 I am so thrilled over the moon to introduce and share that today's guest is Elizabeth Wesley Cassella, and I hope I said that right because I know we've been practicing this one through three cadence. Elizabeth is the founder and CEO of L12 Services, and you can check out her website right there. Elizabeth today on the episode is going to be sharing with us about the lessons we've learned from 2020 and how those lessons will help us in 2022. So stay with us because right after our sponsors we are going to dive deep into this conversation, and I am so grateful to have each and every one of our presenting sponsors. These companies exist for your purpose, right? Like they exist for your mission-driven goals. I always like to say that they exist to be in your corner. So they're here to lift you up, lean in, and to elevate your mission, and when it comes to connection of those that you serve in your community, please do find them. They're easy to find on the internet. They're out there to help and support you to do greater work, bolder impact, so please do check out all of our presenting sponsors that you see there. And I of course want to welcome Julia Patrick to the show as every day, so grateful that you're here. Julia is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I get to play alongside with Julia. She shares her toys quite nicely with me. I'm Jared Ransom, the non-profit nerd CEO of the Raven Group. And again, back to today's conversation. I'm just so excited to have you, Elizabeth. So first of all, welcome. Thank you. I am really excited to be here. Okay, let's start off by having you tell us what L12 services do. Certainly. We are an internal communications firm, but unlike traditional firms that deal with employee engagement, you know, who's reading your newsletters or going to the picnic, we deal with, excuse me, workflow and team to team or leadership to team communication. We really look to streamline how organizations are both communicating, you know, verbally, as well as how they're communicating instructions so they save time and money. Okay, well, I wish my father were alive because he created a thing called the Patrick Grant, Patrick Graham, and he would have one of his secretaries do a draft or, you know, do the send this out so that all of his children were on the same page. We would get this, this is back in the day, we would get this mailed to us, you know, to our, where we were in the world and we would have to like read the Patrick Graham and get on board. So I love your concept here because we need that. We need that ever more going through all of this craziness that we have. But now we are also at this time of the year looking at our plans for 2022. And it just seems so overwhelming to so many nonprofits when we have struggled to get through 2020 and 2021 and we're like, how do we project into 2022? So I'm really excited for you to share some of your wisdom and the first piece I'd love for you to explain to us is assessing workflow and what that, that even means. Excuse me, you know, with regard to the world of nonprofits, I live in Washington DC, which is kind of nonprofit central for the country. And I spent, you know, almost 20 years supporting nonprofits in various areas. But what it turned out for me to be a superpower was my ability to see who was, who is taking on too much work, where the bottlenecks were, where the landmines were going to be on the horizon, and then speaking both to the team and leadership at the same time so that we could either overcome those hurdles, or we could prepare scope of work to, you know, avoid certain pieces of projects that weren't going to be handled properly. But what what we're doing now is something that only was available on large scale recently, and that is using the video interface to perform focus groups so that we're able to map out workflow in a visual representation. In nonprofits, that's really important because the people who work at nonprofits don't do it for the paycheck. They do it for the passion. They do it for the thing that's, you know, aligned with their values and important to them. And oftentimes that means that you have people who are very excited and will catch every ball and spin every plate and potentially head themselves out toward burnout. And nobody wants that, especially when you have a team of high caliber talent. So bringing everybody into the conversation to show what the current state looks like and draw that out, and taking the time to, you know, identify what the future's perfect state could look like, and then connecting the dots between the two so that you have workflows that show the gates of responsibility and people know who dealt with the project right before and after that. You make this sound like it's like second nature, super easy. And I love that. I honestly love that, Elizabeth, because what it tells me is clearly L12 services has created systems for these efficiency models. And so I hear all too often from my clients and just leaders in the sector across the nation is, you know, we don't have enough staff. We can't reach our goals because we've got too many goals and not enough staff. We only have 24 hours in the day, right? And at some point we have to let our team sleep. And what I also saw during 2020, I guess it was, right, is this whole fight flight or freeze mentality, because in our nonprofit sector, I think we often do go to compassion, fatigue and burnout a little sooner, because we are typically the personality that we are all in, right? We are all in whatever needs to happen. Many, many pieces of our sector, and I'm thinking in particular domestic violence and, you know, those kind of communities, it is a constant state of crisis. And so we are constantly all in, and we are then, you know, like just on the brink of a burnout. But you have systems, and I hear it, and that sounds amazing. Well, thank you, and you're right. One of our current clients is an NGO that does trauma medical care in more areas. So they're in Syria, in the Northern Triangle, and everything, every day they wake up and there's a new emergency. That's just how it is. And we're not talking about deadline emergencies if I need to submit something by a certain time. We're talking about people's health and well-being. Talking life and death, really. Yeah, we are talking life and death. So it's a great example to demonstrate, you know, the people that get into the nonprofit world are passionate and they