Happy New Year! How has January started for you? Here, we’ve been looking back as well as forward, as a podcast we recorded in October has just been released. Director, Helena Sharpstone was interviewed by the rather fabulous Kenneth Foreman and James Wright, curators of the Do More Good podcast series. It was fun looking back at career highs and lows and to discuss our thoughts on what good management looks like, how to develop resilience in this ever-demanding world and why selling and fundraising aren’t really that different. Do have a listen and tell us what you think!

Click here to listen online


This month we feature a guest blog by one of our masterclass attendees, Reinier Spruit.  Reinier applies his thoughts on building teams, to fundraising, but honestly, his wisdom gained from attending our session could be applied to any discipline.  Read on and consider how this applies to you and your team.

 

This is how you build the best fundraising team.  In October at the International Fundraising Congress, I attended the masterclass run by Helena Sharpstone and Jhumar Johnson entitled “Leadership essentials and building inclusive, resilient teams”. Theory and practice were beautifully brought together this afternoon. It was once again confirmation that fundraising results are completely dependent on the great people who work in our organisations. From how good those people are at their profession, how those people work together and how they are brought together by the right management and frameworks.

I say it often: the Head of Fundraising is one of the most important ingredients for successful fundraising. Perhaps the most important ingredient. The Head builds bridges up and down, hires the right people, sets an ambitious course, prepares the rest of the organisation to be successful, and… builds the best fundraising team. A team consists of several individuals who work together towards a goal. The combination of all these fundraisers as a team should lead to a better result than if you were to add them together separately. In other words, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

During the masterclass, Helena and Jhumar introduced Patrick Lencioni's book: 'The Five Dysfunctions of a Team'. One element shows that trust is the absolute basis of any well-functioning team. A lot can go wrong due to a lack of trust. Members of teams that lack trust hide their weaknesses and mistakes from each other, hesitating to ask for help or give constructive feedback. They draw premature conclusions about the intentions of others without attempting to clarify them. They don’t recognise and utilise each other's skills and experiences. And they may hold grudges, dread meetings, and find reasons not to spend time together.

But the other way around is also true. Members of teams with a lot of trust in each other admit weaknesses and mistakes. They ask for help. They accept questions and input about their responsibility. They give each other the benefit of the doubt before coming to a negative conclusion. They take risks when providing feedback and assistance and appreciate and make use of each other's skills and experiences. This leaves them able to focus their time and energy on important issues, not on politics. They offer (and accept) apologies without hesitation, look forward to meetings and other opportunities to work as a group.

When we talk about fundraising, we often talk about response rates, revenue, retention, data-driven and donor-orientated fundraising. But attention to the dynamics in your fundraising team is just as important and, in many cases, an absolute condition for achieving results at all. This is only possible in an environment in which people feel safe. Psychological safety [in a work environment] means feeling safe to take interpersonal risks, express your opinions, disagree openly, raise concerns without fear of negative consequences or pressure to cover up bad news.

That sounds great, but how do you create that safe environment as Head of Fundraising? In theory this is not very complicated. Treat others as they want to be treated. Welcome curiosity, because asking questions is very healthy! Promote healthy conflict, because a good discussion works wonders. Give everyone a voice, because every voice matters. Position failure as a real possibility, always give the benefit of the doubt, and put yourself in someone else's shoes.

How much attention do you pay to your amazing fundraising team?

Many thanks to Helena and Jhumar for a great masterclass!

In October we’ll be heading to The Netherlands to speak at the International Fundraising Congress.  One of our workshops is on how to become Fundraising’s most wanted – or any team’s most wanted for that matter.

In a world driven by people power, some people stand out. You know that person who walks into the room (virtual or real) and you just think, “You. We want you”? You don’t even know their skills or experience, but they have a vibe that puts them in demand. What’s their secret? Actually, they have three: a high-performance mindset, an approach the unites rather than divides, and more than just a bit of backbone.

