that's how we try to structure all of our positions because from day one we share that success profile from day one people know this is how your success is going to be measured yes and if you have any questions about it we can have conversations from day one about it and I think setting that um setting that tone having that conversation it it takes a bit of the guesswork out of it.

And it's not an after the fact conversation, which I came up with this idea really, because I found myself frustrated in roles when I was coming up in my career where, you know, a year after, you know, whatever I did, it's coming up with a performance evaluation, and maybe my compensation or my ability to be promoted was hindered by something I was inadvertently doing. Like, gee, I wish I would have known about that. I would, of course, corrected so keeping that in mind i feel like i owe a responsibility to my team to have those thoughtful conversations throughout the year and i find that we're able to um experience a lot more professional growth from our new team members as a result of that frequent conversation so all the things that you described are the things that we do active and test there's definitely still some flaws we are certainly not perfect um but it really does help and you know it's weird because people think employees might be overwhelmed or put off by it.

And admittedly, when people come here, they're like, you're going to have a performance evaluation every month. After a couple months, we normalize this. People love it. Yes.

They love hearing about their progress, because usually it's good news, because we set the expectations. They know what it is. They're delivering on it. So we're just doing kind of a formal shout out every month.

Yeah, usually good news. And people love good news. And one of the things that I think we need to call out is for nonprofits, many of them don't have the bandwidth to have 12 conversations with everybody that they supervise a year. So I would challenge you to then at least do it on a quarterly basis.

If you go further out than that, then you are getting away from the opportunities to help people to do their work better, be more effective and to, you know, deepen your mission impact. So if a leader's listening and they're super frustrated today, which was why they clicked on this episode, what's one question they can ask themselves before blaming their people? We'll wrap that up, wrap this conversation up with that, that last thought. Love it.

Great question. What question? So here's one question they can ask themselves. When was the last time I asked someone on my team what I can do to better support them or how I can show up better as a leader for them?

I can definitely think of a few people I could ask that question to. So that's insightful. Well, this conversation has been super insightful for me. I always learn something.

And it's a good reminder that being a leader doesn't mean you have to have all of the answers. It's about creating conditions that allow your team to be successful. Creating an environment where they can ask those silly questions. Create a safe space for people to fail.

We have some core values here at the charity CFO. like most businesses and one of them is own it and grow which means we expect mistakes we want to hear about those mistakes we want to help you overcome those so this has all been a really good conversation and allows us to sometimes look in the mirror first before we start pointing the fingers and you've given us some really good tips on things that we probably need to think about from a client or i'm sorry an employee experience from the initial onboarding and what that training should look like defining expectations for each role and then having a system of accountability whether it's frequent check-ins, or maybe even a simple report on how we can share, this is how you're actually doing.

So Tiffany, thank you. This was equal parts uncomfortable, but incredibly helpful. So thank you so much for joining us. But before we go, if people are interested in hearing more from you, or they need support with their human resources, including some coaching conversations like this, because I know I benefit from them, what is the best way to get in touch with you or follow along with your firm or to get some more tips and tricks and resources?

Where can people find you? Well, first of all, I feel like we're everywhere, but the most, the easiest place to find us is on our website, hrtaylormade.com, h-r-t-a-i-l-o-r-m-a-d-e.com.

And I'm also on LinkedIn at Tiffany E. Slater on LinkedIn. Okay. Well, nonprofit leaders, if you are struggling to get your arms around all things HR, I know So I, like I said earlier, we at the Charity CFO also work with your team, Tiffany, and you've been a tremendous help for us.

And I know you do the same for all the nonprofits that you work for as well. This has been awesome. Thank you so much. And for those of you that are listening, my shameless plug now, if you found this conversation insightful in any way, please interact with the content in any way.

The Metta World then uses that information to allow other nonprofit leaders like yourself struggling with these same issues, find content like this. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time.