#6 | The Numbers Don't Lie — But Your Leadership Might

What happens when an employee nearly doubles their fundraising goal in under eight months — and still gets reprimanded? In this episode, Dan Freeman digs into a real conversation with a colleague in the nonprofit sector whose performance by every meaningful metric has been exceptional, yet leadership chose to penalize them for an activity goal they still had months to reach. From reneged hybrid schedules to misaligned performance expectations, Dan unpacks why today's workplace so often says one thing and does another — and why that gap between stated values and actual behavior is costing organizations their best people.

If you're reading this and you're in the higher ed, collegiate athletics, or general nonprofit field, I'd love for you to take my survey.

Drawing on his Balcony and Stage framework, Dan makes the case for what real leadership actually requires: relinquishing control, communicating with transparency, and building the kind of trust that gives employees task and autonomy — not just accountability. If you're a leader who claims to want retention, growth, and loyalty, this episode will challenge you to audit whether your actions match your intentions. Today's work doesn't have to be this hard. But it starts with you.

Connect with Dan

Available for Speaking I'm selectively available for keynotes, leadership retreats, and executive panels on decision-making, organizational culture, and leadership identity. If you're building a lineup for your next event, I'd love to be in that conversation. 

→ Reach out at dan@fsgventures.biz or  YourExecutiveThoughtPartner.com

If you made it this far, I want to offer you two limited time discounts. 

• Executive Thought Partner 3-Month Commitment 
• 8-Week Fundraising Intensive Program 

View this form to see the discounts: https://forms.gle/ngxwgS6sjCpyppuA8

Connect with Dan

📝 If you're reading this and you're in the higher ed, collegiate athletics, or general nonprofit field, I'd love for you to take my survey.

Available for Speaking I'm selectively available for keynotes, leadership retreats, and executive panels on decision-making, organizational culture, and leadership identity. If you're building a lineup for your next event, I'd love to be in that conversation. 

→ Reach out at dan@fsgventures.biz or  YourExecutiveThoughtPartner.com

If you made it this far, I want to offer you two limited time discounts. 

• Executive Thought Partner 3-Month Commitment
• 8-Week Fundraising Intensive Program 

