Your tech stack is only as good as your people stack

As nonprofits, it’s our mission to make the world a better place for everyone. But when it comes to the individuals inside our organisations – including ourselves! – we don’t always walk the talk.

Many of us have adopted traditional business models that prioritise productivity and efficiency over the human need to think and meaningfully contribute. This means we fall into unhelpful habits:

• Acting without listening

• Prioritising speed over valuable thinking time

• Opting for simple, short-term solutions instead of the longer, more inclusive  route

• Packing our days full of action with no time for reflection
  

How do we get better at slowing down and prioritising people – resulting in both better quality outcomes and happier places to work?

Submarine or tanker?

Let me tell you a story.

A long time ago, when I was working in a non-profit, we had a CRM rollout to complete. 

We had a choice. We could be a “submarine” – diving under the surface, out of sight, implementing the CRM and emerging six weeks later to let everyone know the project was complete. Or we could be a “tanker” – on the surface for all to see at every stage, but moving at a significantly slower pace.

We chose to be the submarine. This meant we completed the work efficiently – hitting our target of finishing in just six weeks. 

But this was far from a happy ending. Post-launch, there was uproar. A few people were really unhappy about the changes, how they would be affected, and that they hadn’t been consulted. We spent another two months unpicking and resolving the situation.

It was a huge lesson for me. When you rush big changes or decisions – often encouraged in a society that praises efficiency and productivity – you not only miss out on valuable insights, you risk breaking vital trust. 

Making amends after the damage is done often takes just as long as it would have done to be a “tanker” in the first place.

Remember: your tech stack is only as good as your people stack. Take the time you need to get everybody on board – people need support to transition to new ways of working.

Learning to take our time

I now believe that, while some days we may need to take “submarine”-type actions, our broader approach is best served when we commit to being a “tanker”.

Reading Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind, by Nancy Kline, added to my conviction that slowing down in order to take people with you is the most effective route to quality outcomes. Often our sense of speed is fake, we just have more ineffective meetings – raising the sense of busyness.

Nonprofits are well known for the slowness in their decision-making. My submarine experience absolutely showed that, in nonprofits, things just take time, whatever your approach. So why pretend? We should embrace our need to consult, think and do it right! 

Slowing down allows us to: 

• Go deeper with our questions – and get richer responses

• Listen properly to each other

• Get considered answers from everyone – not just the people who usually speak up

Creating this environment as standard in our organisations not only gets us to better, more interesting solutions – it also makes for happier workplaces where most people feel heard.

“A manager’s ability to turn meetings into a thinking environment is probably an organisation’s greatest asset” - Nancy Kline

As well as aligning with your organisational values, creating a listening and thinking culture can boost employee retention too. Deloitte reports that 86% of Gen Z and Millennials say having a sense of purpose is important to their overall job satisfaction and wellbeing. The new generation of employees need to feel like they’re having an impact – if they don’t, they’re less likely to stick around.

Building a listening and thinking culture

So what can you do to help your organisation become one that’s not afraid to listen, embraces co-design, gives thinking time, and reaps the rewards of better, more inclusive outcomes as a result?

Here are a few things I’ve seen have real impact.

1. Practice deep listening with your team

I often find in workshops that even those who genuinely want to be good listeners can really struggle to hold back their thoughts when somebody else is talking. And giving the other person space at the end of their sentence to see if they have anything to add, by staying silent, is so hard!

Practising deep listening in your team will help everyone be more conscious of what the other person is ACTUALLY saying, rather than hearing agreement with your own point of view where there isn’t one. 

2. Be curious and ask open questions

Hand in hand with deep listening is the skill of asking open questions – those that cannot be answered with yes or no. 

These are the questions that build on your curiosity about what that person speaking to you is saying – rather than closed questions that conceal an opinion or advice, e.g. “have you spoken to XYZ, when I did that they were great?”, or “don’t you think this is a problem with X?”

3. Act on what you’ve heard – show people what you’re going to do and do it!

You may have worked in organisations that have made an attempt to include people in planning, e.g. of a technology product/service or a new strategy. This is usually met with approval and excitement by colleagues – at first.

This can quickly go sour when we put effort and enthusiasm into the process but the end result has no reference to what we’ve contributed. We don’t know whether our contribution into that product design or a strategy was even considered – we’ve had no feedback. We start to believe that people asking do not really care and were never really listening. 

This is why it’s essential to have and communicate a clear process for what you will do with the inputs you’ve gathered. And – if you want people to feel accountable for the decisions made – keep them involved in the decision-making and prioritisation process and provide clarity on how final decisions are being made and why. That way they will know why this element of a strategy or this functionality of the product did not make the final cut. 

4. Embrace self-managed, cross-functional teams

Be wary of hierarchies where senior management involvement leads to unnecessary steps in decision making, or decisions being overwritten without a clear explanation. 

Working in self-managed cross-functional teams (which a few nonprofits do to design and deliver digital and marketing products) delivers better results and makes the process more enjoyable for team members. It’s simple - their expertise and advice is seen and heard, they all feel they are adding value and they are making decisions together.

5. Hold your nerve

Including people in decision-making and asking for their opinions can sometimes get messy – which is why it is so often avoided. You need to stay focused and have faith that this is part of the process.

Often people will go off on a tangent and the group’s energy will follow. You need to let people get out of their system what they really want to talk about – or they will keep coming back to it every time the topic arises. This can mean the process you had hoped would last, say, three workshops now stretches over five or six.

This is when you need to hold your nerve!

Don’t accept the messaging of ‘carcrash’ or ‘s***show”. Remind everyone that if they want to have a say, they also have a responsibility to make the process work. Being disruptive is out! Respecting others’ points of view and focusing on finding solutions together is in. I’ve seen first-hand that when this kind of culture is established in a group, soon enough the solutions can come from any member of the team – and are accepted with enthusiasm by others.

Make your people a priority

The scrutiny nonprofits are under due to the money they receive from the public means there is often immense pressure to maximise resources at the expense of all else.

We need to find ways to get the most out of the resources we have, incorporating new tools and improvements, whilst building on the collective passion and wisdom of people who work for us.

Smarter, more cost effective ways of working will keep coming as technology evolves. But, as a sector, we are about humanity first and foremost.

It’s vital we live our values and take the time to bring our people with us on the journey, or it just won’t work.