will do whatever it takes to get to the end result. But what we deal with is trying to help them get there by either providing standard operating procedures or those workflow maps that allow them to create systems or identifying how to communicate what is going on rather than I see a problem, I'm going to take care of it. Because that's not always the easiest way to do it. It's also not the most effective way to do it. There may be somebody on your team who has a specific skill set that can sort through the mess and see where the land mines are on the horizon. Even though you want to help, it may be the best choice for you to say, here's a problem. I'm going to give it to you because it's your specialty area, but know that I'm on your team. If you need anything that I can do, my super skills, let me know and I will support you however I can. And those conversations are hard to have sometimes. It seems to me that you are asking us to look at the ecosystem in terms of what's working and what's not. And then that from there, if I'm hearing you correctly, then once we know that or we address it, like you just said, this is a tough thing because we all put our flag in the sand and we want to protect our little area. How do you navigate the personality side of this? And calling somebody out and saying, this isn't working. I mean, that's a hard thing to hear. It may be that we're at a perfect time to have that conversation. Specifically speaking, if we're looking at an organization that had a really well-oiled machine that was running perfectly in 2019, they probably weren't looking to transition to remote work, but they were forced to. And when that happened, excuse me, people started dead. I know. It's the air. The air. They're having wildfires. I'm so sorry. When people are all in in an organization and they're doing whatever they can do to keep the doors open, meaning 2020, a lot of those flag in the ground and territorial areas became blinds became blurred. Right now, we're looking at the transition from remote work to hybrid. And that's another unknown. So it may be that right now is the time to say, we kept it together. We're going to go forward into the future and we have goals there. Let's sit down and redefine what those areas are, remove the territorialism, remove the flags in the sand and instead say, I'm really good at this. And I see problems, but here are three solutions that I bring to the table. What does everybody think? So I'm super guilty because I have seen an organization that is near and dear to me. And I have seen this organization almost, I mean, I'm gonna say this, create a job for the person. And I've never thought that to be the best practice because I'm thinking, wait, why are we doing that? Why are we finding the right job for this person? But I would love for you to teach me and educate me on this model of efficiency because now might be the right time to create the right jobs for the right talent because I fully believe that so many of our teams are filled with rockstar talent and they may or may not be in the right position. And when I coach my clients, Elizabeth, I talk often about these two superpowers, right? What is it you love to do? And what are you great at doing? These are the two questions that I like to ask. What do you love to do? What are you passionate about doing? And what are you great at doing? Realizing they might not be the same, but yeah, they might not be the same. But those two answers we're now able to work together collectively to reach a common goal to say, okay, here's what we need to do. And based off of all the moving pieces, it looks like you, you and you, you're great at this and you, you and you love doing this piece. So let's work together. It's very similar. I would think that if we're going to combine your comments and my previous comments, the way to do that is, and let me ask a quick question. Is this a young organization? Are they going through like their first scale? They're not. Okay, because traditionally, I see that in young organizations. I call it speed hiring, kind of like speed dating, but you know, for employment, that bringing, you know, representatives from each level of the organization or from leadership all the way to the people who do the jobs to the people who support the people who do the jobs, let there be a voice for every type of work in that conversation, but started out with what are our goals and then leadership after they've identified the goals needs to be really cognizant of sitting back and listening because if you take the, if you take the energy or the power of the people with the superpowers and you just focus on them as individuals, then you're building directly from leadership to a very granular level and you're skipping a lot of the, how do we get there? If you take leaderships north star and then you start thinking about it in departmental areas or focus areas, then you can have a framework that says these are the things that need to be addressed in order to reach that north star. Now let's look at the talent. Do you like to do or are you specifically skilled at these areas that we've just laid out? If you want to have people have input into the types of jobs that they're going to undertake, that's usually the best conversation to have, but you know, quite often you have a leader who they're their niece or nephew's in town for the summer and they want to bring them to the office and give them a taste of what this type of work is like. It's an opportunity to partner the creative solutions that your teams have with the creative vision that the leaders have, but be sure to build out that middle area because that's where you're actually defining strategy. I love that. Creative vision of your team, creative vision of the organization and how do you bridge and marry those two makes perfect sense to me. Yeah, it's smart. You know, one of the things that you talked about is and Jared, I love that you're bringing this up about talent because everybody's talking about this fear of the talent pool and what it looks like and we'll ask you some more questions about that, but I thought this was a really interesting point that you brought up and that we should talk about and that is, you know, a house in order will actually retain your talent or attract talent and how you appear to the outside community and the sector is important, but actually being able to demonstrate that. So talk to us about that. There are some