It’s hard to know what to say when the head of a Small Shop asks me how to deal with wearing all the hats needed to run their organization. Surely the CEO of a smaller organization burns the midnight oil doing the best they can handling accounting, marketing, grant writing, donor relations, event manager, board liaison, head of programs, chief cook and bottle washer.
But that one person can’t possibly be good at ALL those jobs. Certainly they lean in to the ones they feel most comfortable at.
If they come from a program background, then they’ll thrive dealing with all the program issues that come up. If they came up through the world of events, then they likely flourish dealing with their agency’s fundraising and other events.
But what happens then to the jobs they’re NOT well-suited to do? How do they handle those?
I have my own ideas, but I asked someone from a Large Org what they thought about wearing all those hats.
Their answer?
Form an ASO. An Administrative Services Organization.
Huh? First of all, do you know how long it takes to form an ASO? How many lawyers need to be involved? How ASOs do HR, accounting, IT, but not special events, marketing, grant writing, major gifts, and other jobs that can’t be done for a GROUP of organizations, that are stupendously time-consuming, but that also require special skills?
I was hoping for an idea to take back to the Small Shops I speak to that they could implement right away, that could be “real-world” useful, and not something so expensive and arduous – even if you could find the other agencies willing to go along in your ASO venture.
My idea?
For the jobs you’re not so well-versed in, I suggest professional development, classes, or job trading within your organization. If you have a deficiency in one or more areas, do everything you can to bone up in that area of weakness, learn more about it so you can get stronger. Let’s say you shy away from accounting, never really got proficient at it. So you avoid the inevitable, struggle with your agency’s taxes or budgets or spreadsheets. If instead you took a basic accounting class, your time investment in the class would pay off down the line. You would basically trade the time you now spend (waste) crunching the numbers, dealing with errors, and fighting your instinct to throw in the towel, for time learning the proper ways of accounting. Instead of the psychic energy you burn up being in knots about being the stand-in for a CPA, you would instead have empowered yourself to overcome the fear and dread of the numbers.
I know our impetus is to gravitate toward the thing we like to do, do well, and that gives us some satisfaction. But we should do all we can to power through and get better at the thing we don’t do so well too.
And pray for the day we have enough staff that can handle all the jobs we now have. My hat is off to the small shops that do so much with so little.
For more on this and other grant topics, visit Carolyn’s website.
