Inspired Nonprofit Leadership

Sarah Olivieri
  • 4.9 (98)
  • Non-Profit
  • Updated Weekly

This podcast is a place for nonprofit leaders to gain insights, tips, inspiration, and encouragement to unleash their potential.

  1. Scaling Without Overworking with Sarah Olivieri

    2h ago

    Scaling Without Overworking with Sarah Olivieri

    Most leaders trying to scale their organization start by doing more. Longer days. More meetings. One more push to get the next milestone over the line. The ceiling shows up anyway, because a founder cannot scale herself. Growth is more in, more out. Scale is more out per unit of effort, and that math only changes when the structure underneath the work changes. Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through the role redesign that makes scaling possible, drawing on the Impact Method framework and a decade of running her own organization on it. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why working harder ends in a ceiling and what to focus on instead when the goal is true scale The shift from "who's in charge of who" to "who's in charge of which outcomes" and what changes once it lands Heads roles versus hands roles, and the rule for when heads work has to take priority over hands work Why the visionary and the integrator should not be the same person past a certain size, and what an integrator actually owns The high-level outcomes blueprint most nonprofits need: vision, optimum speed and capacity, resource optimization, and service delivery Who This Episode Is For Executive directors and nonprofit founders feeling the ceiling of what one person can carry Leaders whose org chart was built around control rather than outcomes CEOs holding both the visionary and the integrator roles and noticing it's costing the organization speed Anyone whose team is busy but the mission is not advancing at the rate the vision requires Practical takeaways List the five or six key outcomes your organization actually needs owned. Notice how many of them currently sit with you. For one team member this week, redesign their role from a task list into an outcome they own. If you are wearing both the visionary and the integrator hats, name the integrator outcome out loud and identify who could grow into it. Audit your last leadership meeting. Were you controlling people or moving outcomes forward? About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

