Our Work is a Team Sport
A note to my team about how they're like middle school swimmers, no really...
We talked at MTGTMeeting this week about CWF more than anything, but I wanted to write just a bit more about the idea that we’re in this work together and as good as The Sum of Us (shoutout to Heather McGhee’s astounding book of the same title).
Since I didn’t grow up in the US, I am not one for US sports analogies. Despite being a triathlete, most of those idioms I don’t quite use the right way, because I don’t understand the sports well enough (GO SPORTSBALL!). However, in honor of being a currently undefeated, volunteer assistant middle school swim coach, and NCAA Swimming Nationals at the IU Natatorium, I thought I’d compare a fundraising team to a middle school swim team. I think you’ll get why in a minute.
For the uninitiated, individual performances and “wins” might be the defining feature of a swim meet. But this hides a bigger truth about how teams can actually WIN a meet. The head coach of our inimitable middle school swim brigade, my friend Joe Schroeder (accounting professor and chair of the Kelley School of Business Graduate Accounting Program) is a numbers guy, as you might expect. He is really into how you shape the team’s entries into meets to get the most points and win the meet as a team.
When seeing a swim TEAM through such a lens, all of a sudden, ALL performances become important.
Let me show you the math:
If a meet scoring system for each individual event is 5-4-3-2-1, the first-place finisher gets 5 points, second place finisher gets 4 points, and so on. This means that if you have one stellar athlete that can win the race, you can score 5 points. BUT, if you have 3 athletes who can finish 2nd, 3rd and 5th, your score for that event 7 points. In such cases “depth,” as in the number of good enough swimmers you have, can beat individual performances. Multiplied over all events, depth can win a meet by tens, if not a hundred, points.
That explains why we had utility and most valuable awards going to swimmers who may not have had the fastest time, but supported the team in ways that made the whole team successful: swimming events in which they wouldn’t win, but scored points, being a de facto team-captain and making sure the other team members knew what to do; the kinds of things that lifts everyone up to a higher level and makes the team victorious.
Ok, Bout, bring it back to fundraising, please.
I’ve seen many times where the fundraising team was organized like this: “strong” personality at the top with all the most promising highest-level donors, and a struggling team underneath them, subject to sky-high expectations, and assigned portfolios without a lot of proven relationships. Another dynamic I’ve observed that ideas suggested by team members often get taken, repackaged, and presented as original by team leaders (often known as “hepeating,” it happens most often with female team members and male team leaders). Lastly, fundraising “teams” often are more a collection of lone wolves competing, than a team that works together to support the mission and vision of the donors and the organization.
Ultimately, this often makes the leader a “hero” and the rest of the staff exposed to not having much success, and the results are that the entire organization does not meet their expectations. The “problem” is often identified as those fundraising team members whose performance doesn’t meet the expectations. Reorganization, letting staff go, and handwringing at the board level is often a result. It kills morale, and it is detrimental to those donor relationships that these team members have been able to make against the odds. To add insult to injury, the “strong” leader leaves for a better paying job, with a better title, even though their “leadership” was really a disaster.
So, what’s the alternative?
Carmel High School Girls Swimming proved for the 38th time this year, that depth AND individual performance beats everything.
THIS is the kind of team I want our mtgTEAM to be.
In my view, we get there by focusing on those things that empower each individual member of the team to do their best work, and by empowering the entire team to be successful together. Here are some of the ways I think we should do that:
Our relationships with our donors should be built on our strengths, individual personalities and assets, how we can best serve the donor and mission, and not based on our relative rank in the organization. My promise to you is that I won’t “hoover up” relationships in favor of my own interest (or create an environment in which that happens), but rather make sure that you have the right mix of donors to work with and that we work together to see what is best in each individual donor case.
We freely share best practices, good ideas, donor stories, things that worked, things that did not work, because we want everyone on the team to succeed in the same way. My promise here is that your contributions to this process is recognized, attributed, and valued.
We help each other when help is needed, not for the glory of it, but because our collective success depends on it. My promise to you is that I will be there to talk through any situation, make sure that we do everything to enable your success, and work it out when things are tough.
We are accountable to our collective success in more ways than just being a great individual performer. More than anything, addressing poverty by the work we can do as an individual is negligible (distancing all our vulnerable neighbors from poverty requires millions). This is why UWCI works with 85+ community partners, this is why we work together as internal teams with different strengths and responsibilities, and this is why we should work together as a fundraising team.
Only then can we win the meet.