View this form to see the discounts:https://forms.gle/ngxwgS6sjCpyppuA8

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Executive Thought Partner, episode number six. Today's work makes no sense. Gotta take a deep breath for this one. I don't know what's going on with work today. Work today in general. If you look on TikTok, there are you know the millennial manager kind of skits on TikTok and social media and such. But I want to share a conversation that I had with a friend in the last month. And let me tell you, I got so much more frustrated and angry than they did. So this friend's been in the business and nonprofits for over a decade. Political, nonprofit work, institutional and organizational nonprofit work, higher education nonprofit work. And I had a conversation with them. This friend has been successful. And they just came into a new role. And they started in August. We are in April. They had to wait for their supervisor to begin. They really didn't get to start fundraising until the end of September because it took long for things to get through their system. So that was September. We're now in April. It's about seven, seven, eight months. In that short period of time, my friend has hit their numbers goal for money raised, almost doubled it, and is also at the top for their proposals, super efficient. And they also are being super efficient in conversion with their meetings. Because those are some of the metrics for frontline fundraisers. If people can raise more money from less meetings, that is a much higher return on investment. But my friend received news the other day that even there, even though they have three months, just under three months, left for this fiscal year. Three months to get the number of visits they need to get up. Doesn't really make sense to me, especially because they've had meetings and they've almost doubled the goal expectation. Not in 12 months for a fiscal year, not in 10 months, in seven to eight months. Now, I don't know about you, but when you first go into a job, especially a job where it's supposed to produce, that first year is not easy. Whether you're in sales, whether you're in fundraising, whether you're in leadership, it takes time. Especially if you're going into sales or fundraising, it takes time to build relationships with people. That first year is almost always a wash. Why would you put pressure on individuals in that first year to force relationships, which could then create issues later on? You try to force a relationship, someone feels rushed, you could ruin that relationship and they may not want to work with you in the future. Versus letting them get their feet under them if the goal is retention. If the goal is go, if it's retention and growth, why would you not give people time? And that's what I want to talk about today. Today's work makes no sense. How can organizations, institutions, for-profit, nonprofit, whatever it is, how can they say that they want people to work there longer? They want to retain them, they want to reward them, they want them to grow. But then they treat people like that. It made me so angry for my friend when I heard that. Because I know how hard they're working, let alone the fact that they drive there three hours down, three hours back, give or take, four or five days a week, when they were promised to have a hybrid schedule when they came on, and then a month in they changed it and didn't grandfather that individual in. Sounds kind of ridiculous. Keep pulling that rug out from under them. There's an issue. And I really think about a friend of mine, Camber. This is the work she does, intergenerational work. I think it's even more than intergenerational work. Because I've been thinking about the fact that our parents, I'm a millennial, our parents really stayed in the same jobs, stayed in the same areas, very rarely moved unless you were in the unless your parents were in the armed forces or they were part of the military, whatever it may be, or they had a job transfer. And I had a conversation with another friend today where we talked about we don't want to stay at the same place forever. I mean, unless you've built it yourself, you've founded it like the executive thought partner. That's always going to be a piece of me now. But we want to be where we want to be. We don't necessarily want to move, but we're not against transitioning and evolving in job responsibilities, roles, and organizations. So it's a little bit different than our parents, but we love where we are. We want to be part of that community. Wouldn't you want people that want to be part of a community and wouldn't you want to take care of them? So going back to Camber and these intergenerational kind of relationships and leadership and in the workplace, and then talking about this conversation that I had with my friend, this brings me a lot to what are the falsehoods that a lot of these organizations push? How can they improve them? I want to take a second and I want to pause. And anyone is listening to this, I just want you to think you don't have to write it down. I just want you to think about what are two or three things that you've heard your friends gripe about, your colleagues gripe about? What are things that could be done to change a culture, an organizational culture, just to make it better for your friends? It doesn't have to be everyone, but just your friends. I just want to pause here for a second. I'm just gonna wait about 30 seconds or so, and I want you to think about that in silence. I want you to name those feelings to think deeply about that. When I think about it. Could be a football player or whatever it is. We'll call it a sprinter because I was a track athlete. Not sprinting, if that's what you're wondering. I was throwers. But anyway, so when a sprinter pulls up because they've pulled their hamstring, normally it's because their hamstring has exceeded the range of motion that they train in. So I want you to think about that. They're training that muscle through a specific range of motion. If they are putting a hundred percent max output on every step when they're driving out of the blocks in a competition, if they're putting 100% output and they extend over what their hamstring is used to, the body wants to guard itself. And what that means is it extends out and then it snaps back in, and that's when they pull up and you see them hopping on a leg. Now, did the hamstring most likely overextend? Yes. But the cause of that could certainly be well, if there was more flexibility in their glute, in the insertion point of their hamstring, which is up by the glute, or sorry, the origin up by the glute versus the insertion, which is down towards the calf that runs behind the knee. If that was looser, they may have had more stretch and more flexibility, which would have allowed them to not have pulled up. So I want you to think about that. When we talk about today's work, it's not the actions by the leaders, it's the positions that they're in, the culture they've created, and the awareness that they have or do not have. So that hamstring analogy is one of them that I really like to use. The second one is the balcony and the stage. Your leaders should be up in the balcony, watching everyone sitting in the audience, and you, the employees at the stage. The leaders in the balcony, the employees are on stage, doing whatever