How to Avoid Overload when Adding Advocacy Work to Your Plate - Episode 25

You're listening to the nonprofit power podcast. In today's episode, we share how to avoid overload. When adding advocacy work to your plate. So stay tuned. 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. I'm Cath Patrick, and I've helped dozens of progressive non profit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter. 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, to have them seeking you out as an equal partner, and to have them Bringing opportunities and resources to you. This podcast will help you do just that. Welcome to the nonprofit power podcast. Hey everybody. Kath Patrick here. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the nonprofit power podcast. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode. You know, advocacy is important. And you've got some key strategic relationships you want to develop. But it's so much work. Adding that to an already full plate can feel impossible and overwhelming. But if we don't do it, we're cutting off opportunities. Are we doomed to choose between overload and lost opportunity. Thankfully, no. But we have to take on the overload monster and tame it. Yes. Hey there folks. Welcome to the nonprofit power podcast. I'm your host, Kath Patrick. I hear from clients all the time that they are in one way or another, just feeling like they're on overload. Overload in general, but specifically when they want to add meaningful advocacy work and strategic relationship building work to their plate. That it feels like it's just one more thing. And there's all these priorities. And they're trying their darndest to get everything done, but they're feeling a lot like a hamster on a wheel. Too often when that's happening, the advocacy work is the first thing to get put aside. And so I want to address both the putting aside, but thing I think that's most important to get at is the underlying issue of overload. Cause it's common. And if you haven't experienced it at this point, you probably will at some point in the future. What I've noticed is that there are some very common causes of overload in the context of advocacy work and particularly in the context of building powerfully influential strategic relationships. And the number one cause of overload that I see is a lack of clearly defined priorities. And/ or too many things are being labeled a priority, which is essentially the same thing if you think about it. There's the problem of a person simply having too much job. Which can have a number of causes itself, but it's partly related to the thing I just mentioned. Too many priorities and not enough clarity about what's most important. Another major cause is spreading your strategic relationship building efforts too thin. And that can occur in a couple of different ways. It can be that you're targeting too many people at once. It's just too many total relationships. It could be that you're targeting the wrong people. That you're going after either the folks who don't have the ultimate decision-making authority or something is amiss and you don't have the right target for the outcome that you desire. And then the other problem of spreading your energy too thin is spending a lot of energy on a target that's highly resistant to either your relationship building efforts or the thing that you're trying to get them to do. Maybe you have five or six or 10 relationship building targets, but you find you're spending 90% of your effort on one of them because they're so resistant. So all of that leads to spreading yourself too thin, Another cause of overload, which this seems a little backwards, but I promise you, it actually is a major underlying cause of overload. Which is doing your advocacy work sporadically when you have a minute instead of following a well-structured plan with goals and timelines and clear outcomes. And related to that is when either the person doing the relationship building work, and/ or their boss are not seeing strategic relationship building as a critical element of the person's work. And that's huge. Because if you see it as something that's bolted on, that's you do when you are not busy with your real work and that real work is in quotes. Then that's going to make you feel overloaded any time you try to focus real time and attention on your advocacy work. And then the other cause of overload is duplication of effort within the organization. This doesn't happen as often, but when it does, it's usually because there's poor communication among advocacy team members about who's doing what. And so more than one person is working on the same relationship, which is fine because there may be multiple angles to that relationship. But if the left-hand isn't telling the right-hand what it's doing, then not only do you get duplication, but you can sometimes get people working at cross purposes. Which creates overloaded and also creates a whole lot of frustration. So the good news is there's a solution for all this. And the list of solutions is shorter than the list of problems. The biggest number one solution, the first thing to do, is to identify and agree upon a manageable set of priorities together. Whether that's you as a leadership team, you as an advocacy team, however you run things in your organization. But a group of you. And if you're someone who's got advocacy or strategic relationship building responsibilities and you're not part of a leadership team then this becomes especially important for you to pay attention to. That even if you don't sit at the big kid's table all the time, you still have to have a voice in what the priorities for your work are. if you don't, you have a huge problem from the beginning. So as a group you're identifying and agreeing on a manageable set of priorities. And then you don't change them or add to them without another discussion! I see this happen so