There are a number of ways in which you can develop a high-performance mindset.  One way is to consider how you add value to your team and always have this in mind when you contribute. Are you a strong listener, do you ask searing questions that get people thinking, are you full of ideas and won’t give up until you find one that fits the bill?  Maybe you’re an ace problem solver who sees obstacles purely as things to overcome.  Team members with a high-performance approach, value all these attributes and more.  They work out what comes naturally, make best use of it and then apply themselves to develop a level of competency around the rest.  They come to the team with offerings not just requests.  It’s a bit of a cliché to talk about a “can do” attitude but if you can find ways to say yes more than you say no (within reason!) you’ll always be in more demand.

An approach that unites is all about valuing difference.  Do you seek out people who are similar to you? It’s natural and human to want to do that, it makes life easy, gives us a good “shorthand” with our colleagues and feels comfortable.  But you’re in grave danger of falling into group think.  Difference makes us think, sometimes it makes us uncomfortable, but in the end, you are more likely to innovate which propels you to the dizzy heights of an in-demand contributor.  Team members who look to welcome different approaches, experiences and backgrounds to the team, not only create a fertile ground for ideas, but they are also more likely to move seamlessly between teams, creating strong relationships as they go.

How’s your resilience at the moment – feeling sturdy or wobbly?  Understandable if it’s the latter, given all the challenges the world keeps throwing at us.  When it comes to strengthening your backbone, you could do worse than read up on the work of Carol Dweck and Growth Mindset.  The idea that you make your own luck and that talent and skill are far more about hard work and effort than they are lucky genes, just about sums up the Growth Mindset.  She talks a lot about “not yet” – the idea that you haven’t achieved something yet, won yet, smashed it yet – being a healthier approach than writing yourself off at the first sign of failure.  Coaching yourself to think “not yet, but getting there” is a great way to stoke up your resilience.  It’s a hopeful and positive approach that acknowledges the value of putting the effort in and that good things come to those who work hard.  Teams like that.

We hope to bump into you in the Land of the Tulip next month as we have lots more to say, but in case you don’t make it there, we’ll save you a Stroopwafel and record some of our sessions for you to listen to for more ways to become everyone’s most wanted.

It has been said that competition makes us faster but collaboration makes us better.

Collaboration means everyone can contribute: you get to use all the experience in your team, not just some of it.  Not only does a collaborative culture enable you to ensure opportunities and risks are more transparent and manageable, it also makes work more enjoyable and satisfying.

Yet some organisations subtly discourage collaborative working even though they talk loudly about wanting it.  Individual targets, lack of cross-departmental communication and rigid decision-making processes encourage people to compete and play their cards close to their chests.  When your team members only look down at their own work and never glance to the left and right to see what others are up to and how they could add value, it is death to collaboration.

So, if you want a more collaborative work culture, you have to make some changes.  We know - we’ve seen clients of ours make those changes.  It doesn’t happen overnight and it does take repeated practice, but with time a collaborative spirit starts to spread.  Here are some actions that definitely make an impact.

That’s not the whole story but it’s a start.  We work with teams at all levels to help them develop collaborative working.  It’s an art and a science, but luckily, it’s not rocket science.

A month of 4-day weeks due to national holidays (in the UK at least) is both a joy and a challenge.  The joy of the extra day off and the challenge of getting 5 days’ work activity in to 4.  After a particularly heavy week of meetings (for us and I suspect many others) it’s worth reflecting on our meeting behaviour.

It has been said that table manners make it easier to be welcomed to any table.  The same could be said of meeting manners.  And we seem to have forgotten ours. Sometimes.  Maybe a bit more than sometimes.

Have you been at a meeting recently and experienced any of these:

Not only might you have seen them, you may have done them too – it’s hard to be alert and attentive at your 6th consecutive meeting of the day with other tasks needing your attention.

Let’s tackle the aforementioned online meeting bad habits.

Cameras off – it’s the equivalent of coming to an in-room meeting and sitting with your back to everyone.  You might be able to hear everything but others don’t know if you are engaged or feel they can connect with you.  If everyone there has “face fatigue” from so many meetings, consider a conference call instead where no one can see anyone and the expectation is different.  Engage with your voices instead of your faces.

Cameras on but disappearing from view – is almost always down to long, long meetings with no breaks.  Bring back the human element and break up long meetings with a chance to exit left for coffee, a loo visit and to pat the dog or feed the gerbil.