    13 min
  2. 424: One Clear Outcome Can Change Everything with Dr. Tracy Baynes

    4d ago

    424: One Clear Outcome Can Change Everything with Dr. Tracy Baynes

    Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The One Decision That Quiets All The Others There is a moment most executive directors know. A funder is hinting at money for a new initiative. A long-time staff member is pushing for an expansion. A community partner is asking whether you can serve a new population. Your inbox holds three more open questions just like these. Everyone is well-intentioned. Every option has a case. You close your laptop on a Friday and feel the weight of having to decide. This is the kind of tired most nonprofit leaders carry. It is not the tired of doing too much work. It is the tired of having too many decisions with nothing underneath them to settle the question. The truth is, you are not overwhelmed because there are too many options. You are overwhelmed because nothing in your organization is sharp enough to make the right option obvious. The Conversation That Sharpened This For Me I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Dr. Tracy Baynes, the founder of STEP, a college access and leadership program in Arizona that has been running for 21 years. It sharpened how I think about what actually creates calm in a nonprofit leader's day. The ideas weren't new to me. What was new was hearing them explained as the source of clarity that lets a 21-year-old organization keep running without drama. What Tracy Has That Most Leaders Don't Tracy can tell you in one sentence what STEP exists to produce. She can tell you who STEP is for. She can tell you how she would know, years from now, whether STEP worked for any given student. (I've written more on the "how would you know" piece in 3 Tips For Measuring Your Impact.) She is not carrying every decision alone. She is holding every decision up against one clear outcome and letting the outcome answer. That is the difference. Most nonprofit leaders are running organizations that have a mission and a set of programs and a vague sense of impact. Tracy is running an organization that has a specific outcome. A mission is a direction. An outcome is a destination. A direction lets you go almost anywhere. A destination tells you which turn to take. When you have a specific outcome, every "should we?" question has an answer already built into it. This is the upstream decision. Make this one well, and the next dozen get easier. Program Decisions Stop Being Agonizing Right now, when someone proposes a new program, you weigh it on instinct, politics, funder interest, and gut feeling. You hold it up against nothing in particular. Which is why the decision is hard. When you have a specific outcome, you hold the proposed program up against it and ask one question: does this move us closer to producing that outcome, or does it not? Most ideas don't survive that question. The ones that do, you can move on quickly. The ones that don't, you can decline without guilt, without long deliberation, and without losing sleep. The "should we add this?" noise quiets because there is finally something underneath the question that knows the answer. (For more on why this discipline is harder than it sounds, see Focus Is Not Optional.) Without a specific outcome, every new program idea is a debate. With a specific outcome, most ideas answer themselves in under a minute. The weight you carry from program decisions is mostly the weight of deciding without an anchor. Funding Conversations Stop Being Abstract Funders are not avoiding your organization because they don't care. They are avoiding it because they cannot tell exactly what they would be funding. A mission statement is not a thing they can invest in. A list of programs is not a thing they can invest in. "Impact" is not a thing they can invest in. A specific outcome is. When you can sit across from a funder and say, "We exist to produce this specific change in the lives of these specific people, and here is how we know whether we are," the conversation changes. They can finally see what their money would do. They can finally compare what you do to what other organizations do. They can finally say yes for real reasons instead of soft ones. Funders cannot fund what they cannot see clearly. A specific outcome is the only thing they can actually compare and decide on. When the outcome is clear, you stop having to convince and start having to show. The leaders I know who have made this shift tell me the same thing. Funding conversations went from exhausting to almost mechanical. The fundraising skill didn't change. What changed was that there was finally something concrete on the table. Donors Recognize Themselves In Your Work And Stay There is a kind of donor relationship that runs on charm. You build rapport. You send beautiful appeals. You hope. They give once, sometimes twice, then drift. There is another kind that runs on recognition. The donor reads what you do, sees their own values in the specifics, and knows immediately that they want to be part of it. Those donors stay for decades. The recognition only works if there is something specific to recognize. A mission is too broad to land. A list of programs is too generic to mean anything to one person. A specific outcome is sharp enough that the right people see themselves in it instantly, and the wrong people quietly self-select out. Donor recognition is built on specifics, not on mission statements. The right donors find you faster when the outcome is clear. The wrong donors stop costing you energy because they never start. This is what Tracy means when she talks about finding people whose lives are enhanced by getting to give. She is not selling STEP. She is making STEP visible enough that the right people walk toward it. (More on this in Building Strong Donor Relationships.) What Shifts When The Anchor Is In Place Here is what changes for the leader who actually does this work. The decisions stop piling up in your head. The staff conversations get more productive. The funder pitches get easier to write. The donors get easier to find and keep. The programs that don't belong stop demanding attention because they no longer have a way to make the case. The mental weight of constant decision-making drops. The work starts to feel like it is moving in one direction instead of in five. You stop being the only person who can hold the whole organization in your head, because the outcome holds it for you. This isn't more discipline. It is less, because you only need discipline in one place: protecting the clarity of the outcome itself. A Closing Note This isn't about doing less work. It's about doing work that knows where it's going. A specific outcome is not a planning exercise. It is the upstream decision that quiets every downstream one. Make it well, and the next year stops feeling like a series of impossible choices. It starts feeling like a series of obvious ones. That is what Tracy has at 21 years. That is what you can have too. About the Guest Tracy Baynes is the Founder and CEO of STEP: Student Expedition Program (STEP College-Prep) –a college access and leadership program for low-income Arizona high-school students. She received her doctorate in oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1993. After several years as a coral reef researcher at the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Tracy turned her full focus to teaching in 1996. She joined Columbia University's Biosphere 2 Center to teach in their undergraduate program. She later taught and developed college-level field courses for Sea Education Association, University of Pittsburgh, Long Island University, University of Montana, and Prescott College.  From 2001 to 2004, Tracy developed an international ship-based ocean semester on the West Coast for Long Island University.  In 2004, Tracy founded STEP's College-Prep and Leadership Program with the focused mission of educating and empowering low-income Arizona high-school students to enroll in and graduate from college.  Connect with Tracy https://www.stepexpedition.org https://www.instagram.com/stepcollegeprep https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracybaynesstep/:   STEP College-Prep & Leadership Program Donate to STEP National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) Also ...  check out this video compilation of seniors opening their acceptance emails - it is 3 minutes of pure joy! Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