often, that an advocacy team or a leadership team will spend a bunch of time and energy to create a set of priorities, and they're all happy with them and it's great. And they go out to do their work and then another thing comes along and it feels really important. So they just add it to the pile there. Well, this is important too. We better do this. This is a priority. And you can maybe get away with doing that once in a quarter. But when you start doing that a couple of times a month, or even once a month, very quickly you have got too many things that are labeled a priority. And once you've got too many things labeled a priority, quite honestly, nothing is a priority. Everybody's just scrambling, trying to stay half a step ahead on each of the 27 things on their plate that are all labeled priority. So you got to keep it focused. You got to keep it narrow and you can't be changing it every time something new and shiny comes along. Even if that new shiny thing feels really, really important, you still have to have a conversation with everybody affected. Everybody whose role, whose work will be affected by it has to be in on the conversation of, if we make this new thing a priority, what are we going to take off of the priority list, at least for now? Because to do otherwise is to assume that everybody's plate is infinitely expandable, and we know that isn't true. It's such a common organizational behavior to say everything is a priority. And what that does is it puts everybody on overload all the time. And you can't do it. So the other thing I will say about that is that engaging other people in your organization to get clear about and agree on priorities is a skill set all its own. That is immensely valuable, not only in advocacy, but in organizational life in general. If you're going along and accepting without question that the 20 different things on your plate are all a priority, but you also know in the back of your mind that basically, you could maybe do 10 of those things at the level of focus and proficiency that would yield the outcomes that are desired. If you know that you can only do 10 and you're saying yes to 20, then that right there is the number one cause of overload. It's both an organizational offense or failure and it's an individual offense or failure to not step up and say, this isn't realistic. We have to choose. Let's be strategic and make decisions about what is the most important for right now, for the next month, for the next three months, whatever it is, but there is a limit to what can go on your plate. being able to do that in a way that is professional and has the interest of the organization and its wellbeing at its heart. obviously, if it just comes from a place of there's too much on my plate and I can't deal, that's harder for people to hear. I understand sometimes when you get to the point of such intense overload, that that's kind of all you can think about is how overloaded you are and that if something doesn't change, you're going to break. So don't let it get to that point. When you see it coming, when you're already maxed and you see another priority being laid on your plate and being told that's a priority, too. That's the moment to speak up and say, hold up a second. And you may need to schedule a conversation to do this. You may not be able to do it in that exact moment. But you need to be able to have a conversation that is professional and focused. To lay out as a reminder, for yourself and whoever you're talking with, here's what's on my plate right now. Here's how much time each of those things is taking. And you don't have to go into this in exhausting detail, but to say, if you've got five things on your plate and that represents more than a 40 hour work week already, then you can just capture that. And say, this thing A is taking about. 10 hours a week. Thing B is about eight hours a week and so on and so forth. And you add it up and I've already got 45 hours and that's pretty much the max. To do this new thing well, this new priority well, my best guess is that's going to be X number of hours. I'm happy to take this new thing on, but in order to do that, I'm going to have to release something else. Of what's on my plate now, what can we put either on the back burner, hand off to someone else, or whatever other solution is appropriate. And here's my assessment. And be prepared to have your assessment based both strategically and on your strongest skill set. To be able to say, I'm really strong on the thing that you want to hand me. And I would love to tackle that and I think I can be really good at it and be very efficient about it, but I am still going to need to free up X number of hours a week in order to do that and do it at the level that we need it to be done to get the outcomes that we want. Some other things that are on my plate, my current assessment would be that this thing over here, thing Z, is not urgent right now. And we could probably let that just sit quietly and revisit it in two months. Or perhaps thing Y is something that, I've been doing it, but quite honestly, it's not my strength. I wonder if it might make more sense to put that in the hands of someone who is going to be more efficient at it, simply because they're more skilled. Offer solutions, but be ready to have the conversation and insist on the conversation. Because one of the causes of this problem, of these too many priorities and therefore nothing is a priority and nothing is getting done all that well. Is people continuing to just quietly accept when yet more priorities are piled on their plate. When you know it's not doable. Or at least not doable at the quality level that is needed or not doable without harming your health. And neither of those things is okay. So we all have to get much better and much more consistent about insisting on having these conversations about priorities in a way that is professional