Eyes on other screens – agree a one device rule so everyone dispenses with the others, in the same way a well-run meeting in a room would dictate.  Ditto to taking other calls, although a note in the chat to say when you have to unavoidably step out for a minute goes a long way.

Non-participation and looking bored – where the latter applies, we should cut some slack.  Some people aren’t bored, they just have that kind of face when they’re concentrating.  Also, if we were in a room together, we wouldn’t be endlessly staring at each other’s faces as we do when we’re on a virtual call.  Non-participation, however, is different.  Let’s set our meetings up with as few observers as possible.  Everyone there should be able to play their part (and that includes speaking up at some point) or have the right to question why they are on the attendee list.

Late entries and early exits - whilst in-person meetings are not the answer to everything, they do seem to acknowledge we are human beings – with pauses, breaks and gaps built in for people to breathe before they go on to their next activity.  We’ve been banging on about this in our blogs since late 2020 and we can confirm that clients who have adopted our “15-minute rule” or similar – not running meetings back-to-back – have seen more energy and engagement at gatherings as a result.

It helps if you and your fellow meeting colleagues make a commitment to behave on the screen as if you were all in the room. So, game face on, elbows off the table, no chewing with your mouth open and let’s tidy up our online meeting etiquette.

 

As a manager, it can be tricky to get the balance right in your management style.  You want to be supportive and helpful to your team but you also want to stretch them.  Research has shown that high-performance teams share a common mind-set.  They are fully committed to supporting each other and they are prepared to challenge too.  They do both because it leads them to better places.  A supportive mind-set encourages listening, valuing the contribution of individuals, being inclusive, building trust, a good atmosphere and genuinely caring.  A challenging mind-set encourages constructive debate, questioning, feedback, agreeing stretching goals, taking responsibility and holding self and others to account. It's a combined approach that’s hard to develop and maintain but is the only one that consistently delivers high performance and results.  All this needs to come from and be role modelled by the team’s leader.  So, if you are one, what example are you setting and if you’re not a manager but an important member of the team, what are you contributing?

Low in both

When there’s little support or challenge, the only place it leads to is apathy.  The team does just enough to stay out of trouble, but it never invests in relationships or truly commits to the work.  If you’re in a team like that and you can influence it, great.  If you can’t – get out.  You’ll learn little and achieve even less.

High in challenge, low in support

 This leads to a stressful team environment.  You have the push of the challenge without the pull of the support, so you start to create a team where everyone looks out for themselves, results are short term and development is random.  This sort of team energy works for some, others will fall by the wayside.  Either way people are in survival mode, which means you get into bad habits and long term it won’t get you the best results.

High in support, low in challenge

 This is a great big gooey hug of a team mind-set where relationships are prioritised over results.  As a manager you encourage care and kindness, as a team, you’re on each other’s side 24/7.  It sounds good and it can feel good to be part of, but it lacks the challenge that pushes people to achieve more, find better ways, ask powerful questions, say what needs to be said and develop along the way.  Teams in this shared mind-set can kid themselves they are high performing.  They rarely are.

High in both

If consistent high performance is what you strive for, this is where you want to be.  It’s easy to talk about but tough to do and requires real commitment from everyone.  How do you know when you’re in it?  You feel free enough to have the autonomy to act and connected enough to commit fully to the team’s results not just your own.  You also feel a bit scared sometimes.  You’re part of something really good and you don’t want to be the weak link.  So, whether you’re the manager or a member of the team – you step up.

There are many practical ways to develop a high support/high challenge team mind-set.  If that is where you’re headed but you need some extra ideas on how to get there quicker, talk to us about how you can lead your team to consistent high performance or be in a team that doesn’t accept mediocrity.  We’ll happily spill the beans on what it takes and we’ll support and challenge you to get there.

Human beings love to categorise, don’t they? When we talk about generations, we are usually referring to our family, who fits where and how we can trace them back. Or we use it to complain about their music.  When marketeers talk about generations, they mean people grouped together sharing birth years spanning 15-20 years who share certain characteristics.  Based on the work of Neil Howe and William Strauss, the Generations help us understand people’s attitude to life, leisure and society and have an interesting application to work.