    38 min
  3. 423: Why Aren't They Owning It!? with Sarah Olivieri

    May 25

    423: Why Aren't They Owning It!? with Sarah Olivieri

    Episode Description Most leaders think of delegation as a way to get time back. That framing is half the story, and it's the half that keeps leaders stuck in the weeds. When the conversation around delegation only centers on the CEO's calendar, the team ends up filled with people who do tasks well and own almost nothing. Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through why delegating outcomes, not tasks, is what builds a team capable of running the organization forward. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why task-focused delegation accidentally selects for "that's not my job" team members and filters out the A players The shift from delegating tasks to delegating outcomes, and what changes in your team within months of making it The zigzag-runner image: how the visionary moves through the future and how a strong team follows on a smoother path Why a culture of accountability is downstream of a delegation pattern, not a value statement The conversation Sarah had with a client that morning about moving from supervising people to managing outcomes Who This Episode Is For CEOs and founders who keep saying their team isn't proactive enough and quietly suspect they are part of why Leaders whose calendars are full of approvals, check-ins, and re-explaining the same thing Mission-driven leaders who want to grow people, not just productivity Anyone tired of being the only person on the team who thinks about strategy Practical takeaways Pick one task you delegated this month. Reverse-engineer it into the outcome it was meant to produce, and re-delegate the outcome. Notice the difference between supervising people and managing outcomes. Choose one team member and shift to the second mode this week. Audit your last three hires. Were you hiring for execution or for ownership? Adjust the next job description accordingly. About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

    9 min
  4. 422: Compassionate Nonprofit Leadership Is Operational Lubricant with Yerachmiel Stern

    May 21

    422: Compassionate Nonprofit Leadership Is Operational Lubricant with Yerachmiel Stern

    Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Hidden Cost of "Efficient" Leadership Most nonprofit leaders I work with want to move faster, decide cleaner, and hold the standard. From the outside, that looks responsible. From the inside, something else is usually happening. When a leader skips the relational work because it feels slow, the cost doesn't disappear. It moves. It shows up later as rework, attrition, board friction, and team members who go quiet in meetings because they have stopped expecting to be heard. The bill comes due downstream, where it is harder to trace. The truth is, the time you spend being human with your team is not extra. It is the infrastructure that makes everything else faster. Source of Insight I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Yerachmiel Stern, the executive director of Pesach Tikvah, and it was an important reminder to me that there are still many leaders out there who think compassion is "soft" and a "waste of time". Those leaders are missing out on the important role compassion plays in a well run, highly effective organization. The Tone You Set Is the System You Get The single most underrated piece of organizational design is the emotional state of the leader walking into the room. Not the agenda. Not the org chart. The leader's tone. When a leader walks in, regulated, warm, and present, the team's nervous system gets a signal: it's safe to think out loud here. Hard things can be named here. Mistakes can surface here without triggering self-protection. That signal is doing real operational work. It is shortening the time between a problem appearing and a problem getting solved. When a leader walks in tight, transactional, or performatively calm, the team picks that up too. People stop volunteering information. Decisions move underground. The same problems take three meetings to surface that should have taken one. In short: The leader's nervous system sets the team's nervous system. That isn't a vibe. It's a throughput metric. Information moves faster in a regulated room than a guarded one. This is why "read the room" is not a soft skill. It is a leadership requirement. Before you open your mouth in a meeting, you are already leading. The Goalposts Question One of the cleaner ways to diagnose whether a leader is operating from infrastructure or from extraction is to watch what happens when a team member brings a request that doesn't fit the existing rule. The old reflex is to point at the rule. Policy says no. Budget says no. We don't do that here. The infrastructure-minded leader asks a different question:  "Is this rule still serving the outcome we actually want, or is it serving the convenience of saying no?" Sometimes the answer is genuinely no, and the leader holds the line. Often the rule was set in a different context, the request is reasonable, and the cost of saying yes is much smaller than the goodwill you lose by reflexively saying no. In short: Rules are tools, not identities. When the rule no longer serves the outcome, the rule is the problem. Saying yes when you can is a form of system maintenance. This isn't about being a pushover. It is about staying connected to why the rule existed in the first place. Hiring for the Heart, Not the Resume Conventional hiring asks: Have you done this exact job before? It optimizes for risk reduction. It also reliably under-selects for the people who would have been excellent in the role with a slightly different background. Relational hiring asks a different question: what does this person actually want to do, and is that aligned with what we need done? The shift sounds soft. It is not. It is one of the highest-leverage operational moves a CEO or executive director can make. People who are doing work that matches what they actually want to do produce more, stay longer, and require less management. People who are doing work they took because it was available produce less, leave sooner, and require constant supervision. In short: Match the heart to the role. Heart-aligned hires need less management. Heart-misaligned hires cost twice: once in their tenure, once in the rehire. You will not get this right every time. Nobody does. But shifting the question from "have you done this" to "do you want to do this" changes your hiring math permanently. (For more on the underlying skill of leading with this kind of attunement, see) The Power of Soft Skills for Nonprofit Leaders. Compassionate Release The harder version of this same principle shows up in firing. Most leaders avoid letting someone go for too long. They tell themselves they are being compassionate. The person needs the job. The team is already stretched. The performance gap isn't catastrophic. We'll give it another quarter. What is actually happening, in most of these situations, is that the person being kept in the wrong role already knows. Their nervous system knows. Their family knows. The team knows. Everyone is in a quiet, low-grade limbo that costs energy from every direction at once. When the leader finally has the conversation, the most common response isn't anger. It's relief. Sometimes spoken, sometimes not. The person was waiting to be released from a fit that was never going to work, and they were too loyal, too scared, or too tired to release themselves. I call this a compassionate release. The compassion is in the clarity, not in the delay. In short: Limbo is more painful than a clean ending. Delay is a form of harm dressed up as kindness. Compassionate release ends the cost on both sides. Holding someone in a misfit role isn't generosity. It's a tax everyone is paying, and the longest-paying account is the person you think you're protecting. The Ford and the Cadillac There is a version of nonprofit leadership that aims for "good enough." The reasoning sounds responsible. We don't have unlimited resources. We can't deliver gold-standard service to every client. We have to triage. We have to be realistic. This framing adds risk. The math isn't wrong. The framing is. It confuses two different things: what you can deliver structurally, and how you deliver what you have. Two organizations can offer the exact same baseline service, and one will feel like an extraordinary experience and the other will feel like a transaction. The difference isn't the budget. The difference is the personal touch wrapped around the delivery. One line from my conversation with Yerachmiel stayed with me: "If you give the clients that personal touch, the Ford could be better than the Cadillac." What I appreciate about this framing is that it explains the mechanism. The personal touch is what converts a service into a relationship. The relationship is what produces retention, referrals, advocacy, and the willingness to come back when things get hard. None of that requires more money. All of it requires presence. I had this experience recently in an emergency room. The equipment was advanced. The diagnostics were thorough. The most meaningful 30 seconds of the entire visit was a staff member taking a breath, asking how I was doing, and telling me my chair could recline. He delivered the most excellent service of the visit, and it cost him nothing. That is the Ford becoming the Cadillac. The structure didn't change. The presence did. When Going Slow Is Going Fast The hardest piece of this for high-performing leaders to internalize is that the relational work, which feels slow, is what creates the speed. I learned this with my own son, who is on the autism spectrum and has ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and anxiety. The clinicians who took an extra five minutes to let him regulate consistently finished on time. The clinicians who tried to muscle through and just hold him still consistently turned a 30-minute appointment into a two-hour event. Sometimes the visit had to be rescheduled at a different office entirely. The "fast" approach was the slowest approach. The "slow" approach was actually the fastest one. The math is unambiguous once you start counting all the hours, not just the visible ones. In short: The relational time isn't extra. It's structural. Skipping it doesn't save time. It moves the cost. Going slow at the start is what produces speed at the finish. This same pattern shows up everywhere a nonprofit leader operates. With board members. With staff. With donors. With clients. The minutes you invest in being a person before you are a transaction are the minutes that compound. Humility Is a Confidence Move There is an older model of leadership that equates confidence with never apologizing, never being wrong, and never being visibly uncertain. It's still around, and it's slowly being retired for a good reason. Confidence in a leadership role isn't the absence of mistakes. It is the willingness to absorb the final responsibility for the outcome, mistakes included. When the team trusts that the leader will carry the weight at the macro level, the leader is then free to be humble and openly learn at the everyday level. That doesn't subtract from authority. It deepens it. People follow humans, not personas. (For more on this, see The Power of Vulnerability with Becca Pearce.) What This Makes Possible When compassion is treated as infrastructure rather than personality, a few things shift. What shifts: Meetings get shorter because information surfaces faster. Hiring gets cleaner because you're matching hearts to roles, not resumes to slots. Firing gets kinder because delay stops getting confused with mercy. Service quality goes up without the budget goi