and serves the organization and serves the interest of the team. Another huge thing is having clearly defined outcomes before you start. There's nothing that will produce overload faster than taking action toward a general goal without knowing what the outcomes are that you're trying to make happen. It results in less strategic, less focused effort. And so we want to be super, super clear on the outcomes. And again, best if those are defined by the team. But if the team hasn't defined them, somebody needs to. If it's on your plate, then you define them and run them by your boss or run them by whoever you can, before you start doing the work. And hand-in-hand with that, once you've got the clear outcomes then you need a clear plan for how you're getting there. And in episode 16, which was on how to create an advocacy plan that will keep your team focused and getting great results. If you haven't listened to that, I recommend you go back and listen to that. if you don't have an advocacy plan or if the one that you have is kind of gotten off track, that's a really helpful episode. And the other thing is you got to have enough people involved to actually get the work done. And again, in episode 15, we talked about how to create a high impact advocacy team. So that's worth a listen too. But having enough people who make a team who are getting the strategic relationship building work done is essential. It can't all be on the shoulders of one or two people in the organization for a couple of reasons. One it's not doable. And two, if God forbid, anything should happen to one of those people, you're in a world of hurt because then you don't have the breadth of relationships spread through the organization. And the other thing is to check in regularly with yourself. And with the other folks on the team, so that you can both help each other out. But also when I say check in with yourself, It means I don't just keep beating your head against a wall. If you're doing something and it's not working, stop. Stop and assess: what is your sense of why this isn't working? Don't just keep doing more of the same thing and hoping for a different result. And generally speaking with strategic relationship building, if you're doing the usual strategies and they're not working. there can be a number of causes but it's usually one of three things. It's that you're unable to get access to them. Or your messaging isn't landing with them. Or you've chosen a target who has really high resistance to either the thing you want, or to your organization, or maybe to you. But there's high, high resistance. And breaking through is really hard because they're just so opposed. So I'm going to take those in order. If you're having trouble getting access, the number one thing to do is to focus on finding and leveraging bridges. There are almost certainly people that you know, that know the relationship building target, that can be a bridge between the two of you. If you've been calling, if you've been emailing, if you've been reaching out, if you've been showing up at places where they are, and you're not connecting and it's not happening, it's time to get really serious about leveraging some bridges. And if you can't find bridges, keep looking. Cause they are there somewhere. You've got them. There's always a bridge somewhere. If your messaging isn't landing, focus on deepening your research. Dig deeper into what keeps that decision maker up at night. What do they care about? What's important to them. And what is the language they use to talk about those things? And go back and take your messaging apart and rebuild it. To focus even more deeply, aligning the stuff that you are about with their stuff that they care about. And if you keep working at that, you should be able to get your messaging to land more effectively. And again, if you have a bridge to work with, use them to help give you insight in how best to approach the target, including how best to craft your messaging. Your bridge isn't going to write your messaging for you. But what they can do is say, Decision-maker X really is invested in ABC. If you want to get them to pay attention, frame your stuff in the context of ABC. Or They always talk about the social impact. They always talk about ROI. They always talk about whatever their hobby horse is about their angle on policy or their angle on funding. However, they talk about it, whatever they seem to see as the linchpin for viewing an issue. If the bridge can tell you what that is, then you can frame your stuff that way. So definitely use your bridge to help you with messaging, but also just deepen your research. Now, if you've wound up with a target who's highly resistant. And you've done the work of researching them and identifying and leveraging bridges. And you're tailoring your message based on your research and what your bridge has told you. And you still can't get anywhere. Then it's time to revisit your cost benefit analysis of developing that relationship. Because you've invested all that. You've done it right. And if you're still getting no traction whatsoever, you've got to ask yourself, is this still worth all the time and energy and effort that's going into building this relationship? Or is there another way to get the outcome that we want in that area? Or is that maybe a relationship we're just going to let go of for right now? Or put it on the back burner because we have these three other relationships over here that are super important and they're getting neglected as I spend all this time trying to break through with this one person who just seems impenetrable. You try your best. But don't just keep going at it without pausing and assessing and saying, is this still worth what it's costing us. And only you can answer that question. But if you don't ask it, you can wind up burning a ton of energy and effort getting super frustrated. And both of those