What were your early career drivers? If you’re a leader whose first thoughts are ambition, climbing the ladder, becoming a manager, responsibility and recognition, then there’s a good chance you occupy a different generation to the people you are now managing and the teams you now lead.  Perhaps you are a Baby Boomer managing Millennials or a Gen X leading a team of iGens.

Our work world has understandably changed in the last three years and people now don’t want what they wanted before. Younger team members have their own set of drivers and include prioritising health and wellbeing over ambition. Older team members who took early retirement after the pandemic may well be on their way back in to work, having discovered they can’t make the finances stack up for a longer later life.

A lot has been written about The Talent Challenge and The Great Resignation and it’s depressing. The good news is there is a lot you can do to counter these trends.

The key is get inside the heads of the people you’re trying to recruit and retain and find ways to appeal to them. This involves thinking differently  about what you can do to attract good people and keep them once you have them, during one of the biggest challenges ever faced in our work lifetime.

What got you here really won’t get them there anymore.

Hello and welcome to late summer.  The days are getting a tiny bit shorter and we’re all trying to squeeze the last drops out of August before September and bursting-at-the-seams diaries are once again upon us.

This month may be a busy one for you or a chance to undo the top button and breathe a bit.  Either way, it is a great time to pause and consider helpful messages to get our heads in the right place and feeling strong for the start of the autumn work term.

Holidays and work breaks are fantastic and necessary, but the effects soon wear off. So here are a few things to say to ourselves and others, useful to keep energy high and get in shape for the season ahead.

You win or you learn

It’s great to do well, walk a smooth path and have a long run of success at work.  Everyone deserves that at least once in a while – but it’s not when the learning happens.  We learn the most through the gnarly, tricky times, when nothing seems to go our way.  So when you hit a big fat failure, take it on the chin.  Life at work has a fair bit of win and lose in it, but losers are also learners.  Review what went wrong, gain the views of others, put right what you need to, then learn and move on.  It doesn’t feel this way at the time but you’ll look back on this period as a time of personal and professional growth that propelled you to a better place.

All feedback is a gift

It really is. Even if it is badly wrapped and seems like the present no one wants.  If all we ever hear is praise, we never know what we need to do to progress to the next level. When someone praises you, thank them but also ask what you could have done even better.  And ask them to be specific so you can really nail what you need to do to improve.  When you’re given negative feedback, learn to value it.  There will be something in the content that is of use, even if you don’t rate the delivery or the messenger.  Challenge it if you need to, ask questions if lacks clarity or substance, then take it and use it in a way it will help you most.  And don’t forget to thank them for the feedback – and not through gritted teeth.

This too shall pass

Resilient people are positive.  Not shiny, smiley positive but sensibly positive in the way they gain perspective and look ahead.  Develop the ability to influence what you can and want to change and make choices about anything you can’t change.  No one can ever take away from you the right to choose your own attitude to the situation.  A positive, assertive attitude will take you a long way and tends to be associated with those high-performance people everyone wants on their team.

It‘s my bad

If like us, you were born before the 1980s, “it’s my fault” is what this means.  We seem to have lost the ability to step up, take responsibility and say sorry if something was our fault and shouldn’t have happened.  Just doing that when you need to, helps develop strength and accountability and you and in your work culture.  It allows us to own up, explain why, put things right and try better next time.  It also stops us expecting to be bailed out all the time by someone with rescuer tendencies.

And there are many more sayings that convert to practical ways to grow a bit of backbone, so if that is what you feel you need for the next few months, talk to us about how you can develop a stronger self and a more resilient team.  We promise to be firm but fair.

 

It has been said that competition makes us faster but collaboration makes us better.

Collaboration means everyone can contribute: you get to use all the experience in your team, not just some of it.  Not only does a collaborative culture enable you to ensure opportunities and risks are more transparent and manageable, it also makes work more enjoyable and satisfying.

Yet some organisations subtly discourage collaborative working even though they talk loudly about wanting it.  Individual targets, lack of cross-departmental communication and rigid decision-making processes encourage people to compete and play their cards close to their chests.  When team members get territorial, only look down at their own work and never glance to the left and right to see what others are up to and how they could add value, it is death to collaboration.