workers who they really enjoy the job of going in and fixing organizations and that's great or maybe they work in startups so they're helping to build the organization, but when your organization has some maturity and there are, you know, statistics and models of growth that you're already actively going through, oftentimes you'll want to bring in people who have a specific super, you know, super skill set to address an area and how do you do that if you don't have clearly defined metrics or at least a roadmap to what success looks like and what I mean by that is make it very clear not only to the people who you currently have on staff but the people that you're bringing in that they don't have to come in and fix anything. They can just come in and do the work that you want them to do the way that you get there and I am very cognizant about what a lot of people are calling the great resignation. We're working with organizations right now to make sure that they don't lose that high caliber talent within their teams. We're talking to them really about allowing the previous conversation we had where talking about the goals and the vision and talking about the strategy, letting the people who are on the ground bring solutions to the table, implement them, test them, reiterate them as they need to but when you do that and someone has a voice in the organization that either improves culture, improves workflow or improves professional development, they are more likely to stay because they're helping to build something. The people that are leaving I'm finding from our surveys they don't feel heard, they don't feel like they have any voice or leverage that can change anything and they've taken the last 18 months and really kind of analyzed what is important to them in life and it's not necessarily the paycheck. It's the ability to feel really good and to understand what success looks like and every day be able to go there. If you don't have an organization that's administrative heavy it's not about knowing that success is checking off a task list. Maybe it's knowing what every quarter's goals are because those quarterly goals actually roll into what the year's strategic goal is. So having a deep understanding and continual conversations about these next three months we're working on this, any decision you make or any suggestion that you make should support us getting there. I like that. I like that because Jared and I talk a lot about this, the frustration that you get, you fall into the trap of setting these plans, setting these goals and then you aren't necessarily tracking them enough until you get to Q4 and then you're just like holy moly I'm never going to get this. I'm never going to get here and then it becomes just such a struggle and a slog to you know navigate the rest of that term. My team is much vulgar word than holy moly but yes. The way that my team is relatively small, not even relatively big, it is small. But one of the things that I've, well I hope none of my teammates are listening right now, but one of the things that I plan to do when we hit the top of Q1 next year is I'm going to send everybody one of those electronic picture frames and what's going to be loaded in there is the year's strategic plan and each quarterly set of goals. I love that. I'm like freaking out. Yeah, guess what you're getting Julia? You're getting Jared. Oh my gosh. Okay, show's done. I got to go because I got things to do. Can you send us the affiliate link for that Elizabeth because we want to make sure you get credit. Oh my god you know that is like one of those duh things because we can all agree that we do all this work. We use our best intentions, our best brains and then why is it we can't get it across you know the line and it is because I believe it's it's not present. It's it's not something that's out of sight out of mind. Yeah okay wow okay we only have about 10 more minutes. I can't imagine that you're going to do anything better than this. No pressure. No pressure Elizabeth. Wow okay well I do want to get before we go. You did talk about this and this is something that keeps me up at night and that is the great resignation. Talk to us about what you're seeing, what you're interpreting, how do we navigate this? This is where the the communications part of internal communications I feel is really important. As you know if your organization sells lights and the strategic plan is sell more lights this year than last year and your quarterly breakout isn't necessarily clear as to how you get to that goal. What are the milestones? When people are thinking about leaving their jobs yes there's the the piece that we just discussed about you know clarity of goals but there's also a need for and again this is my opinion but my my clients have found that this has been helpful um net promoter internal surveys and not to give anybody you know survey overload because I know a lot of people are starting to implement them but an area that I see that organizations are missing is asking people about their values because their values have changed their or at least their awareness of their values has changed and and asking them about what they think is possible not just our organization could you know put a curig in the in the kitchen but more like what what do you feel is possible for our organization at this size to adjust in order to make the values that you have and the things that you want out of your job in your work world come into alignment with the needs of the business great we talk in in at l12 services about the four pillars of internal communication what are you communicating where are you communicating it when and how and that last piece falls under the how how are you communicating with your teams and your your individuals not just the needs of the business but the needs of the collective staff and individual and how do we get that to work simultaneously so it's symbiotic yeah okay that was good is that digital frame worthy julia would you also I'm gonna like distill that and put that into the the because you are right you know we can do anything I believe when we know what we're marching or as I like to say rowing in the same direction or we're moving towards a goal we talked about this yesterday jared it might have been on the chitty chat chat but we were talking about how even when you know that you're going to get a break it might be down the road but you you hold on to that and it helps you get to get