    29 min
  5. 421: CEO or Operator Mode with Sarah Olivieri

    May 18

    421: CEO or Operator Mode with Sarah Olivieri

    Episode Description Most founders are running their organization from operator mode and calling it leadership. The doing feels productive. The decisions feel necessary. And the strategic work, the part that actually points the organization in the right direction, keeps getting pushed to "when things calm down."  … And things never calm down. Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through the difference between CEO mode and operator mode, why staying stuck in the doing creates a bottleneck that stalls growth, and how to start protecting visionary time even when you are wearing every hat. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why visionary work is a critical function on par with payroll, HR, and programs, not a "fun extra" The pattern she calls visionary whiplash, and how unprotected visioning disorients your team Why the CEO who stays the operator becomes the decision bottleneck that stalls growth The tiki raft analogy: when capacity is the problem, direction is not the question yet The first concrete move most small organizations make before hiring more leaders Who This Episode Is For Nonprofit Executive Directors and CEOs wearing every hat and quietly suspicious that visionary work doesn't count as real work Working boards running an organization with no staff, trying to figure out where strategy ends and execution begins Leaders whose teams have started saying "I don't know what we're focused on this month" Anyone watching their organization stall because every decision still routes through one person Practical takeaways Tag your time. Notice which hours go to right-direction work and which go to operator work, and track the percentage. Put new ideas on a list to review at your next strategic cycle instead of acting on them the day they arrive. Run a strategic planning cycle every two months, even if it is a solo session with a clear agenda. Before hiring more leaders, consider whether a strong executive assistant would unlock the capacity you actually need. About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