The Pandemic made collaborating ever more challenging yet many of us found we put in more of an effort.  We couldn’t take each other’s physical presence for granted so worked harder to build connections. Lots of our clients tell us collaboration between teams increased over the last two years and they continue to ride that wave.  They do this so collaborative behaviour sticks and becomes part of their ways of working.

So, if you want a more collaborative team, you have to make changes.  We know - we’ve seen teams make those changes.  It doesn’t happen overnight and it does take repeated practice, but with time a collaborative spirit starts to spread.  Here are some actions that make an impact.

Destroy silos.  A meaningful way to do this is by agreeing unifying goals.  Everyone should know how their work impacts on the overall goals but also how it impacts other teams and departments.  Create a culture where everyone feels like they are an important piece of the pie and what they do matters.  Banish all talk of who is more important than who.  Because no one is.

Build trust.  It’s the foundation for just about everything.  We trust our colleagues when we believe they will deliver on what they promise, honour their commitments, be reliable and not say one thing and do another.  Collaboration encourages trust and trust encourages collaboration.  One way to build trust is to look at the communication style of your organisation.  Is it as open and inclusive as it could be?  If not, consider what you could do to make it less concealed.

Think it before you do it.  Collaboration begins with a mind-set, not a list of actions.  For people to do collaboration, they first have to think about it (and see its value).  Encourage people to ask themselves questions like:

Questions like these get people thinking in the right way – the actions follow.

That’s not the whole story but it’s a start.  We work with teams at all levels to help them develop collaborative working.  It’s an art and a science, but luckily, it’s not rocket science.

As we emerge into 2022, bleary-eyed, hoping this will finally be the year of steady state (trying to avoid "new normal"), how are you feeling? Many of our clients’ report feeling weather-worn, buffeting by the effort of steering through Covid and all its storms and gales.

Your energy may be low, but maybe your heart is lifted and optimistic about the future if only you could gather yourself up and power on.

In times of turbulence, we often stretch to behaviours and skills that are not natural. This is tiring and takes concentration and is maybe why we feel our reserves are low. As a result, some of us may be tempted to move on from our current roles to feel like we are breaking the habits and renewing ourselves, gaining a sense of doing something different.

One way to reinvent ourselves is a little closer to home, though. Resilience has been at an all-time high in the past few years. It has brought invention, creativity, tenacity and let's not forget pivoting. So maybe a way to rejuvenate ourselves is to step back and do a good old-fashioned review of our resilience and what it has done for us.

We have been coaching individuals and teams around resilience for many years and one of the crucial things to realise is that it isn't about gritting teeth, never moaning or not owning up to finding times tough. It is quite the opposite, in fact. Resilience teaches us to speak up if we need help, actively seek out people that know more than us and purposefully rest and recover.

Have a go at thinking through three of the six resilience factors and how you have benefited from using them.

Determination – the ability to dig deep and welcome challenges. How many times have you done this recently? Have you delayed instant gratification and instead dug in and produced your best work? What satisfaction did you get from that and what have you learned about yourself? Did you have a mantra for tough times that you can still use today? For example, "If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well", "head down, keep walking", "5 o'clock will come". Using mantras can keep our spirits up and team mantras are potent. For example, one of our clients used to work for Cadburys in the IT team. After a tough week of transforming and developing, the team would say, "now let's go make great chocolate". Love this. It reminds them why they have done their best that week and that it was for the good of the whole organisation and themselves. Oh, and for all of us who love chocolate!

A sense of purpose – how much has the last year moved you towards where you want to be in life. It may even have fast-forwarded it. We always knew we should embrace digital online learning but kept putting it off. Several lockdowns later and we feel like we have been doing it forever – have you done something like that? Have you gained experience in one year that might have taken you four if there hadn't been a crisis?

Connections – who have you networked with recently? How many online coffees have you had with colleagues across your organisation that would never have happened in the office? What have you learned from them that helps you now and in the future? Have you gained a broader understanding of your organisation from all those pub quizzes you attended, humanising colleagues from all functions?

Those are just three resilience areas. Use them to reframe last year as rejuvenating, stretching, challenging rather than tiring.

Last year could have been 100% tiring or 100% inspiring!

Get in touch if you want to know more about building resilience for yourself and your teams