through what you have to do and I think that you know values are part of that and we don't discuss that we a lot of times we would say oh that's at home or that's private but I like that you have brought this forth because I don't know if we've had anyone really articulate that is that we need to have those personal discussions and to see how we can make them align to our organizations now before we go I have one question that's that I've been thinking about and that is what size of organization are we talking about so many of the millions of you know nonprofits in our country work off of a kitchen table they're they don't have a large staff or large team what do you say about that I like how how did they go about putting in place plans like this should they be doing this oh what if it's only for the bigger bigger organization no I actually talked to a lot of entrepreneurs or small teams about this there is nothing better than getting all of this straight when you're small because when you do expand you don't have to take the time to create standard operating procedures or handbooks or communications policy let's pretend that the three of us are a team and would you necessarily know just because we're we're all professional women which channels to use for which types of communication like would you know that slack is just for you know emergency where's the zoom link that I need in five minutes and your your project planning platform is just for bullet point I you know topics that talk about what's been completed or what needs to be completed next would you know that email is probably the best place to brainstorm don't put that in your project management platform like if you write those things down and distribute them to your team the likelihood that you're going to get caught off guard or not know where the information is when you need it I mean how many of us have been standing in line at the grocery store and found out that we're standing next to somebody who's either our perfect client or somebody that could you know use some of the tools that we have to offer and you can't find it on your phone if you know where it lives and you know where you talked about it last like that through the scanner and and you've just made a new friend okay that's pretty damn good compared to the frame you're on the ball Elizabeth like you know we're just yeah it's it's so great well and I think I was just talking to someone the other day about their onboarding processes right and I said and they're offboarding and I said and this was a small business owner and I said I talk about my offboarding process during the onboarding process of a new client and it's the same of what I'm creating as an interim CEO for my client that's hiring their first executive director we're already talking about here's the policies and procedures for leave of absence if you shall need one during the onboarding process right like so it's really creating these processes because as Elizabeth you said if it was the three of us on a team which please I would love to be on this team then I really think from that like you just continue to build efficiencies you continue to build those SOPs or standard operating procedures that continue to evolve as your systems evolve as your you know everything evolves so I think it is so important to Julia's question and to reiterate Elizabeth's answer is absolutely it is for any science team this is really where it's at for scalability and sustainability could I just make one more point yeah you may so tie it all together you know with the high caliber talent you want to attract a clean house for them to come to even when you're small you're the people that you hire are critically important you you have to hire correctly when you have a very small team so one of the things that will be an excellent way to make sure that your team's on the same page and that you're hiring the right person is to be able to have that written documentation and have something that clearly addresses these types of policies which will in turn as you've hired somebody bring them in they start looking around and doing the work and within 90 days they could say you know you measured success to here but because of my skill set and my experience I think actually we can go to here and I can show you what I bring to the table that will now require us to meet these standards before we call it successful love it oh my gosh we could talk forever and I hope that we can schedule you back on to I would love it thank you share more and to tell us more in you know when it comes to all all of these great efficiency systems so Elizabeth thank you for being here for those of you that want to check out Elizabeth founder and CEO of L12 services she is housed outside of DC but works nationally and probably globally I know one of your clients is definitely global so l12services.com she has a phenomenal newsletter you might want to get signed up for that as well and it's just doing amazing work in the for-profit and nonprofit sector so thank you for joining us today thank you so much oh my gosh it's been amazing I've learned so much I've really been inspired again I'm Julia Patrick CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy I've been joined today by the non-profit nerd herself Jared Ransom CEO of the Raven group again we want to thank all of our presenting sponsors this is the type of generative discussion that we have every day on the non-profit show not always is great ideas I got it I got a witness because that frame thing is really awesome but yeah our sponsors allow us to have these discussions and so we are extremely grateful for that we want to remind everyone that we've launched a new show called fundraising events.tv check it out it'll help you navigate all of the amazing things that go on when you are putting on a fundraising event and I love I love that thing you say Julia and I've been practicing I want to say in my sleep um from from golf tournaments to galas to barns to ballrooms is that how it goes pretty cool yeah it's really true it's really true I mean we we can't just be thinking the ballroom space anymore yeah there are just so many different opportunities especially during this recovery moving forward so yeah we want to share those ideas with you we also want to remind everyone and especially as these pesky numbers tick up on the virus to stay well so you can do well thank you everybody we'll see you back here tomorrow