    18 min
  6. 420: Design Thinking Without The Jargon with Ashley Jablow

    May 14

    420: Design Thinking Without The Jargon with Ashley Jablow

    Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... The Problem Isn't Change. It's the Size of the Decision. Most nonprofit leaders I talk to are not actually afraid of change. They are stuck between two sizes of it. On one side, a monster decision. Restructure the program. Leave the role. Overhaul the funding model. A move so big it feels reckless to say out loud. On the other side, no change at all. Keep going. Ride it out another quarter. Wait for more information. Wait for the board. Wait for a better moment. What nobody offers is the middle option. The small, cheap, fast, reversible move whose only job is to teach you something. That option is almost always the right one, and it is almost always missing from the conversation. Where This Thinking Came From I've been turning this over for a while. I recently had a conversation about exactly this with Ashley Jablow, who works with leaders and teams in transition and has deep training in design thinking. It sharpened how I think about why change gets stuck inside nonprofits and what actually unsticks it. The short version: the problem isn't that leaders lack courage. The problem is that the only option on the table is too expensive to say yes to. Change Is Neutral. The Story You Wrap Around It Isn't. Change is constantly happening. Seasons turn. Budgets shift. Staff come and go. A funder's priorities drift. A board member rolls off. None of that is catastrophic on its own. What makes change feel charged is the story we attach to it. In the nonprofit sector, that story is usually some version of: change is dangerous, so we should avoid it. That story hardens into a posture. The posture becomes the culture. The culture becomes the reason your organization cannot move. In short: Change is constant and mostly neutral. What makes it feel dangerous is the interpretation the organization layers on top. Culture that treats change as risky will struggle to adapt even when adaptation is overdue. If you want an organization that can respond to what the world is actually doing, you have to separate the event from the story. The Hidden Cost of "Staying Put" Here is the belief I keep running into inside nonprofits: doing nothing is the safe option. Especially with money. Especially with programs that "have always worked." Especially when funders are watching. The truth is, staying put is not neutral. It has a cost, and that cost is usually larger than the one people are trying to avoid. If a program is slowly losing relevance and you do not adjust, the cost shows up later as a funding cliff. If a leader is quietly burning out and the system does not adapt, the cost shows up as a crisis hire. If a revenue model depends on one big grant and you do not diversify, the cost shows up when that grant does not renew. In short: Inaction is not the absence of risk. It is a different kind of risk. The cost of standing still usually arrives later and bigger. Every "we'll deal with that next year" is a decision, not a non-decision. When leaders only weigh the risk of moving, they miss half the math. Why Nonprofits Over-Index on the Risk of Moving Two structural things push nonprofits toward inaction. The first is the donor stewardship story. Somewhere along the way, "be a good steward of donor money" got translated into "never take risks with money." That is not what stewardship means. Stewardship means using resources wisely in service of the mission. Sometimes that means holding the line. Sometimes it means making a bet. The second is harder to see, and it matters more. In most nonprofits, the people with the biggest formal role in risky decisions, the board, do not experience the consequences of those decisions. The staff does. The community does. The executive director does. The board votes and goes home. So when a decision comes with risk, the board defaults to "let's not do that." To them, sitting still feels responsible. To the people running the organization every day, sitting still might be the thing burning the building down. In short: Stewardship is not a synonym for risk avoidance. The people voting on risky decisions in nonprofits often do not bear the consequences. The people who bear the consequences are usually best positioned to lead the decision. Decisions belong, as much as possible, with the people who will live inside their outcomes. That is not a revolutionary idea. It is just rarely the way nonprofit governance actually operates. The Move That Makes Change Manageable This is where the size of the decision matters. When every change is framed as a cannon shot, people freeze. The stakes are too high, the ambiguity too wide, the board too uncomfortable. So nothing moves. But there is another option. Jim Collins calls it firing bullets before cannons. Ashley Jablow frames it as a design thinking question. It is the same idea in different clothes. Ask what is the smallest, fastest, cheapest thing I could do right now to learn the most? That is a different size of decision. It does not require a board vote. It does not require a three year strategic plan. It does not require certainty. It only requires that you be willing to run a small experiment and read the results. In short: The question to ask before any big change is: what's the smallest move I could make to learn the most? A bullet is cheap. A cannon is expensive. Fire bullets first. Experiments replace certainty with evidence. One line from that conversation with Ashley has stayed with me: "What is the smallest, fastest, cheapest thing that you could do or try right now in order to learn the most?" What I appreciate about this framing is that it does not ask the leader to be brave. It asks them to be curious. It shrinks the change until it fits inside the capacity the organization actually has, and then it uses the result of that small move to decide the next one. That is how sustainable change actually works. Not through heroic leaps. Through a chain of small moves that each teach you something. Self-Trust Is the Quiet Currency of Change There is a second thing small experiments do that nobody talks about, and it may be more important than the learning itself. They build self-trust. Every small move you make and see through teaches you that you are a person who follows through. Every small experiment that works teaches you that your instincts are worth listening to. Every small experiment that fails teaches you that failure is survivable and useful. You cannot lead a big change if you do not trust yourself to make a small one. And most leaders who feel stuck are not missing strategy. They are missing the lived experience of their own follow-through. In short: Small experiments are also self-trust training. Leaders who have never run a small move do not trust themselves with a big one. Evidence of your own follow-through is what makes confidence durable. This is why the "do one small thing" advice is not soft advice. It is structural. It is how capacity gets built. Another moment from the conversation sat with me here. Ashley named a question she said often hides under any change effort, whether leaders realize it or not: "Can I trust myself to actually accomplish this and follow through?" Most leaders never say that question out loud. So the answer never gets built. Small experiments are how you build the answer. What This Makes Possible When leaders stop sizing every change as either "do nothing" or "blow it up," the whole posture of the organization changes. What shifts: Change stops being a crisis event and becomes a practice. Decisions get made closer to the people who live with the outcomes. Self-trust builds through reps, not through a pep talk. The organization starts learning instead of defending. The work is not lighter. It is just better aimed. Closing This isn't about being braver. It's about picking a smaller move. Nonprofits can adapt without crisis. They can change without drama. They can build self-trust through evidence instead of hoping for it. Not by betting the whole organization on one cannon shot, but by firing a lot of cheap, honest bullets and paying attention to where they land. 🎧 Listen to the full episode of Inspired Nonprofit Leadership to hear the conversation that informed this thinking. 📬 Subscribe to the Inspired Nonprofit Leadership Newsletter for weekly insights designed to help nonprofit leaders build clarity, capacity, and results, without burning themselves or their teams out. Related reading: Reclaim Your Capacity, The Energy Factor, and A Lesson on Delegation. About the Guest Ashley Jablow (Jab-lo, pronouns: she/her) is the founder of Wayfinders Collective and creator of Life Design School, a creative studio for people in career and life transition. A seasoned facilitator, speaker, coach, and design strategist, Ashley blends design thinking and innovation, emotional intelligence, and creative tools to spark clarity and action for teams and individuals navigating change. She's also the artist and author of 100 Days of Designing My Life, a guided journal series for reflection and reinvention.  Connect with Ashley: Websites: wayfinderscollective.com, lifedesignschool.co, @ashleyjablow The Clarity Kit Workshop The Innovative Leadership Salon Series Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like t

