It’s been looming over you. The board meeting is next week, and the strategic plan has been sitting in the back of your mind since the last meeting. You open it, pull up the operating priorities you set six months ago, and start to review. Almost immediately, something inside you tightens. You are going to need to explain why you are behind. Why certain priorities haven’t budged. Why the plan that felt so right when the board approved it looks so disconnected from what’s actually happening day to day.
I know this moment. I have been that executive director. And what I can tell you is this: the strategic plan isn’t the problem.
Most executive directors don’t start the day with a plan. They start with a list. An exhaustive one that includes everything that needs their attention, all at once. The strategic plan is on that list. It just never seems to reach the top.
First, the program manager stops you on the way in with a community concern. The grant application needs one more section added before the noon deadline. A staff member is struggling and needs 20 minutes for problem-solving help. The board chair sends an email flagging something from last night’s news. By 10 am, the list is buried, never mind getting to the strategic plan.
An executive director’s reality is different from the board’s
Research from the University of California found it takes an average of 23 minutes to refocus after a single interruption. The average employee faces an interruption every two to three minutes. For an Executive Director managing programs, funders, staff, board, and finances, these interruptions aren’t occasional. They are a core part of the job.
According to Statistics Canada’s 2023 survey of more than 8,000 Canadian nonprofits, 70% of boards see their primary role as mission guardians or strategic and fiduciary overseers.
For the executive director, the reality looks different. The board sees the plan. They don’t see the Tuesday morning spent managing a staffing crisis, the Wednesday afternoon lost to an emergency funder call, or the Thursday lunch hour spent rewriting a grant application from scratch because the original writer left. The board sees the strategic plan. The executive director lives the work week.
The gap between those two things is where something quieter builds. Not quite shame. It is more like the specific dread of having to explain something you could not control, mixed with a low, persistent hum of wondering whether you are the problem.
You are not the problem.
When the executive director is stuck in reactive mode, the organization follows. Strategic priorities stall at the top and rarely make it to the people below. Clarity about what matters has to come from the top, and when the top is consumed by what just arrived, the rest of the organization fills the gap on their own. Programs drift toward what is loudest rather than what is most important. According to YMCA WorkWell’s 2024 Workplace Well-Being Report, 1 in 4 Canadian nonprofit employees report burnout often or extremely often. That is not a statistic about disengaged organizations. It describes capable people running hard without a clear sense of where they are going.
Over time, the strategic plan on the shelf stops being an accountability problem and becomes a people problem, and then a mission problem.
The role of executive function
Strategic follow-through is not a discipline problem. It is an executive function problem. That phrase is worth explaining in plain terms, because it is easy to hear it and move on without understanding what it actually means.
Executive function is the brain’s capacity to plan, prioritize, and initiate action. It is what you use to look at a list and decide what actually matters. It depletes under stress, under interruption, and under competing demands. When you are managing a staffing crisis on Tuesday and an emergency funder call on Wednesday and a grant rewrite on Thursday, you are not failing to prioritize the strategic plan. Your brain has genuinely run out of the resources it needs to do that kind of thinking. That distinction matters because a discipline problem and a capacity problem are not fixed the same way.
The executive director who cannot get to the strategic plan is not undisciplined. They are cognitively maxed out. The structure of the role makes strategic thinking genuinely hard to sustain. That is fixable.
Six practices to get you back on track
The answer is not a longer planning retreat. It is six small structural changes that reduce the cognitive work required to stay connected to what matters. None of them adds to your plate. Each one replaces something you are already doing inefficiently.
The first is visibility. The full strategic document is too large to hold in working memory. Translate it to one page: three quarterly priorities, three actions each, one owner per action. Put it somewhere you see it every day. Out of sight is genuinely out of mind. That is how working memory works; it is not a personal failing.
The second is protected time. One 60-minute block per week, the same time each week, in the calendar, treated as non-negotiable. The decision is already made. You do not have to find the time. You just have to keep it.
The third is pattern recognition. Most reactive interruptions are not random. They are the same five or six problems arriving in different forms. Track them for two weeks. Once you see the pattern, you can build a standing response or delegate them permanently instead of solving it fresh every time.
The fourth is a pause before yes. Before stepping into an interruption, ask one question: is this mine to solve right now? Not every fire needs the executive director. Pausing before you respond is a skill. It gets easier with practice.
The fifth is a five-minute Friday check-in. Not a full review. One question: did anything I did this week connect to a strategic priority? If the answer is consistently no, that is worth paying attention to.
The sixth is the one most executive directors get backwards. They handle reactive tasks because those feel urgent and manageable. They hand off strategic work because it feels like something others can carry. The instinct is backwards. The strategic work is yours. A lot of the reactive work is not.
The plan was good when you wrote it. The board approved it for a reason. What got in the way wasn’t commitment or capability; it was a role that structurally pulls attention away from the work that would actually build the organization, every single day. Knowing that will not fix it on its own. But it is an honest place to start, along with these six simple practices.
Sources:
- University of California — interruption and refocus research
- YMCA WorkWell 2024 Workplace Well-Being Report
- Statistics Canada, March 2024
Shari Black, ICF-PCC, is an Executive Function and ADHD Coach for professionals and entrepreneurs, and the founder of Black to Basics. A former Executive Director of two Ontario-based nonprofits, she brings 25 years of leadership experience across the private and nonprofit sectors. She works with non-profit leaders across North America on the executive function strategies that help get back to basics on knowing what to do and getting it done in our distraction prone work environments.
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.
