That dreaded email arrives. Your Board, leadership and a consultant spent last weekend at a lakeside cottage, hashing out strategy.
Your inbox now holds the result. A glossy PDF. It looks worth the fifteen thousand dollars spent on it. It’s full of “strategic priority” tables and “theory of change” diagrams.
But, as you click through it, you feel a knot forming in your stomach. There’s no way you’ll be able to implement even half of this. The issues raised every day by your frontline staff tell you as much.
None of you was in the room when it was written. Now you’re responsible for implementing it. And, when it fails, your feet will be held to the fire.
It’s all too common. But it doesn’t have to be. There’s a simple bottom-up approach to strategy that reflects your team’s existing knowledge and experience. No expensive facilitator required.
The problem with outsourcing strategy
I’ve sat through strategy retreats where boards and consultants have lengthy discussions about the work, but not with the people doing it. Strategies get created by well-meaning people who haven’t served a client or run a program in years, if ever.
Once you have the strategy, you’re expected to get “buy-in” and “alignment” for plans that overlook the day-to-day realities. And, if you raise concerns, you risk being seen as “lacking strategic vision.”
You try to implement their strategy, but it comes at a steep cost. Feeling unheard, your team disengages or walks away. You spend months trying to implement the plan you’re given, only to be blamed when it doesn’t work.
Organizations outsource strategy development because it feels legitimate. Who can argue against expensive facilitators, flipcharts and resort meeting rooms? Or the structured discussions of SWOT analyses and RACI frameworks.
But the high-level approach to strategy often skips over the realities that frontline staff face. And the result is an expensive way to fill up cloud storage, while your team scrambles for makeshift solutions. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Why the best strategy comes from the frontlines
In 2022, at an Emergency Shelter in Calgary, Teale Masrani and her team at the University of Calgary’s Computer Science Department developed a technology to support frontline staff.
The shelter is run by Calgary’s Drop-In Centre (DI), which manages records for upwards of 4,000 clients per year. These records include basic demographic information, event logs (accounts of incidents) and bars (when a client is barred from accessing services).
The DI has a committee that reviews bars and decides whether to lift them. This committee expressed the need for a tool that allows staff to look beyond the data and get a better understanding of the person being discussed.
Masrani’s team took feedback from frontline staff and client experiences to develop a tool that took a more holistic understanding of each client. Understanding the “human behind the data,” as Masrani put it. While still under development, the tool has improved the bar review process by giving committee members contextual information they previously lacked.
Yet, many organizations implement software at the strategic level. Had the DI followed that pattern, it would have imposed a system without addressing the need for a nuanced approach to client data.
You don’t need a retreat
Developing a strategy for your organization doesn’t need to be done in a hotel boardroom. Nor do you need a massive budget to begin collecting insights. Short 15-minute conversations can give you the feedback you need.
Start by picking 3-5 frontline staff or volunteers in your department. Schedule 15-minute 1:1s with them (virtual or in person). Start by saying that you want to hear their honest perspective on what would make their work easier and more effective. Reinforce that this isn’t about evaluating them, but getting a better understanding of what they’re dealing with.
Then, ask them these questions:
1. What’s something in your work that makes your job harder, or is preventing us from serving our clients better?
It may be due to bottlenecks, technical problems, or miscommunication. Listen for things you can fix.
2. If you could change one thing about your work that would make your job better, what would it be?
Listen for recurring themes and look for quick wins within your control.
3. What’s working for you right now that management might not know about?
Look for opportunities to surface and highlight organic innovation.
During your meetings, listen, take notes, and probe with open-ended questions. Don’t defend or explain current processes. And try to get a sense of which issues are the most urgent.
These conversations will give you a strong understanding of your team’s actual needs, and maybe even a few problems you can solve without seeking approval. They’ll also give you examples to use when speaking with your superiors.
What to do when leadership won’t listen
Quick wins and problems you can address at your level are great, but we still need to influence organizational strategy. Leadership won’t always prioritize “staff feedback” in strategic planning. In those cases, it helps to demonstrate the impact of staff feedback.
Start by documenting the quick wins you can control. Use your “frontline feedback” to make small changes to your team’s processes or programs. Keep a simple log in a Word document or Excel spreadsheet:
Date | Feedback Received | Action Taken | Benefit to Client/Staff/Organization
Take 90 days or more to develop proof that listening to your frontline staff produces positive outcomes. You can then use that data to show your leadership how you improved program delivery or eliminated risks by listening to frontline staff.
These small, documented wins are proof that frontline insight is essential to uncovering patterns and mitigating risks. When leadership sees these results, they’ll be more likely to consider frontline input in their own strategic planning process.
Strategy isn’t something you need to outsource to a facilitator or save for an annual retreat. It’s something you build with the people who know your work best.
Adam Revay spent 17 years in the nonprofit sector navigating impossible timelines, funding cuts, and strategic reshuffles. Now he works with nonprofit leaders who know their frontline staff have the answers but struggle to get them heard. His free DRIVE framework shows you the 5 things your team needs to do their best work.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone and do not necessarily represent those of CharityVillage.com or any other individual or entity with whom the authors or website may be affiliated. CharityVillage.com is not liable for any content that may be considered offensive, inappropriate, defamatory, or inaccurate or in breach of third-party rights of privacy, copyright, or trademark.