    37 min
  7. 419: Stop Designing Programs Backwards with Sarah Olivieri

    May 11

    419: Stop Designing Programs Backwards with Sarah Olivieri

    Episode Description Most nonprofit leaders sit down to design a program and start by mapping the steps. The modules. The services. The flow. That work is real, and it belongs at step four, not step one. The three steps that should come before it are usually missing entirely, which is why so many programs are hard to run, hard to improve, and hard to explain to funders. Sarah goes solo in this episode to walk through a four-part program design framework that flips the order most organizations are using. In This Episode, You'll Learn Why step four (mapping the program) is the step almost everyone starts with, and what that costs the organization downstream The two questions to answer before you ever map a single service: what problem are you solving, and what does "done" look like for the client How to define qualified-to-start without quietly excluding the people who need the program most The 3.5 marketing bonus step that lets you serve everyone while still marketing to somebody specific Why this framework makes program measurement and KPIs dramatically easier to set later Who This Episode Is For Executive directors whose programs feel hard to explain to funders Nonprofit leaders staring at modules they built before they ever defined "done" Boards and leadership teams about to launch a new program and tempted to skip the upstream work Any organization whose pitch keeps landing as "we serve everybody" Practical takeaways Set your existing program modules aside (Sarah offers her fire bucket) and answer the four questions in order before you look at the modules again. Define done as a state of being for your client, not a count of completed sessions or modules. Pick one program this quarter and name the specific audience it is the best fit for, even if you serve a broader population. Use the magic-wand exercise: design the program with unrestricted funding first, then build version A from current resources and pitch version C to your donors. About Your Host, Sarah Olivieri Bold, strategic, and refreshingly human… Sarah Olivieri is the go-to expert for conversations on aligned leadership, outcome delegation, and sustainable growth. She brings wit, warmth, and real-world wisdom to mission-driven founders, visionary CEOs, and change-makers who want more clarity, more joy, and more results. Most leaders hit a wall when success depends on them holding it all together. Sarah helps them change that by redefining leadership around outcomes instead of activity, empowering teams to own results that scale and freeing leaders to focus on the vision that drives them. A former director of three nonprofits and founder of five businesses, she has a rare ability to spot opportunity where others see chaos, shift stuck patterns, and build organizations that support both legacy and life. Sarah leads with the same mindset that made her an award-winning sailor: iterate on what works, stay focused in the storm, and never forget the joy of the journey. Links Website: saraholivieri.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-olivieri Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