things are major causes of overload. It's not just how much energy you're putting out. It's also the frustration level that you're experiencing. If you put out a lot of energy and you get a huge win. Wow. You know, the energy you get back from that helps you you handle what's on your plate and not feel as overloaded. But if you're pouring energy in and getting only frustration back, it's incredibly draining and it just makes the overload feeling even worse. Now. if you're relatively new to strategic relationship building, And specifically to building powerfully influential relationships with decision makers. One huge piece of advice for you is don't start with a highly resistant or problematic target. Start with one that's already somewhat friendly to your cause or to your organization or to you personally. Or some combination. But if it's a really tough nut, who's none of those things, and you're relatively new to this work. That relationship, if it's going to be pursued, should probably be handed to someone in the organization who is highly skilled already at strategic relationship building and building powerfully influential relationships. The person with the higher skill level and the higher confidence level that goes with it will be able to be much more efficient. And get to the place of making a decision about, 'do we still pursue this?' much faster than someone who is still learning. The other thing is that it's important to recognize there's a whole set of skills attached to building powerfully influential strategic relationships. And those skills take time and practice to develop. So while you're building up your skill level, things are probably going to take more effort and more trial and error than it will for someone who is already operating at a very high skill level in that area. That is totally fine. That's how we learn. So give yourself room. And absolutely do the work because the way you learn these skills is by doing them. You can read about them. You can listen to me talk about them. But you won't actually build those skills until you go out and start interacting with your strategic relationship building targets, and figuring out what works and figuring out what doesn't. I can tell you all the strategies, but you've got to actually apply that to develop the skill that goes with it. Because there is a skill set and an art form to doing this at a high level that you can only get by doing it many many, many times over. And each time you learn more. You learn more about that target, but you also learn more about the nuances and the finesse of building powerfully influential strategic relationships. Which is ultimately what we're trying to do here. but the thing is, while you're building your skills, which is awesome. And I'm so excited that you are doing that. But you have to recognize this learning curve and that extra time and effort that goes with it while you build skills. You have to recognize that and so does your boss. Because while you're in building mode with your skills, you won't be as efficient as someone who is already highly skilled. And If your boss happens to be one of those people who is highly skilled at strategic relationship building, they may have a picture in their head of what it would take to go build that relationship. But the picture in their head is what it would take for them to go do it. And so if there's a significant skill difference on this specific thing between you and your boss, it's very important to have a conversation with your boss-- and the bosses out there who are listening I want you to hear this too. That if you're really good at this, and you're wanting your team to become more skilled, don't expect them to do that work with the speed and efficiency that you would do it with. Folks who are learning are gonna need more hours freed up from their plate so that they can do this work and build their skills, which will in the long run benefit the organization, because you're going to have a stronger advocacy team across the board. The fact is that developing powerfully influential strategic relationships and becoming more highly skilled at doing that are two of the most productive uses of anyone's time who works in a nonprofit, in the long run for the individual and for the organization. Hands down the most productive thing you can be doing. It's super important to keep that front and center in your mind because it's so easy to see all the little minutia of running the place, which is very important. Of course. You got to pay the bills. You got to raise the money. You got to make payroll. You got to make sure the services are delivered at a high quality and that clients are treated well. You got to do all those things. And that is super important. But so is the building of these powerfully influential strategic relationships, which make all of the rest of that possible. So we can never lose sight of that. And every member of the advocacy team from the CEO on down, I must keep this in mind. And take active measures to keep the priorities strategic and focused, and to make sure the team members have room on their plate to do a good job of building strategic relationships. We have to be absolutely relentless about ensuring that we choose our priorities strategically. And with a sense of realism about what is healthy and possible for the people on your team to do for the long run. If we do that, when we do that, we build a stronger organization, a stronger team, and ultimately make it possible for so many more opportunities and resources to flow to the organization with less effort, long-term. Thanks for listening. And I'll see you in the next episode. If you found value in this episode, please share it with other progressive nonprofit leaders. And I'd be grateful if you'd leave a rating and review on iTunes, which will help even more people find out about about the podcast. Thanks so much.