they need to, gaining the attention of the consumer or the customer sitting down watching it. So I want you to think about that. Is your leader at the balcony? Are they on the stage? Or are they seated in the audience? And as a leader, are you at the balcony? Are you on the stage? Are you in the audience with everyone else? If you're in the audience, how do you have the view to be able to look at the balcony and look at the stage when you are with everyone else in the craziness? If you're on the stage with the employees, you can see the audience, can't really see the balcony, right? It's kind of dark up there, like the lights on you. Can you make the strategy with your employees? Yeah, you could be sort of a player coach. But you should really be in the balcony as the strategizer in chief. That's one of the phrases I've used in one of my newsletters, the strategizer in chief. And what I do, and the way that I think about this work, is that leader has to be up there on that balcony. But if that leader is not there, how do we get them up there? Because if you're in the throes, man, if you're in the audience, that's tough. If you're on the stage, you're making your reactive and your urgent decisions because you're with the employees and they're looking to you directly eye to eye. You're in the throws. You have to make a decision. And you don't have time to think because all of the eyes are on you. That's the issue. When that happens, we make those decisions. Those decisions don't allow you as the leader to be able to get the overall picture because the lights are on you. You can barely see the first two, three rows of the audience, and you certainly can't see the balcony. So, how do you go from that stage to the balcony? Well, you have to go to the balcony. You have to get the view first, you have to understand what's going on, what does the picture look like? What's happening with your consumers, your customers, your donors, your prospects? And you also need to be up there to see how are your employees interacting with them. You need to be able to see are there misses? Are people not doing things? You can't just go up there once. You have to stay up there. And that takes a lot of strength because leaders want to control. But to get that picture, to be able to shift that direction and understand all of the outerlying pieces, right? Pulling up with a hamstring, that stretch, you've got to go to the top. You have to see, you have to relinquish control. And that's going to be something that I work on really hard with my leaders. You have to sit up top and let things happen. When I'm coaching my athletes on the weekend, when they first start in practice, I usually let them take eight to 10 throws, eight to 12 to let them warm up. Why would I start coaching my athlete in their first one to four throws when they've just picked up the implement? They're not warmed up, they're not connected to it. Why would I do that? I give them time to get in the groove, to feel things. So, why is you as a leader would you be judging your employees immediately at the get-go versus letting them warm up, letting them do what they need to do, letting themselves get in the groove. So you need to relinquish that control and allow them to get into the groove. No one is perfect on the first try. No one's perfect when they first start warming up. It takes a little bit to get things moving and get connected with it. The second one is not just relinquishing that, but starting to be aware of the external factors and the internal factors with your individual employees, the group factors of how they all work together, and then the external factors of what affects them outside of what they're doing. Could be you. Could be the consumer, the prospect, the donor, the customer. It could be any one of those things, but you're not going to know that unless you get to the balcony and you do that. I work really hard on that with my leaders, because the leader needs to understand what that looks like. And then we really work on how do you communicate that? Because your employees down on the stage can't be successful if you can't do a good job communicating to them transparently and clearly about what is expected, what they're being held accountable to. If you're not having those individual conversations, what do they say? The phrase is praise loudly and critique quietly. Praise in meetings, critique individually. That's how you need to be looking at this and having those conversations because that's how you build trust too. No one wants to be called out in a meeting around other people, but they want to be praised in front of them. So we build that out, we help them communicate. But then because they get that and they've relinquished that control, we use them, the leader, to work with the employees to create a structure that allows the employees to have task and autonomy. Not only do they have a task, but they can make a decision because leadership trusts them to do it. That's how you create buy-in when you support that. And the only way that you're going to support that is if they understand exactly what's expected of them, which means you have to communicate clearly and transparently. And then we create an even larger structure of horizontal leadership. Where it's not just one person, it's not the middle manager, it's the employees that can make decisions because the middle managers understand what leadership wants. So they get it, and then they get it, and then they go tell their employees what to do. So then that allows the employees to make the decisions, it allows the middle managers to be the disseminators and the player coaches, and it allows the leader or leaders at the top to be able to strategize from above and see how everything's working. Now, does that mean that the leader can't go down to the stage in the audience? Absolutely not. They should, because if not, you're going to detach yourself from it and you're going to lose that empathy and understanding. You've got to go experience it. But that is not where you reside. And I bring all this up because that's not how today's work happens. Today's work makes no sense. None of that happens. And I really, really, I'm pleading to any leaders listening to this, I don't care if you work with me, just take some pieces from this and think about it. I'm going to take the transcript from this, I'm going to turn it into a newsletter because I know some people like to read versus listen to a podcast. I don't care if you read it and you highlight and you copy whatever you do, please stop making today's work so much more difficult than it needs to be. Work today does not need to be difficult. And I've heard that from so many people in fundraising. Why do people make it tougher than it needs to be? So I want to leave that today. I want to thank you for listening to the Executive Thought Partner Podcast number six. Today's work makes no sense. And we've talked about it. And we're going to continue on this because this is everything that I'm talking about. I hope you listen in. I hope you subscribe. You can go over to my LinkedIn, Dan Freeman. You can also go to my website, your executive thoughtpartner.com. I have some newsletters over there. I have some newsletters on LinkedIn. Love for you to follow, connect, and check out my resources too. I have some free documents. Thanks for listening.