    13 min
  8. 418: Boundaries Are a System Problem with TaShun Bowden-Lewis

    May 7

    418: Boundaries Are a System Problem with TaShun Bowden-Lewis

    Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... How Nonprofit Leaders Can Set Boundaries, Protect Their Mission, and Lead Without Burning Out Here's what nobody tells you when you step into a leadership role at a mission-driven organization: the mission can become the reason you never stop working. Because the need is real. Because your team is watching. Because the funder is waiting. Because someone always needs something — and you got into this work because you care. The truth is, that's not sustainable leadership. That's a slow leak. In a recent episode of the Inspired Nonprofit Leadership podcast, I sat down with TaShun Bowden-Lewis, Esquire — CEO and Founder of The Bowden-Lewis Consulting Group, and the first Black Chief Public Defender in Connecticut's history. TaShun has led under some of the most demanding, high-stakes conditions a public-sector leader can face. What she's built — both in herself and in the organizations she's run — is a repeatable system for leading with boundaries intact. What follows is the framework she shared, broken into the three areas where most nonprofit leaders lose the most ground: time, self-care, and money. The "Warm No" — How to Hold a Boundary Without Abandoning Anyone Most leaders avoid saying no because they think it means abandoning the person asking. TaShun reframes it entirely. A warm no isn't a refusal. It's a redirect. "A warm no is: I can't do it right now, but I can get to that tomorrow morning." — TaShun Bowden-Lewis Even better: "I can't help with that, but Jane Doe can — let's connect you right now." The need still gets addressed. The relationship stays intact. And your time and energy stay where they belong. This matters more than it sounds. When leaders say yes to everything, they're not being generous — they're being unclear. Unclear about priorities. Unclear about capacity. And that unclarity spreads. Every person on your team is watching how you respond to demands on your time. They are calibrating their own behavior accordingly. As I've said on the show: "If you aren't setting time boundaries, you're leading everybody else not to do it." The practical version of this looks like task-batching your email (TaShun checks it in designated windows only), setting a hard cutoff time at the end of your workday, removing work email from your phone, and putting your availability expectations in your auto-responder and your email signature. Not as a preference. As a policy. "I only respond to emails between 10 and 11. If it's an emergency, here's another way to reach me." That's not a wall. That's a system. Self-Care as Infrastructure, Not a Cliché There's a version of the self-care conversation that's become background noise — bubble baths, journaling prompts, take a walk. TaShun isn't interested in that version. She talks about self-care the way she talks about organizational systems: it has to run on autopilot. It has to be structural. It can't be something you get to when things calm down, because things never calm down. "Self-care has to be a non-negotiable." — TaShun Bowden-Lewis Her practice is grounded in the margins of the day — morning silence and gratitude before the work begins, evening reflection on a single daily win before the day ends. Not a two-hour morning routine. Not a perfect system. Just two consistent anchors that keep the nervous system from running hot all day long. This isn't a lifestyle preference. It's a leadership strategy. When you're dysregulated, your team feels it. When you're burned out, your decision-making degrades — quietly, gradually, in ways that are hard to see until you're already in trouble. "Everything trickles down from the head," TaShun said. The energy you bring into every room is the energy your team marries up to. Peer support networks and executive coaching fall into the same category. TaShun is direct about the loneliness of leadership — especially for leaders who are "firsts" in their field. "Being a leader sometimes is isolating." The antidote isn't performing wellness. It's building the actual structures — the coach, the peer group, the reflection practice — that give you somewhere to process what you're carrying. Mission Clarity as a Financial Boundary Most discussions about nonprofit boundaries stop at time and energy. TaShun takes it one step further: your mission has to be the filter for your money relationships. Specifically, for your donor relationships. When a funder comes with money attached to conditions that would redirect your organization's energy — conditions that aren't actually aligned with your North Star goal — the warm no applies there, too. The mission protects you. But only if it's operational. "The mission has to be operational, not just inspirational." — TaShun Bowden-Lewis An inspirational mission statement is on your wall. An operational mission is the specific, concrete goal that every program, hire, partnership, and resource decision flows through. It's what you look at when a donor says "I'd love to fund this, if you'd just add that." Icing before cake is the problem. Most organizations chase funding before they've built the foundation that makes that funding worth having. When your mission is vague, you're vulnerable — to scope creep, donor capture, and mission drift that happens one "yes" at a time. When your mission is a real North Star, the warm no becomes obvious. You're not rejecting a donor. You're being clear about where you're going. What This Looks Like When It's Working A leader who has these disciplines in place looks different from the outside. Her team knows when she's available — and when she's not. They hold their own time boundaries because she modeled them first. The organization's programs, partnerships, and donor relationships all trace back to the same operational mission. There's a peer who gets a call on the hard days. There's a morning that's hers before the work takes over. She isn't working less. She's working with more intention — and the difference shows up in results, retention, and the long-term sustainability of everything she's built. None of this is complicated. All of it takes discipline. The good news is that these are structural decisions, not motivational ones. You don't have to feel like setting boundaries in order to set them. You just have to build the system and hold the line. TaShun has. You can too. About the Guest TaShun Bowden-Lewis, Esq., is my guest for this episode.  TaShun Bowden-Lewis, Esq. is a criminal defense expert, esteemed speaker, consultant, personal and executive coach, and the CEO/Founder of The Bowden-Lewis Consulting Group. With almost 30 years in the CT Division of Public Defender Services, culminating in her historic 2022 appointment as the first Black Chief Public Defender, she is an experienced, transformative leader with the business acumen and community-focused mindset to deliver results through discipline, integrity, and perseverance. She has been an Associate Professor at Post University, in Waterbury, CT, for almost twenty years. TaShun has been recognized and lauded for her leadership, community outreach, and dedication to her craft. In 2023, she became a CT Bar Foundation, James W. Cooper Fellow and in 2024, she received the Edwin Archer Diversity Award from the Lawyers Collaborative for Diversity. She is also a mentor, workshop facilitator, and trainer. Connect with TaShun Bowden-Lewis: Website: www.bowdenlewisgroup.com Booking: https://thebowdenlewisconsultinggroup.zohobookings.com/#/4698007000000043010 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/The-Bowden-Lewis-Consulting-Group-61573189334209/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tashun-bowden-lewis Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2MBtPkmcN/ Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn.

    24 min
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About

This podcast is a place for nonprofit leaders to gain insights, tips, inspiration, and encouragement to unleash their potential.

Information

  • Creator
    Sarah Olivieri
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    423
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 Olivieri's Inc.
  • Show Website
    Inspired Nonprofit Leadership

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